‘Chinese Girl Videotape Leaked’ & ‘Revenge of the Asian Woman’
— Joyce Chong
If I played roller derby, my name would be Yellow Fever,
knocking out all those white boys from college
who used to whisper sweet nothings to me
in Mandarin
This week I have some poems to share with you from the latest knockout issue of The Boiler Journal. All three poems tackle the racist undertones in the fetishization of Asian women head-on, although I’m mainly looking at the first two, which are most closely tied together. The language is direct and undistanced in ‘Revenge of the Asian Woman’, a jab at the often tangled and complicated intersection of white privilege and how it acts on the white perception of others. It’s interesting to note that the “woman” being pursued here is not a person but a set of expectations and assumptions propped up by a limited and highly Americanized view of Asia as seen through the media.
What’s being “seduced” here isn't a person but a notion of a type of human that doesn’t exist. An idea. Similarly in the media, Asian women are often used as a prop or decoration to denote “otherness” in a film, and then sexualized to be made relevant to the story in some way. Media portrayal has never suggested that these characters had any agency or personality of their own, building NPC-like arc’s of their existence that then act themselves out in reality. Ideas of getting an Asian girl with your knowledge of this or that “Asian thing” isn’t a far stretch from “complete this quest and you'll get this reward”.
because unlike you,
not everything’s handed to her on a platter.
‘Chinese Girl Videotape Leaked’ examines dually the role the media has in perpetuating notions of hypersexuality and the failure of these stereotypes to hold up in reality. It also addresses how to exist as a sexual being when all the space for representation is taken up by racist sexual stereotypes and American-manufactured versions of otherness. In these poems, it’s made clear that the woman is not the same thing as the idea.
so just accept the fact that I look great in gold short shorts
and will never take you back to my homeland.