Protests Prompt Retailer to Pull T-shirts Mocking Chinese-Americans

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, April 20, 2002

Protests Prompt Retailer to Pull T-shirts Mocking Chinese-Americans

College clothier Abercrombie &Fitch is pulling a line of T-shirts from store shelves Friday after they sparked widespread protests in California for mocking Chinese Americans.

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College clothier Abercrombie &Fitch is pulling a line of T-shirts from store shelves Friday after they sparked widespread protests in California for mocking Chinese Americans.

The retailer decided to pull the T-shirts, which featured racist caricatures of Chinese Americans with conical hats, after receiving hundreds of protests through the Internet.

The T-shirts, each sells for 24.50 U.S. dollars, show cartoonish Asian characters with slanted eyes and conical hats whoserve as pitchmen for companies such as restaurants, dry cleaners and bowling alleys.

One of the T-shirts portrays a man pulling a rickshaw with the words "Rick Shaw's Hoagies and Grinders. Order by the foot. Good meat. Quick feet." Another shows two Asian men at "Wong Brothers Laundry Service" and carries the logo "Two Wongs Can Make it White."

The T-shirts had been on sale for two weeks, before students atStanford University and other schools learned about them on Wednesday. The students started an email protest that spread quickly across the country, and the shirts also became a hot topicon several Bay Area-based Web sites.

A&F, which markets shorts, T-shirts and other casual apparel toyouths between the ages of 18 and 22, said it was sorry that the T-shirts offended people, stressing the T-shirts were only meant to bring humor to its fashion line. The company has pulled five styles of T-shirts from its website.

But many Asian American activists said the damage has already been done. Activists in San Francisco picketed one downtown store on Thursday evening, and presented a letter demanding that the shirts be pulled from shelves and that the company publicly apologize.

"We think it's inappropriate for this company to make a profit from these really negative, harmful and hurtful images of Asian Americans doing work they have been historically forced to do," said Jane Kim of the Chinatown Community Development Center.

A& F, which owns 31 stores across California, declined to say how many of the T-shirts were manufactured or how much money it will lose from pulling them off store shelves.

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