Asian American Women – Bitch Flicks

Vintage Viewing: Marion E. Wong, Energetic Entrepreneur

What is certain is that, while ultimately upholding the value of family and of traditional culture, ‘The Curse of Quon Gwon’ gives vivid expression to the frustrations of women within those rigid norms, doing so with a cinematic language of the female gaze that centers female perspectives.

Written by Brigit McCone, this post is part of Vintage Viewing, our series exploring the work of women filmmaking pioneers. It also appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors, Part 2.

When considering the ethnographic films of Zora Neale Hurston, as one of the few surviving remnants of early cinema to be directed by a woman of color, I discussed the doubly distorted image of themselves that such women confronted, in a culture without their authorship. At the same time, the article surveyed the significant numbers who were recorded as making films that have not survived, with the intersection of racism and sexism placing obstacles in their path at every stage from financing to distribution to preservation. One of the most energetic women to struggle to fully author her own uncompromising vision, the first Chinese American director, as well as among the earliest female directors, was Marion E. Wong.

Wong founded the Mandarin Film Company (the first Chinese American film company) with ambitious plans to create non-stereotypical images of Chinese Americans, assuming, perhaps naively, that the American appetite for exoticized images of East Asia would make them even more eager to see authentic content. She shared with the Oakland Tribune that she wanted to “introduce to the world Chinese motion pictures with ‘some of the customs and manners of China.’” Mandarin Film Company was practically a one-woman show, with Wong serving as screenwriter, director, supporting actress, and costume designer on their only feature film, 1916’s The Curse of Quon Gwon: Where the Far East Mingles with the West. It’s “the earliest known Chinese American feature” film and “the first and only film made by an all-Chinese cast and an all-Chinese company.” 1917’s Oakland Tribune describes Wong as “energy personified,” with “imagination, executive ability, wit and beauty.” An article in Moving Picture World indicates that Wong traveled as far as New York and China in search of distributors for her film, but none were forthcoming. The film would have likely been as lost as the 1922 film, A Woman’s Error, by pioneering African American filmmaker Tressie Souders, had not two reels of it been unearthed in a basement in 2005. Watching Wong’s film now, we can catch a glimpse of what early cinema might have been, if the viewpoints represented had been more diverse.

The Curse of Quon Gwon: Where the Far East Mingles with the West – 1916

Opening with a statue to the household god Quon Gwon (Guan Gong or “Lord Guan,” a deity based on Guan Yu, a historical general immortalized in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese Literature). Worshiped in Chinese folk religion, popular Confucianism, Taoism, and Chinese Buddhism, Guan Gong represents the principles of loyalty and righteousness. Though the recovered reels of The Curse of Quon Gwon were lacking intertitles, they have been added to this version to enhance the viewing experience, with Guan Gong speaking the words of the Three Brothers’ Oath in the Peach Tree Garden, from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in translation by Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor. We are then shown the heroine’s formal introduction to the family of her groom. Wong stretched her budget by filming with an amateur cast: the heroine was played by Wong’s sister-in-law, Violet Wong, the villainess by herself, the mother-in-law by her own mother, Chin See, and the child by her niece. However, her sets are lavish and her camera moves gently back and forth to prevent the scene from being static. In general, Wong’s shot composition and editing compare very well with the industry standard of 1916.

Mixing Western and Chinese costume, Wong raises the cultural tensions and transnational identity of Chinese Americans at the time, resisting the tendency of mainstream cinema to portray “Oriental” characters as static stereotypes, instead imagining them in a state of fluid cultural transformation. As the heroine resists her maid’s efforts to transform her hair into a traditional Chinese style, her aspirations toward Western fashion are clear. An over-the-shoulder shot of her face in the mirror encourages the audience to identify with the heroine’s gaze, one of several moments by which the film establishes an aesthetic of female gaze and subjectivity.

One of the film’s central showpieces is its depiction of a traditional Chinese wedding ceremony, complete with regalia and gifts, reflecting Wong’s desire to showcase Chinese culture to her imagined Western audience. The beauty of these scenes make it difficult to imagine that a lack of quality was the reason for her film being rejected by distributors. Perhaps its centering of a Chinese American woman’s experience was judged unrelatable to viewers, though the struggle of a restless woman to accommodate herself to the strict rules of her culture is a universal theme. The heroine struggles to walk in her high shoes and laugh with her groom at his regalia, showing their unserious attitude toward Chinese traditions, even as Wong’s film celebrates them. After the wedding, Wong utilizes dissolves to show her heroine hallucinating that she is shackled with chains, anticipating Germaine Dulac’s dramatizing of the interior perceptions of women.

