By now you probably have heard of “The Super Bowl commercial you probably did not see”. Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra’s campaign advertisement aired during Super Bowl features a beautiful Chinese woman (or, as he called her later when he was made to explain himself, “a Chinese girl”), complete with a straw hat, bicycle, rice paddy, and “Chinese-sounding” music.
It’s like, HELLO! back to the World of Suzie Wong, Fu Manchu, and Dragon Lady.
The Internet, at least the part I frequent, was all-a-buzzing, criticizing Hoekstra’s campaign of insensitivity, stupidity, and flat-out lying. There are several areas about this ad that are under criticism:
1. The actress’ perceived accent, fake or otherwise: I was quite moved by people of non-Asian descent being offended by the portrayal of a Chinese person (purported in China even though the scene was actually show somewhere in California) speaking with an accent and “broken” English. I have to admit: I did not see this at all. We have all heard atrocious fake Asian accents, and compared to those, hers is actually subtle (regardless whether the actress is Asian American or Asian Asian). And the “broken” English amounts to dropping the “S” after a verb which I sometimes do by mistake because, well, I am speaking a foreign language.
I would like to put this out here: Although I would rip anybody’s head off for attempting fake Asian accents, my children’s included, there is no shame in speaking English with an accent. Duh. I tell my kids, “Don’t make fun of people speaking with an accent. They all know one more language than you do. And their English is better than your [insert foreign language].”
2. Her accent is not authentic: Well, we will find out when the APB put out by Lawrence O’Donnell for this poor actress succeeds in tracking her down. Even though I do not like what she did, being a theatre person, I have to give her some slack: Do people understand how hard it is for actors of Asian descent to find roles that are NOT stereotypical in nature? She actually sounded a bit like me. So now I am sitting here wondering: “Fuck. So people think MINE is broken English and my English sucks?”
I was once criticized by an audience for not having an authentic Chinese accent in the play I was in. I found it hilarious and thought it was a great compliment. What do people think a Chinese accent should sound like? It baffles me really.
3. She does not look Chinese: People say that to me all the fucking time. Well-intentioned criticism like this frustrates me to no end. What IS a Chinese supposed to look like? Is there an encyclopedia of Chinese people that we can look up like a bird watcher’s guidebook? Nope. Not Chinese. Angle of eyes all wrong. Not Chinese either. See? The nose is not in the right place. Coloring is all wrong too. Seriously?
Furthermore, who cares if the actress is Chinese or not? It does not matter whether she is American-born or not either. What matters is that PeteHaveNoClueHoekstra and his people approved an ad with rampant, racist stereotypes (and of course, shameless fear mongering and blatant misinformation regarding debt and economy).
4. Yes, the fear mongering alluding to the misconception about the debt China holds against the US [Remember the Chinese Professor ad in 2010? And the Yellow Peril trope populated by the Fu Man-Chu series in the 1930s?], and the relationship between the debt and the economy. Actually, it is rather insulting that PeteGetNotHoekstra assumes people would believe the line he’s trying to draw between US government spending and jobs being sent overseas. Here, allow me to quote Paul Krugman: [I know not everybody worships him but this article, Nobody Understands Debt, is spot on]:
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base…
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
… …
It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.
Ok. Now that we’ve got the air cleared, could I please start with my psychotic foaming at the mouth now? Thank you.
Nobody seems to be bothered by this. At least, they did not comment on it. My first reaction?
“O.M.G. Is she selling porn??!! Is she trying to get the good ol’ American white boys into her pants?!”
WTF is with the downcast eyes, the come-hither smile? What’s even more bizarre is that she’s supposed to be addressing Debbie Stabenow, Hoekstra’s opponent in this race. I was seeing Lotus Blossom and Dragon Lady morphed into one right on my computer screen, on a Monday morning, in the fucking 21st century. It was such a visceral reaction that I had to grip the edge of the table to stop myself from screaming; I held my breath in fear because I was half expecting her to say “Me love you long time”… This is THE most offensive stereotyping I have seen so far in the 21st century. PeteMeSuckHoekstra did not even try to hide it. This “character” in his campaign ad is made up of everything that created “Dragon Lady” and sustained this stereotype over the decades. The ad, unapologetically, resurrected the stereotype of women of Asian descent as calculating, treacherous and manipulative a la “Dragon Lady”. Along with that, the ad invokes the fear of the Yellow Peril (originated in the 19th century when Chinese laborers were imported like cattle to the West Coast to build the railroads): only now they stay in China while taking away the jobs from the Americans…
Hello? PeteIamNotARacistHoekstra, Fu Man-chu called. He wanted his Dragon Lady back. He said that you could come over to the 1930s to visit her.
