Flower Crown Magazine: Issue 2

Not Your China Doll
by Kaylee Dolloff
AUTHOR NOTE: When I say Asian from this point on, I
mean East Asian unless I say otherwise. This isn’t to say
that Central, Western, and South/eastern Asian people
don’t have their own problems with their portrayal
in the media; however, I, being an East Asian person
myself, don’t have enough knowledge of what other
Asians have to go through so I will be writing from my
own experiences as a Chinese person so I won’t speak
over other groups. Also note that I’m American so
everything I say is from an American perspective. (e.g.
“media” referring to American media)
If you ask mainstream media, Asian people are nothing
but stereotypes. The men are either masters of martial
arts or they’re completely emasculated and used as
comic relief with their broken English and strange habits.
The women are portrayed as sexy geisha, dragon
ladies, subservient schoolgirls, or nerds who only exist
to be an obstacle for the white female lead to conquer.
Both are subjected to the perpetual foreigner trope,
and we often are given no names or distinct personalities
– and if we are given names, they’re usually
foreign sounding, since there’s no way Asians can be
born and raised in America with American sounding
names.
We’re going to focus on the image of the Asian woman,
since Asian women never really have existed as
their own people in media and this has affected how
your everyday Asian woman is perceived extremely
negatively.
One of the most notable trends is the stock Asian
appearance in female characters: small in stature, thin,
and incredibly fair, with either very small and slanted
eyes or big, wide, doe-looking ones. There are Asian
women who look like this, sure, but this is by no means
all of them so it makes no sense that they’d be presented
as such. Asian people, and to a more general
extent, people of color, have a lot of genetic diversity,
but media refuses to acknowledge this for pretty much
every race of color. There is no “right” way to look
Asian, but the media has ingrained a predefined image
of what an Asian woman is so deeply into our culture
that anyone who doesn’t fit in that little box isn’t really
considered Asian enough, or she’s seen as undesirable.