runaway

CW: racism, homophobia, mentions of abuse and drugs.

The cool thing about growing up and expanding your world view is that you eventually see your childhood heroes for what they are. Flawed humans (and maybe, just plain assholes). First Joss Whedon and now JK Rowling. Nothing is sacred and no one is safe.

I loved the Harry Potter series (the original seven books, I refuse to accept any of the latest garbage she’s put out/had her name attached to – within the HP universe) and I still count Prisoner of Azkaban as one of my favourite books, but even fondness and nostalgia can’t shield JK Rowling from some of the problems with the world she has created, the way she explains/defends it, and her quarter assed (not even half) and damaging attempts to rectify that now in 2018.

Note: Simply for length reasons, these are all related to the Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts franchises.

Crime One: Racism

It’s no great secret that there are very few characters of colour in the Harry Potter universe. Apparently, while it’s plausible that there’s a whole (not so) secret world of magic, it’s just too unbelievable for there to be many witches or wizards of colour. Before you come at me with “but Vee, mudbloods and Voldemort only wanting pureblood wizards is a metaphor for racism!” you can stop that right now. Because you know what’s also a great metaphor for racism? Actual racism. How about how people of colour are literally discriminated against every single day. They get passed over for jobs, they’re spat at in the streets, they’re being killed by police. Metaphors for racism? Not good enough.

I’m in the camp that think white writers shouldn’t write their main character as anything other than white, for a whole host of reasons, but if I had to summarize it, I think stories of colour should be told by authors of colour, we should be opening the doors for more authors of colour, we should listen to their voices, their stories, their experiences. I think white authors can’t know the exact nuances of what it’s like to be a person of colour, how the world treats us, the experience of living in diaspora, the disconnect between first gen, second gen and third gen family members, and so much more. It’s something that sure, you can read about it, you can do your research, but you’ll never quite understand it unless you’ve lived it. All of that being said, I do believe that white authors can include characters of colour in a meaningful way, that is, not for decoration, not as a handy plot device to move your story along, and not as a harmful, disgusting stereotype. But let’s stop for a second and count the number of background characters of colour that have been more or less confirmed (note that Hermione could easily be coded black, the only hint we get is in PoA, she’s described as “very brown”, but it’s not until the older Hermione was cast with a black actress in The Cursed Child did JK pop up and say “of course she could be black!”). So, we have Lee Jordan (maybe unfairly assumed, as he’s only described as having dreadlocks but he was cast with a POC), Dean Thomas (who was very good at drawing – also maybe unfairly listed, was cast with a POC), Parvati and Padma Patil (possibly unfairly listed, described as having long black hair, and cast with POC), Cho Chang (quickly, can I point out that a character of Asian descent being sorted into Ravenclaw the “smart house” plays into so many racist stereotypes that I can barely breathe), Kingsley Shacklebolt, Blaise Zambini. And then, well, there’s Nagini.

Tweet reads: “The Naga are snake-like mythical creatures of Indonesian mythology, hence the name ‘Nagini.’ They are sometimes depicted as winged, sometimes as half-human, half-snake. Indonesia comprises a few hundred ethnic groups, including Javanese, Chinese and Betawi. Have a lovely day.”

About a week ago, the trailer for Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald was dropped to mixed reactions. The trailer revealed a snippet that reveals that Voldemort’s pet snake was once a shapeshifting woman, cursed to become trapped in a snake’s body. An Asian shapeshifting woman. Reduced to becoming (a white supremacist but metaphorically) a white man’s pet. Cool. Naturally, there was some backlash about this turn of events, and so JK tried to tweet out the reasoning and explanation (while also saying she’d been keeping this racist secret for 20 years) that obviously Nagini had to be an Asian woman because it was based on a creature from Indonesian mythology, and that Indonesia comprised a “few hundred ethnic groups, including Javanese, Chinese and Betawi”. Cool, JK, but the actress cast is Korean, and you saying all of this kind of reinforces the idea that all Asian ethnicities are interchangeable. Let’s not even get into a white woman explaining Indonesian mythology or ethnicity, or the fact that it’s also an Indian mythology, the Naga. I don’t want to split hairs here, there are other examples of mythology that are similar but have key differences across other cultures (the kitsune/kumiho/huli jing fox spirit, for one). So it’s possible she only read up on the Indonesian myth and took her inspiration from there. But the way she “explained” the debacle sits uneasily with me. She brushes over any concerns that come from people of colour – valid concerns and questions, and instead chooses to ignore the real issue, which is that by playing into the harmful stereotype that Asian women are subservient, and that all of the different Asian ethnicities are interchangeable, she does more harm than good for inclusivity and that she is doing it for show. She doesn’t give a shit if her work includes characters of colour, and if it does, she doesn’t give a shit that they’re shitty stereotypes, 2D characters that are nothing more than the colour of their skin, just there to boost the POC count in her works.

