Asian American Gender Politics in Media
And how some bad faith Asian American "feminists" use orientalist stereotypes and flatten intersectionality to denigrate or dismiss Asian American dissent
On January 15th, 2019, three Asian men were murdered in a cold blood hammer attack at a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn:
Thang Kheong Ng, a 61 year old Malaysian immigrant, was struck over the head, spilling blood over the counter
Tsz Pun, 51, part owner of the Chinese restaurant, had his skull smashed in
Fulai Pun, 34, nephew of Tsz Pun, who had worked as a chef since he was a teenager, was repeatedly bludgeoned
The assailant was Arthur Martunovich, a 34 year old white man, who specifically targeted Asian men for murder.1 Afterwards, when asked why he committed these horrific crimes, he would say that he watched movies that portrayed Asian men being so cruel to Asian women, that he had to step in and save Asian women by killing Asian men.
“Chinese men are awful. They hold their women captive. And their women have like real (inaudible) ability and that’s why they keep them captive,” Martunovich said to police after his arrest.
This past August, murder charges were dropped against Martunovich, as the judge in charge of the case found him mentally unstable. At the height of tensions over anti-Asian racism, this ruling seemed to be a slap in the face to the Asian American community. Only curiously enough, Asian Americans journalists would never utter a word on the matter. The journalists who covered the story were non-Asian and posited the question if it was even a hate crime2. Why was there neglect on what constituted a clear hate crime against Asian Americans?
Instead, some Asian American journalists seemed to be more interested in another topic entirely: boosting Aaron Mak’s recent exposé of Men’s Rights Asians. The topic of white adjacency, colonialism and interracial relationships has been a contentious one in the Asian American community for decades, and the article’s release started weeks of mud slinging from Asian men and women on both sides of the debate. With so many recent changes on the American dialogue on race, many of the article’s assertions were outdated or misrepresented Asian Americans. As someone who’s closely followed Asian American history in media and how the Asian American gender divide manifested, I felt compelled to share my analysis and thoughts.
Before I begin, I find it necessary to start with a disclaimer, seeing as countless times Asian Americans with platforms would weaponize the MRAsian term against me as a baseless ad hominem in order to service their own platforms and arguments in bad faith. I do not care at all who dates whom and have plenty of Asian friends and family both men and women who have white partners. I do not want to control Asian women’s bodies for the sake of my own sexual pleasure. I am more or less satisfied with my dating life. I am not nor have I ever voted Republican, and am fairly into left-wing progressive politics. What I do care about are the ways in which some Asian Americans in media contribute to orientalist stereotypes or the silencing of other Asian Americans.
In the past few years, the conversation around E/SE Asian Americans (abbreviated as AsAms) and gender has been thrust into the mainstream. While most AsAms have an inkling that our gender issues cannot be mapped onto the general American experience, there’s a lack of consensus as to how gender affects our personal and political lives.
AsAms are rapidly becoming more visible as a critical mass of 2nd+ generation AsAms have come of age to finally contribute to the greater cultural conversation. However, because American media has long controlled our narrative, much of our conversations in the mainstream have been filtered through the lens of white supremacy. Attempts to find a unified voice have been clumsy, at best.
Even with more Asian writers today, white editors can ultimately choose what and what not to print for the mainstream audience.
Since AsAms don’t have any AsAm-only run publications with a significant audience, the AsAm narrative is still controlled by white media. It behooves any AsAm to really question what the narrative is trying to do for our communities (Hint: it’s not to unite or help us).
One of the biggest misconceptions about AsAms in mainstream media is that we’re ultimately all one homogenous Borg3. This has made it easy for the media to target all AsAms as a monolith:
an enemy to be feared (Yellow Peril, Japanese internment camps, etc.)
model minorities to squelch concerns about systemic racism
racist minorities who are complicit in upholding white supremacy
scapegoats to blame whenever things go wrong (covid19)
By contrast, AsAms are the most heterogenous group in America. As a relatively newer immigrant group in terms of magnitude4, there are natural divisions:
between generations (marked by cultural and language barriers)
between dozens of different Asian countries and their respective cultures and conflicts
between different socioeconomic classes, as AsAms have the highest income inequality than any other group
However, some of the AsAm gender divisions have been engineered by the American government and media to divide and commodify us.