Thank you, indeed, PeteShowingYourTrueColorHoekstra, for reminding me and for proving to people who like to tell me that “It’s in your head. Racism does not exist any more. Grow some thick skin. Stop whining.” that idiots without self-awareness are still around us. Stay vigilant.
Apparently many of my friends from my “real life” LOVE The Help. Love it. They are telling people on Facebook to “GO SEE THE HELP. RUN. NOT WALK!” including a dear dear friend who studied and wrote about Apartheid in South Africa. As I ponder how much I should share my perspectives with her at the risk of hurting her feelings and alienating her, I re-read my post from January 20. 2010, and nope, my view has not changed. Since the movie adaptation is receiving rave reviews all over and I have not seen my Anglo-Saxon lady friends so enthusiastic about a movie with an African American lead since The Blind Side (yes please argue why the African American characters are at most CO-lead, and you’ll be right in my book), I feel compelled to share this post from almost 2 years ago again.
Or, actually, skip this post entirely and go read My Brown Baby‘s post “I Was the Help —- and My Experience Taught to Dream Big“. If you have been reading my blog and liking what you have been reading, I have a feeling that you are going to appreciate very very much what Denene Millner, the autohor, has to say about the book, the movie and the reception of it. Peace out.
REPOSTED from January 20, 2010
I probably don’t need to publish this post on my blog. It is not appealing. It is not good writing. It will not make you laugh out loud. It is not even a proper rant. Besides, it is friggin’ long – I am amazed at how much I tapped out on my iPhod, and tedious. I am not even making any coherent argument, not to mention grammatical errors! Run-on sentences! totally exposing myself as a feeble-minded person. Even the title spells “MEH”.
That being said, I feel this pathological need to be on the record, I guess. Since I have been treating this blog as my diary, I want everything that comes out of my head to be on here. So, sorry about this… mental puke…
I brought the book, The Help, by Kathryn Stockett with me on my flight back home last December. I have had the whole flight between IAD and Narita to ponder on this book. I won’t even attempt at writing a review since I am really not qualified to do so. And at any rate, there are already more than 1,400 reviews on Amazon.com. Furthermore, all the book reviewers in the major news outlets have done so and waxed poetic on this book, with one of them comparing The Help to To Kill A Mocking Bird.* I will just make a list of things that I have been chewing on. By Tap Tap Tap on my iPhone (without a SIM) and therefore heavy editing involved thereafter.
Spoiler alert: If you are thinking of reading this book, you should skip this. I will also be 100% honest with myself, which means I will be contradictory, at times nonsensical, and possibly offending, especially if you love the book.
Confession first: I enjoyed reading this book tremendously. Cliché, yes. Truth is: it IS a page turner. For me. From the moment when I opened it in August when I first received it, I could not completely put Aibileen out of my head until the Christmas week, when I finally had time to sit down and read the book in long stretches.
The stories are riveting. The voices are, as much as I hate using this word because it is often confused with “stereotypical”, or at the very least “archetypal”, the voices sound to me “authentic”. That is, when I was reading it, when I was caught up in the drama of the story that was being expertly told, when I was kept in suspense as to the safety of the women, when I was hoping with clenched fists and a racing hear that they would triumph over evil and that justice would be done. Well, justice be done to a certain extent, in the strict confines of the story-telling.
Now I ask myself: How many Southerners do I know? None.
Do I know any African American domestic help? Nope.
What do I know about Southern dialects and accents? Not a thing.
So what do I know about whether the book is “authentic” or not? Hasn’t this always been the gripe I have against books like Memoirs of a Geisha? That a fiction novel, on account of its main characters being of a non-white race, is evaluated and praised for delivering an “authentic” portrayal. Do we even care whether Dan Brown’s characters are authentic or not?
Damn the identity politics theories I read, classes I took.
I cannot help, in the back of my mind, though I immensely enjoyed the stories of these women, that a white woman took possession of the black women’s stories twice, especially after I read Kathryn Stockett’s personal note at the end of the book: like Skeeter in the story, Stockett wrote the black women’s stories and gained wild success.