Thinly veiled racism? Guilty.

Crime Two: Poor Handling of LGBT+ Issues/People

Back in 2007, speaking to a crowd of fans at an event at Carnegie Hall, JK Rowling revealed that she “always thought of Dumbledore as gay” to wild applause. Finally, a canon character was more or less confirmed as LGBT+ (sorry to the Dracarry shippers, that still just lives in our hearts). Great, right? Except, why did she wait until the book series was completed to come out with this revelation? Why didn’t she include it in the books? Sure, you might say “well, Vee, it’s a kids book, you’re expecting far too much” except it’s not a “kids book”, it’s always very clearly been in the young adult category (certainly after the third book, at least) and readership has always been split between adults and younger people. The series came out when I was a teenager, finishing when I was 21, and I definitely would have appreciated some LGBT+ representation in a book that meant so much to so many people. I’m not saying she needed to include a sex scene in there (she could’ve faded to black, like Stephenie Meyer did in Breaking Dawn) but to go back and retcon that Dumbledore was gay and that she’d always thought that, for it to ring true, she needed to leave us hints in the original series. She “always thought of Dumbledore as gay” but “didn’t feel the need to spell it out”. Maybe she didn’t see the point of it, maybe she didn’t want to spoil her “big reveal” (note that some fans had always suspected that Dumbledore had been in love with Grindelwald), but by not mentioning it until after the fact? It comes off as lazy, or as wanting to appeal to the LGBT+ community, by trying to earn an ally card by doing very little at all.

Tweet reads: “I was asked whether Lupin’s treatment by others could be seen as a metaphor for (then) stigmatised conditions. I agreed that it could. 2/4”  J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling)

Then there’s the Lupin issue. Supposedly, at some point in 1999, JK was asked whether or not Lupin’s “condition could be seen as a metaphor for (then) stigmatised conditions” and she said it could. Basically, lycanthropy is meant to be a metaphor for HIV/AIDS in the HP universe. In Short Stories From Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship, and Dangerous Hobbies (released 2016, mind you), JK writes “Lupin’s condition of lycanthropy was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS. All kinds of superstitions seem to surround blood-borne conditions, probably due to taboos surrounding blood itself. The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes”. Maybe she had the best intentions in mind when she came up with that idea, and true enough, blood and blood purity does matter to an extent in the wizarding world, but something about it feels hollow and gross. I’d like to note here that we only meet three werewolves in the series (Lupin, Greyback and an unnamed man who was bitten) and none of them were female. Take that how you will, but a few fans came to the conclusion that her “metaphor for HIV/AIDS” also includes the harmful stereotype that gay men were going out and maliciously infecting over men with HIV.

Retconning the source material to make herself seem LGBT+ inclusive but handling it terribly? Guilty.

