My last blog wondered about the impact of anti-immigrant feelings, worsened by economic conditions, on international adoptees and their families. In that blog, I quoted from the book Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. This blog will be a further review of that book.
The first thing I should note is, as I said last time, that the word “Orientals” is deliberately used by the author to demonstrate negative stereotypes of Asians as too irreconcilably different by nature to ever fit into American society. Do not use the word “oriental” when referring to people today. Use Asian-American if you need to designate and don’t know the heritage country. If you know the person’s heritage, say “Japanese-American, Korean-American,” etc.
This book is by a professor of American Civilization at Brown University. It talks about ways Asians have been portrayed in the American media throughout the history of Asian immigration to America. In his introduction, Lee gives short definitions of “foreign”: outside or distant, and “alien”: immediate and present but with a foreign nature or allegiance. Lee posits that people not threatened by foreign visitors may have a harder time adapting to people they perceive as different living permanently in their community, and perhaps over time bringing new ways of doing things and new traditions.
Lee talks about economic crises in American history that have given rise to images of the Asian as something fearful. Beginning with the California Gold Rush in the 1950s and continuing through the Cold War, the image of the “model minority”, to the 1990s and economic threats Americans perceive from Japanese corporations and from the larger presence of Asians in small businesses and communities, there has sometimes been tension between Asian-Americans and other people of color.
Early black-and-white movies portrayed Chinese men as effeminate, often assuming “women’s” roles as laundresses, cooks or household stewards since they were not allowed to directly have a mine claim. Alternatively, films sometimes warned of the danger of white women being seduced by Asian men.
Despite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent internment of many loyal Japanese-Americans, including American citizens, World War II did ally the U.S. with China and against Germany, breaking down some old stereotypes of the “threat to civilization” coming from foreigners of another race.
In the 1950s and 1960s, many Asian-Americans were praised as a “model minority”, largely, Lee argues, for not making waves.
In the 1990s, the Michael Crichton novel Rising Sun was made into a movie. The murder of a beautiful (blonde) young woman is linked to the proposed sale of an American company to “Japan Inc.” Two films released just before and just after the L.A. riots in 1992 were Falling Down and Menace II Society. The first film was about whites feeling displaced by Korean small-business owners, the second film was much the same, but with African-Americans taking revenge against Koreans.
Lee calls these two 1990s films part of “a narrative that treats the urban violence of Los Angeles not as a material result of the global restructuring of capital that has polarized the city between the rich and poor (in which Asian Americans are posed in the middle), but as a black and white clash of civilizations, transformed into a war of black against yellow.
“Rising Sun, Falling Down, and Menace II Society, despite their quite different vantage points, share a narrative of beset nationhood and a post-modern anxiety about the harsh and unforgiving new world of global capitalism, transnational culture, and multiracial communities.”
It should be kept in mind that many, many African-Americans and Asian-Americans—and Americans of every ethnicity—have often worked together devotedly against racism and injustice. I am not trying to promote stereotypes. Rather I’m trying to explore the hidden stereotypes and anxieties in the media that may create a climate initially hostile to our children, who may not always be perceived as “American”.
The last film Lee discusses is Mississippi Masala, a hopeful vision of black and Asians learning to understand each other.
Please see these related blogs:
Dispelling Racial Myths in the Media
Adoptive Parents’ Stages of Thinking about Adoption and Race