you have the boldness of a much younger woman (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ciderpress) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} yennenga,@ 2009-04-05 14:55:00 |
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| Entry tags: | asian women carnival |
Asian Women Carnival #1
Welcome to the first Asian Women's Carnival!
As the deadline for submissions closed, I was challenged on the use of one of my icons and thus, my own representation of "Asian" in public spaces in regards to the carnival. When I sat down to think of way to be more representative of Asian women as whole in 100x100 pixels, I realised that this impossible and misleading task was why I had started the carnival in the first place.
We, Asian women, cannot be defined simply or solely by geography, from east to west, north to south, nor history nor culture nor ancestry. Different groups of people lay claim to and define themselves as "Asian", Women who identify as and are identified as Asian may never set foot outside the Asian continent or indeed set foot on Asian soil. In the same way, different groups of Asians are excluded under this umbrella term I find so hard to define because of the way "Asian" is defined by dominant majority groups. In the U.S., Asian means East Asian. In the U.K., Asian means South Asian. The various different identities resulting from the multiple diaspora cultures and native cultures in South East Asia makes "Asian" a far more complex concept than it is in an overwhelmingly mono-ethnic Korea.
As an East Asian woman who grew up in the U.K., I know that my Asian-ness is not the same as my British-Sinhalese friend Anuka's Asian-ness -- I still hesitate to call myself Asian without heavy qualifiers when I am with British Asian friends. I know that my Asian-ness is not the same as my cousin's, who has spent her whole life in Japan and I know it is not the same as my mother's Asian-ness, even though she came to this country so many years ago. I look at the shortlist of women in this year's Asian Women of Achievement Awards and I know that all of these Asian women have come from different backgrounds and negotiated the spaces around them in different ways to achieve excellence.
In order to know myself and to know others, in order to separate out the cultural expectations from the west and the east on who we are and how we should be as Asian women, in order to shrug off the responsibility imposed by being presumed to be representative of all Asian women, in order to see other Asian women as they are and not how I think they should be, I think it is important to hear from other Asian women's voices from all over the world, in various different stages of their lives talk about their identity and how it touches on various aspects of their lives. I think this is essential to truly understand the cultural heritage that is part of me and how to respectfully find and perhaps rebuild a cultural identity that belongs to me instead of accepting the consensus that I am a perpetual foreigner in every land. I believe that listening to and talking with as many Asian women as I can will help me not feel so alone, unknown and isolated, it will help me define who I am as an individual Asian woman, rather than be defined and it will help me to preserve what has been handed down to me in blood and bone and song.
Talking about this in public can be a daunting and painful task and there are many people with stories, ideas, experiences and thoughts to share who have hesitated because there is very little space afforded to us and our conversations are frequently derailed and hijacked, used as spectacles by voyeurs to exploit and further exoticise us. However, I feel it is important to try if we can and when we can, it is important to carve out a space for ourselves to share our voices and not be invisible to each other or to ourselves. I believe it is in these voices, our voices, we can hear and see our commonalities, what makes us unique, what makes us a community if we are a community, what makes us individuals, what makes us Asian.
I am grateful to everyone who submitted a piece for this carnival, particularly to those who wrote something specifically on the topic. For the first carnival, I had very little criteria; I asked Asian women and allies to write about identity in any subject that touches our lives.
Cultural Stereotypes, Representation and Appropriationbossymarmalade writes about cultural appropriation and cultural identity as a woman of Indian descent from Trindad in sita pays her dues.
I am tired of this. I am tired of white women using my words, my concepts, my goddesses and my stories and my clothing and my food for their own fulfillment, ignorant of the context of oppression and imperialism, and then telling me I should be happy about it. I'm tired of the Pussycat Dolls wearing bindis and nose-rings, tired of air fresheners helping people to "plug into their karma", tired of the disassociation of yoga from Hinduism among its fans and sneers about its chants and poses among its detractors.
...