When comparing with Dulac, it is worth remembering that Dulac’s revolutionary impressionist and surrealist aesthetics evolved over the course of many films, from a beginning making conventional narrative cinema. Considering how impressive the cinematic imagination of her debut is, if Marion Wong had received support and distribution, there is no telling how experimental she might have become.

After her husband’s departure, the heroine finds herself rejected and driven from the family home, following a false accusation by the villainess, played by Wong herself. She seeks to take her child with her but is prevented, despite pleading for her child to be returned. Stripped of jewelry, she seizes a knife and contemplates committing suicide to purge her dishonor, before throwing it aside and resolving to live on without shelter, friends, or support. Her befriending a lamb may represent her innocence, or the contrast between compassionate nature and cruel culture.

As the heroine wanders off, grief-stricken, across a windswept wilderness, I was reminded of chapter 28 of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which Jane strikes out alone and spends the night on the moors, confronting her place in the universe and testing her endurance. In depicting the heroine’s confrontation with nature, her right to be seen as a self-sufficient being and independent of her bonds with others, is affirmed. It occurred to me that I had never seen an Asian woman in an American film in this way, a different form of empowerment from martial arts (kung fu, wuxia, etc.) heroics – the right to be self-sufficient and to seek existential meaning. Zhang Ziyi’s leap from the mountain at the conclusion of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the only other example that springs to mind. In 100 years, depiction of Asian women in Hollywood has not matured in its nuance to the level that Marion Wong achieved in 1916. To celebrate the connection of Wong’s heroine with Jane Eyre’s psychological journey as rebellious woman in restrictive society, and acknowledge the Western leanings of Wong’s heroine, extracts from Jane Eyre have been used as intertitles to illustrate the heroine’s thoughts throughout the film.

As a guilt-stricken maid resolves to confess to the heroine’s husband, who has returned and is heartbroken to discover his wife banished, the villainess attempts to choke the maid into silence. Instead, the husband bursts in on them and learns the whole truth (without the original intertitles, it is impossible to determine exactly what the false accusation was, though it possibly involved the heroine’s adorable child). As her husband sets out to find her, the heroine stumbles home, weary from her wanderings. The triumphant reunion of the family, and the despairing suicide of the villainess, conclude the film.

As the heroine adopts Chinese dress, dabs her eyes sorrowfully then gazes on the idol of Guan Gong, bowing solemnly to it, before flashing forward to a scene of the happy family with an older child, the final message of the film is ambiguous. Was the heroine justly punished for her Westernized disrespect of tradition, repenting and learning better by embracing her duty to family? What is the curse of Guan Gong? In the Three Brothers’ Oath, Guan Yu vows, “If we turn aside from righteousness and forget kindliness, may Heaven and Human smite us!” Did the curse then apply to the villainess, who turned aside from righteousness by making the false accusation? Or was it the heroine who was cursed for her rebellious impulses and disrespect of tradition, but redeemed by divine mercy? Are we, finally, to see her Western attitude as transgression or simply as individuality? What is certain is that, while ultimately upholding the value of family and of traditional culture, The Curse of Quon Gwon gives vivid expression to the frustrations of women within those rigid norms, doing so with a cinematic language of the female gaze that centers female perspectives.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ5dbcFjXhQ”]

Photo of Marion E. Wong via Wikipedia in the public domain in the U.S.

Brigit McCone keeps trying to learn Chinese but can’t tell the tones apart, though she is happy the ‘Ireland’ is apparently written as ‘love you orchid’. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and writing posts like this one.

Women-Directed Films at the Asian American Showcase

The lineup included The Tiger Hunter, (directed by Lena Khan)… Light (directed by Lenora Lee and Tatsu Aoki), and Finding Kukan (directed by Robin Lung). … Depictions of stories that are absent from an experience that is generally thought to be collective is definitely the point of film festivals like the Asian American Showcase. The film offerings this year illuminated the immigrant experience as an American one. At the same time, the breadth of the experiences represented, while hardly a cohesive or even complete picture, offered nuanced views of stories never heard in textbook discussions…

This guest post written by Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The Asian American Showcase is a series of films by Asian Americans or about the Asian American experience alongside an art exhibition. It features a wide variety of films from many viewpoints. Sponsored by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media (FAAIM), this year’s Showcase, which took place March 31st to April 12th in Chicago, featured mostly women-directed films, plus the Sundance Film Festival audience favorite, Gook, and the timely documentary on Japanese internment camps in the U.S., Resistance at Tule Lake. The lineup included The Tiger Hunter, (directed by Lena Khan), Motherland (directed by Ramona S. Diaz), Wexford Plaza (directed by Joyce Wong), Light (directed by Lenora Lee and Tatsu Aoki), and Finding Kukan (directed by Robin Lung).