Crime Three: White Feminism

Maybe this crime really explains the others. It explains her support of the decision to cast Johnny Depp in the Fantastic Beasts film series. Yep, Johnny Depp, you know, the guy who physically abused (then-wife) Amber Heard. Sure, he’d been cast before we knew about that. He’d appeared, for five whole minutes in the end of the first Fantastic Beasts film, so he’d already signed on. Surely, he couldn’t be fired when his contract was signed. Except, we’ve seen examples of men accused of abuse being let go from their jobs (not often, but it happens sometimes). Kevin Spacey, for one. So, why couldn’t Grindelwald be recast? Especially after a five minute cameo at the end of a movie? JK Rowling released a statement where she acknowledges that around the time of filming the first movie in the new franchise, stories involving Depp’s abuse of Heard started to appear in the press, and “based on our understanding of the circumstances, the filmmakers and I are not only comfortable sticking with our original casting, but genuinely happy to have Johnny playing a major character in the movies.” Comfortable and genuinely happy to have a known abuser affiliated with your work, based on our understanding of the circumstances, the circumstances being that Depp physically abused Amber Heard, who provided photo and video evidence. Even Daniel Radcliffe has spoken out about the decision to let Depp remain on cast, given the decision to fire a lesser known actor (Jamie Waylett) from HP: Deathly Hallows pt 2 after his arrest for growing 10 marijuana plants (he was later arrested for a more serious crime, but that was well after his firing from Harry Potter). DanRad mentioned how he was, of course, thankful for the opportunities provided to him from being cast as Harry Potter, but that “I suppose the thing I was struck by was, we did have a guy who was reprimanded for weed on the (original Potter) film, essentially, so obviously what Johnny has been accused of is much greater than that.”

Tweet reads: “Just unfollowed a man whom I thought was smart and funny, because he called Theresa May a whore. 1/14” J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling)

Of course, supporting the casting of an abusive man doesn’t make her a white feminist, nor does tweeting about unfollowing a man for calling Theresa May a whore. What does, in my honest opinion, is her handling of any criticism she receives, and the bullshit way in which she tries to earn her ally card, but only when it suits her. If all of this mattered so much, she would’ve included it the first time around. Retconning her source material in an effort to appear more diverse isn’t true diversity. It’s literally a made up world, she could’ve made it more diverse from the start. She needed to explicitly state things, because marginalised groups need to see representation. Good, strong, representation. Not weak and harmful versions. By being properly inclusive in her material, as a middle class white woman, she could’ve set an example of how things should be. If she’d spoken to any marginalised group, heard their stories, about their lives, gained an insight in how to write about them, her POC, LGBTQIA+, lower class, etc audiences would’ve come away with the message that she cared and wanted them included in her stories. In her world.

The bottom line is, JK Rowling does not care enough to follow through, and well, when you’ve made as much money as she has, why should she? She bangs on about how truly diverse the wizarding world was and gives examples to back it up, but she does so way too late, and without any real proof, just her word. Sure, she created this universe, maybe she did believe Dumbledore was gay, or Hermione could be black, but she needed to say it back then, not ten years later when people are critical of the cis-het white world she’d created. She rants about men immediately calling women names when they disagree with them, prides herself on blocking and unfollowing these men, but when called out about supporting the casting of a known abuser? She suddenly no longer cares about supporting another woman. One who was arguably, treated a little worse than just name calling. Her idea of feminism is clouded by her life experience, which would be fine if she took the time to listen to the people around her, from different backgrounds, and try to understand why they feel what she says and does is offensive, clumsy, and lazy. But when her opinion and her views challenged, she comes out swinging, blocking people, throwing around statements like “Dumbledore is gay!” or “Hermione is black!” as a clumsy attempt to appease the very people she does not give a shit about. The solution is laughably simple, all she would have to do is just listen to marginalised voices. Hear their stories and educate herself. And if she truly wanted to be a true intersectional feminist, she would do it. Understanding her privilege would cost her nothing. In fact, it would garner her more respect, something she’s lost a lot of in the last few years.

Just say you don’t care, JK, it’s more honest. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

By: Vee H 

  Sources:

Twitter

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/09/08/jk-rowling-reveals-remus-lupins-werewolf-condition-metaphor-for-hiv/

https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/grindelwald-casting/

By Vee H

 Mid-Autumn Festival (Moon Festival, Lantern Festival, etc. – call it what you like, it goes by different names in different cultures) has always held a special place in my heart. Growing up, I never knew the proper name for it, I just knew it as the time when my mum would start bringing home mooncake. Mooncake in our family kitchen never symbolised the end of a harvest year to me. Rather, it was my signal that a big party would soon follow, with various aunts and uncles (not actually related to me). Not as exciting as Lunar New Year – no âng-pau (red packets) at this party. Instead, this was more like a big feast (admittedly, every sort of party with my mum’s friends was a big feast, this one just happened to have mooncake to differentiate it). This year, it fell on the Monday just passed, September 24, and true to form, I celebrated with too much mooncake for one person to consume.

