I love Asian women and so can you!

OK, so yes, this is the academic caveat: I don't watch a lot of tv, but what I do watch is BRAVO and I am addicted to two of their reality shows: Top Chef and Project Runway. This is Season 4 of Project Runway and as we speak I am watching Ginny Barber, wife of Tiki Barber (a former NFL player and Today show host) talking to designers. [NOTE: Don't worry--no spoilers ahead!]

Why I'm noting Ginny Barber is the way she was introduced--it was through the voice of one of the designers, Christian, who, after Tim Gunn said that there was a special guest, described this "beautiful Asian woman (maybe he didn't say beautiful--it might have been stunning or something similar) come through the door. I love Asian women."

I love Asian women . . . what the hell???!!!

I mean, does this guy REALLY love all Asian women? [SECOND NOTE: Christian is the youngest member (21) and is openly gay (almost all of the male designers are openly gay--with the exception of the seemingly sole macho hetero who wants to REMIND viewers of how he's NOT gay. You just want to say, "Relax, dude, we get it--and by the way, the more you keep telling us you're straight the more we're just going to think that you are protesting a *little* bit too much) and I mention this because he wasn't trying to hit on her or talk about her in an overtly sexual way--but of course it still comes across as objectifying her--although perhaps it's the Margaret Cho syndrome, I dunno].

Anyway, it really bugs me--when people say things like they love Asian women. Am I being oversensitive? Of course! But I mean, the whole mass stereotyping (even if relatively positive/benign) is problematic and very specifically saying that you love Asian women (even if you're a white gay guy) is really just reinforcing all of those horrifically patronizing, "Orientalizing," and sexualizing beliefs about Asian women.

One last thing--Tiki Barber (African American) and Ginny Barber (Asian American) make a very visible mixed-race couple. So kudos to BRAVO for highlighting them.

Update, Nov. 29 (Friday): I saw a re-run of this episode last night, and I wanted to clarify the comment that Christian made. When Ginny Barber walked into the room he said "And then this fabulous Asian woman walked in. She looked gorgeous with her dark skin and hair. I love Asian people; they're fierce." Funny how I extrapolated the "I love Asian women" comment--which just goes to show what someone's hypersensitivity will do. It is still problematic, however, to love Asian people because we're "fierce" but it does temper the orientalized tone by saying "people" and qualifying it with "fierce" (rather than just leaving the comment about the woman's great skin and hair). Of course perhaps what I'm really reacting to is that Christian is to Project Runway what Marcel was to Top Chef season 2: young, cocky, and annoying. And one more comment--the other very public but absent inter-racial couple on Project Runway is, of course, Heidi Klum and Seal. So PR really is a show that is promoting inter-racial love.

The Vietnamese Touch

Today I got pounded on the back by a middle-aged Vietnamese woman at a nail salon. I went with my cousins and an aunt for some female bonding and manicures. There were a string of about three different nail salons on one block, all of whom looked to be run by Vietnamese/Vietnamese American women. And this is, I have to say, a commonality in the Bay Area--nail salons run by Vietnamese people.

It's an interesting ethnic niche market--the Vietnamese nail salon. I can't quite figure out how they make any money since it was $10.00 a manicure, which included, as I alluded to above, a sound back pounding, neck rub, and full arm massage, along with the manicure. It feels as if nail salons in CA are almost synonymous with Vietnamese Americans. And yet, I do wonder if I'm stereotyping--and I don't mean to be. So I suppose it does raise the question: when does something cross the line between being a description to being a stereotype?

Hung on Top

Last night in its third season, Top Chef named Hung (don't know last name--they usually only refer to one another by their first names) the winner of the cooking reality tv show. Hung is a Vietnamese immigrant--his story came out in the penultimate show, when he finally got personal and discussed his motivations for being in the show--as a tribute to his parents: his father escaped from Viet Nam in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, came to the U.S., and eventually brought the rest of the family over, while his mother is credited for teaching Hung how to cook, infusing him with the skills and passion for a life of the kitchen.