My access to my own heritage has been denied me so long. Why do I have to be happy to see other people not only trivialize my culture, but also use it for profit? Why is it that they can talk about chakras and ayurvedic fragrances and curries and Kali Ma and saris and mendhi with the assurance that nobody will look down on them for it, but I can't even bring myself to watch Bollywood films? Why did I have to hide all of my Indianness so much and so well that even other brown people refuse to acknowledge it?
drelfina writes about cultural appropriation and representation in Rice PorrigeHave you been told stories by your parents, of the scholar, the poet, the patriot, the official who'd spoken against the Emperor, and in punishment banished, and in protest committed suicide in the raging river? Have you been told that the people who heard, wrapped rice into thick leaves, sticky and large, and thrown into the water for the fishes, to keep them from the official's body and all who could were out in their boats trawling the water for his corpse?
deepad wrote a poem titled The Indian Woman.The Indian Woman
Does not always cook like Madhur Jaffrey
Always look like Shilpa Shetty
Always write like Jhumpa Lahiri
Always fight like Goddess Kali
fickle_goddess writes about shattering the stereotypes of Asian womenAsian women are women. Women are people. Asian women are people. And the stereotypes are going down.
The first one to die will be the idea that Asian women don't get angry, because we're here, we're angry, and we're not going to shut up.
glass_icarus wrote two Remyth stories about Asian-American identity in abandoning cartography and dragon lady; lady dragon.There is still no map for us.
Once upon no time, the men and women who shared my skin came to the shores of a land of many dreams. Some wanted to stay, and some wanted to return to their roots, but all of them dreamed of home.
I wrote about stereotypes of Asian women, history and my own experiences as an Asian woman living in a white majority country in a Remyth post: so was i born into the world.
The woman who has my face is a lotus blossom, a dragon lady, a geisha girl, a china doll. She has a painted smile that she hides behind her hand, a curtain behind which the sexual tigress waits to love you long time.
Racism
joannakatana on racism and RaceFail '09.There are cultural reasons beyond personal preference as to why I'm not in literature or the arts. I am an Asian female. When my parents moved here, when they had my brother and me, they did their best to arm us, to immerse us in their new country. And they warned us. Steered us away from art, pushed the science. Because science is a mostly a yes/no discipline. Because math is a yes/no discipline. Because computers are yes/no devices. If you get the right answer, it is hard for those who hold power over you to deny you.
isilya on the personal cost of racism.This is what racism is to me as a young Asian woman: racism is hundreds of stones on my chest.
rcloenen_ruiz writes about living in the Netherlands and racism in Talking to the Moon and Other things.“We’re a tolerant country,” they’ll say. “Perhaps too tolerant.”
Nevertheless, the words they don’t say feels like skin pulled taut over a can that’s ready to explode.
Underneath the surface, I can taste their hatred and their fear. It’s not really me their afraid of, it’s not really me they hate, but what I represent, I suppose.
The word Allochtoon has become, some sort of curse word that represents the shape of our anonymous skin. A blanket spread over all of us who bear distinct marks of being non-Dutch.
dnldreams writes about the history of Hmong communities in the U.S.A. and struggles these communities face currently.But when the government which you slaved for, which you sacrificed your farms for-- the same government which promised you opportunities of freedom and you pledged yourself a US ally-- treats you as a terrorist, and you can't obtain citizenship, that is when I cannot stand it anymore.
I will take persecution.
I will take racism.
But I will not, and should not ever take that my parents are being denied citizenship.
My mother's grandfather was a solider. My father's grandfather was a nurse. They were there for you. And you continually turn your back. How many more years will it take for them to recognize us?
How many more years will you ignore us?
Identity
aozhoux talks about online identity, real life identity and how On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're Chinese.Because there are, in my opinion, possible downsides to owning my Asian-ness. I worry - accurately or inaccurately - that people's impressions of me might change should they be confronted with the realisation that I am, after all, not white. That anything I say or do may henceforth be conveniently attributed to my Chinese-ness, especially if any of my personal quirks should happen to fall into certain common stereotypes (and oh, some of them do *g*). Even worse, people might go so far as to start projecting their language biases onto me, and then I'd start getting the equivalent of "but you write so well (considering your ethnicity, never mind the fact that you grew up exclusively in white-dominated, English-speaking countries)", and then I'd... have to kill them.
stephiepenguin on a defining moment in recognising her own Asian identity looking up words and phrases and clauses....a culture and history cannot be diluted into a 45 minute lecture (or even a full-semester unit), and my family cannot be essentialised into something so simplistic, but that was my epiphany, that moment when I suddenly actually understood why I wasn't like anyone else.