For those who have no idea what Mid-Autumn Festival even is (and apologies for my shoddy recollection and story telling for those who do know), I’ll try and summarise as best I can (with a little help from my friend SK, who spoke with her grandmother to find out the Chinese folklore). Basically, the story is that a woman named Chang’E was married to this dude, Hou Yi, and he was considered a hero because he shot down nine of the ten suns (which were scorching the Earth). As a reward for his good deed, he was given an elixir so he could live forever. So anyway, one day, when Hou Yi is away, his apprentice Pengmeng breaks into their house and tries to force Chang’E to give him the elixir, and she refuses and drinks it for herself. She then becomes a Goddess and flies upwards towards the heavens, and chooses the moon as a place to live. So she’s up there with a rabbit (I’ve no idea where this rabbit came from) for company, and it’s constantly pounding the elixir of life for her (Chinese folklore) or rice cakes (in the Japanese and Korean versions of the story). Anyway, Hou Yi comes home and discovers what happened, and he’s devastated that his wife is gone. But as he looks to the sky to call out her name, he sees the moon and notices how bright and full it is, and he sees the face of Chang’E. So he then brings out her favourite cakes to pray for blessings from heaven, which is where mooncakes got their origin. Basically, at the end of all of that, it’s like Asian Thanksgiving, but with a pretty story.

Chang’E and her rabbit

The festival generally starts a few days before the actual date with all the preparation. SK’s mother told a story of when she was a young girl and her grandmother would start praying in the middle of the night when the moon wasn’t completely full yet (the festival stems from the harvest, and praying ensures good crops). She would pray to the ancestors and the Gods for a good harvest that year, then the next day, she’d make rice cakes and mooncakes. Because their family had been especially poor, the women would all go into town and buy fabric to make one good outfit for the day, and to get their hair and eyebrows done. Every woman and child from the same stretch of street would end up sitting in someone’s courtyard (usually whoever had the biggest) and roll tang yuan (rice balls cooked in water with peanut sauce, filled with red bean, or peanuts and sugar) and they’d spend the day together cooking and gossiping. That night, they’d eat mooncakes and have a feast with their families (only with family). Then after dinner, they’d take a lantern and climb the mountain to the temple and pray with incense for a good harvest.

Mooncake!

For me, personally, my memories are a little bit more “Westernized” – most likely a result of growing up in a half Malaysian, half Australian household. A few days before our big party, my mum would gather my sister, my dad and I to clean the house, while she went and did the food shopping. After that, the real work began, hand rolling dumplings (we did this three times a year: Christmas, Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival – as a result, I can make 200 dumplings in just over an hour and probably have early onset arthritis), and helping mum prepare the rest of the food. Thankfully, we outsourced the mooncake (a sweet pastry filled with lotus paste/red bean – so named for the salted egg yolk inside, which represented the moon) and it was store bought. Then, we’d decorate our house with paper lanterns (traditionally, lanterns symbolised fertility but these days they’re mostly decorative and more or less symbolise the actual festival), and set up the food offering to the ancestors and deities (in my house we more or less made a fancy fruit platter with whatever was in season, but always included pomelos). Then on the actual day of the festival, we’d have mum’s friends and family over for the big feast (the 200+ dumplings I lovingly rolled by hand).

Lanterns

So, what does any of this have to do with women, you may ask? In one regard, simply put (from SK), festivals wouldn’t really happen without the women making them happen, particularly with the cooking and preparation they do. Certainly, from my own experience, Mid-Autumn Festival was always a time of family, of time spent with my mum and hearing her tell stories of how she celebrated with her family in Malaysia. In another, the moon has long been associated with women (to do with menstrual cycles and tides, you know the drill). Moreover, the story of how Mid-Autumn Festival came to be is really the story of Chang’E, her quick thinking and refusal to give in to a thief, and her subsequent transformation into a Goddess of the moon.  