Light is an artistic interpretation of the beginning of immigrant Bessie M. Lee’s life in America. It melds dance interpretations, poetry, re-enactments, and historical documentation against the backdrop of Aoki’s innovative sound and musical design. While laboring under her master’s oppressive demands, Bessie is told girls like her are a “dime a dozen.” It was an insult that rang true; something too many women have been told, especially while labor was being extorted from them. In this case, an immigrant seemingly without connections in a new country, Bessie, like so many women before her, was working hard while being told she was worthless, as if she should be grateful for her abusive circumstances.

Lenora Lee has created several works about Chinese migrant women and their lives after coming to the United States. In other films, she uses choreography, filmography, and setting to explore the stories of women who were trafficked from China and other women’s lives. Through a combination of projection, fully produced cinema, and live dance performance that references Tai Chi, she expresses narrative emotions as well as historical occurrences. Ultimately, her work elevates and personalizes stories that in a textbook may be a footnote meant to represent the experience of a larger population of people.

Depictions of stories that are absent from an experience that is generally thought to be collective is definitely the point of film festivals like the Asian American Showcase. The film offerings this year illuminated the immigrant experience as an American one. At the same time, the breadth of the experiences represented, while hardly a cohesive or even complete picture, offered nuanced views of stories never heard in textbook discussions of the American experience.

Robin Lung chases in the footsteps of erased Hollywood innovator Li Ling-Ai in Finding Kukan. In 1941, during a war that still in many ways defines the U.S. today, a film produced and funded by an Asian American woman won an Academy Award. Li never received credit for the documentary Kukan, but Lung attempts to discover a copy of the missing story and the full extent of her involvement with the film. Along the way, Lung also attempts to revive interest in the film after a heavily damaged copy is discovered in a basement.

There are several road bumps along the way, and some brick walls. Lung expresses discontent at being unable to prove her theories throughout the documentary. The film becomes as much about her perceptions of what makes a woman a hero, as what made Li a hero. To Lung, she wants to bring to life an active, fearless woman who traveled to China during a war to bravely capture what no one else was showing. At one point, Lung expresses her desire to see Li doing the work alongside the men as an “American” perspective. Yet the film Li has produced shows the women in China supporting the country alongside the men in the way Lung longed for. Adversely, Li lives a cosmopolitan life in New York, tirelessly supporting the film at social events and garnering connections and possible supporters in any way that she can. By the end of the film, Li has taken on the role of a more traditional American producer giving life to a project more meaningful than most in Hollywood could hope for.

Lung is ultimately unsuccessful in garnering American interest in a recovered Kukan. However, after discovering a letter of frustration Li authored to one of her best friends about what would become her book on the lives of her parents, she is reinvigorated and tries a new tact. Traveling to China, Lung brings a videotape of Kukan for a special viewing to a group of historians.

This American film that once inspired interest in a horrifying conflict across the world from the U.S., takes on new importance in the People’s Republic of China. While it depicts a Nationalist China, the film contains views of attacks made by Japan from the ground, something these historians had never before seen. Ultimately, while it seems it will be years before Li receives her full due in American cinematic history, her work has taken on new importance in an unexpected way.

Stories told about the general perception of the American Dream all include some tie to our collective immigrant past (aside from Indigenous peoples). Rarely does a film tell that story while holding onto that past as part of the protagonist’s future. While it struggles with straddling at least two comedic audiences, The Tiger Hunter successfully presents a story about coming to the U.S. without distancing itself from its characters’ cultural background.

After years of chasing the fantasy of his father’s hyper-masculinized role in the lives of his village, Sami (Danny Pudi) attempts to impress the father of Ruby (Karen David), his childhood sweetheart. The intimidating General Iqbal (Iqbal Theba) has decided he will only arrange his daughter in marriage to someone who has become successful in the U.S. Director/co-writer Lena Khan presents a classic romantic comedy with Indian American and Indian Canadian leads. It is a hilarious look at the lengths a man will go to marry the woman of his dreams.

While the film focuses on earning the right to marry a woman, she is conspicuously absent from most of the film. At first this appears to be an oversight, or playing into so many classically male-centered heterosexual romance narratives. Pleasingly, Khan eventually turns this on its head.