ambientlight writes about her experiences studying in the U.K. as a Chinese-Singaporean and its effects on identity, language and relationships.Here at Oxford, I am aware, for the first time, as being somehow representative. I have been made, for the first time, to feel as those people may look at me without seeing me; they may look at me and merely see a tourist, a foreigner, one of those 'Orientals'
stephiepenguin contemplates a life spent not being too Chinese and on showing another face.I didn't realise until last week that 'too Asian' is not assumed knowledge; not everyone knows what it means. I fumbled through an explanation, of Australia's romantic multiculturalism, this country we live in where everyone thinks they're multicultural because they like Thai green curry but they're happy to fear the Chinese spies, and then I realised how to explain it, what it means to live in Australia as ethnically Chinese (or thereabouts), to walk that line between Chinese but not too-Chinese, to keep oneself safe whilst also keeping one's identity.
jennifergearing on internalised race issues and her struggle with her own cultural identites.And yet, the fact that it turned out this way reminds me of how much self-hatred costs. It reminds me, as I try to piece together who I am and what that means, of just how hard I made it for myself, and the little stabbing pain that causes serves as a reminder every time I think it would be easier to pass; easier to let things slide; easier to pretend it doesn't matter.
allangtegek on being multiracial Indonesian Dutch woman, cultural identity and representation.And then I started thinking about representation. Because, while most of the people on TV do look like me, they don’t share my heritage and background. (Or most of them don’t anyway.) I said that wasn’t a problem for me but more and more I think that was a rationalization I started making by the time it got through my thick, thick skull that my cultural default ≠ Dutch cultural default and that the people in my books and on my TV weren’t exactly me, just like me in some ways.
Flight Papers writes about her family history in Walking and ghosts
They’ve never sat us down, my sister and I, and said, “It’s time we told you our life stories. We’re immigrants, and it’s important for us to share what that means, and it’s important for you to know where you came from.” I don’t think any parents have ever said that in the history of the world outside of movies. But you pick these things up—a stray word here and there, stories packed up the attic and left to rot. They’re patched and dusty, and they don’t fit together and I’m sure that dates and details have fallen off over time.
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tiarashafiq writes about cultural identity and representation as a Bangladeshi Malaysian in Cultureless.In Malaysia I’m an outsider. I’m not Malay, not Chinese, not Indian. I do not figure into any quota systems, any allocations. Just Lain-Lain- The Others. I grew up amongst people from all those cultures, and more, and experienced firsthand their religions, their food, their family life, their relationships. The tales of Sunday School, the incense smoke, the muezzin call and lines of beggars waiting for the sacrificial meat. Yet I’m still an outsider.
Shivani writes about her identity as a mixed race Indian in washing the mud off my stripes.
And many times I just lied brown. I told people that my mother was an INDIAN from Trinidad, and that I was in fact completely Indian. I learnt the rules – that I could never correct people's English, but everybody could correct my hindi. I learnt that people who 'hated' fair skin, were good people, and people who hated dark skin were bad.
Natasha Sahara Latiff writes about the complexity of cultural heritage and how we chose to define ourselves in Designing My identity.
But my identity became more than ethnic garments as I grew older. I picked up dancing, learnt Mughal history in India, explored the nuances of Indian culture, its specificities. I skipped through verses and verses of translated Urdu poetry; Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sudhir Ludhviani, ……and vowed to finally learn. I struggle to speak but the words find it exhausting to string through as the tongue is not native yet. Yet.
Claire on the word "Hapa" and cultural appropriation.
See, the history of "hapa" is that it was a term specifically created to refer to the children produced by European/American hegemony in Hawai'i. Without the colonization, you don't need the term "hapa haole." And it's a specifically positive Hawai'ian word for mixed children, a word created to include mixed children into native Hawai'ian society, to find a place for them. You can't have power in a Hawai'ian word for multiracial Hawai'ians if it doesn't exist solely for multiracial Hawai'ians.