In order to understand how western media has shaped and controlled the narrative of AsAm gender relations, we have to look at the history of America's structural racism against Asians and how the men and women were impacted very differently.
A Brief History of Interracial Marriage in America
Prior to the 20th century, America initially used Chinese men as a discardable source of cheap labor to build the railroads. Chinese men were banned from bringing wives from their respective countries due to the Page Act of 1875 and because of strict miscegenation laws, Chinese men were not allowed to start families with white women. To add insult to injury, America later passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, making it illegal for these Chinese immigrants to naturalize. Many Chinese men had no families or community life as a result.
Chinese laborers, uncredited and paid next to nothing for building the railroad, needed to be excised from America
By the mid 20th century, during WW2 and Cold War conflicts around the Pacific, American GIs encountered Asian women during their tours and wanted to bring them over as brides. However, since miscegenation laws were still in effect, the War Brides Act of 1945 was passed to legalize interracial marriages for the first time. For the next 20 years, miscegenation laws were repealed until Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which made interracial marriage legal across the country.
Let me restate: it was white male desire for Asian women that started the push towards interracial marriage in America. In addition, America began to actively portray this specific interracial pairing in order to normalize it to the greater American public.
I can’t help but laugh at the jealous white woman in this poster.
There were real material incentives for Asian women to marry white men. Many of these women, who just had their homelands destroyed or ravaged, understandably took the opportunity to marry and come over to America. Even domestically, when Japanese men, women, children and the elderly were all put into internment camps, there was an exception: Japanese women with white husbands. The implication was that unless vetted by a white man, an Asian was not a true American.
Therein lies the ugly truth: since Asian women were allowed to step foot onto this country, America created tangible incentives to date white men.
In addition, Hollywood and the media adjusted the way it portrayed Asian men. Prior to WW2, Asian men were portrayed in similar racist tropes as Black men, hypermasculine and sexually deviant. In conjunction with the narrative of Asian women being suitable wives, the media started to highlight Asian men working in traditionally feminine jobs5, to present the idea that white men were in masculine (and more lucrative) roles in society.
Sessue Hayakawa, usually cast as a villain in Hollywood, was considered attractive to white women prior to WW2
Continued conflicts in Asia during the Cold War and the Immigration Act of 1965 brought over a new wave of Asian immigrants, many who came from poor countries without knowing English or anything about American culture, much less the prior history of discrimination Asians faced in America. First generation immigrants had no access or voice in American media, which opened the door for white men to have full control over the AsAm narrative. Stories would either lean into offensive stereotypes fetishizing Asian women6 or romanticize white male saviorism of Asian women7.
By the turn of the century, results from media propaganda surfaced:
American born Asian women had the highest interracial marrying rate of any ethnic group: over 54%.
While the out-marrying rate is also high for 2nd generation AsAm men (38%), the statistics don’t account for how many AsAm men remain unmarried because of bias in the general American dating market. Online dating has made things worse for Asian men: a recent OKCupid study (now curiously deleted, but you can find references to it) revealed the obvious: that a white man in America is the most desirable overall in dating. It also found that for an Asian man to be equivalent to a white man in the general dating pool, he would have to earn earn $250k/year more than a white man.
The incentives of dating white men still exist today just by virtue of white men being in proximity to wealth and power in America.
In media and politics, right wing white men are married to the most influential AsAms such as Elaine Chao, Amy Chua, Julie Chen Moonves and Wendi Deng Murdoch.
It’s also no secret that the alt-right has an Asian fetish, e.g. Libertarians with Asian Wives and Tila Tequila, a self proclaimed Nazi sympathizer. Sometimes, marrying white is even encouraged by immigrant Asian parents, with the practical idea of upward mobility. There are still sexpats8 who bring home Asian wives from poorer Asian countries.
In liberal coastal cities, where many AsAms reside, a fair amount of 2nd generation AsAm women work in industries such as politics, tech, finance, law and media. These industries are dominated by white men (especially politics and media), so it’s understandable that many Asian women in these industries date those around them, who also happen to be in positions of power and privilege.
So do some AsAms (both men and women) have a problem with certain Asian women based solely on their dating choices? Or is there something else going on here? My own journey in entertainment and media revealed to me that not only was the government and the media responsible for these divisions, they started to amplify AsAm voices in media that would spread orientalist ideas about Asia and Asian men for them.