After forming farcical friendships with other outcasts who fail at being “professional Americans,” Sami sets up a fake home in his boss’ abode to impress Iqbal, and by extension his daughter, who travels with him. It is when the truth comes to light (due to Sami’s inability to keep up the lie for moral reasons) that the object of his desire hits the audience with the element they may or may not have noticed was missing. “It is me you have to marry,” Ruby points out, in light of the many lies he has told to impress her father. While her father has final say, ultimately Sami and Ruby have to share a marital trust that would last them a lifetime. In the end, it is her opinion that truly matters.

The film leaves a lot of questions about the arrangement unanswered, and while the end of the film is endearing, its ambiguity leaves a lot to be desired as far as clear moral heading. Yet it is undeniable that the final confrontation between Sami and Ruby becomes a twist for the role of women in this particular narrative, whether intentional by its creators or not.

There are many more tales to be told and heard by audiences that are sorely in need of them, whether they’re aware of it or not. This year’s Asian American Showcase offered many impressive narratives told and directed by women.

Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski is a museum educator by day (and often night), and a freelance writer every other time she manages to make a deadline. She can be found on Twitter @JMYaLes.

Elektra in ‘Daredevil’: Violence, White Masculinity, and Asian Stereotypes

Elektra is in some ways, the most problematic character. … Yet there is something strangely compelling about Elektra, not as an extension of the show’s tired prejudices against Asian people, but as a woman who despite her questionable origins transcends the limiting Strong Female Character trope. …Her presence in and of itself disrupts the masculine hegemony of violence in the show.

This guest post written by Kelly Kanayama appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

When it comes to sensitive depictions of people of color, Marvel’s Netflix show Daredevil has a fairly terrible record. There’s Claire Temple, portrayed by Afro-Latina Rosario Dawson, who helps the white male hero but can never be with him; that privilege is reserved for Karen Page, the embodiment of pure, white womanhood. There’s Madame Gao, who checks all the boxes of the Inscrutable Asian stereotype: the exact nature of her Asianness can never be revealed, she appears to spend her time sipping tea and painting whatever this is, and her communication mostly consists of vague pronouncements. Then there are the hordes of nameless and – as a result of their face coverings – literally faceless ninjas, whose sole purpose is to be dispatched by Daredevil, as his skill in their own martial arts is just that impressive.

And then there’s Elektra Natchios, half-Asian, half-white, sexual, violent, dangerous, and in some ways, the most problematic character on the show.

Elektra functions partially as a contrast to Karen: the femme fatale of color tempting a moral white man away from his virtuous path and, because the two are linked, away from a good-hearted, white woman. To underscore this dichotomy, Karen typically wears whites, neutrals, and blues, like the Virgin Mary would, whereas Elektra’s wardrobe consists of red and black (the vamp’s colors) with accents of gold or the metal of a blade.

Although the series presents Elektra as Daredevil’s equal in terms of fighting prowess, the show disempowers her by attributing this to her status as a living weapon of the Hand. As a woman of color, she is inherently an empty vessel to be filled, with ultimately no agency regarding her actions. Even more worrying, the responsibility for her lack of self-determination lies with her fellow Asians; the Hand may have the occasional non-Asian member, perhaps highlighted to sidestep accusations of racism, but its operation and aesthetics are pure East Asian stereotype. This dynamic ties into other media depictions of people of color suffering the most oppression at the hands of their own – such as any Western news story about South Asian, Middle Eastern, and/or Muslim women – which often serves as justification for the exercise of white privilege over non-white individuals or communities. We might not be perfect, but we’re not as bad as them. It’s fine to bomb their countries, because otherwise they’ll just keep on oppressing.

It must also be noted that the only named Asian characters besides Elektra are Madame Gao and Nobu, whose name no one bothers to mention for most of Season 1 (I resorted to calling him Hot Suit Guy until then). For the most part, Asians in Daredevil are a monolithic mass, the menace of the Other against which a powerful white man must rise.

To meet this challenge, white men repeatedly prove their worthiness to rule by mastering Asianness. Daredevil and Stick are more proficient in Asian martial arts than the warriors of the Hand, while the Kingpin demonstrates his intelligence by speaking to Madame Gao and Nobu in their own languages. These men are thus “better” than their Asian counterparts, as seen in the Kingpin’s ability to convince Gao and Nobu to cooperate with him, or in the fact that both Elektra and Daredevil are both trained by Stick but the latter manages to not become a killer, due to a morality that the Asian Elektra can never have.

Daredevil is a white man’s world. Asians are just getting beaten up and dying in it.

