Them's Fightin' Words

Over the years I've received occasional hate mail from white supremacists, but for the first time in a dozen years, I got hate mail from a Chinese person in reaction to a tale I wrote entitled Oh, Shut Up!

Or did I?

Usually I reprint such e-mails here for all to see, but this one was so full of bile and bad language that by the time I parse all of it out there would be hardly anything left. I can say he trotted out the usual arguments: my wife sold out by marrying me, I have a fetish, I'm too ugly to get a white woman, my own race finds me unattractive, blah blah blah. Nothing original there.

But then he went on to challenge me to a fight, owing to the jest I'd made in the tale about punching someone in the head if they use the word 'fetish' around me when talking about my wife. He said:

I'll not initiate violence. I'll let you have first swing at my head. But you must accept that I will retaliate with full force. I look forward to grinding your [expletive deleted] head into the pavement.

Of course I'm not going to fight the guy; there's something fundamentally wrong with a person who spews this much hatred. Besides, he set the meet for Sunday, April 2, which means I'd have to wait until 2017 were I so inclined to take him up on his offer. Do I really want to meet someone who is incapable of reading a calendar?

And then he did something weird: he cc'd the e-mail to members of Hong Kong's Civic Exchange (misspelling one of the member's names in the process: he called Iris Chan Iris Chang, who was the author of The Rape of Nanking), who will likely be surprised and disgusted when they read it.

At that point I began to suspect the guy was simply a pretender; his e-mail name was 'Wayne Lo', and a quick Google search turned up a real Wayne Lo: a Taiwanese-American who shot up a college in Massachusetts in 1992, killing two and wounding four others. I'm inclined to think this guy is from the United States; whether he's Chinese or Caucasian is now irrelevant.

He probably thought that his diatribe would make me angry and that he would succeed in making me go to his little challenge, where he wouldn't show up, thus making a fool of me. Instead I pity him and the way he thinks.

So, I sent him this reply:

Dude, you are wound way too tight.

Lighten up a little and learn to love life.

I'm sure that will just wind him up more, but when you reach a certain age you get more pleasure fighting with words than with your fists.

Update: he replied, as expected. More bluster. It's pathetic.

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