A Personal Exploration of Asian American Gender in Media
During my high school years in the late 90s/early 2000s, even while the internet was still in its nascent forms and Reddit did not exist, my Asian guy friends and I were well aware of yellow fever. Asian women were seen as desirable while the men were not, and the WMAF pairing was seen as not only natural, but preferable to Asian women. Asian self-hate was palpable and out in the open back then, half white half Asian people were regarded as superior to full Asians since they came out “better looking”. I remember someone remarking that a half white Asian we knew was like Blade: “all of our strengths, none of our weaknesses.”
As recently as a decade ago, it was socially acceptable for Asian women to proudly say they’d never date an Asian guy and exclusively date white men.
A common reason given at the time for some Asian women was that Asian men reminded them of their cousins/brothers. One wonders how China has 1.4 billion citizens with this logic. With media continually portraying white men as heroes, who could blame Asian women for being attracted to what was demonstrated to be desirable and popular? White worship was not only out in the open, but encouraged.
My personal reaction to this at the time was apathy with a tinge of annoyance. All of the girls I was attracted to were Asians who were actually into Asians9, so in my view, it didn’t affect my personal life. I had no interest in dating outside my own race, since as a minority, I prioritized shared lived experience in a relationship. However, later on after pursuing a career in entertainment, I started to recognize that racism directly affected how Asian men were portrayed in media: mainly as either foreigners who knew kung fu or dickless nerds set up as the punchline of a joke.
In 2015, a few years after I had moved to LA in pursuit of an acting career, I became frustrated as there were still no roles for AsAms and the few roles were mostly stereotypes. I was inspired and decided to write and create my own show, Just Doug, both in an effort to launch my career and to create media that gave depth to AsAm personalities and storylines.
Come for the masturbation scenes. Stay for the penis analysis.
As I was spitballing story ideas with my co-writer, he recounted one of his friend’s experiences:
As an Asian guy at the bar, an Asian woman said to him, “You’re not my type, I don’t date Asian guys.” What was worse was that it was unsolicited, as if she was already pre-empting him to say, “Don’t even try, buddy.”
I had never personally heard something with such wanton vitriol. I began to research and figure out why the discrepancy between the dating lives of Asian men and women was so apparent. Tinder for Asian women was like shooting fish in a barrel, whereas for Asian men, it was a long distance marathon for their thumbs.
Every Asian man in America has had penis anxiety. Immersed in white media, you start to believe stereotypes yourself. Do I have a small dick? Is it true? Are we really cursed? In my research of the relationship between ethnicity and penis size, I came across some interesting tidbits.
Did you know Japanese porn producers purposely choose men with smaller than average penises to make the viewer comfortable? That white immigrants such as the Irish and Jews were given the small penis stereotype when they first arrived? And what was the exact methodology of penis measuring in “studies” held by western doctors in the 19th century?!)
In Just Doug, I wanted to bring up uncomfortable conversations that AsAms have in their personal lives. When Doug gets rejected by an Asian woman, it’s ambiguous as to the reason why, just as the reasons are complex in real life. I wanted to explore and deconstruct pre-existing false binaries and inconsistencies, and to potentially start honest dialogue within our community and the greater public at large about our social issues.
Part of my marketing strategy was to contact any AsAm journalist who had written about whitewashing10. I was able to put the show on Facebook Watch as one of their first narrative shows as well as get placements in the Verge, HuffPo and Washington Post. However, I was disappointed when many of the AsAm culture writers and journalists I reached out to blithely pretended the show did not exist. One journalist contacted me showing interest in showcasing the show, then mysteriously ghosted my emails afterwards. Another, a friend of mine who wrote for a well known Hollywood trade, admitted to me that she did not watch it because it was not an official Hollywood project.
I couldn’t help but feel that it was strange that I was being shut out by the very people who claimed to want more of what I had just produced. Did I potentially touch a nerve with some AsAm gatekeepers by talking explicitly about Asian interracial dating trends?