Yet there is something strangely compelling about Elektra, not as an extension of the show’s tired prejudices against Asian people, but as a woman who despite her questionable origins transcends the limiting Strong Female Character trope. In addition to being half of a white woman/woman of color romantic polarity for Daredevil, her presence in and of itself disrupts the masculine hegemony of violence in the show.

Here’s a drinking game I wouldn’t recommend playing with Daredevil: take a sip every time the title character growls “my city.” You’ll pass out in the first fifteen minutes. It’s a key phrase in deciphering his motives behind defending Hell’s Kitchen, which aren’t simply rooted in the desire to stand up for victims of crime. If that was all he wanted, he would have stuck to his day job as a lawyer for the poor and the otherwise marginalized, without the need to sneak out after dark to break some bones. “My city” connotes ownership and, in turn, the right to treat the city’s occupants however he sees fit, since they as part of the city belong to him. The Punisher also comes to this situation from a (former) position of institutional authority. As a former Marine who was deployed in the Middle East, he represents the exercise of U.S. and largely white male-dominated power with the goal of establishing order, and still refers to himself as a “soldier.” This is the language of possession and imposition, spoken by the show’s white male leads.

Elektra displays little concern for such ideologies. Her accent marks her as an outsider in Hell’s Kitchen and in the U.S., and the phrase “my city” is absent from her conversation, as is its more neutral variant “this city.” She is a foreigner, a woman, and a person of color who is at least somewhat removed from her male counterparts’ battles of ownership and authority – and is their equal at what they do best in their efforts to impose the order of white patriarchal institutions upon their surroundings. To drive this point home, Elektra’s most sexualized moment is inextricable from her first display of physical power, as these are combined in that boxing ring scene – first through a fight where she and Matt are evenly matched, then through a passionate coupling where she spends most of her time on top.

In a show where violence equals authority, being the living weapon of the Hand grants her a status similar to those of Daredevil‘s male leads, investing her with the ability to fight alongside or against them as an equal. While Elektra’s is a different type of violence from that carried out by the Punisher or Daredevil with a different source, it is nonetheless effective.

Granted, this part of the plot is still highly objectifying. Perhaps I’m trying to justify my love for a character whose own backstory undercuts her power by finding alternate readings of the indefensible; even in 2016, as an Asian-American woman, I often have to settle for the problematic and compromised or nothing at all. It is a rare occurrence to see a powerful woman on-screen who looks like me and who isn’t entirely composed of racially fetishized tropes: the clingy schoolgirl, the murderous geisha, the dominatrix ninja, or some unholy combination thereof. Elektra may bear aspects of these tropes, but she is by no means reduced to them – in a show where authority is reinforced by successful acts of violence and such acts are the purview of white men, she undermines this supremacy through her own violence and her existence as a female Other of color among the male, the white, and the powerful.

Kelly Kanayama was born and raised in Honolulu but now lives in Scotland, where she is pursuing a PhD in comics research. She has written about comics and superheroes at Bitch Media, SciFiNow, NPR: Code Switch, Women Write About Comics, and Mindless Ones. Her poetry on comics and pop culture has appeared in Room Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, and the British Science Fiction Association magazine Focus. You can follow her on Twitter @kellykanayama.

On Indie Rom-Coms, The Duvernay Test, and ‘Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong’

It was Viola Davis who commented about the lack of substantial roles as love interests for women of color on the big screen. … We see that familiar and very white narrative unfold between an interracial pair in ‘Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong,’ except this time it’s infused with cultural nuances that, while they don’t reinvent the wheel, offer a fresh perspective.

This guest post by Candice Frederick was originally published at Reel Talk Online and appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships. It is cross-posted with permission.

It was Viola Davis who commented about the lack of substantial roles as love interests for women of color on the big screen. They’re often prostitutes, sexual victims, or practically asexual (meaning, their characters help the protagonist — a white woman — with her romantic dilemmas with no sexual desires of her own). It’s preposterous.

That said, I love that Jamie Chung plays the romantic lead in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong, a film she also co-executive produced with her real-life hubby and co-star, Bryan Greenberg. I also love that Davis, Chung and other women of color in Hollywood are taking matters into their own hands by creating their own films and narratives (Davis even has a film production company). Chung partnered with writer/director Emily Ting on a story that lends itself pretty closely to Richard Linklater’s Before series in that it focuses on the dialogue between two strangers flirting with ideals on love, companionship, and ambition.

