Teri Hu
MA Education in Language and Literacy
UC Berkeley, May 1999

Continued...

Molding Minorities:
Asian American Youth Respond to Images in Popular Culture and Literature 

While M. Butterfly may serve to further dichotomize the genderization of cultures, it does provide a clear and powerful argument against the emasculation of Asian men by Western society.

Popular movies also contribute to the desexualized Asian male stereotype. This subject is best explored in Gina Marchetti’s groundbreaking book on representations of Asians in American filmmaking, Romance and the “Yellow Peril:” Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. I do not want to review her entire treatise, but I do want to mention a few points that are especially relevant to our discussion.

First of all, Hollywood has traditionally set up non-white men of all races as the bad guys in opposition to the good white man, so it is not particularly surprising that Asians were also caught up in the net of villainy. What’s interesting to note is how the early Asian male villains were portrayed as desirous of white women, yet unable to acquire them. From the very beginning, Asian men were sexually inept, posing no real threat to virtuous white womanhood, unlike the frighteningly virile stereotypes of lusty black villains or the suave romantic Latin lover. This aspect of the Asian male stereotype has not changed, essentially, since the Silent Era.

Even as Asian men became acceptable as heroic protagonists towards the end of the millennium, they were still not allowed a love interest, especially if the female star is a white woman. In 1998, The Replacement Killers, a mainstream movie featuring Hong Kong cinema star Chow Yun-Fat and Hollywood starlet Mira Sorvino, resisted depicting the two leads in any romantic light. Although Chow has been a consistent and successful romantic lead in his Asian films, he has not yet been allowed to kiss a woman in either of his U.S. features. This becomes especially suspect when there are several gratuitous sex scenes in The Corruptor (1999), where his white male co-star, Mark Wahlberg, cavorts with a parade of nubile Asian prostitutes.

This brings us to the questionable sexuality assigned to Asian women. Although they may be portrayed as virtuous, and are almost inevitably depicted as desirable, Asian women are also severely limited in the range of roles they can play in mainstream movies. Prostitutes, whether with a heart-of-gold or a heart-of-stone, are a favorite trope for Asian females. The element of disposability, of self-negation that such a stereotype conveys is especially obvious given their frequent pairing with powerful white men. Even if the relationship is presented as a “true” love interest, it is generally understood that the Asian woman will need to sacrifice some aspect of herself in order to be acceptable in the white man’s world.

In the classic example, The World of Suzie Wong, (1960) William Holden’s white knight, Robert Lomax, cannot fully embrace Suzie, played by Nancy Kwan, until her bastard son from a previous relationship is killed in a mudslide. It is only with the loss of her child, a symbol of her independent life before Lomax “rescues” her from prostitution that she becomes acceptable. Although the title focuses on Suzie, the plot is really about her abandonment of her world for the privileges of his superior civilization.

These romantic rescues are another dangerously attractive stereotype that feeds on preconceived cultural notions. They offer Asian females, especially impressionable young girls, a seductive fantasy of salvation. Because there is no question that most Asian cultures devalue women, movies such as The World of Suzie Wong or The Joy Luck Club convey a false sense of equality in the white world. By presenting white men as loving and respectful of women in contrast to the often abusive and unattractive Asian male villains, these movies ignore the very real gender imbalances that exist in mainstream American culture. And, of course, since teenagers are a primary audience for such popular fare, the implicit messages in these films have a lasting impact on social mores for generations to come as these youngsters grow older with these images buried in their psyche. Today’s teens do not need to have direct exposure to the source of a stereotype to be affected by it in their daily lives.

 
School Setting


In order to see how my academic research applies to real life Asian American youth, I turned to my students. I teach at Mission San Jose High School—which is also my alma mater—in Fremont, California. This is a sprawling bedroom community in an affluent San Francisco Bay Area suburb, near San Jose and the Silicon Valley high tech community. As of the 1997-98 school year, the ethnic breakdown of our student population was as follows:²

We are currently a recognized National Blue Ribbon School as well as a California Distinguished School, and have won these awards with some frequency in the 35 years since the founding of the school.