Into the Weeds of r/aznidentity
I received a better response from grassroots marketing: Twitter and Reddit. At the time, I was fairly apolitical and I rarely engaged with either platform until I stumbled upon AsAm subreddits such as r/asianamerican and r/aznidentity. As I posted my show on these subs, I was exposed to conversations about AsAm history, politics and its media class for the first time. While r/asianamerican parroted many of the narratives of mainstream media, r/aznidentity took a different approach and was unafraid to push the envelope and debate topics that weren’t covered by the mainstream such as:
questions of Eurocentrism when the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians cast a half white Asian
the thorny topic of discrimination against Asians in high school and college admissions due to opaque Affirmative Action policies
the nature in which Asian countries were colonized by America
Unsurprisingly, r/aznidentity responded well to the countercultural nature of my show. I started to engage more with the subreddit and noticed that while some of the conversations around dating were toxic and misguided much of the anger and rage seemed to come from a feeling of powerlessness.
At the center of the debate about Asian women and white men was the question of agency: while Asian women are not responsible for yellow fever and their fetishization, relationships are a two way street. Do Asian women bear any responsibility for perpetuating stereotypes by exclusively dating white men? Or worse, publicly announcing they were doing so because they found Asian men repulsive?
Despite the fact that there are now much more AsAms in media, it is still easy for the media to control the AsAm narrative because we have no unified community, much less a voice or platform independent from the mainstream. As AsAms became aware of the problematic nature of stories written by white men like Miss Saigon, the media started to pivot to a much more effective strategy of cherrypicking and amplifying certain AsAm voices that aligned with their interests and dismissing the ones that challenge their authority. By creating and co-opting an AsAm media class, the media could effectively shape and control the AsAm narrative by filtering and using simple incentives11.
Sometimes the AsAms who are amplified don’t have an underlying agenda themselves, but are simply sharing their own lived experience. I have no doubt that Amy Tan’s life experiences mirrored that of the Joy Luck Club. But while the movie was celebrated for being the first American studio film with a majority AsAm cast, it contained exclusively negative portrayals of Asian men while portraying white male partners as desirable and progressive. More recently, Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before originally was written to have five white male love interests for the main character who was a half Asian girl. To Han’s credit, she listened to the criticism and voiced regret saying that she could only tell the stories that she knew as she grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood without Asian men.
Sometimes, it’s more explicit. The former Asian voices section at Huffington Post only employed Asian women and white men writers. Jenn Fang, an Asian culture writer, wrote an article that blamed the Isla Vista killings on toxic Asian masculinity, despite the fact that Elliot Rodger killed Asian men (and no Asian women) because of his anger at white women. Going even deeper, I found journalists and comedians who’ve made a living by shitting on Asian men, leaning on the orientalist stereotypes that Asian men are inherently more misogynistic than enlightened white men in the west.
Roslyn Talusan, who has written for various publications such as Vice, has had a vendetta against Asian men for a good part of a decade.
The conversation was suddenly thrust into the mainstream in 2018 when tweets by Celeste Ng, a novelist (of Bad Art Friend fame), surfaced that stated that she did not find Asian men attractive.
When you have to reassure your non-Asian audience that you do not, in fact, find Asian men attractive.
There was a firestorm on both Twitter and Reddit, where many AsAms demanded a response and answers for these tweets. However, things got out of control when Ng received targeted harassment in the form of vicious emails. It was unclear as to who was directly responsible, but r/aznidentity, was the most visible subreddit that criticized Ng. My guess was that while some of the harassment came from r/aznidentity, the majority probably came from subreddits such as r/hapas (a little less toxic these days) and r/EasternSunRising. These subreddits promoted extreme ideas of Asian supremacy, racial purity and the trauma some children experienced from WMAF relationships. Ng in response wrote an article decrying all the harassment she received.
While Ng had very valid points about r/aznidentity, some of the framing was disingenuous. The article’s title insinuates that the primary reason Asian men, who she called MRAsians or Men’s Rights Asians, were harassing her solely because she was a visible woman in media dating a white man. Anyone who even remotely disagreed with her, even if they were an Asian woman, became a harasser, and consequently an MRAsian. When Asian founded publications like Plan A and Nextshark attempted to give more balanced takes on the situation, she labeled them MRAsian as well. MRAsian became an effective way to discredit any AsAm by immediately connecting them to a right wing ideology to outsiders looking in.