We see that familiar and very white narrative unfold between an interracial pair in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong, except this time it’s infused with cultural nuances that, while they don’t reinvent the wheel, offer a fresh perspective. Take for instance, the fact that Ruby (Chung) is the fish-out-of-water American visiting Hong Kong for the first time, and Josh (Greenberg) is the white American living in Hong Kong for the past decade, who shows her around town. Too often it’s been the other way around where the Asian woman who lives in the non-American city, doesn’t speak any English, and falls for the mysterious (and culturally tone deaf) white American (this is is, of course, if the Asian female character isn’t playing a sex worker).

Another intriguing aspect of the film is that Ting is unafraid to approach dialogue that doesn’t avoid the fact that the two have different ethnicities and are enveloped in an open conversation where comments like “Oh, you have an Asian girl fetish?” aren’t out of place. In fact, they’re completely appropriate given the narrative.

But it takes a lot more than diverse romantic leads and authentic dialogue to make a great film. People of color characters don’t automatically legitimize a film. Though the conversation around “The Duvernay Test” (named after filmmaker Ava Duvernay), which challenges Hollywood to cast actors of color in substantive roles, is an important one to have, we must still advocate for characters that are interesting and three-dimensional. Sadly, Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong is just not enough — even with its commitment to depicting society as it really is: diverse. Both Ruby and Josh are underdeveloped and we don’t feel invested in their characters outside of the conversation that’s driving the plot. For a romantic comedy starring a real-life couple, it remarkably left me quite cold.

I want to see more of Jamie Chung on the big screen, and I am intrigued enough by Ting’s passion for the project to be interested to see what she does next. But I’m all set with this project.

Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong opens in theaters and On Demand February 12.

Rating: C

https://youtu.be/m4ATqbLDoNs

Creator/blogger of Reel Talk Online, Candice Frederick is a writer for hire, lover of snark, former magazine journalist, and co-host of the podcast, “Cinema in Noir.” She is also a Personal Lifestyle Contributor for Black Girl Nerds, and member of the Online Film Critics Society, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and LAMB (Large Association of Movie Bloggers).

Seed & Spark: On ‘Ex Machina,’ Artificial Intelligence of Color, and How to Become a (White) Woman

I decided to be a filmmaker because I believe that women of color should proclaim ownership over the creation and dissemination of our images and stories. When Ava DuVernay asked her Twitter followers to name films that featured black, brown, Native, or Asian women leads, only a handful of films on that list featured an Asian American actress with an Asian American woman director at the helm. (And the drop-off between first and second efforts is alarming; Alice Wu, the writer/director of 2004’s ‘Saving Face,’ has never made another feature.)

This is a guest post by Zhuojie Chen.

In the opening minutes of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Nathan, the eccentric founder of the fictional company BlueBook, commissions Caleb, one of his programmer employees, to conduct the Turing test on Ava, an artificial intelligence subject. If Caleb cannot distinguish whether he is interacting with a computer or a human, then Ava passes the test. The bulk of the film focuses on the interplay between these three characters and attempts to bring up issues of gender and sexuality – specifically, performative (white) femininity. In this entry, however, I’d like to focus on Garland’s complete misfire with the character of Kyoko.

During Caleb’s first day in the research facility, he meets Ava (whose name is a variation of the Biblical Eve), the test subject with a (white) face crafted from his porn search history. She possesses internal circuitry that visibly lights up before him and speaks haltingly. In interviews, actress Alicia Vikander has noted that Garland instructed her to play Ava like a robot who wants to be a girl.

On Caleb’s second day, Kyoko (an Asian woman with a hairstyle that surely drew inspiration from Fu Manchu’s moustache) enters his room, silently places a tray on the table, and leaves. Later that evening, Kyoko spills wine as Nathan and Caleb eat dinner. Caleb attempts to placate Nathan’s angry outburst by telling Kyoko that he’ll take care of the spill, but Nathan’s reply – “Dude, you’re wasting your time talking to her; she doesn’t understand English” – left me with an acute awareness of the unfolding spectacle. In white America’s imagination, Asian American women take up dichotomous spaces: Dragon Ladies or China Dolls. As a recovering academic, I’m tempted to cite scholarly article after scholarly article to validate my point of view; but as a life-long Asian American consumer of pop culture, I see a system that consistently replicates itself.

Kyoko is a white man’s plot device; a foil to Ava; a trope that evokes the imagery of comfort women without delving into any of the trauma. She falls well within normative standards of beauty (thin, light-skinned), but Garland constructs her so that she is still a foreigner. Her silence functions in two ways: first, she doesn’t take up the space that Ava is allowed through her inquisitiveness; but her voicelessness also marks her as dangerous, as disloyal. And what of Nathan’s banal dismissal of her? “Hey, Kyoko. Go, go.” Like a post-racial hipster reimagining of “ching chong ding dong,” it too tries to juxtapose supposed Otherness with homegrown simplicity and fails at either cleverness or subversion.