Many Asian immigrants move to the Mission San Jose area specifically to attend our highly rated schools, which has led to severe overcrowding and thus, resentment against these “outsiders” who have “taken over” the community. Although the recent arrivals are not, by any means, uniformly wealthy, the multimillion dollar houses sprouting on the nearby hillsides have come to represent the newcomers and the problems they bring. Many longtime residents of the area feel that greedy land developers have been exploiting the quality of our schools to attract buyers for their overpriced homes without regard to the needs of the existing community. While these grievances are not without justification, they focus disturbingly on the Asian newcomers—many of whom actually live in the older houses—even though there are many new white families moving into the big fancy “Executive Homes” on the hilltop as well. I believe this is because the established community tends to see the Asians as “new” and “different” and “not American” regardless of how many years the Asian family has actually been in the United States.

I should explain that I feel a particular affinity for Mission San Jose High School, since it is my school in more ways than one. I have experienced Mission as a student, graduating with the Class of 1988. I am currently experiencing it as a teacher, and next year, when my younger sister—of whom I have custody—enters the ninth grade, I will also be a Mission parent. As you can imagine, this place is important to me and I have a vested interest in seeing that it offers its students a top-quality education as well as a safe emotional environment. My relationship with the school has perhaps made me especially sensitive to the “outsider” status of Asians in the school, but I am confident that I am not imagining the racial tension that exists within the student body. I am particularly interested in examining the ways my students of Asian descent respond to this tension, and how it manifests itself in their own views of their position in American society.

One of the ways that I see Asians as being marginalized at Mission is in the lack of Asian authors and characters in the English curriculum. The absence of viable ethnic role models in Mission’s literary offerings is harmful to the students, especially those of Asian descent, because it sets forth a skewed vision of the world. As residents of a diverse state such as California, negotiating cultural differences is a daily fact of life, one that is not reflected in the majority of their books.

When readers meet characters with which they strongly identify, their own identities are influenced by these fictional people. It is this sort of connection to literature that creates genuine readers, people who read for pleasure, who are able to immerse themselves in a fictional reality and engage with texts on a personal, almost spiritual, level. Without a healthy range of diverse and representative role models in the curriculum, many students will not find their own life experiences reflected in the readings, and reading itself may never become magical for them. As an English teacher and lifelong student of literature, I don’t think I need to say that I think this is a tragedy.

Literature is often a primary means of self-understanding for high school students. From talking with my students, I've found that they identify strongly with the books they read for school and align themselves according to the works that move them. As many of them do not generally read for pleasure, these readings are a powerful influence in identity formation. For Asian American students in particular, these books—mostly by and about European Americans—become roadmaps to assimilation. They are seen as definitive documents of the American experience and students with non-European backgrounds must reconcile their own diverse histories within the European cultural framework of these books. The relative absence of Asians or Asian Americans in the curriculum leads these students to devalue their own culture relative to the well-represented mainstream.

For instance, one student, a Chinese male from the Class of 1999, said that The Great Gatsby was his favorite book because he admired Gatsby’s perseverance, his driving ambition to reclaim Daisy’s love. It was clear that he identified with Gatsby. When I asked him if he’d ever read a book by an Asian author, he said “just The Joy Luck Club,” which he did not enjoy. It’s completely understandable that a seventeen year old boy would relate more to Jay Gatsby than any of the Joy Luck women…but how would he have identified with Raymond Ding from Shawn Wong’s novel American Knees? Unless he’s introduced to the possibility, he will never know. This possibility is what is missing from our curriculum.

 
The English Curriculum


All students at Mission San Jose High School are required to take four years of English in order to graduate. These classes are meant to expose them to a variety of literature as well as provide them with college preparatory writing skills. The latter skill seems to be adequately addressed, as over 70% of U.C.-bound freshmen from Mission pass the Subject A Examination. However, upon a closer inspection of the curriculum, it is clear that the first goal is not fully met. The diversity of the student body is also largely ignored. Although Asians make up nearly 45% of Mission's students, of the one-hundred plus books on the four-year booklist, only two were written by Asians, Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya and The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (according to an English Department Core Literature Memo).

There are also a handful of other ethnic texts in the curriculum, but the students' exposure to them may be limited by the teacher's personal preferences or the availability of titles within the school. From my observations of department meetings, there seems to be resistance on the part of certain teachers to adopt new texts, since this would force them to revamp aspects of their set curriculum as well as force them to reconsider what “literature” means to them personally.

