The context of this article is Jim Chen, Unloving, 80 Iowa L. Rev. 145 (1994) (responding to Robert S. Chang, Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space, 81 Cal. L. Rev. 1243 (1993)Imagine you are at public meeting-a forum of some kind at which members of community discuss their ideas and concerns. Seated ahead of you are two people you know only slightly. Imagine now that one of them (for sake of that much-maligned value, narrative vividness, let us call him Chang) rises at time when it is his tum to speak. Confessing to some hesitancy, some ambivalence and fear, he nonetheless confides in group some thoughts he has been toying with-some concerns about direction community is taking, some tentative ideas for ways in which he and others might respond. Then imagine that Professor Chang sits down; but before most people in crowd have even digested what he had to say, person next to him (call him Chen) jumps from his chair, screams You leave my wife out of this! and begins to pummel Professor Chang, shouting insults as he does so.I do not think it is excessive to characterize Professor Chen's attack on Professor Chang as kind of academic mugging, intended to wound if not disable or destroy its object. Reading Professor Chen's intemperate language--his talk of Professor Chang's work as secessionist manifesto, product of fundamentalism, a linguistic whip by which lords of racial fundamentalism drive individuals into appropriate racial herds Nazi propaganda, a virulent form of racism in its own creationism at its purest, and an apologia for the most grotesque form of tyranny imaginable --I was puzzled, angered, and concerned. I was even more puzzled to read that Professor Chen characterized this dialogue as reasonable intellectual dispute during which he generously chose to treat [Chang's] Asian American moment with dignity he so plainly want[ed] (and, by implication, does not really deserve from an authority as eminent as Professor Chen). Two questions occur simultaneously. First, what could Professor Chang have done to inspire this unseemly outburst? And second, what makes Professor Chen believe he has right thus to police scholarly discourse, branding those with whom he disagrees with most hateful of stigmata?