MisrepresentASIAN

What do most people think of when they hear the word Asian? Chinese, Japanese and Korean, unless you are the occasional Brit who thinks of Indians. Despite being Southeast Asian, I have been indoctrinated into this association since I was young. Living in a town with a majority East Asian demographic did not help. But why? Why do so many Americans look at East Asians as the extent of which Asians are defined? A major yet subtle reason why so many other Asians are ignored is the lack of representation in the media.

Asians as a whole have a lack of representation in the entertainment industry whether it be in directing, on screen, or onstage. Some would say this is mainly due to the fact that our parents’ culture discourages such professions. While I can’t speak for all Asians, for me, this is true to an extent. However, this does not account for the fact that Asians are individuals and not just robots that follow whatever their parents say, nor factory made Made in China stereotypes that are too nerdy to do any other job than doctor, lawyer, or engineer. This does not account for the millions of Asian actors in America that are trying to make their big break. You may ask, “If there are so many Asian actors, why do Asians only make up one percent of the leading roles in Hollywood? Why haven’t many Asians made it in show business?” Good question. It is thanks to one age old word: racism.

While racism from higher ups in the media applies to all minority groups in some way, the type of racism applied to Asiansis unique.Three groups of Asians that the media especially deems nonexistent even more so than East Asians include Central Asians, Southeast Asians, and West Asians. All groups have differing degrees of representation: some have little to no representation, others receive negative representation, while other AAPI groups are white-washed.Now, why does all of this matter? Together, all three categories form one large motivation for the rest of America to either ignore or mock Asians. Together, all three categories make it so that the discrimination that Asians face seems okay. Together, all three categoriesmake many Asian children like me grow up rarely or even never seeing a face like their own, never seeing someone they could look up to or aspire to be. While this is a problem for all Asians, at least East Asians now have shows such as Fresh Off the Boat and have actresses such as Constance Wu, Michelle Yeoh, Ken Jeong, John Cho, and Lucy Liu to look up to. In addition, South Asians have actors like Dev Patel and Priyanka Chopra who have made it fairly mainstream in shows and movies such as Quantico and Baywatch as well as South Asian comedians Kumail Nanjiani, Hasan Minhaj and Mindy Kaling. However, not all Asians are represented equally.

As a Southeast Asian, this lack of equal representation for my Southeast Asian brothers and sisters hits especially home. I am Vietnamese, Cambodian and Chinese, but growing up, I usually identified as Chinese. Being Chinese in a sea of of East Asians was simply more convenient for me. Whenever I would try to include the fact that I’m also Vietnamese and Cambodian when asked by my elementary school peers about my ethnicity, I would get the common response of furrowed brows and an interrogation on where those countries actually were and how it was possible that I could be more than one Asian ethnicity. Despite the fact that I would consistently tell the same people the same long winded explanation about the fact that I am part Southeast Asian over again in the same monotonous pattern, they still ended up forgetting and labelling me Chinese because it was easier for them to wrap their heads around.Therefore, I labeled myself as Chinese and began to downplay my Southeast Asian heritage.However, as I grew older I began to embrace my Hmong side much more and despite the occasional headache that occurs when I try to explain myself, I have grown more patience to sit through the process because educating others is important, and since white people can sit and ramble away about being 25 percent Irish 25 percent German 25 percent Italian 10 percent Hungarian 10 percent Slovakian 5 percent Atlantean, I think that I should be able to explain and get people to remember my three ethnicities. However, it would have been nice if 6 year old me had the representation in the media so that all of that would have been prevented.

In the media, I have rarely ever seen Southeast Asians represented. The only Southeast Asian that I knew of in the media was Brenda Song playing London Tipton in the Disney Channel staple The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and Wendy Wu in Wendy Wu Homecoming Warrior. However, it was only later on that I found out her Hmong roots as she played East Asian characters. While I’ve never explicitly felt shame for my Southeast Asian roots, the fact that some of the only Asian cultures being portrayed were East Asian subliminally ingrained the idea in my head that East Asian cultures were somehow better or more interesting, which was why they were more appreciated. However, when the media does explicitly represent Southeast Asia and its culture it typically represents it as a tragic war stricken impoverished region of the world.  This portrayal of Southeast Asia landed Haing S. Ngor an Academy Award for his Supporting role in the Killing Fields,making him the first Cambodian and Southeast Asian to win an Academy award and the first and only Asian to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting actor. While there is truth to this portrayal, it gets tiring and disappointing to see that all the media seems to know about Southeast Asia is the Vietnam War and the caricature of a helpless refugee.

