By Sandra Wang
H
ave we gone backwards in time? I remember watching The Joy Luck Club (1993), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and Disney's Mulan (1998) and thinking, “Wow! What fantastic heroines!” They looked like me, they spoke like me, and they were navigating the same East Asian patriarchal issues as me. Plus, I got to dress up as Mulan for Halloween, and since Mulan was the only screen representation I had as an East Asian girl, I was pretty stoked and thankful I got to be a Disney warrior princess. Now, I’m not sure where these awesome characters disappeared to, but I’d like to offer several contrasting examples of East Asian women representation on screen from the 1990s to the 2000s, and an explanation of why certain characters are a better representation of East Asian women than others.
Let’s start with Waverly Jong from The Joy Luck Club. Do you remember her? She was a child chess prodigy. As a young girl, she faltered at the last second during a chess match, and it was all downhill from there. She was a brilliant chess strategist by her mother’s design, but as soon as she lost that ability, she became nothing in her mother’s eyes. We flash forward to her life as an adult, and she seems a bit lost and rebellious in pursuit of her own path and identity, though still smart and capable. However, as many of us know, appeasing Asian tiger parents is a Sisyphean task. It is never enough, and therefore, you are never enough. If you are an immigrant or a child of immigrants, you know that being “enough” is a task all immigrant children carry deep inside, and so the generational expectations and unresolved trauma continues. If you are an East Asian woman, I bet her story and the other stories within The Joy Luck Club spoke deeply to you and resonated with you in ways Western media seldom do. As a former Waverly, I ugly cry every time when I watch The Joy Luck Club, and I hope I’m not alone in being deeply touched by her story.
To contrast, let’s jump forward twelve years to 2005. Memoirs of Geisha was released that year. In the movie, a young Japanese girl named Sayuri gets sold to a geisha house matriarch who then trains her to become a geisha. As part of her geisha maturing process, she has to sell her virginity to the highest bidder as part of a “mizuage” which is a deflowering ceremony. Imagine you’re a young Asian woman watching this. Gross, right? But you think, well, it’s based off a book, and the author based everything off of his interview with a real Japanese geisha. So maybe it’s at least realistic, even if it is offensive. Allow me to correct you on this false narrative.
The real story is that Arthur Golden, a Jewish-German American man from Tennessee and author of the original novel, falsely promised Mineko Iwasaki, a retired geisha, that his interview with her was anonymous to honor the geisha code of silence. However, he published the book with her name in the book’s acknowledgements section which spurred hate and massive backlash against Iwasaki in her home country of Japan. Many Japanese assumed she told him this sordid tale. As it turns out, only sex workers underwent a mizuage and only within certain subsections of the Japanese sex industry pre-1956 when it was outlawed. Golden merged this concept with modern geisha-dom to create his own fantasy, and used Iwasaki’s name to legitimize it to Western audiences. So which is worse? That an American man exploited an East Asian woman, that he unnecessarily sexualized an East Asian character he fully controlled on page, or that he connected his fantasy to a real woman thereby upending her life? Besides this being the worst multiple choice question ever, know that someone scrubbed this information from the film’s wikipedia entry to prevent more people from knowing about it. It only appears in the book’s wikipedia entry which fewer people visit.
Don't get me wrong though. Wonderful East Asian women roles exist, and Michelle Yeoh's recent Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) is proof of this. So what’s the deal? Why the difference in the representation of East Asian women on screen? Surely, if there are strong characters then there also must be weak characters. But this doesn’t quite hold up when you look at the “weak” women who struggle with self-confidence and identity of The Joy Luck Club. Watching them, I have never once felt they were diminished as people and as human beings. If anything, their weakness made them stronger, and I saw the humanity inherent in their weakness because they were told by insiders of the struggle, not outsiders looking in. In Memoirs of a Geisha, the character has little agency over her circumstances nor does she rise above it in the end.
I’d like to offer an explanation. Representation depends on pre-production talent. Pre-production involves choosing directors who bring the vision to life, screenwriters getting the characters right, and the producers choosing which directors, editors, writers, and cinematographers will mold the project. For The Joy Luck Club, the director, one of two screenwriters, and two of four producers were East Asians. For Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the director, two of three screenwriters, and all three producers were East Asian. For Mulan, only one of the four screenwriters is East Asian, but this particular screenwriter received top billing in the screenwriters section and is an East Asian woman. For Memoirs of Geisha, the director, screenwriter, and producers are all non-Asian. When I look at the differences between East Asian leading women roles that speak to me versus the ones that do not, these behind-the-scenes people make a significant difference.
Films that disempower East Asian women tend to fall short because the house of cards was built upon a shaky foundation. People who have no lived experience as East Asian women simply cannot grasp the complexities of being an East Asian woman. Pre-production talent is the foundation upon which a story is ultimately crafted, and you need insightful talent who can grasp nuances and subtleties. You lose these people and you lose the foundation. Any minor shake and the whole house of cards loses structural and narrative integrity. So if you only remember two things from this article, remember these two things:
Representation matters both in front of the camera and behind the camera.
It is important to have East Asian (women) storytellers tell East Asian (women) stories.
As a personal exercise, I invite you to research films you’ve watched that feature East Asian characters. Look at who directed, produced, and wrote the movie. Read their bios, and explore how their background and experience may have shaped and influenced the characters’ arcs and themes of the film. Do you think their background created characters true to life, or did the characters become caricatures? Did their artistic and character choices resonate with a deep truth you’ve known and experienced as an East Asian person, or did it fall flat?
Finally, as an Asian American and Christian in this world, I invite you to consider who has a seat at your table. Maybe you’re a missionary, a social worker, a nonprofit employee, a social justice activist, or community leader. When you advocate for someone who doesn’t look like you, do you invite their participation in the creation of your activism and programming? Do you involve them in the “pre-production” phase of your work, or are they end-product consumers only? If you don’t involve them in pre-production, I hope you take a second look at your workflow and philosophy. Perhaps take a chance and bring this up with your organization and staff. Nobody wants to be misrepresented, and nobody wants to be spoken for. And I certainly hope you speak up as an East Asian person when your voice isn’t accounted for! This is my job as a filmmaker and hopefully yours as an impact maker. After all, this is the missional journey of Christ: you do not dictate and judge from above, but rather, you go into the field to become one with your subject. This is the craft of a good storyteller and advocate that seeks 3D truth over 2D stereotypes.
The author invites feedback from all Asian women.
Photo by Nathan DeFiesta on Unsplash
Sandra Wang is an aspiring documentary filmmaker living in Houston, TX. She hopes to use film to capture the resilience of the AAPI community and its rising voices. Through films and media, she hopes to increase presence and awareness of AAPI voices in the civic engagement process, political sphere, and professional industry. She is a former speech and debate judge and the only East Asian immigrant woman to do so in the state of Texas.