I understand the above statement reeks of identity politics, but I cannot help the gnawing feelings in the back of my head.
What bothers me even more is Skeeter’s cajoling, forcing almost, these women into telling her their stories because she was told that she needed to write something that nobody had ever written before in order to get into the publishing world. Throughout I was extremely uncomfortable with her motive: next to the all too real risk to the black women’s lives, her motif seems so trivial. Selfish even. What is the potential downside for her engagement in this feat? None too serious really. And indeed, there was a happy ending for Skeeter. But for Minnie and Aibileen the future remained uncertain.
Although I do wish something horrible would happen to the wrong-doers and was a bit let down when it didn’t, I do applaud the author for not cheapening the story by taking the easy way out. They are still in the mid 1960s in Mississippi and it is not like they are going to all of a sudden find true equality by the end of the book. I need to give the author props for not providing her White readers with an easy cathartic way to assuage the white guilt. “The villain that caused such misery is dead/appropriately punished, all is well in the universe. Now get on with your merry life.”
As I mentioned, the book received gleaming reviews. From White book reviewers. This could be racist on my part, and certainly identity politics at its worst as some might say, nevertheless, I feel I NEED TO know how an African American reader may feel about this book. NOT because a white woman from a privileged family in the South wrote this book, but because, again, despite my immense enjoyment of this book, and yes indeed I feel guilty for liking this book when I started wondering how my friends back in my graduate study classes would have said about this book, I cannot ignore the conflation of the tropes: 1. the White heroine being rescued, or finding self-realization, through Black folks around her that she does not socialize with, 2. Black people, unable to help or save themselves, being rescued by a White person.
I imagine this book already optioned by a movie studio. Or soon will be. Anyway you look at it, it IS going to be a great vehicle for some of the outstanding African American actresses, and god only knows how hard it is for a good script with a strong minority character lead to make it all the way to some head honcho’s desk. I do hope that the script and the actor that portrays Leroy would breathe some more life into him rather than the one-dimensional wife-beater. When in doubt, we reach for the things we share as women: abusive husbands, cheating boyfriends, sexist Chauvinistic patriarchs. In that process, our men are further demonized. Joy Luck Club immediately comes to mind. I can’t watch that movie without cringing. Not a single man in that movie is worthy of loving. Is it why it was accepted by the white mainstream audience? “Poor Asian women. They are so much better off over here. Away from their men.”
When The Blind Side came out, and the Internet was all abuzz about what a feel good movie it was, it immediately raised the mental red flag for me. “Feel good” means, to me, “Not for you. You are probably not the target audience/reader. Stay home. Otherwise you won’t feel good.”
I asked an African American columnist whether she planned to see the movie,
“No. We don’t consider that movie an attractive idea.” She said coyly.
* The surest way to incite heated debate against the worth of any book is to compare it to the beloved To Kill a Mocking Bird… So if you hate someone, yeah, go ahead and compare them to Harper Lee.
Because of my racial/ethnic/cultural/educational make-up, I do not watch what I tell my children: I tend to over-explain everything and over-analyze everything for them. I also like to point out instances of racial/cultural prejudices and stereotypes disregarding whether they may be too young for such identity politics theory talks. Sometimes I feel sorry for them ’cause I have ruined quite a few “plain, good old fun” movies and shows for them.
A downside of such vigilance (or as the mainstream society likes to label it, Paranoia, or as Fox and Friends like to call it, Rampant political correctness that’s ruining this country’s cultural identity and core) on my part is that once in a while I would slip and my kids get to call me out on it.
Then they pile it on thick.
While we were discussing my 13 year old’s birthday party earlier this year, he mentioned that he really would like to go to the penny arcade before the sleepover at our house. Naturally, I tried to talk him out of it.
“Are you sure your friends will like the penny arcade?”
“Duh. It’s the arcade, mom. Of course they’ll like it!”
“How about the twins? They don’t seem to be the kind of kids that would be interested in going to the arcade.” Honestly, I said that based on my observations of how their parents care really about academic performances and how studious these two kids are.
“Mom, don’t be such a racist! Just because they are Indian, you just assume that they like to study all day long and they don’t like to do anything fun?!”
My bad.
