The
professor brought up a really interesting point the other day. While we
extensively discussed the stereotyping of black people in media, we briefly
touched upon Asian stereotypes. The topic we started consisted of how Asians in
pop culture is often victims of positive stereotyping. It was made clear how
negative stereotyping could be a detrimental cycle; that stereotypes come from
nowhere, and are oft made-up and self-perpetuating. And so, naturally we’d ask:
what about positive stereotyping?
In my
opinion, stereotyping is necessary to a minute degree. We use it to get ideas
across efficiently, to parody or to poke fun. A personal rule of thumb to keep
in mind though, is that if you decide to poke fun at one party, you should poke
equal amounts of fun at everyone else. It’s all in relativity. I see
stereotyping to be a spectrum ranging from good to bad: For example, making a
black man love fried chicken can be seen as bad; next to a white man bathing in
money, and an Asian man on a calculator, and all of a sudden, it doesn’t seem
as offensive, because everyone else is subjected to the same level of
prejudice.
In today’s
media, this rule doesn’t seem to be applied much at all. Black characters (I
refuse to say African American in this case, because it’s not an exclusive
phenomenon to the United States) are often put into small-time crime roles, for
instance. In recent days, it’s getting better; for one, we don’t have blackface
as a standard depiction, and there is an emergence of actors in Hollywood of
African descent. I point towards characters like Ian or Curtis, from Utopia and Misfits respectively, or John Luther from Luther…even Jerwayne from Phoneshop, as examples of characters in the right
direction.
Asian
characters, however, don’t share the stereotyping
spotlight. It takes a lot to mark any Asian character as stereotypical; in
illustration class, someone literally had to draw a Fu Manchu clone for it to
be branded a stereotype. But this isn’t the case. We aren’t all good at math,
or all good at music. We aren’t all good at kung fu, and Asian girls aren’t all
obedient wives. All of these can, arguably, be good or bad, but they’re usually
seen as a good thing in the media. As a result, characters of East Asian
descent suffer positive stereotyping. The effect is that there are rarely any
well developed oriental characters in recent western pop culture. Mako from
Pacific Rim, for example, served as the kick-butt girlfriend to the white
American main character. In DC, we have China White the female Asian assassin;
Shado the female Asian assassin; Katana the female Asian assassin, Cheshire the
female Asian assassin and, yes, you guessed it Huntress is indeed a female
Asian assassin.
That is not
to say there aren’t any other characters. There are plenty of Asian characters
in the various comic-verses. The issue is, there aren’t any unique ones; they
all share a stereotype of some sort, like the female Asian assassin; in Ryan
Choi as the Atom’s case, the brainy Asian guy, or the Mandarin, another Fu
Manchu clone.
Someone
tried to convince me once, that I was overthinking it. There were plenty of
Asian main characters in pop culture, as I quote, “[…] like Jackie Chan, or
Bruce Lee and Jet li.” This highlights the limited roles an East Asian can play
in the current mass media; we’re evil, good at fighting or female.
Asian
females especially, get a lot of damage from this. There is a sense in popular
culture, that East Asian women are repressed, obedient and highly desirable.
This leads to websites like Creepy White
Guys, which shares the various types of racist and misogynist messages
Asian women get. This is a whole other topic for another time, but it
highlights my next point.
For some odd reason, if the main
character weren’t white, the comic, movie or television show, wouldn’t be popular. There is always a sense that White is better in popular culture. For
example, Akira, commonly hailed as a
milestone in animation, was on the verge of being turned into a live-action
film. The premise, however, was that, instead of being set in Neo-Tokyo, it would be set in Neo-Manhattan. It was rumored that Garrett
Hedlund or Zac Effron would play Kaneda.
Another example: The Raid, soon to be a trilogy, is an
Indonesian story, said to be one of the best set of action movies of all time.
Soon, it will be remade, still called The
Raid, but instead, Chris Hemsworth will be playing the main character. The Raid is already a live-action film;
post 2000s, why it has to be remade with white main characters is still foreign
to me.
Jumping
past the recent and obvious examples of 47
Ronin, Avatar and live-action Dragon
Ball, let’s discuss the upcoming movie from Disney, Big Hero Six. Based on the
Marvel comic book series of the same name, in the comic, they were all
Japanese. Sadly, their translation to the big screen meant they had to be “less
stereotypical” and “more diverse”. And so, we now have a range of characters
from different places in the world. One thing that still bugs me though, is
that even though the main character Hiro looks oriental, his description on various
sites always starts with “[…] He is Half Caucasian”; and the only other Asian
character on the team is, yes, that butt-kicking Asian girl.
I hope that
perhaps someday, another Bruce Lee emerges in the entertainment world to
reorient our views on how Asians can be represented in media, but until then,
all I can do is hope, and try. Maybe I’ll wake up one morning, and finally find
a hero in western pop culture that I can finally latch onto and say, “look, he’s
like me!”
