Many years ago, at a tech/startup networking event in Palo Alto, I found myself unexpectedly being interviewed for a job I didn’t want, couldn’t do, and wouldn’t be paid for by a guy I’d never want to work with.
“It’s good that you have a background in the industry, tell me why you would be a good partner for this project,” he demanded smugly. I was startled, busy, and not unlike a woman at the bar getting away from a creeper by saying she has a boyfriend, I figured it would just be easier to explain (several times, because he wasn’t listening) that I was not a developer, rather than ask him why the hell he ever thought I was trying to get this “job” to begin with.
Afterwards, I walked away, puzzled. Why me? There were a bunch of clearly more compatible potential partners for him in the room. What made him think that my casually asking him about his project meant that he was going to decide whether I was worthy to do free development on it?
Then it hit me: I was the only asian chick. It was a strange feeling, because it was the first time in the bay area that I had actually felt singled out for being asian.
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A couple of items in the news lately have made me want to bring this up. The first is the this article that’s been going around lately about Amélie Wen Zhao cancelling the Blood Heir novels because of severe social justice backlash. The second is the ongoing conversation about Marie Kondo.
A lot of people in my social justice community have been using the Blood Heir example for why we need to be careful about using the discourse of diversity in power plays and avoid hate mobbing well-intentioned actors who make correctable mistakes.
As an east asian woman, I have a slightly different interpretation:
Let’s talk a minute about negative stereotypes. What’s are the biggest, strongest negative stereotypes about black people? They’re violent, stupid perhaps, several other things. (Black people have it super tough.) Hispanic people are stereotyped as lazy, sexualized. Indigenous people are drunk.
What are the strongest negative stereotypes about east asians?
Go on, take a minute. It’s slightly more complicated, right? They’re definitely there, but you need a minute to articulate them. Conformist (but is that so bad)? Dirty (but not Japanese people)? Cliquish (but that’s not the right word)? Good at math (but is that one negative)?
I would argue that the most dehumanizing prevalent stereotype about east asians is that we are at your service. (When I asked my husband this question, his suggestion was, “drones”.)
Especially for east asian (and often south asian) women, there is a sense that we are available, supportive, meticulous, even effective, but never need credit or the limelight. You can demand 3x as much from an asian woman, and she’ll just be there.
Asian women are stereotyped as for you.
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The sentiments described in this article about Marie Kondo frustrated me quite a bit. I really just wanted to say:
Look, poor white people. At the end of the day, Marie Kondo, like 80% of the rest of the world, is just not accessible to you. It’s infuriatingly unjust, it sucks to be poor, and capitalism needs to go down.
But stop bitching because this one asian lady, in particular, hasn’t managed to cross the chasm of income inequality to deliver her solution to you, when if she were white you’d just frown, accept that she’s yet another rich people fad, and go do something else.
But instead, many of the classism complaints about Marie Kondo’s approach has this sense of loss, or tragedy — she becomes a sensitive, discussion-worthy topic because unlike all the other affluent minimalist things, we feel more compellingly that she almost might have been for us. Damn this Japanese lady for not taking care of ME.
I feel like I’ve seen a lot of sentiment that the Marie Kondo backlash is racist while we struggle to kind of put our fingers on WHY. Is it about animism? Maybe? Personally I don’t know anything about Shinto. Is it just mean to yell at a rare successful asian self help guru? That’s important, but it feels like there’s more to it.
Personally, I think that if you’re experiencing this inchoate sense of indescribable racism, try and see if this explanation fits: the Marie Kondo backlash is playing into the stereotype that asians should be extra available in the perfect service of others.
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Ironically, playing into a different stereotype, the Blood Heir story has an immediate resonance for me with getting reamed by scoring a 90% on a test. Amélie Wen Zhao didn’t do it right. How much work should she have been doing? How much work would she have been expected to do if she were white?
Asian Americans get angry at casting white characters as asian leads: Asians in Asia think it’s awesome. Crazy Rich Asians took away the box office in the US and flopped in China. The fact is that Asian Americans are a unique minority group that does not fit either within white western culture or pure asian culture.
As a result, we spent our entire lives putting ourselves “in context”. In Zhao’s apology/retraction post, she said:
The issues around Affinite indenturement in the story represent a specific critique of the epidemic of indentured labor and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia, including in my own home country. The narrative and history of slavery in the United States is not something I can, would, or intended to write, but I recognize that I am not writing in merely my own cultural context.
But why must the American context be a part of every conversation? Why does she have to explain where each inspiration came from to justify the origination? Where is the space for Asian Americans to draw freely from all of our own contexts without pausing for explanation?
We are the space in which our culture inexorably mix in a unique way that is a growing force today and in the centuries to come. Asian Americans are participate in and manufacture a sort of cultural creole that cannot simply be separated and reduced back to its component pieces in a simple number of steps.
At some point, we need to recognize this culture for its unique coherence, and stop justifying ourselves, tracing each piece, making sure every combination is legal. Ultimately, Asian Americans being on stage will require disappointing both Asians and Americans.