On our way home from the blockbuster movie Thor, The Husband asked Mr. Monk, our 8-year-old, who he would like to be if he had to choose: “Thor or his brother Loki?”
“What kind of question is that? Why did you ask him that? Who would have chosen Loki? Of course everybody wants to be Thor!” I interjected because of the whole sibling rivalry thing and I did not want Mr. Monk, sensitive that he is, to dwell on the fact that the younger brother Loki is less than ideal in the movie. (Let me just put it this way so I won’t ruin the movie for you…)
Beside, from a pure aesthetic point of view…
From the backseat a voice immediately piped up, “Oh sure, everybody wants to be Thor. Everybody wants to be the blond-haired, blue-eyed guy.”
Mind you, The Husband is of Scandinavian descent and sports blond hair and blue eyes. (Alas, there ends the similarities between him and Chris Hemsworth… I just need to keep on telling myself that I do not like hairy men…)
“Oh yeah, the blond-haired blue-eyed people are the good guys. And the dark-haired guy nobody likes him.” My oldest continued. “Yeah, let’s just kill the brown-haired guy and the dark-haired people. This is a Hitler movie! A Hitler movie!”
(I have been sitting here for 15 minutes, trying to come up with a tidy ending for this post. I don’t know how to end this post. So I am just going to end it abruptly and go to bed considering how it is 4:43 am…)
I recently remembered that I have kept my computer files from the last century somewhere on the hard drive and went looking. I came upon a Letter to Nobody that I wrote in 1997 documenting an interesting encounter that I have since forgotten.
What surprises and delights me is that I sounded just as sarcastic, bitchy and “stabby” thirteen years ago. I have not changed one bit!
.
Yet another excuse for me to use my favorite sign from The Bloggess
.
Another just as delightful realization dawned on me: A letter to nobody yet with an imagined audience somewhere out there? An innate, almost pathological need to (over) share, to tell my stories? I guess I am destined to be a blogger all along. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: I should be grateful that blogging came along and saved me from a life in the joint from having stabbed someone. It was bound to happen if not for this.
.
.
My Stories
June 25, 1997
As you all know, I have had several “interesting” experiences as an Asian woman in this country. But tonight I hit the jackpot. . . I thought I might share it with you all. I hope you “appreciate” this story as I do.
I went to Brookstone in the mall with my husband this evening. We were looking at different things and I wandered away from him. (My first mistake?) I was looking at a finger blood pressure measurement machine when the salesperson sneaked up from behind.
“I see, you are taking your own blood pressure,” he said.
I wasn’t interested in the gadget, so I didn’t respond to him.
“Do you not understand English? Are you with the man over there?” he said loudly and slowly.
So before he even heard me speak, he assumed that I did not understand English.
“Oh, man, I can’t believe this is happening.” I thought.
I tried to give him a good comeback. So I took a deep breath, sighed, without looking at him,
“No, I do NOT understand English.”
He laughed. Ha ha.
Now, most normal human beings would just take the hint and leave me alone, but not my salesperson. He continued,
“Oh, you do NOT understand English VERY WELL. Not only do you understand me fine, you also got the joke.”
I was wondering which part of his remarks could be the joke. I was also frustrated because he did not get MY “joke”.
“Are you looking at the electric toothbrush also?”
He took down one of the electric toothbrushes displayed on top of the blood pressure taker I was looking at and started explaining how the thing works. Again, I wasn’t really interested.
“Are you not understanding me? Do you understand enough English? Are you following me here?” he out of nowhere drew this conclusion about me.
I asked myself, “Is it because how I look? Is it because how I dress?”
I have to admit that he caught me offguard. I couldn’t believe that someone would say something like this out right to me. I was so surprised that I forgot to get offended.
Silence.
He kept on saying something else. I wasn’t listening. I was laughing. I turned to him with a smile,
“You know, right now I really feel like grabbing something and hitting you with it.”
I ended my line with more laughter.
“I’d better leave here now,” I said, not moving.
At this moment, my husband approached us and asked me what happened.
“Oh, I was just being too helpful and she said she wants to hit me with something,” the salesperson said with a laugh.
Then he turned to me and said, “I know how you feel.”
Do you really? I was thinking.
“I feel the same way whenever I go shopping,” he added.
So isn’t that curious? He feels like an Asian when he goes shopping!
