A viral video, Asian women, stereotypes and racism

Hi all, like many of you, I was so tickled by the viral video of the British professor Robert Kelly whose interview was interrupted when his two young children wandered into his room, only for his wife to desperately scramble to get them out of the room - all on live TV. It was a hilarious piece of comedy, of how live TV can go desperately wrong with comical consequences. I laughed so hard and watched it several times. What I found upsetting though, was the way so many people automatically assumed that the Asian woman who desperately tried to get the two children out of the room was a nanny or housekeeper, when she was in fact his wife. That's right, Robert Kelly has a Korean wife: her name is Kim Jung-A. Why can't a white man have a Korean wife then? Or the other way around for that matter? 

There's a great BBC article about some of the stereotypes that Asian women face in the West and some preconceptions that the public make. Most of it of course, is based on the stereotype that being a white man, Robert Kelly must have a white wife, but this is 2017. Why do people still make such assumptions in this day and age? What if we turned it around: what if it was Jung-A being interviewed on the BBC and it was her husband, Robert, who burst into the room, hastily dragging the two young children out of the room: would people still make the same assumptions, "oh look, she has an older, white, male housekeeper-nanny to care of her kids whilst she works." No, people would almost certainly assume that Robert was her husband. So why are Asian women (and indeed Asian people of both genders) still subject to such stereotypes today? Now whilst the excellent BBC article on the issue mostly places the blame on white people being ignorant, I'm going to look at the other side of the coin - at Asian people.

Perhaps it is stating the obvious when I say that Asian culture is incredibly sexist - cultures in the West are a lot more progressive when it comes to a whole range of issues from gender equality to celebrating diversity to LGBT rights to the freedom of speech. You can't separate one issue from the whole package: these values develop as societies evolve and mature and perhaps you may label these as liberal or progressive values, but when it comes to women's rights, like all these other issues, Asian women are still worse off than their Western counterparts. A lot of people blame the way Asians are often portrayed in the media in the West, but what they don't realize is that for so many years, Asian media is just as complicit (if not a lot more so) in portraying women as mothers, wives, nannies, playing supporting, submissive roles to their husbands who are in charge. Things are slowly improving but not fast enough. Let me give you an example, let's look at the very popular K-pop music video for 'Female President' by Girl's Day.

This was to celebrate the first South Korean female president Park Geun-Hye (whom ironically has just been impeached and removed from power) - alright, so this is a song all about girl power, right? But the music video painfully starts with what I can only describe as a soft porn sequence, featuring the silhouettes of the singers removing their lingerie behind a screen like pole dancers doing a striptease. They spend the rest of the music video performing in skimpy outfits - I'm no prude and I do love K-pop, okay? If they want to project that kind of sexy image for their audience, that's their choice (or rather, the choice of their K-pop record label, but I digress) but for a song celebrating girl power and the first female president of South Korea, it seemed to reinforce the message that whilst you may have a female president in power, women are still there to be objectified by men for their bodies. So this is the way Korean culture treats their women in the media, regardless of the gender of their president. If you were to look at the wider picture, in East Asian media in general, women tend to be portrayed in more submissive, traditional roles because it simply reflects their position in those societies. The only evolution is that now women are objectified through soft-core porn in mainstream media, but I fail to see how making a woman perform in lingerie is somehow empowering her.

This goes further when you look at Asian families where oppressed rather than liberated by their own families. Having been brought up in an extremely traditional Chinese family, I witnessed that first hand and I have two sisters who bore the brunt of that sexism. One just accepts it without questioning it whilst the other resented it but still somehow yielded to what was expected of her despite being extremely dissatisfied with the situation. It wasn't just my father that imposed sexist, gender roles on my sisters, but my mother was equally complicit as well, conforming to every stereotype there was and openly condemning any woman who dared to stray from the expected roles of a wife and a mother. It's not that I blame my parents per se, but I am letting them off the hook because they are not very educated or enlightened - they are brainwashed by their culture which is inherently extremely sexist. Without the benefit of an excellent education to gain confidence in their own judgement, they simply defaulted to what their culture had prescribed them without questioning the validity of it in the modern world. When I put it like that, I can only feel sorry for them rather than judge them for accepting the very sexist aspects of Chinese culture (which I do reject wholeheartedly, of course). I'd like to think that our generation can do a much better job on the issue of sexism.

