After the brouhaha earlier this week over Michigan congressman Pete Hoekstra’s “DebbySpendItNow” Super Bowl ad, it was only a matter of time until someone did some online-slash-Facebook sleuthing to figure out who the Asian woman (speaking broken English) was. According to Phil Yu, author of the Angry Asian Man blog, her name is Lisa Chan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley graduate, last year’s Miss Napa Valley, and a friend of a friend. Chan has yet to confirm she is, in fact, the girl from the ad, but Yu does pass along some “inside information” about how she is taking the backlash that does have the vague ring of truth.
From what I understand, she feels terrible (and fearful of the fallout) over her participation in this ad. [She] has partnered with a community organization to release a statement with her version of the story.
While Yu hesitates to cast blame too quickly, saying Chan may have been “manipulated by a politician’s ugly tactics,” it does seem rather unlikely that she was wholly duped into modifying her speech to better resemble a dastardly American job-stealing foreigner. Then again, maybe it is all Hoekstra’s fault.