Next year, the festival falls on Friday, September 13, so if you start seeing lanterns and mooncakes appearing in local Asian grocery stores, spare a thought for the women in these cultures, the women who are the lifeblood of all the different festivals like this one – who make sure their family is well fed, who pray to the ancestors and leave offerings for a good harvest. Think of poor kids like me, who were woken up at the crack of dawn to hand roll dumplings or help prepare other dishes. And when you look at the moon, think of Chang’E, and her rabbit companion – and honestly, living alone on the moon with a rabbit sounds so peaceful and heavenly. Anyone know where I can find an elixir of immortality?

Sources:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-mid-autumn-moon-festival-and-the-lady-of-the-moon_292666.html

Image sources:

1.      Chang’E and the moon - http://english.gov.cn/news/2014/10/06/content_281474992818307.htm

By: Vee H.

Here’s the thing, I have a confusing relationship with Joss Whedon. If we were “Facebook official” (does anyone still call it that, or have I just revealed my true spiritual age of 105?) our relationship status would be “it’s complicated”. It didn’t used to be like that; as a teenager, I probably would have said my favourite tv show was Buffy The Vampire Slayer, with its spin-off, Angel, in second place. I fell in love with a premise that Whedon certainly did not create (one girl in all the world, blah blah) nor was he the best at executing it. Whether it was the characters he’d created, the actors playing them, the witty scripts and storylines – or a mix of all of these things, I was hooked. I staunchly defended the show, and by proxy, Whedon himself, from any harsh criticisms, and overlooked anything that now, as a 32-year-old, stands out as (and I hate using this word) problematic. I followed him from Buffy; to Angel, Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog, Dollhouse (look, I skipped Firefly for some reason, I’ve tried dipping a toe in but space cowboys aren’t for me, it seems), and that’s not to mention the movies he had a hand in (not an exhaustive list) – The Cabin in the Woods, The Avengers and The Avengers Age of Ultron. I was loyal, if Whedon’s name was attached, most likely, I was all in. There was something comforting and familiar about his humour, the way he told his stories – all of them laughably simple but layered to make them more complex. Like Shrek and onions.

So maybe you’re wondering where I took a left turn, jumped off the Joss Whedon Fan Train, as it were. Admittedly, it was a slow process, it wasn’t just a running leap off into the unknown post-Whedon world. A few years after Angel ended, some things circulated in the Buffy and Angel fandoms, rumours of how he treated his favourites, and those who had fallen out of favour with him. One of those people being Charisma Carpenter. In 2009 at a convention, a fan asked her how she felt about Cordelia’s last story line in Angel and how the show changed after her departure. While she didn’t explicitly come out and say the exact reason, she hinted that Whedon had been mad at her for making certain life decisions that would directly impact the vision he had for his show. Rumours have long since abounded that, in short, he punished her for falling pregnant. Obviously, no one but Carpenter and Whedon know the true story and at the time of hearing it, I took it with a grain of salt, but that seedling sat in the back of my mind and began to grow. After all, it explained a lot about the fourth season of Angel, and why the character of Cordelia made a complete 360. It was here that my relationship with Whedon started to sour, I began to question how someone who was so outspoken and publicly proud to be a feminist, could treat a woman that he had worked with for nearly a decade like that.

With that knowledge in mind, it was hard not to view some of the dialogue and plot points in his media a little differently, this is only one small example, but looking back, there is way too much slut shaming going on in Buffy to the point where Faith (my favourite character in the whole series, don’t @ me, I’ll defend her until I die) is seen as a lesser person than everyone else, because other female characters (Willow, Cordelia and Buffy herself) have branded her as a “cleavagey slutbomb”. Sure, ok, she goes and kills a bunch of people but they focus on her being slut much more than a psychopath – and I feel the need to point out that we only actually saw her sleep with one person (Xander) by the time the slut shaming actually started, and not that we should count, but Faith only slept with three people (Xander, Robin, and Riley in Buffy’s body) in the whole course of the show. And she killed four humans. Which means in Joss Whedon’s world, if you’re a woman, having sex is a worse crime than murder. Not exactly a feminist message.