Although one would guess that I would be rooting for Hung, I actually was turned off by his personality during the show--he was highly competitive, independent minded, confident to the point of being cocky and arrogant, disdainful of his competitors, often scoffing at how easy a challenge was, and admitted that his strategy was to look out for himself only--that in a regular kitchen he was a team player but that during Top Chef he was in it to win and wasn't interested in helping other contestants.

Yet I wonder how much of my own distaste for him was based on the internalized stereotypes I've imbibed about the way Asian Americans should behave: deferential, communally oriented, humble, self-effacing, and quiet. Hung is none of these things, and I am glad that he IS so confident and sure of himself, as well as being skilled. Although, interestingly enough, one stereotype that was perpetuated on the show was that Hung had technical mastery but no soul or heart (a charge often leveled against Asian and Asian American artists/musicians). I think Hung does have heart and soul and I'm glad that he, along with Yul Kwon, are changing the face of media television, even if briefly, to demonstrate that Asian American men can be strong and confident winners.

You People

So the first thing you should know when reading today's post is that I live in a fairly crunchy-liberal-progressive little town, one that currently has the highest tax bracket in the state because there is a tiny downtown area and not many businesses--largely, it's a residential community that abuts Southern University and traditionally people who lived in my small-crunchy college town were working class and affiliated with the university in the sense that they had jobs there, non-faculty ones. As the 70s and 80s came around, more graduate students and eventually faculty, from Southern U. bought homes and before you can say "gentrification" housing prices were shooting up. If anyone lives in the SF Bay Area or NYC, perhaps this will be a familiar tale, although the fact that average home prices in my town are still below $300,000 is probably laughable to anyone who has tried to buy a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home in the Bay Area.

At any rate, I had run-in with the phrase "you people" today as I was walking my dog around my neighborhood. It's a pretty sleepy little neighborhood, in fact, the street where the altercation happened doesn't even have sidewalks. As I'm walking on the final stretch to home, a brown dog, of indeterminate breed, pops out of nowhere and approaches us. I look around for the owner, but can't see anyone, and the dog is off leash and fast approaching. Now, the backstory to my impending discomfort about this situation is that I used to have a dog, Luther, who was very violent when approached by dogs off leash and have had some AWFUL things happen with dogs off leash approaching him when he's on leash (dogowners understand the whole off vs. on leash phenomenon with dogs. Off leash, both dogs are usually OK. On leash, it's a different story, and when one is on and the other is off, all bets are often off). Anyway, I was nervous and a the dog came over and started to sniff Bruno (and Bruno sniffed back) I called around for the owners and asked if they could please call their dog and get him away from my dog because I wasn't sure what Bruno would do on-leash to an off-leash dog.

At this point, the dog's owner, a white man in his late 40s or possibly early 50s, standing next to a white pick-up truck, calls over his dog and then starts to speak to me in an overly aggressive tone of voice, asking me if I lived on this street, and if not, I should stop walking my dog on his street because it was my own damn fault for walking my dog in front of his home (we were actually on the opposite side of the street from this man's house, but apparently, even the width of the road wasn't wide enough for my infraction of walking my dog) and that "YOU PEOPLE" should get off the damn street and mind your own damn business.

Now, as I was first sorting out all of this information, my first delayed reaction was, "Huh? You mean, he's not apologizing, he's acting hostile?" and then I of course took offense and asked him who he meant by "YOU PEOPLE" and that I had every right to walk my dog on this street--it was a public street and I wasn't doing anything wrong. At which point (because now I've engaged him and moreover, confronted him with his own irrationality) he gets even more hostile and he isn't quite screaming but he's definitely talking in a LOUD VOICE and keeps repeating the phrase "YOU PEOPLE" and "OFF MY DAMN STREET" in different variations as Bruno and I made our way back home.

And of course, I couldn't help but think, what did he mean by "YOU PEOPLE":

*Asian Americans?
*Women?
*non-Southeners?
*Dog Owners who used leashes when walking their dogs?
*non-Southern accented people?
*Uppity Women of Color who talk back to white Southern men?
*Overly educated, liberal, hippy, crunchy-granola, property tax raising, gentrifying, not-from-here Yankees who turn down their noses on the local people for their seemingly red neck/ignorant/racist/in-bred/no-class/no culture ways?
*All of the above?

