Community Essay : ‘Unspoiled Asian Woman?’ Bah! : The stereotype may have its positive aspects, but they’re not worth the limits that come with any pigeonholing.
My habit on Sunday mornings is to spend a couple of hours reading The Times at the local coffee place. On this particular Sunday, I sat down at a table next to an ordinary-looking man. When he looked up, I smiled and nodded, and began to flip through the paper.
He continued to look at me. When I looked up again, he asked, “What nationality are you?” I gave my standard reply, “I’m American.”
He tried again, “I mean, what ethnicity are you?” Well, ethnically, I’m Chinese. But because I have been pegged in the past for being all sorts of things, I asked him to guess. “Chinese or Taiwanese,” he said. I told him he was right, even though he didn’t seem to understand that Taiwanese are Chinese ethnics who live in Taiwan. He said that I didn’t look “overtly Chinese,” but because I was reading the Sunday Times and had a book with me, he deduced it. “The Chinese tend to be sharp and educated,” he explained.
A Chinese-American friend of mine likes stereotypes such as this, which he sees as basically positive. I must admit that these images have benefited me, too. Once, a cop let me go after stopping me for speeding. He asked where I was going in such a hurry. I said that I was going to a research meeting at my professor’s house. Apparently, a plausible excuse. I am convinced that, no matter what I do, I will never be seen as a troublemaker.
But there are times when a little agitation is necessary, and when one is an Asian woman the effect is a little difficult to achieve. For example, my sister, also a short Asian woman, and I were given a hotel room in Washington, D.C., next to a room full of partying teen-agers. Unable to sleep at all, we called the front desk several times throughout the night to no discernible improvement. When we complained in the morning, the manager called us “ladies” in a patronizing tone and told us in exaggeratedly slow speech--as if we could not speak English--that no refunds could be made. My sister and I were infuriated to the point of screaming at him until he relented, apologized for the inconvenience and refunded our money. Just in time too, as the people waiting in line began to leave, unaccustomed to seeing diminutive Asian women in hysterics.
And once, I was at a psychiatry case conference where a psychiatric resident was analyzing a tense interaction between an Asian teacher and a Latino parent. He suspected that as a neat, organized Asian, the teacher could not tolerate the chaotic lifestyle that typified the Latino. Well, I am a disorganized Asian who knows many compulsively neat Latinos, so I suggested that the conflict may have a bit more to do with personality than cultural differences.
My sport of choice, basketball, also seems to contradict a stereotype. When I confess my enthusiasm for slam dunks and three-pointers, I usually get a slightly startled response and a remark like, “Oh, you play basketball?” I then feel a vague sense of guilt for not living up to the feminine ideal that seems to personify the Asian woman. The next time I’m asked what I do for exercise, I should say “light jogging or tennis, because my constitution is quite delicate and cannot withstand heavy physical exertion.”
Lest you think that I deliberately contrived a personality to counter the Asian stereotype, I should also note that I studied classical piano, am quite computer literate, and once majored in engineering--all of which seem to be associated with being Asian.
But I would happily give up the “positive” aspects of the stereotype in order to be liberated from the negative. It is not uncommon these days to see a new and burgeoning category in the personal ads: “White male seeking Asian female.” Whenever I see this, I wonder what it is these men are seeking. Is it what playwright David Henry Huang calls the “butterfly” persona--an exotic, submissive woman who caters to her man’s every whim? Is it what a white male friend of mine, who dates mostly Chinese American women, believes--that Asian women just “put up with more crap” on the average? This is the kind of mentality that says, while white women have been ruined by the feminist movement, Asian women remain unspoiled, willing to overlook the occasional sexual indiscretion and sexist remark.
Once, when I was walking on the beach in Santa Monica, a man walking past said “Hi” in an insistent tone. I ignored him and continued walking. Having passed me, he doubled back and shouted “Hi!” his face about a foot from mine. I continued walking and he left me alone, muttering to himself “Chinita,” a derogatory Spanish term for Chinese female.
I had the choice of telling him off, which would have spoiled my nice walk, or ignoring him, which made me feel somewhat helpless. I wish I didn’t have to choose at all.