Food
mollya writes about the food of her childhood and trying to recreate that experience as an adult.I had wanted to be able to do it all, the first day prep and the second day rolling, because I wanted to show my friends what hapa is. I wanted to show myself that I could perform this task that my mother never even taught me to do. I wanted to find out if I was all Washingtonian or if there was still some part of me that was a hapa girl from the flat hot light of central California. I was trying to recapture my California childhood in the middle of a Korean grocery store in the farthest, scariest suburbs of Washington DC. I knew that everything I needed to make the sushi was in this store somewhere. I just didn’t know where it was. I didn’t know which plastic packages and metal tins were the ones I needed. I couldn’t find them.
Health
Eva Luo writes about the neccessity of outreach in ethnic communities.
When we went to visit her in the hospital, Auntie Ling explained to us her various treatment options. She could either wait out the aneurysm and take blood pressure lowering medications or she could undergo surgery. Auntie Ling's husband then interjected that he did not want her to have surgery because there was only a 7% survival rate in the surgery. While we were visiting, the doctor came in for a short check-up and we were told to leave. We did not have the opportunity to discuss her condition with the doctor. Auntie Ling and her husband can both speak English more or less fluently, but did they both really understand what was going on?
Auntie Ling was discharged from the hospital on meds after a few days, but by the end of the week, she was back in the hospital because her pain and nausea had worsened. By the next week, she was transferred to another hospital for surgery. Her sudden decision to have surgery baffled me. My mom later explained to me that one of Auntie Ling’s friends from church had asked for clarification on the risks of surgery and found that Auntie Ling and her husband had misunderstood the survival rate. The surgery had not a 7% survival rate, but a 7% failure rate.
Beauty
thedeadparrot writes about beauty, race and reclaiming anger.Needless to say, I do not possess golden flowing locks or sparkling sapphire orbs. I have black hair and brown eyes, like my parents do, like all my extended family does. I still remember being five and spending lots of time wondering whether or not hair dye would fix this problem. Because it was all about the hair color, really. A hair color that wasn't mine and would never be mine.
Our Bodies and Sexuality
cycads on western men's perception of Asian women and viewing Foreign Bodies as Sexual Playgrounds
Men like Jake perpetuate racism, sexism, and colonialism under a more subtle guise in that it’s not about denigrating Otherness, but rather desiring and yearning for it. Today, foreign bodies (places, women, food) are not the scary and mysterious things of the past anymore. Instead they are to be embraced. They make you hip, worldly, in touch with distant cultures of peoples you may never meet in your lifetime (Yirgacheffe coffee, anyone?). So on the face of it, fascination with the exotic Other doesn’t look like racism and the colonial conquest of yore.
deepad's response to the Open Source Boob Project.So many of us have worn so many buttons for so long, that I think our job is to learn the many ways in which we can put the button on our selves that says, 'you don't need a button'.
theladyrose writes about Asian asexuality, her experiences as an Asian woman and the stereotyping she faces in Strange love, or how I learned to stop worrying and love my asexuality.Increasingly, I find myself trading one Asian American stereotype for another – China doll for model minority classmate. Not that I’m a perfect student by any means, but I’ve found it much easier to establish relationships of any sort with males if they see me in totally desexualized (and correspondingly de-romanticized) terms, as a strictly platonic, pseudo-sisterly confidante who’s willing to edit their papers. I’ve asked out Asian American, hapa and non-Asian American guys, and funnily enough the Asian American guys, who know that I’m asexual, were the only ones who politely turned me down. Granted, my sample size isn’t that large, but it’s frustrating to often feel like I’m pigeonholed by my Asian American peers who know I’m asexual.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s such a pressure for my high-achieving Asian American guy friends to prove their masculinity that subconsciously they couldn’t imagine having a romantic relationship with an asexual even if they aren’t having sex.
Relationships
rcloenen_ruiz, a Filipina, writes about mixed race marriages and the preconceptions and stereotyping she faces.That some women get married for economics is such common knowledge that when I migrated to The Netherlands, the guy at immigrations told me that if I failed to please my husband or if I separated from him while I did not have an independent permit, my husband had every right to send me back home.
Probably, this is a line the immigrations officer gives to every foreign woman who gets married to a Dutchman, but for a while I felt very, very intimidated and disempowered. I felt I had to do everything to fulfill how the Dutch people perceived a good wife should be.
V, an Australian Chinese woman, on being in a mixed race relationship and the various reactions she faced from her family when she told them.