I probably don’t need to publish this post on my blog. It is not appealing. It is not good writing. It will not make you laugh out loud. It is not even a proper rant. Besides, it is friggin’ long – I am amazed at how much I tapped out on my iPhod, and tedious. I am not even making any coherent argument, not to mention grammatical errors! Run-on sentences! totally exposing myself as a feeble-minded person. Even the title spells “MEH”.
That being said, I feel this pathological need to be on the record, I guess. Since I have been treating this blog as my diary, I want everything that comes out of my head to be on here. So, sorry about this… mental puke…
I brought the book, The Help, by Kathryn Stockett with me on my flight back home last December. I have had the whole flight between IAD and Narita to ponder on this book. I won’t even attempt at writing a review since I am really not qualified to do so. And at any rate, there are already more than 1,400 reviews on Amazon.com. Furthermore, all the book reviewers in the major news outlets have done so and waxed poetic on this book, with one of them comparing The Help to To Kill A Mocking Bird.* I will just make a list of things that I have been chewing on. By Tap Tap Tap on my iPhone (without a SIM) and therefore heavy editing involved thereafter.
Spoiler alert: If you are thinking of reading this book, you should skip this. I will also be 100% honest with myself, which means I will be contradictory, at times nonsensical, and possibly offending, especially if you love the book.
Confession first: I enjoyed reading this book tremendously. Cliché, yes. Truth is: it IS a page turner. For me. From the moment when I opened it in August when I first received it, I could not completely put Aibileen out of my head until the Christmas week, when I finally had time to sit down and read the book in long stretches.
The stories are riveting. The voices are, as much as I hate using this word because it is often confused with “stereotypical”, or at the very least “archetypal”, the voices sound to me “authentic”. That is, when I was reading it, when I was caught up in the drama of the story that was being expertly told, when I was kept in suspense as to the safety of the women, when I was hoping with clenched fists and a racing hear that they would triumph over evil and that justice would be done. Well, justice be done to a certain extent, in the strict confines of the story-telling.
Now I ask myself: How many Southerners do I know? None.
Do I know any African American domestic help? Nope.
What do I know about Southern dialects and accents? Not a thing.
So what do I know about whether the book is “authentic” or not? Hasn’t this always been the gripe I have against books like Memoirs of a Geisha? That a fiction novel, on account of its main characters being of a non-white race, is evaluated and praised for delivering an “authentic” portrayal. Do we even care whether Dan Brown’s characters are authentic or not?
Damn the identity politics theories I read, classes I took.
I cannot help, in the back of my mind, though I immensely enjoyed the stories of these women, that a white woman took possession of the black women’s stories twice, especially after I read Kathryn Stockett’s personal note at the end of the book: like Skeeter in the story, Stockett wrote the black women’s stories and gained wild success.
I understand the above statement reeks of identity politics, but I cannot help the gnawing feelings in the back of my head.
What bothers me even more is Skeeter’s cajoling, forcing almost, these women into telling her their stories because she was told that she needed to write something that nobody had ever written before in order to get into the publishing world. Throughout I was extremely uncomfortable with her motive: next to the all too real risk to the black women’s lives, her motif seems so trivial. Selfish even. What is the potential downside for her engagement in this feat? None too serious really. And indeed, there was a happy ending for Skeeter. But for Minnie and Aibileen the future remained uncertain.
Although I do wish something horrible would happen to the wrong-doers and was a bit let down when it didn’t, I do applaud the author for not cheapening the story by taking the easy way out. They are still in the mid 1960s in Mississippi and it is not like they are going to all of a sudden find true equality by the end of the book. I need to give the author props for not providing her White readers with an easy cathartic way to assuage the white guilt. “The villain that caused such misery is dead/appropriately punished, all is well in the universe. Now get on with your merry life.”
As I mentioned, the book received gleaming reviews. From White book reviewers. This could be racist on my part, and certainly identity politics at its worst as some might say, nevertheless, I feel I NEED TO know how an African American reader may feel about this book. NOT because a white woman from a privileged family in the South wrote this book, but because, again, despite my immense enjoyment of this book, and yes indeed I feel guilty for liking this book when I started wondering how my friends back in my graduate study classes would have said about this book, I cannot ignore the conflation of the tropes: 1. the White heroine being rescued, or finding self-realization, through Black folks around her that she does not socialize with, 2. Black people, unable to help or save themselves, being rescued by a White person.