Another complication arises around the scheduling of teaching units. Since some titles are less abundant than others, the books must be rotated through the teachers' schedules. Therefore, the preferred historical approach—especially in courses such as American Literature and World or British Literature—is often impractical as teachers essentially trade titles, catching books as another teacher finishes with them rather than planning their curriculum systematically from the beginning of the year. This would discourage some teachers from teaching certain unpopular texts due to them being unavailable at a convenient time in the school year.

Finally, the process for getting books approved by the district is discouraging and complicated. First, a text must be read by a credentialed employee, then read and seconded by another, and then read and approved by the department chair. Then, there is a three page packet of nomination forms that must be completed and submitted by the May deadline. If anyone chooses to submit a nomination, they must then attend a series of inconveniently scheduled committee meetings and board meetings to defend their book choices. And finally, the five member school board is notorious for their generally conservative politics and intolerant attitude, further discouraging even the most liberal and progressive teachers from attempting this process. 


Freshman Composition


At Mission San Jose High School, the English curriculum is determined by class level. Ninth grade is Composition and Literary Analysis and all of the core books—Lord of the Flies, Hiroshima, Animal Farm, The Miracle Worker, Of Mice and Men—are written by white males. Not one of the novels contain any Asian characters. Given the ethnic makeup of the students, the dearth of Asian American images in the curriculum is striking. The implicit message in excluding Asian works from this introductory class is that Asian writing is not worthy of literary study. At this impressionable age, 45% of Mission's students are not seeing any of their own experiences reflected in the English curriculum.

The only book that offers any representation of Asians is the token non-fiction title, Hiroshima, by John Hersey. This is generally the least popular book in the curriculum due to its dry journalistic approach and unappealing subject, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the U.S. in 1945. Many teachers complain about having to teach the book and a large number of my freshmen students in the 1997-1998 school year complained about it as well. While the tone of the text is fairly sympathetic to the Japanese, the unengaging writing style prevents the freshmen from absorbing the moral and ethical lessons Hersey intended. This unfortunate choice associates depictions of Asians with dull, unpleasant reading while portraying the Japanese only in the context of a conquered enemy. There is no acknowledgment of the Japanese American internment experience related to this text. 


Ethnic Literature


Sophomore English is ostensibly Ethnic Literature, but a closer look shows that the representations of ethnic peoples are generally primitive and condescending. There are no works by ethnic Americans, and the few ethnic authors are foreigners. For instance, tenth graders often read The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. While it may provide a fairly sympathetic and accurate portrayal of a poor peasant's life in pre-Communist China, it is by no means a product of an ethnic author. Even though Buck did spend a large portion of her life in China, as a white missionary, she is still not a true representative of the Chinese.

The only other "Asian" title on the Ethnic Literature list is Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve, which is, at least, written by an author from the ethnicity represented. However, considering that it portrays a poor peasant woman, whose life is depicted as an unending series of traumas and upheavals, it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to The Good Earth. Once again, the poverty-stricken farmer is shown to be powerless in the face of encroaching civilization and the native lifestyle is doomed, to be replaced by the superior European cultures.

Another popular text in Ethnic Literature is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. While this is not an example of Asian or Asian American literature, it once again depicts native people of color—in this case, Africans—as primitive, disharmonious and ultimately conquered by European civilization. While I do not contest the accuracy of the depictions or sympathy in the authors' intent in any of these works, I do question the implicit message the school is sending to its students in choosing these texts as ethnic representatives in the curriculum.

Mission's tenth graders are being told that ethnic cultures consist of little more than subsistence farming and military unrest. They are not given literature by Americans with ethnic heritages or literature that depicts ethnic cultural traits as positive or dominant, even though the focus of the course is supposed to be those cultures as represented through literature. There is also some feeling among the teachers that this course is not really “serious” about literature. At a meeting in April, 1999, where we were discussing the texts that differentiate a “regular” class and an Honors class, one teacher (whose specialty is British Literature) commented that none of the Ethnic Literature texts were “challenging enough to be considered exclusively Honors material.” This dismissive, almost contemptuous attitude towards Ethnic Literature pervades our English department and its approach to teaching works by authors of color. 


American Literature


Works by ethnic American authors are supposedly saved for eleventh grade American Literature classes, but again, the required core readings—The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, Huckleberry Finn—are generally by male writers of European descent.