Is it that wrong of me to point out that Asian women tend to take these more traditional, more submissive roles in society because they are oppressed by their very own cultures? I don't think so, it does happen a lot in Asian societies. Why do white people have such impressions of Asian women in the first place? Is it a function of racism (to some degree, yes - oh that's always a convenient scapegoat) but is it also because Asian women are often forced to conform to these stereotypes because of the sexism in their own cultures? As we have just celebrated International Women's Day 2017, I believe the greater evil we are ignoring is the sexism within Asian cultures - blaming white people for making assumptions is somehow shifting all the blame away from the source of the problem: sexism in Asian society. It is too easy to point the blame at someone else rather than realize that as Asians, damn it, we have to change as well and accept part of the blame for this sexism by challenging the nastier aspects of our own cultures rather than blindly accepting it the way our parents did. Surely with the benefit of a better education, we can do better than our less enlightened parents, please. For some Asian women, the only way to get away from all that sexism is to simply marry someone from another culture altogether - that's exactly what Mrs Kelly (Kim Jung-A) has done.

So let's talk about one quite nasty aspect of Chinese culture: when a man is looking for a wife, he would usually only pick a woman who is 'inferior' to him in many ways. She cannot earn more than him, she cannot be more educated than him, she cannot achieve more than him otherwise it would belittle his precious male ego. This has led to the situation where many well-educated women in Asia being unable to find dates whilst the men at the bottom of the food chain being involved in a race to a bottom to find a bride who is even less competent. I find this whole situation utterly absurd and I think it stems from a major flaw in Chinese culture about the prescribed roles within an ideal marriage. In order to maintain the status quo in this patriarchal system, women are oppressed and instead of celebrating the achievements of successful women, they are often criticized for not conforming to more traditional roles. Whilst this is not solely a problem within Chinese culture, few Chinese people (even Chinese women) would acknowledge that it is even a problem because they would rather not confront a problem they feel they can neither take on nor solve. However, these very same Asian people would get incredibly upset and scream racism the moment a white person makes a racist assumption - why? Because it is a lot easier criticize someone else's culture ("how dare you make such an assumption, you white people are so racist!") than to take a long hard look at the problems of your own. #blindspot

Here's another example about this kind of blind spot. I am an Asian person (well technically speaking I am mixed, but I digress) who speaks English fluently as a mother tongue and first language. And yes I get rather upset when a white person asks me what my mother tongue is or pays me a compliment about how well I speak English. Of course I get angry and profess to be whiter than them when I hear that. But the fact remains that the vast majority of people in Asia do speak English as a second language and even those from places like Singapore and Malaysia do speak it with a strong accent - they may write English flawlessly, but the moment they speak it, the accent tends to suggest that English may not be their fist language. I met up with a Singaporean friend on business in the UK this weekend and whilst I was gladly speaking in a mish-mash of English, Hokkien, Singlish and Malay with him, I did wonder if white people will assume that English was his second language due to the way he would mispronounce certain words such as 'niche' - he pronounced the 'ch' in niche as a strong CH as in the word 'chip' whereas native speakers would pronounce the CH as an 'sh' as in the word 'ship'. Similarly, when he said the word 'advocate', he placed the stress on the second syllable instead of the fist -  again, that's a very Singaporean thing to do. And those were just two examples, I could list many more. Perhaps I am really splitting hairs here (I understood him perfectly notwithstanding these minor differences in pronunciation), but you can see why a native speaker of English would pick up on these subtle differences and may come to the conclusion that my friend didn't speak English as a first language as people who spoke English as a second/foreign language tended to be the ones who had accents.  #nosmokewithoutfire

Of course, it isn't just Asians who are incredibly sexist - there are sexist bigots anywhere in the world you go (oh such as Poland), but to simply accept sexism in our society just because it is a problem everywhere simply isn't the right approach to take. Whilst it may be convenient to blame white people every time they make a sexist assumption about Asian women, isn't it time that we confront sexism in Asian society and see why it has create this situation where Asian women are compelled to take more submissive roles in the first place? Let's start by at least talking about it - I've said my piece, now I look forward to hearing what you have to say about the topic. Over to you, many thanks for reading.