Cut to just last year, when Whedon’s ex-wife, Kai Cole, came out with a heartbreakingly honest account of just what went down in their marriage. Details of his infidelity, gaslighting and emotional manipulation came spilling out of her, and sure, you could argue she was an embittered ex-wife, wanting to hit him where it would hurt the most, but it’s interesting to note that Whedon himself has never actually outright denied or refuted these claims. And ok, infidelity does not strip you of the right to call yourself a feminist, but as written by Clementine Ford “it’s about how he absolved himself in a letter sent to Cole after his infidelity had finally been exposed, blaming the women he cheated with, calling them “beautiful, needy, aggressive young women” who “surrounded” him.” It’s about how he used his feminist badge as a shield, claiming he was raised feminist so he just liked women better, or how he claimed in a letter to Cole, and I quote, “in many ways I was the HEIGHT of normal, in this culture. We’re taught to be providers and companions and at the same time, to conquer and acquire — specifically sexually — and I was pulling off both!”

With all of these things in mind, I started to see Whedon’s feminism as what it likely is; performative, a way to excuse his behaviour, a safeguard to hide behind as if to say, “oh no, I am not like other men at all, although I may act as other men do and fully accept my privilege as a cis-het white male, I’m different. Because I’m a feminist so when I do these terrible things to women, it’s ok, because I love, respect and support women.” Maybe he truly believes he’s a feminist, publicly, he flies the flag very well, and there’s no denying he’s profited from this label, heralded as a great feminist hero, an ally to women everywhere. It’s only when you start to scratch the surface, peel back the layers of the Shrek-onion, do you start to see him for what he (in my mind) really is. A dudebro playing at being the nice guy, someone who says all the right things but whose actions don’t quite match up, in fact, they crumble under any real scrutiny (for further proof of this, go read the leak of the Wonder Woman script, allegedly by Whedon. If you can make it through the whole thing, I’ll buy you a coffee – hell if you can make it through the first 10 pages).

Where does that leave Joss and I then? I admit that I’m conflicted, in a culture that has moved more and more towards “cancelling” people I’m the proverbial fence sitter. I acknowledge that there are people, media, etc that are problematic (the dreaded word) and I think everyone has the right to decide whether or not to consume said media. And for myself, personally, I endlessly flip between the two schools of thought. I won’t watch anything new with Johnny Depp, nor anything from Woody Allen, for example, but I have gone back (since Amber Heard spoke of her abuse at his hands) and watched some of Depp’s older movies. Some people have told me that they disagree, that even watching his older stuff is wrong, that I should ban all forms of Depp media from my life otherwise I am giving him my tacit approval, and that’s their choice and their right, but I suppose I’m still working out where I want to draw the line. I (maybe naively and incorrectly) believe that I can view a piece of media and know its flaws, or the flaws of the person behind it, but still somewhat enjoy it for what it is, or the story it’s telling.

Maybe that’s where I am with Whedon, somewhere in between, neither in the black or the white, somewhere in the shades of grey, because that’s how life is sometimes. I don’t think he’s a fully bad person, nor do I think he’s a fully good person. I think he’s human, and humans are inherently flawed. And maybe that feels like a cop out, but it’s all I have to offer right now. My view of him will never be as it once was, and thus my viewing of the media he has created and produced will likely reflect that. Re-watching Buffy and Angel has become a different experience; I’m no longer blindly swept up in the twists and turns, the witty repartee between characters, but instead viewing through a different lens, one where I question what message he’s really trying to send, what his true intentions are. Instead of laughing at every single joke, they never quite land right with me anymore, my childish naivety gone, replaced with the simmering anger of a woman who wonders why sexist jokes and judgements are supposed to be funny, why the rape of a female character is an excusable plot device to teach men a lesson. It’s exhausting to second guess someone I don’t even know, but this is the brave new world that a combination of his behaviour and my own feminist journey has left me in. These days, I wouldn’t ever say “I love Joss Whedon”, like I would’ve back in my teenage years, more likely you’ll find me saying “I loved Buffy but God it’s weird to watch as an adult”.