These books have few, if any, Asian characters, and so, do not merit discussion in this context. However, it is important to note that once again, Asian exclusion is not a neutral act. By systematically denying Asian American students the opportunity to read works by Asian American writers in the classroom or even to read about Asian characters in the books they do assign, the school is sending the message that such works are not of value.

There may be a glimmer of hope in the recent addition of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston to the supplementary reading list. Although this text can be problematic, its presence signals a loosening of the rigid boundaries that formerly defined American Literature at Mission. Such optimism is qualified, though, since the school has only purchased 70 copies of the text for its junior class of nearly 600. Eleventh graders are still required to read Arthur Miller, while only a select few may have a chance to tackle Kingston. 


World or British Literature?


The content of the twelfth grade English curriculum is currently under debate. While it has been traditionally considered World Literature, the district-approved literature anthology series has twelfth grade designated as British Literature. For teachers, this means that teaching twelfth grade English as World Literature requires creating a curriculum from scratch, without the prepared materials that textbook publishers so generously provide with their books. With these incentives, it is understandable that many senior English teachers opt to focus on British Literature rather than assume the burden of developing an independent curriculum.

As expected, British Literature does not include any works by Asians, although there are Asians who write in Britain (such as the critically acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro). What is less understandable is how the World Literature curriculum is also devoid of Asian writers, even though this would be an appropriate place to teach those foreign ethnic authors from Ethnic Literature. Once again, Mission's curriculum shuts out the voices of ethnic authors, depriving its ethnic students of the opportunity to see themselves reflected in their readings.

 
Student Subjects


For my study, I decided to focus on a group of five students that I knew well. They are all seniors, two males and three females, enrolled in two of my four English 12A classes. All are Mandarin-speaking Chinese immigrants from either mainland China or Taiwan, currently 17-18 years old, who arrived in the U.S. between the ages of 2 and 16. It is interesting to note that all of them come from intact marriages, and have at least one sibling, which would tend to indicate a fairly strong commitment to traditional family values within this group. Although none of them are “bad” students by any standard, their overall (self-reported) GPAs range from 2.6 to 3.8, which may be taken as an indicator of their investment in scholastic performance.

I chose these students because I knew our mutual home language, Mandarin, would help these students feel more comfortable discussing issues that would normally not be addressed in school. My status as an MSJ alumna and my affiliation with U.C. Berkeley lent credibility to the study as well, reassuring these students that I not only understood the pressures of being a Mission student, but was able to succeed despite the challenges of attending such a competitive school. I am well aware that my Chineseness was another valuable asset in garnering trust with these students, some of whom feel greatly alienated from the school’s general culture, but it must also be noted that had I not been Chinese to begin with, I would not ever have conceived of the study. Therefore, it’s difficult to separate my own ethnic identification from the results of my research, and my findings must be considered in this light. If researchers must be categorized as either “insiders” or “outsiders” in relation to their subjects, I suspect that my position is more inside than out, and my perspective must be interpreted as such.

I approached these students early in November, and they each verbally agreed to participate in the study. In December, I distributed a letter describing the study and a survey (Appendix A) that asked the subjects to evaluate the influence television, film and literary role models have had on their lives. It was interesting to note that many of them could not pinpoint any pop culture role models, but easily found role models in real life. By the end of February, I had received all five completed surveys, and was ready to begin the interview process.

Although I intended to ask about their reaction to the absence of Asians in the English curriculum in these interviews, I found that these students were generally not consciously aware of this lack. Since they had no prior opinion on this issue, I felt it would be leading and biased to force them to acknowledge it and form an opinion. It seemed much more relevant to focus on their responses to popular culture influences.

All of the interviews, except one, were conducted in my classroom, which also serves as the yearbook office and has a constant flow of students wandering through, looking for friends, working on layouts, dropping off projects and generally creating havoc. It is a cozy, comfortable room, with a mini-fridge, microwave, hotpot and overstuffed couch, and a colorful bench outside the door. Because of the energetic nature of the environment, the interviews were often interrupted, and the presence of other students made certain topics difficult to explore. 

