I work in a grocery store and one day I was with one of my coworkers, a Filipino woman with an accent. As I was bagging groceries, the customer we were helping turned to me and said earnestly, “She has the most lovely oriental accent.” I had no words. It deeply concerned me that this old white man was saying “oriental” and was seemingly enamored by my coworkers’ accent. He saw this aspect of her as something desirable and exotic.
The word oriental comes from an imperialistic era of world history that defined Asia and asian cultures by European standards. To me, the term implies that anything Asian is also foreign and different. And as this term was heavily used during a time of American imperialism and colonization of Asia, it also implies that something Asian is both desirable and capturable.
The media has perpetuated the sexualization of Asian culture and women with “oriental” tropes. One example of this is in the musical Miss Saigon. When I was younger, I didn’t really pick up on how harmful its portrayal of Asian women was.
Miss Saigon presents Vietnamese women as sensual and mysterious objects that young American soldiers fawn over and hope to take home as trophies. The musical makes it seem as if the white Americans must rescue these women for the purpose of improvement. This wrongfully implies that there is something wrong with Asian culture and it needs to be fixed or improved upon in order to be socially acceptable.
Miss Saigon is also guilty of fetishizing Asian women as they depict prostitutes in traditional clothing and makeup which holds the connotation that traditional culture is something sexual and erotic although its not.
There are still many instances in recent times where asian culture is subliminally fetishized and inaccurately portrayed. In Freaky Friday with actor Lindsey Lohan, the Chinese characters cause mischief with their “exotic and spiritual culture” as they wreak havoc on the white family. Of course, the Asian women are dressed in stereotypical garments and are viewed as bothersome outsiders.
Crazy Rich Asians does a good job accurately showing the intricacies of Asian culture and creating a storyline that doesn’t rely on Asian stereotypes and fetishization to carry the plot.
Asian women are exoticized as foreign commodities, reducing their culture and bodily autonomy to some sort of prize. Furthermore, Asian women are commonly depicted as mysterious outsiders and docile to western influences. This perpetuates ethnocentric beliefs about their malleability and ignores the importance and meaning of asian culture.
While Asian Pacific Islander (API) representation in the media is progressing, there is still a lot of work to do to reverse the ingrained stereotypes born in the 1900s.