To be fair to Ng, the controversy brought a lot of confusion and there may have been no real way for to discern who was coming in good faith. I don’t doubt that she faced terrible treatment by some extreme Asian men12.
However, by virtue of her platform, Ng had successfully positioned herself as the morally correct side and anyone who revisited the conversation ran the risk of being labeled a misogynistic incel.
The damage was done: by popularizing the idea that r/aznidentity was a right-wing incel adjacent movement during the height of the #MeToo movement, the subreddit and its community were all implicated and smeared. Many, including myself, decided it best to leave the conversation and r/aznidentity entirely. For the next few years, the discussion about AsAm gender issues would remain cold.
The Recent Intraracial Asian American Culture Wars in Media
In 2020, Asian America had a more important crisis on its hands, a twin pandemic of the coronavirus and violent anti-Asian hate crimes which targeted many Asian senior citizens. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the majority of anti-Asian hate crimes were being committed in cities with high Asian populations, such as SF and NYC. The uncomfortable truth was that while the majority of the verbal anti-Asian harassment from the hate crimes were from white offenders in wealthier suburban areas, many violent hate crimes in urban poorer areas were caused by non-white assailants. Intuitively, it made sense: AsAms are among some of the poorest and largest communities in cities like NYC and SF. As the pandemic raised pre-existing racial tensions and exacerbated economic conditions for the lower class, Asians were targeted for robberies, assault and murder for the simple fact that Asians were not protected by the police.
Personally, I’ve taken it upon myself to parse through these difficult issues with AsAms and other Black people. With coronavirus and the George Floyd protests happening in tandem, I wrote this piece for Nextshark early in the pandemic, fearing that the media would manipulate the narrative to pit Asian and Black people against each other just as they spun the narrative about the LA Riots in 1992.
A primer on how the media turned the LA Riots from a police brutality issue into a Korean vs Black one.
They did.
The media portrayed the George Floyd protests as equivalent to the mass destruction of Korean neighborhoods in LA. Koreans in 1992 were portrayed as anti-Black alt-right white supremacists, not desperate citizens in fear for their lives. Meanwhile, Black protestors, despite many peaceful protests and demonstrations, were portrayed as mostly opportunistic looters and criminals. The result? Many AsAm owned small businesses were totaled while big corporate outlets remained relatively untouched. For African Americans, police reform was treated as a joke by the Biden administration after the 2020 elections. Yet many Asian and Black people became convinced that the other was their biggest problem in America, despite the fact that white neoliberals control the government and their police departments in all of the coastal cities.
Where were the establishment AsAm journalists throughout all this?
For an entire year, mainstream AsAm journalists were silent on these crimes. People turned to alternative sources of news such as AsAmNews and Resonate and countless numbers of grassroots Instagram accounts. Nextshark, primarily a culture blog, began to pivot and became one of the only legitimate sources of anti-Asian hate. Worse, sources like NBC Asian America even downplayed the hate crimes, questioning if AsAms were overreacting to the violence they were experiencing. Most egregious of all, there were countless nuance-free thinkpieces about anti-Blackness within the AsAm communities that only served to further inflame tensions between the minority groups.
After speaking with the few AsAms in media and activists who were protesting anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020, I came to the conclusion that most AsAm journalists knew violent anti-Asian hate crimes were happening, but that reporting on the ones committed by non-whites would be detrimental to the optics of the Black Lives Matter movement. The silence was deafening, especially when AsAm media figures would be up in arms about softball topics like white women appropriating Mahjong but fail to mention the murder of Vicha Ratanapakdee.
It became apparent to me that AsAm in media were either staying silent to either protect their brand or were being silenced by their editors or bosses.
The unofficial embargo of reporting on anti-Asian hate crimes was lifted after the Atlanta spa shootings in March. It was a slam dunk opportunity to report: the assailant was a white male shooter who looked like a Proud Boy poster child in a conservative area and targeted Asian women out of clear racialized misogyny. Mainstream AsAms journalists finally started to talk about anti-Asian hate, though still only in the context that only white supremacists were attacking them. Conservative outlets would then opportunistically amplify every hate crime with a Black assailant, sarcastically remarking that the crime was due to white supremacy.