We ought to contextualize Kyoko’s character within the larger framework of the way in which Garland navigates racial issues. Caleb eventually learns that Nathan has been building test subjects for quite some time. There’s Lily; by version 2.4.0, she’s a fully formed naked white woman who we see walking down a hallway. There’s Jasmine, a naked black woman who, by version 4.3.0, still doesn’t have a face. She never moves on her own; she never acquires agency. (In version 4.2.2, we’re treated to a shot of wigs.) And there’s Jade, a naked Asian woman racialized on her name alone. Jade, from versions 5.0.1 to version 5.2.3, asks Nathan, in accented English, “Why won’t you let me out?” Version 5.3 assaults her captor; version 5.4 tries to break free, slamming on glass walls, only to break off her own arms in the process.

After Caleb uncovers this footage, Kyoko reveals that she, too, is A.I. by peeling back layers of “skin.” I entertained the thought that Garland was, in this image, attempting to convey that Kyoko’s problematic depiction of Asian American womanhood had been filtered through Nathan’s eyes, as he had envisioned her. Unfortunately, Garland envisioned this film. The power of cinema is not simply representational; the power of cinema lies in its constant act of creation, of reification.

At the film’s conclusion, Ava and Kyoko join forces to kill Nathan. Ava loses half of an arm in the process; Kyoko loses her life (like a horror film, the lady robot of color doesn’t make it to the end). After the struggle, Ava steals into Nathan’s room and finds the defunct A.I. models. She unhooks her damaged arm and replaces it with Jade’s. Slowly, she peels off Jade’s skin and assembles those pieces on her own body, takes a white dress from another A.I., and leaves the facility with Caleb still locked inside. One of the last images we see is Caleb pounding on the door, a dead Kyoko mere feet away.

In one of Caleb’s first sessions with Ava, he says to her, “Mary’s a scientist, and her specialist subject is color….But she lives in a black and white room. She was born there and raised there and she can only observe the outside world on a black and white monitor. Then one day someone opens the door, and Mary walks out. And she sees a blue sky. And at that moment…she learns what it feels like to see color. The thought experiment was to show students the difference between a computer and a human mind. The computer is Mary in the black and white room; the human is when she walks out.”

How unfortunate, then, that in order to see color, in order to be truly human, Ava must actively participate in the erasure of women of color. From Luise Rainer in The Good Earth (1937), who won her first of two Oscars by playing a Chinese servant, to Emma Stone in Aloha (2015), who thought she could convincingly portray the quarter-Hawaiian, quarter-Chinese character Allison Ng, white women in Hollywood have long benefitted from systemic racism that centers white artists at every turn. The consequence of privilege is that it allows those who have it to be oblivious to its ill effects; privilege, by nature, craves inaction or continued ignorant actions; it necessitates an investment in the status quo.

Luise Rainer in The Good Earth and Emma Stone in Aloha. They’re both Asian; didn’t you know? — Luise Rainer in *The Good Earth* and Emma Stone in *Aloha*.
They’re both Asian; didn’t you know?

In 2014, I went to the Sundance Screenwriters Intensive with a feature script called M. Virgin, which is a comedy that deals with Asian American fetishism. This summer, I will take three scenes from the feature and turn them into a proof-of-concept short film. I hope you’ll support the project with a contribution, a follow, or both. Only systemic change is worth our collective investment.

Zhuojie Chen is a writer and filmmaker from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She lives and works in New York City, spent her childhood obsessed with Power Rangers, and will ardently defend Michelle Kwan’s performance at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Once upon a time she went by Suzy; then she decided she liked her given name more.

‘The Social Network’ and the China Doll/Dragon Lady Syndrome

Part Dragon Lady, part China Doll, Christy is 100 percent stereotypical. It’s hard to believe that such a distorted representation, steeped in age-old myths, only dates back to 2010. Even more disheartening is the fact that most film critics did not raise an eyebrow at this deeply flawed portrayal.

This guest post by Stephanie Charamnac appears as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.

When The Social Network came out in 2010, critics heaped effusive, almost rapturous praise on the film. Rolling Stone hailed it as “bracingly smart, brutally funny and acted to perfection,” while the New Yorker called the movie “absolutely emblematic of its time and place.” Amidst all the hype, one less than glowing aspect of The Social Network went virtually unnoticed: its blatantly stereotypical portrayal of Asian-American women, as epitomized by the character of Christy Ling. Christy, played by Brenda Song, has a minor role in the film and appears onscreen for no more than twenty minutes. But in this short space of time, she is depicted as the ultimate hypersexualized, exotic and aggressive Asian girlfriend – a hybrid between Dragon Lady and China Doll.