I imagine this book already optioned by a movie studio. Or soon will be. Anyway you look at it, it IS going to be a great vehicle for some of the outstanding African American actresses, and god only knows how hard it is for a good script with a strong minority character lead to make it all the way to some head honcho’s desk. I do hope that the script and the actor that portrays Leroy would breathe some more life into him rather than the one-dimensional wife-beater. When in doubt, we reach for the things we share as women: abusive husbands, cheating boyfriends, sexist Chauvinistic patriarchs. In that process, our men are further demonized. Joy Luck Club immediately comes to mind. I can’t watch that movie without cringing. Not a single man in that movie is worthy of loving. Is it why it was accepted by the white mainstream audience? “Poor Asian women. They are so much better off over here. Away from their men.”
When The Blind Side came out, and the Internet was all abuzz about what a feel good movie it was, it immediately raised the mental red flag for me. “Feel good” means, to me, “Not for you. You are probably not the target audience/reader. Stay home. Otherwise you won’t feel good.”
I asked an African American columnist whether she planned to see the movie,
“No. We don’t consider that movie an attractive idea.” She said coyly.
* The surest way to incite heated debate against the worth of any book is to compare it to the beloved To Kill a Mocking Bird… So if you hate someone, yeah, go ahead and compare them to Harper Lee.
It is Thursday (and actually soon will be Friday…) Yes, I am cheating again by backdating my post. But it IS Wednesday somewhere in the world, right? Oh. Who cares. It is a WTF post by me when I’ve got my WTF glasses on. (Yeah, this line is for you my Wicked Kitchen Lady…) So WTF ANYTIME… FTW!
We received a Christmas card from a high school friend of my husband’s. The address label on the envelop was one of those personalized family labels with the faces that are supposed to represent each member in the family.
Get your family labels here! Personalized to fit your family!
Our friends are of Asian descent, and therefore the figures on the address label all have black hair, and it does remind us of them: with the appropriate hair styles. To my surprise, my husband was interested in getting a set for us.
“Maybe for next Christmas?” He emailed me with the link.
Don’t you just love how they add things to your list with a nice question like that?
Fine. I thought. It could be cute. Naturally I was already wondering how we were going to represent our multiracial family. Perhaps I could get some message out with each letter I mail. Represent! I thought. Things could get very interesting. I thought. Little did I know that it was going to be VERY INTERESTING alright.
I browsed through the site, looked at the samples, and clicked on ORDER:
Choose your head and hair style here: Male and female heads
They do have a wide selection for heads/hair styles. At this point, my kids became curious in this project and they were getting excited, impatiently waiting for their turn to choose their own faces.
“Oh oh oh. Choose this one!”
“No. Mom looks more like this one!”
Finally we (i.e. the kids) settled on a hair style for me.
So many heads, so little time... to make my decision I mean...
By selecting the head style, we were then shown a variety (i.e. THREE) of different skin tones and many hair colors to choose from.
So many hair colors to choose from! Should I go with my natural color or my highlighted color?
“Mom, pick the Dark Brown Hair. That looks more like you.” My oldest said.
“Mom, I am not sure what you should choose for your skin color. That one is too light, and that one is too dark.” My youngest said. He is a man of 100% honesty.
I was relieved that the instruction gave me the permission to select “Fair Skin” for myself, since I consider my complexion to be “tan”. I thought I’d go with Black Hair and Tan Skin because I did not want people to mistake me for a non-Asian person. However, my hair has not been BLACK BLACK for almost a decade: I discovered highlights many years ago and baby, let me tell you: I ain’t gonna go back. Fine. She looks too happy anyway. What I need really is a scowling face. I went with the kids’ suggestions.
Here comes the WTF moment. The first WTF moment…
(The following is a “dramatized” version of the screen I saw at the initial WTF moment. I went through the ordering process just so I could grab a screenshot to show you, my friends. You are welcome)
My jaw dropped. Add-on Features. “Asian eyes” is one of the 3 add-on features offered by the company. Along with Glasses and Santa Hat.
Asian Eyes. One of the only 3 add-on features. Me so honored.
“What the…?!” I stopped myself short. The kids looked at me, then looked at each other.
“Mom. You should check ‘Asian Eyes’ because you are Asian.” Mr. Monk, my youngest, said. With all honesty.