It is also harmful seeing that the media sometimes uses this portrayal of Southeast Asians as a vehicle to perpetuate negative stereotypes. The most prominent example of this is the musical Miss Saigon which is a story about the doomed love between Vietnamese orphan who becomes a prostitute and an American G.I. who eventually abandons her once he finds a white woman. It is the Vietnamese retelling of the infamous Madame Butterfly with similar, glaring issues. Not only is the play criticized for being a white man’s bad interpretation of a culture they know nothing about, but it also has heavy tones of white savior complex as it perpetuates the stereotype of the weak Asian woman ready to be saved by the strong white man, reaffirms that Asian women are lesser than white women, emasculates Asian men who are already deemed undesirable by Western media, celebrates Western Colonialism, and more. The one thing this play has going for it however is that the main leading actress is actually Asian, although not Vietnamese, which is yet another issue.

While a majority of the portrayals of Southeast Asians have to do with poverty and the war, that is not all that has been portrayed. In another musical The King and I, the story instead portrays an ethnocentrically driven white feminist named Anna who becomes a governess and English tutor to the wives and children of the King of Siam. The King wishes to bring Siam into the modern world but holds traditions and values that horrify Anna,. Although they butt heads at first, they eventually learn to respect each other and even end up being romantically attracted to each other. This play portrays Western culture as advanced and superior to the “savage” Eastern culture and portrays another white savior just in the form of a woman although the play tries to make up for it in the song “Western People Funny” which is problematic in the title itself.

Despite my personal connection to Southeast Asian struggles from lack of representation in the media, I also must recognize that other Asian groups have it just as bad or even far worse. An example of this would be West Asians, whom most people would call Middle Easterners. The Middle East is a region located in the continent of Asia;  Asia is a large diverse continent with 48 countries. While they do not look, sound, or have cultures that one would typically associate with the stereotypical Asian, Middle Easterners are in fact Asian, and lack the proper representation. I believe that West Asians do have it worse than Southeast Asians due to the fact that when they are represented they are labeled terrorists. It's quite obvious that they are demonized by the news media. Whilst the news media labels them terrorists or barbaric, they fail to recognize the basic fact that quite a few Americans still have not learned a) not all brown people are Arabs b) not all Arabs are Muslim and c) not all Muslims are terrorists; this is all whilst making gross inaccuracies about the Muslim religion, such as saying that jihad as holy war when to most Muslims it is a struggle for self improvement.

Not only does the news media reinforce this savage and terrorist culture trope, but movies such as Sacha Baron Cohen’s “the Dictator” and “Argo” also reinforce it. When those movies are the only few movies to represent the Middle East, they subliminally ingrain these stereotypes into the minds of consumers In the few instances when Middle Easterners and the Middle East ares not portrayed as dangerous there are other negative aspects that are pushed,like the stereotype of Arab woman as weak or overtly sexual harem girls shrouded in veils as seen in “Arabian Nights”. If not that, then there is whitewashing. For instance, there is the Prince of Persia” with starring the extremely Persian actor, Jake Gyllenhaal.     

However, while Middle Easterners have it bad and negative representation may be worse than no representation, Central Asians have it far worse in terms of a lack of representation and this causes the erasure of the group entirely, resulting in society treatingCentral Asians like they don't exist.The cultures of countries such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan,Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan are all beautiful. The media can be used as a platform to highlight cultures and social issues, and the fact that Central Asians barely even have a foothold on this platform means that there voices are rarely heard. The closest representation of Central Asians I can think of is Afghanistan, and we all know what kind of representation Afghanistan gets.

Representation is key to having your voice heard in America and Asian Americans rarely get that voice. Instead they are ignored, ridiculed, and their issues are pushed to the side. However, this is not an all lives matter situation as some Asians have it way harder than others. It is imperative that while we recognize white privilege in the media, we also recognize East Asian privilege over other Asians and only then will we be headed on the road to progress.

by VIVIAN HO