In the flush of anger, I thought about calling Animal Services and reporting his dog being off leash, and I thought of calling the police and complaining about the verbal harassment and intimidation. But as I calmed down and came home, I decided to wait. And partly it's fear. I don't live far from this man, and my own stereotypes of white Southern men are alive and well--and perhaps it's unfair for me to classify him as an irrational bigot who would have no problem retaliating against me and Bruno for reporting him, but I do fear that. And I also realized that I also spoke up against him, as was my right, in part because I am all of the above in the "You People" column (although I'd like to think I'm not so condescending towards native Southeners, but lets face it, I'm an overly educated liberal-progressive English professor from the West), and I thought it was important for me to stand my ground against his hostile tirade and irrational anger against me and Bruno--because I didn't want to be a silent Asian American woman.

But now, where do I go from here? I'm not sure. But I don't doubt that race was a subtext for this entire encounter, even if it wasn't true for him, it certainly was for me.

The Hollywood Mirror

Last week as I was de-toxing from my South Carolina sojourn, I took a break from the work schedule I put myself on and immersed myself in narrative. I read two novels in 4 days (The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich and The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman--I recommend both, highly, for different reasons. Erdrich continues to weave the genealogy that she began in Love Medicine about American Indians in the Midwest--with haunting and beautiful effect--and Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy is a page turner and much more than a children's fantasy world: it is dark and rather treacherous and raises some philosophical/theological questions that are really more for adults) and more to the point of this entry, I saw 3 films: the latest and final installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, the indie film Waitress, and the latest caper flick in the Oceans' series, Oceans 13.

What do these films all have in common?

Nothing, other than the fact that I was entertained by all 3 and that all 3 lacked any real Asian American characters. In Waitress I don't think I recall seeing a single non-white person. It is set in some small, rural town in the midwest or the South (unclear the exact setting). Pirates did feature Chow Yun-Fat as the pirate king Sao Feng. The Angry Asian Man blog already discussed the stereotypes associated with his character--and the People's Republic of China is so incensed with the continuation of "yellow peril" stereotypes that his character perpetuates that they have apparently edited out certain scenes for release in mainland China.

Did the depiction bother me? Yes and no. Yes, because it's racist fantasy and no one likes racist fantasy. No, because I wasn't expecting more from this film series. I mean, if I don't want to be incensed by Hollywood depictions of Asians and Asian Americans, I shouldn't go to movie theaters and watch Hollywood films. It's almost a given, nowadays, that what you see projected on screen is going to be a stereotype or gross caricature. Nothing new has really changed in nearly a century of cinematic portrayals. So yes, it's important to point out all the ways that Sao Feng and the other Asian faces are in line with Hollywood stereotypes--and so are the other "ethnicized" characters--the Turk, the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the African--so I'm just not surprised and unlike with books, in film I can turn down the volume of the critical voice--or at least I was able to this week.

But the surprise film I want to talk about is Oceans 13. Because they have done something in all 3 films with the Chinese character that I think is intriguing and I can't figure out if it is done for pure laughs or could be a potentially subversive thing to do. They never have the Chinese character, Yen (played by real life acrobat, Shaobo Qin) speak English--he speaks Mandarin and the other characters respond in English. But what is important is that they all understand one another--the only need for an "interpreter" is when they are conning other people. It's a small thing--and I think it was originally done for laughs in the first film when Qin speaks Mandarin and Brad Pitt responds in English, signaling that Pitt can understand Mandarin, but continuing this conceit in the third film is interesting and potentially subversive because it creates a world in which a facility for language is assumed--where accents are not used for comic effect and where there is something natural about everyone understanding Mandarin and simply responding back in English. And there are never subtitles or explanations--if you don't speak Mandarin then you have to figure out through the context of the speech act what is being conveyed. So what is mirrored back is a reality in which you can speak Mandarin and look like a Chinese guy (and be a Chinese guy) and you don't get mocked or ridiculed--you are understood and accepted.