“Shut up.” My oldest chastised his brother.
“Hmmm. Honey, do you know that they offer ‘Asian Eyes’ as an Add-On Feature?! Next to Santa Hat and Glasses?!” I hollered at husband.
“Mom. What do the, eh, Asian Eyes look like?” My oldest asked. Now fully invested in this new development as well.
So we searched high and low on the website, and we finally found it. Ta da!
WTF Moment Numéro deux…
Seriously. Do those eyes even belong to a human?
“What the heck is this? Voldemort?!” I was so startled by the unreality of it I burst out laughing.
My oldest was indignant. “That is so racist!”
“What is racist?” My youngest asked. But fortunately, immediately, “Those don’t look like your eyes. You should just use the black dots.”
I laughed even harder when I saw the labels for kids: “Have your kids feel special!”
Asian eyes, what? for the straight A kids? (Yes yes, I know, yet another stereotype...)
Oh, little Jennifer is going to feel special alright… When she is shown to be some evil spirit, creepy imbecile, or wicked mastermind with no pupils.
CODA: I am not trying to read too much into this. I am sure the company does this out of good intentions. What kind of idiot would want to set out to offend paying customers, right? They are trying so hard to operate in this multi-cultural, multi-racial, complex and wonderful world that the United States of America has become. But seriously, dude? Those “Asian Eyes” are beyond creepy. They gave me nightmares. I was wondering why you stopped there? Why didn’t you include an Add-on feature for Coolie Hat? (Ok. Ok. I can’t help it!…)
Asian eyes? Take that!
Warning: This post should be filed under “Psychotic Ranting and Anonymous Foaming”, a category available from NaBloPoMo, (Thank you to whoever was wise enough to create this category…) in which I whine about stereotypes that caught me by surprise. Please feel free to ignore me when I am behaving like a rabid dog. Come back when I am normal, or normal by my standard.
The thing about reading a fiction is that a good book sucks you in, lures you to identify with the protagonist, even more so if it is from the first person point of view. Most fictions have an underlying universal theme: family, betrayal, love, hate, loss, reunion, found happiness, redemption, self-discovery, at least the successful ones do.
I went into the library in search of a good book to read. I do this by browsing the book shelves and see what strikes my fancy. Like many things I do in life, I trust it to chance. Serendipity. I love the sound of it, more so since I learned how to spell it correctly.
I came across a book by one Jonanthan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You. The front flap promises a “riotously funny, emotionally raw novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind — whether we like it or not.” Wonderful! Besides, this book apparently was being adapted into a feature film from Warner Brothers Studios. Even better! This way I can just read the book and skip the movie: since we all know, as a rule, the original books are infinitely better than the adapted films, right? (Except Marvel heroes movies of course. IMO.)
So imagine me, a universal reader, Everyman (Or, Everyperson if you want to be all PC about it…), following along the storyline. Everyperson, moi, going merrily down the road with the narrator who just lost his father and whose family is not mourning/coping properly, (Ok, so not so merrily after all. Sorry, my bad), I thought, “Dysfunctional family,” yup, we all have one of those. But wait. Hmm. The author could have lightened up on some of the cliché phrases and expressions, but that is not a good reason to put down a book once you started it. Or… is it?
Then on Page 11, BOOM! it came. Out of nowhere. The Chinese showed up.
My landlords are the Lees, an inscrutable, middle-aged Chinese couple who live in a state of perpetual silence. I have never heard them speak. He performs acupuncture in the living room; she sweeps the sidewalk thrice daily with a handmade straw broom that looks like a theater prop. I wake up and fall asleep to the whisper of her frantic bristles on the pavement. Beyond that, they don’t seem to exist, and I often wonder why they bothered immigrating. Surely there were plenty of pinched nerves and dust in China.
.
Really!?!
<I am going to take a breath. In the mean time, please watch “Really with Seth and Amy” on SNL>
.
.
I am back. Here are the thoughts that went (are going) through my mushroom-cloud head:
Well, Mr. Tropper, this is where you left me befuddled and where I leave YOU! On Page 11…
Sax Rohmer published the Fu Manchu novels in 1913. Wasn’t that like, hmm, almost a century ago?
And, really? Just because someone does not talk to you, all of a sudden, they are inscrutable? Maybe they just don’t like you because you are living in THEIR basement.