The first time we see Christy in the film, she is in full seduction mode. Dressed in a cleavage-baring top and short skirt, she approaches Eduardo Saverin (the co-founder of Facebook) during a college lecture. When she realizes that he is Mark Zuckerberg’s friend, she immediately suggests that they all go out for drinks. A few minutes later, Christy and Eduardo are shown in a bathroom stall, with Christy performing oral sex. In this scene, she is every bit the Dragon Lady – aggressive in her sexual advances and confident in her own “exotic” charm. After this encounter, Eduardo tells Mark smugly: “We have groupies.” Within the first few minutes of appearing in the movie, Christy has already been established as a sex-crazed gold digger.

Although Christy is sexually aggressive, she is portrayed as being passive and quiet in later scenes. One notable instance is when she and her friend (another Asian woman) are sitting on a couch in Mark Zuckerberg’s room, listening as the male students discuss their plans for Facebook. When Christy asks if they can do anything to help, Mark simply responds “No.” Unfazed by his dismissive attitude, she continues drinking on the sofa – casually accepting the fact that she has no role to play in this powerful men’s club. A similar scene unfolds when Mark, Eduardo, and Christy meet up with Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, in a restaurant. Although Christy is the one who set up this meeting, she is again relegated to the background when the three men start talking. Every time the camera pans in her direction, she is shown listening raptly to Sean Parker, deferring to his opinions. At no point in the scene does she make a meaningful contribution to the business meeting. Her function is purely decorative. All that is asked of Christy is for her to behave like a beautiful, silent China Doll – a role that she executes perfectly.

But for her final scene in the film, Christy suddenly switches back to full Dragon Lady mode. Seething with jealousy and suspicious that Eduardo is cheating on her, she ends up setting fire to the gift he gave her (a scarf), and dumping it in the garbage can. In her last moments onscreen, she epitomizes the “crazy bitch” trope, with plenty of Dragon Lady-style villainy for good measure. It seems that her character can only exist at opposite ends of the spectrum – either hyper-aggressive or doll-like in her submissiveness. This leaves no room for complexity or insight into her behavior; she is merely a caricature, and not a fleshed-out person.

Thus, Christy appears to be more akin to an object than a real character in this film. She is supposed to be a Harvard student, but there is no intellectual dimension to her portrayal: her body is the only thing on display, readily available for the visual and sexual pleasure of white men. Part Dragon Lady, part China Doll, Christy is 100 percent stereotypical. It’s hard to believe that such a distorted representation, steeped in age-old myths, only dates back to 2010. Even more disheartening is the fact that most film critics did not raise an eyebrow at this deeply flawed portrayal.

In their gushing reviews of The Social Network, critics from the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Los Angeles Times did not once mention the film’s stereotypical treatment of Asian-American women. The Boston Globe noted the movie’s lack of strong female characters, but merely as a passing comment instead of a real critique. Even The Harvard Crimson had nothing but praise for a film that essentially objectifies all of Harvard’s female students. The reviewer called The Social Network “a stunning modern epic” and deemed it an “authentic onscreen representation that captures the general tone of the [Harvard] campus.” This glaring lack of critical insight underscores what is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of widely circulated stereotypes: they often appear so “normal” that they are taken for granted.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien’s review for The Daily Beast offered one of the rare instances where a critic from a major news website took issue with The Social Network. O’Brien commented that “missing from what critics are calling the defining story of our age are female characters who aren’t doting groupies, sexed-up Asians [or] vengeful sluts.” The fact that most of the mainstream media outlets failed to notice or question the film’s problematic representation of Asian women indicates the extent to which Dragon Lady and China Doll stereotypes still permeate the entertainment industry.

This vicious cycle can only be broken when mainstream media portrayals start to acknowledge that Asian women are real people, and not hypersexualized objects of lust. Media producers – especially those in Hollywood – need to realize that these harmful images only serve to perpetuate racial prejudice and ignorance. If we really want to move into the 21^st century, it is time to banish the ghosts of the Dragon Lady and the China Doll from our screens once and for all.

Stephanie Charamnac is a freelance writer and editor living in Singapore. She holds an MA in Media & Communication from NYU, which is just a fancy way of saying that she’s obsessed with all things pop culture.