‘She Can Keep Her Korean to Herself’: News Anchor Gets Racist Voicemail Complaining She Was ‘Being Very Asian’ After Briefly Mentioning Dumpling Soup
Screenshot via Instagram.
Michelle Li, a Korean-American news anchor for KDSK News in St. Louis, Missouri, received a racist voicemail from a female viewer after briefly mentioning dumpling soup during a segment about New Year’s traditions.
Li, who was born in South Korea and adopted by an American family in Missouri, tweeted a video clip of the original news broadcast that drew the unnamed woman’s ire.
It’s subtle but people do notice! Something small but representation matters…we are not all eating cornbread, my friends… though it is delicious. https://t.co/RiSiP7JGLp pic.twitter.com/AFBLIgOhX6
— Michelle (@MichelleLiTV) January 2, 2022
In the clip, she discusses foods commonly eaten on New Year’s Day, including greens, black-eyed peas, cornbread, and pork. “I ate dumpling soup,” Li commented. “That’s what a lot of Korean people do.”
Your friendly neighborhood Mediaite contributing editor made black-eyed peas for my family and neighbors (easy recipe here), but that dumpling soup sounds really good too.
The unhappy woman who left Li the voicemail apparently thought differently, so irate that a mere 3 seconds of televised airtime were devoted to discussing Korean traditions, that she felt compelled to call Li and leave a voicemail message complaining about it. Li posted a video on her Twitter and Instagram accounts, in which she plays the audio of the voicemail and calmly sips a drink from a green plastic cup.
View this post on Instagram
“Hi!” the message cheerily begins. “Um, this evening, your Asian anchor mentioned something about being Asian, and Asian people eat dumplings on New Year’s Day, and I kinda take offense to that. Because what if one of your White anchors said, ‘Well, White people eat this on New Year’s Day’?”
She continued, complaining that she didn’t “think it was appropriate that she said that, and she’s being very Asian, and, uh, I don’t know, she can keep her Korean, um, to herself, alright?”
“Sorry, it was annoying,” she concluded, offering this explanation: “Because if a White person would say that, they would get fired.”
As seen above, Li does not react much in the video itself, but did write on Twitter that she would “love to say something back,” and on Instagram she captioned the post with, “We should all be given the chance to bring our full humanity to the table.”
She also changed her online bios to read “VERY ASIAN” and has received an outpouring of support online, with a number of her fellow Asian-American journalists making similar changes to their bios.
In an article about the incident on KDSK’s website, Li wrote that “negative viewer feedback” was nothing new in her more than 20 years in journalism, but the internet had “made comments worse over the years because it’s so easy.”
But “on New Year’s Day, I got wrath from a woman who was upset that I ate dumpling soup, a tradition for many Koreans and Korean Americans.”
“The whole television segment was less than 30 seconds,” Li commented, noting the absurdity of the woman’s reaction to an ad-libbed line, a little “banter” she had added.
Li then included her Instagram video and a transcript of the woman’s voicemail, which was “roughly a minute long — twice as long as the story itself, and about ten times as many sentences.”
However, Li wrote, “[t]here is more good than bad,” because the voicemail had “turned out to be a gift,” inspiring lots of positive comments and messages, and she had “loved seeing so many people share their family pictures and stories on social media.”
“We are all just people trying to exist,” she concluded. “If I had the chance to actually speak to this woman, I would love to have a heartfelt conversation with her — maybe we could do it over a bowl of dumplings. In St. Louis, there are a lot of great options.”
Watch the videos above, via Instagram and Twitter.