Is it because of our eyes? So small, you can’t see “into our souls”?
Oh, and news flash: The whole inscrutable Chinese thing? MEGA TROPE! Done to death since the 1870’s.
Until you also think the French with their obsession with wine and cheese, the Italian with their obsession with impeccable fashion style even when they are just sitting inside their own house, and the Germans with their inherent love for logics and orders, and all the FOREIGN languages they speak with, are also inscrutable, don’t call ME inscrutable.
And if you are keeping the landlords in the movie, I dare you to make them inscrutable. No, seriously. More jobs for Asian (Asian American) actors. I support my kind. I can’t wait to see it.
Every Halloween, we saw news reports and editorial comments on offensive costumes du jour. What I call Halloween Costume Conundrum. HCC.
This year, the HCC award went to Illegal Alien:
It was such a brouhaha partly because, in my opinion, it was sold through Target’s website. Target, the one mega store that does not seem to garner public ires, not yet. In fact, Target has been the trendy, cheap chic, darling for just about every social spectrum in the U.S. (It is amazing if you think about it. Kudos to their PR and marketing teams.) Protests against this costume started garnering support when immigrant activists cried foul, loudly. Several news programs commented on the costume as “distasteful” and “disgusting”, or even racist.
Now, I am as overtly sensitive as the next person of color, and probably have one of the largest chips on my shoulder. But my first reaction to this costume was:
That is clever!
You see: here the costume plays on the double meaning of “alien” and twists it around. The costume does not indicate the race/ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation of the wearer. It reminds us, or me at least, that there ARE illegal aliens from all over the world. (And as hinted by this costume, beyond this world even…) AND, the “alien” is holding a GREEN CARD, therefore technically, the being is NOT illegal.
Subversive, no?
Furthermore, it could also be saying: Underneath the appearances, we are all PEOPLE. Our common enemy should be the sons-of-bitches in the galaxy far far away that are scheming to invade Earth and enslave our minds and bodies. We are the world. Indeed. Nicely done.
Why would people look at this and immediately label it as “racist”? Doesn’t the automatic association of “illegal aliens = Latinos” expose the person’s own prejudice?
Why would the immigrant activists make the quick assumptions that the illegal aliens in the Extraterrestrial form are meant to target the Latino community? Although I agree that most people, whether they admit it or not, do make the equation readily, I wish the immigrant activists would have seized the opportunity to dis-stabilize the stereotype that has been haunting the Latino communities.
“Look at this costume. ‘Illegal aliens’ may not be illegal after all. And underneath that label / mask, that could be ANYBODY.”
NOW, the more progressive (and yes, the “annoying” ones, the “hyper sensitive” ones, the buzz killers, the trouble makers, etc.) bunch amongst of us wince at any costume that aims to convey a different race/ethnicity when it is donned. I still feel conflicted towards how I should react:
What if the wearer is a person of color? What if a Chinese person wants to dress up as a Geisha? What if an African American person wants to dress up as a Native American warrior or a Native American Princess? (Yes. I am channeling my puzzlement towards the Tyra Bank’s “Hapa disaster” on America’s Next Top Model…)
How about dressing up as a Bavarian with a beer mug in hand? Yodel-a-hee-hoo, Yodel-a-hee-hoo! Is that offensive to a person of Bavarian descent?
I do have a semi-answer to the above: A person of Bavarian descent would most likely be treated just as a “regular” person. White. Un-marked. Even if they do speak with an accented English, as long as they don’t speak, when they walk down the street, they are “Just like everybody else.” Whereas a person of color will always carry the visible indicator with them. We are marked. There are always assumptions, unconsciously, made about us.
“So, you are Chinese. You must like rice.”
Yes, I do. But when I look at a white person, I don’t go,
“So, you are white. You must like cheese.” Or, if you are a hip white person, “Sushi“.
Because I overthink things, especially things that matters to nobody else, I was at a loss when I saw this, at a costume shop, right in the middle of the PC, Liberal center of the U.S. – Cambridge, MA:
This is yet another picture I took of the art works that resonated with me when we went through the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago.
“We will not become what we mean to you.”
I think about that sentence often ever since…
I’m interested in how identities are constructed, how stereotypes are formed, how narratives sort of congeal and become history.
This is how the artist, Barbara Kruger, explained the thoughts behind her creation.