Like I said, it’s complicated.

Sources:

http://oranges8hands.tumblr.com/post/117924895453/charisma-carpenter-transcript-on-being-fired

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_igTbXKPck

https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/clementine-ford-why-joss-whedons-treatment-of-exwife-kai-cole-matters-20170821-gy16lx.html

https://indiegroundfilms.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/wonder-woman-aug7-07-joss-whedon.pdf

Image sources:

Yahoo.com

The Joy Luck Club was the first movie I remember with an Asian cast. That was 1993 and I was 7 years old, too young to understand how important that was, or even to really know why that was. I’m a child of the mid 80’s, I grew up in the Disney Renaissance, and when my friends and I played “princesses” on the playground, for most of that time, I pretended to be Ariel, despite my childish unease at not having a princess that looked like me. Mulan was released long after I had outgrown playing at make believe, and though overjoyed there was finally an Asian princess (albeit, technically not a princess, and technically not my specific ethnicity), my pre-pubescent brain had learned that it was better to be white.

Looking back on my childhood and teenage years, I can recall only a handful of Asian characters on my screen that made any impact on my life – Trini, the original Yellow Power Ranger (in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the only series worth watching), played by Thuy Trang, a Vietnamese American actress (RIP), Mulan (though does she really count, given she was a cartoon?), Lori Lee on Neighbours, played by Michelle Ang, an actress of Kiwi and Malay-Chinese descent, Sunny Lee on Neighbours (seems like Asians only get the one last name in Australian shows) played by Hany Lee Choi, a Korean-Australian (finally!) actress. Four seems like a pretty piss-weak number in comparison to the thousands of white characters that flooded our screens and pages.

By the time I hit my early twenties, I still hadn’t had many positive experiences with watching or reading about Asian characters, their roles reduced to a cruel stereotype, an easy laugh, a punchline to a joke that I hadn’t realised I was meant to be, lazy writing by people who had never questioned if this was doing more harm than good. The only representation I had taught me several things, and none of it was good:

1.) I was only allowed to be a nerdy sidekick, I could never be a hero myself. I could be the nerdy / funny / quirky best friend, but not the lead. Romance was for white girls, not for Asians.

2.) I was only funny as a punchline – I could be laughed AT, but never laughed WITH. This meant that I must have a “funny” accent and speak in broken English, this was the only acceptable way for me to land a joke (whilst simultaneously being the joke).

3.) Mainstream media deemed Asian faces unattractive, therefore I could be cute, but never beautiful. “Pretty for an Asian” was something I heard a lot. It did wonders for my self-esteem!

4.) If I was to be represented in media, my whole story MUST be about being Asian because that is the only defining fact about me. It could never just be a part of my life, it must be my WHOLE being. You know, the way a story about white characters revolves around the fact that they’re white.

5.) All Asians are interchangeable, so it is perfectly acceptable to cast a Vietnamese actor as a Chinese character. Please note that I do not blame the actor for this, they’re trying to make a living, just as the rest of us are. And roles for Asian actors are few and far between, they do not have the power to turn it down in favour of casting the correct ethnicity. That should fall to the people in charge making the casting decisions.

Part of this is why I’m so excited to see a step in a more positive direction for Asian stories in mainstream media, why I think it’s absolutely so important for non-Asian people to go see ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ while it’s still in theatres, or to check out ‘To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before’ on Netflix (so it does whatever it needs to do with the algorithm to make it trend). Send the message that you care about our stories, even if you “can’t relate” – which I’ve heard being used as an excuse as to why people won’t see it. Funny though, these same people can go watch The Avengers movies, or Star Wars, and last I checked, you weren’t Tony Stark (RDJ, obviously, this does not apply to you). Support Asian stories in Western media – but do not support the white washing of Asian characters (ScarJo, I’m looking your way). Encourage positive and not harmful Asian characters, stories, media, so that kids who were like I was, don’t have to grow up feeling ashamed of their heritage and culture.

By: Vanessa Head

Image sources:

Joy Luck Club, d23.com