Even more insulting is that he said the “novelty” (i.e., racial differences) in the relationship between J and I will wear off, and if it all goes to shambles from there don’t come back to him because he doesn’t want anything to do with it... how insulted and repulsed I feel to be told that our relationship is based on some sort of fetishised notion of each other.
(This is followed up here.)
Film Reviews
mollya on Latika from Slumdog Millionaire and Asian women representation in Western films.My objection is to the filmmakers' choice not to give her the tiniest shred of character at all - other than to be the object of desire. The filmmakers didn't allow her to react to her circumstances with her own actions and ideas. She was objectified not just by the men in the film, but also by the people who MADE the film.
Ash Kini reviews Never Perfect, directed by Regina Park. This documentary is about Mai-Anh, a Vietnamese American woman, in the days leading up to her “double eyelid” surgery.
Gaming
Brinstar writes about WOC protagonists in Portal and Mirror's Edge.
Ligman asserts that Mirror's Edge was trying to copy Portal, and based upon superficial evidence, she draws comparisons between the two characters and the marketing of the two games. The only similarities the two games have are: woman of colour protagonist (Chell's race/ethnicity are ambiguous), first-person perspective, minimalistic graphical user interface (GUI), and a theme song with the same name. It's hard to find weight to the imitation argument because the games have quite different design philosophies and different goals for their lead characters. It terms of marketing, it's difficult to draw useful comparisons, because each was released with different promotional goals in mind.”
Roleplaying
dmp writes about Thoughts about Orientalism, Imperialism & Steampunking Asia from an Asian woman's perspective.If taken as simply a fashion concept and entertainment trend, why should people be concerned? Why should it matter? Should white fans suddenly have to worry about Bigger Implications, and thus, spoiling the fun they’ve having?
But a realization: Oh YES it matters, and YES other white steampunkers should take note (and Steampunkers of color should consider, if they haven’t already). Because every time someone says it doesn’t matter, they’re further promoting that outdated attitude that a diverse and complex portrayal of Asia does not matter. That it can be packaged into chopsticks, jade dragons, and kimonos for general consumption, to conform to any fashion trend, to mold to any entertainment purpose. And I’m not comfortable with being part of a packaged deal. It is the cultural epidemic of misrepresentation all over again, just like what those Western artists and writers did in the nineteenth century: Orientalism 2.0. And steampunk shouldn’t be that way.
Book Reviews
*
drelfina reviews Throne of Jade and Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik.[Editor's note: I would like to remind those reading to be mindful of the 90 days of RaceFail'09 and refrain from kneejerk reactions and comments because they like/love/are fans of/are friends with Novik.]
* Barbara Jane Reyes reviews Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila by Marianne Villanueva.
*
rcloenen_ruiz reviews Juan Luna's Revolver by Luisa Igloria and links to other reviews and interviews.* Jennifer Wedemeir reviews Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley By Shalini Shankar.
* Professorwhatif reviews And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women, edited by Muneeza Shamsie.
* Gita Tewari reviews Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in New India by Anita Jain.
Asian Women in the Past, Present and Future
Barbara Jane Reyes links to various profiles about Asian women for Women's History month and more resources about Pinay culture.
Claire at Hyphen Magazine wrote a series of Women's History Month profiles of Asian women including Sugar Pie DeSanto, Anousheh Ansari and Jane Luu. The master list is here.
Endnotes
And so, we've come to the end of the first Asian Women carnival. Thank you for reading! Many thanks to all the contributors who have shared their thoughts and stories and special thanks to
delux_vivens for her encouragement, support and providing a space for the Asian Women Carnival at yennenga. All errors of fact, spelling and interpretation of submissions in this post are entirely my responsibility.Following the large amount of interest and participation in the carnival, I would like to continue the carnival if people are interested. Thoughts? Comments? Ideas? Feedback? Suggestions for specific themes? Please leave a comment.
Also, more importantly, the position of future host is open! Please drop me a line (either in a comment or via email aciderpress at gmail dot com).
Please check out International Blog Against Racism Week, the PoC in SF Carnival, Women of Colour and Beauty Carnival, Tell it WoC speak Carnival and the Remyth Project. Also of interest, APAHM, which was created to celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander characters and actors, May 2008 by
bridgetmc.