 
Art


I began with Art, an 18 year old who emigrated from Taiwan three years ago, at the age of 15. We met one afternoon, after school, chatting casually on the bench in the hall while my yearbook students were frantically racing to make a deadline. He is a tall, pleasant boy with a cheerful, but guarded, face who is quiet but friendly in class and easily accepted by his peers. This last is particularly surprising because Art is gay, and makes no attempt to hide his orientation, although he is not exactly openly “out,” given the cruel and unstable nature of high school society. Although he says that his parents are ok with his homosexuality now, the “now” implies that there were some difficulties in getting them to be “ok with it.”

His family is fairly wealthy, his father owns a pen factory in China, travelling frequently between California and Asia, while his mother raises Art and his younger brother in Fremont. This means, of course, that he does not have a constant, stable male role model around the house, and it seems that he is closer to his mother than his father, perhaps an inevitable result of the arrangement. He is not close to his one younger brother.

Another area where there may be some family tension are Art’s career plans. He is attending the prestigious Chicago School of Art in the fall, and says he has his parents’ full financial and emotional support. He wants to be an artist, although he is not sure of the specific field yet. Art did acknowledge that his parents were initially skeptical of his artistic aspirations, and worried that he would not be able to support himself financially with a “frivolous” degree. There are no art schools in Taiwan, so they have no frame of reference to understand the system in the States. However, because Art was able to point to a handful of successful Asian graphic artists such as Doug Chiang (the lead designer of the first Star Wars movie, Episode One: The Phantom Menace) his parents eventually allowed him to apply to art schools, with the caveat that he must decide on a financially feasible field by his junior year.

It is particularly interesting that he mentioned Doug Chiang to his parents, but did not mention him as a role model in his survey. In fact, Art did not mention any Asians in his list of role models. He did not claim any in movies and television, nor did he identify with any fictional characters. Instead, he cited Greg Louganis as a role model from books (presumably from reading Louganis’s autobiography Breaking the Surface, as Louganis is clearly an athlete, not a literary figure), and James McDaniels, his boyfriend, as his role model in real life. They are both gay white men.

Art’s relationship with James is another interesting element in his case. He is the only male subject that is currently romantically involved. James is thirty-two years old, and it seems fair to speculate that Art may see him as a substitute father figure given his own father’s physical (and possibly emotional) distance. There are other, more disturbing possibilities. A homosexual man from Australia once observed to me, while visiting San Francisco in the summer of 1997, that the white homosexuals in the gay scene there treated their Asian boyfriends “as if they were little more than beasts. They weren’t considered quite human.” As you might imagine, this memory came back to haunt me after my interview with Art. The phenomenon of “rice queens”—white men who specifically target Asian males (usually young) in the gay community because they consider them non-threatening, almost feminine, partners—suggests that the attraction between them may not be healthy, and that the pervasive feminization of Asian males is manifesting itself in their relationship. What is particularly frightening is that Art may not be able to recognize this. Since he has, essentially, no Asian male role models, gay or otherwise, he will identify with the models available to him, generally white males. This makes it difficult for him to question their authority and assert his own needs when the situation calls for it.

Although Art spoke of their relationship affectionately, and seems to be happy and comfortable, any romantic involvement between two people with such a drastic age difference (14 years) raises some questions of propriety. Perhaps it’s a good thing that he is going so far away for art school, as it may give him a chance to gain some perspective on the situation and reassess it accordingly.

Of my five subjects, Art was the only one who did not feel any particular affinity to Asian celebrities. When asked what he thought his life as a gay teen would have been like in Taiwan, he immediately responded, “Terrible, just terrible.” In his native country, homosexuality is still illegal as well as immoral. I speculate that his awareness of the marginalization of homosexuals in Taiwan causes him to reject his Chinese identity to some degree, as he recognizes he will never be able to live comfortably, freely expressing his sexuality, in his homeland.

Although Art is readily social in the classroom, and participates as a clarinet player in the school orchestra, including performing at the Spring musical production of Once Upon a Mattress, he says he does not have any friends at school with whom he regularly socializes. He goes home for lunch, as his house is just across the street from the school, and on weekends he reports that he mostly hangs out with James. His isolation within such a large Asian population also suggests that he has rejected (or been rejected by) the Asian American culture within the school, and this may be a factor in his denial of Asian influences as well as his embracing of white American role models. 

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posted on March 1, 2003.