When there is a large differential between the news and what one experiences day to day, people start to question the media. After one of the few personally trying to speak out against anti-Asian hate for the past couple years and being frustrated with AsAms in media, I connected with several AsAm women on Twitter who also saw the hypocrisy of these AsAm journalists.
I also revisited r/aznidentity, the only forum where people were truthfully discussing the nature of these hate crimes. It was actually a relief to see that the subreddit had actively cleaned up some of its more toxic behaviors and had a fair amount of Asian women posters as well as Black members in solidarity. The board had become a hub for a growing number of AsAms who distrusted the mainstream media on topics.
Imagine my surprise then when I read through Mak’s Slate piece on r/aznidentity, calling it out to be an anti-Black subreddit only trolled by MRAsian incels. The subreddit was portrayed as almost comically evil, as if there were thousands of Asian men angrily gathering for the sole purpose of harassing Asian women just by virtue of their dating history to maintain racial purity. The article itself felt a bit dated, which made sense as several interviewed for the article said Mak had reached out to them in 2019. And while I don’t condone the harassment that Eileen Huang received, the article frames a few details incorrectly. Huang came to the attention of the subreddit when she made her tweet, not solely when she was making TikTok videos. And the tweet was not made prior to the anti-Asian hate crimes, the crimes were happening since the pandemic first started, not when AsAm journalists like Mak first started covering them. Mak, a tech journalist, clearly couldn’t do verifiable basic research for his article, reeking of the same disingenuous half-truths contained in Ng’s piece.
There was no surprise then when Ng herself boosted the article, along with tweets from an obvious troll account13.
Either Ng is not very good at the internet, hugely influenced by confirmation bias or is maliciously using a prop.
Other prominent AsAm journalists who also took it upon themselves to spread orientalist ideas about racialized misogyny.
I don’t know where to even start with this one.
Immediately after the article’s publication, another extreme AsAm group attempted to cancel Simu Liu by linking him to the r/aznidentity subreddit without any hard evidence.
“Trust me, bro.”
Internet sleuths would dig up a few embarrassing posts Liu made but nothing corroborating this group’s initial claims. One researcher even wrote an article suggesting that some of the Reddit evidence against Liu was fabricated. But the damage to Liu’s reputation was done, within hours the tweet and the story went viral, the truth of which to be sorted out by internet mobs.
Upon reading Mak’s piece, I questioned the purpose of the article.
While Mak several times makes the assertion the r/aznidentity is exclusively an anti-Black, Men’s Rights Asians subreddit, from my limited time interacting with the forum, it seemed that there were both AsAm men and women (as well as Black members) to be discussing a wide variety of topics not covered by the mainstream.
Mak doesn’t offer any solutions beyond an insinuation that the subreddit should be shut down. Ng tweeted recently that Asian-led publications like Nextshark and Plan A should be cancelled as well. It seemed like a coordinated assault by the establishment AsAm media class to attack AsAm forums and publications run by AsAms. Would shutting these places down really help the AsAm conversation?
A distinct pattern seemed to emerge: whenever an Asian man would gain any sort of platform, they would be scrutinized for the smallest things by extreme AsAm culture writers, especially if it they remotely suggest that Asian men suffer through things socially in America that Asian women do not. Even attempts at reconciliation and conversation by Asian men such as Joshua Luna are deemed problematic. He has been harassed for years by some of these writers and journalists.
Luna has been nothing but professional throughout all the attacks he received.
The false binary implied by many of these extreme writers was clear: if you aren’t following the AsAm establishment’s unofficial codes of conduct, you’re part of a radical right-wing incel movement.
There’s an asymmetrical advantage establishment AsAms enjoy: when the average outsider finds an article that portrays an ethnic subgroup a certain way, they’ll take it as truth and that group has no real chance at a rebuttal or recourse.
r/aznidentity addressed the timing of the article as well, first saying that Mak had told the r/aznidentity that Slate did not want to do an article about Asian Activism until Mak pitched the article to Slate in a negative light. None of the positive things the subreddit did were published in the article, in order to give an extremely one-sided view. The editors then held off on publishing until the media cycle on anti-Asian hate died down so as to not appear unsympathetic to AsAms.
Most of the dialogue about AsAm identity had been free of the AMWF conversation for years, until the Mak piece. All of this indicated to me that there is something deeper happening:
After gaslighting AsAms during the pandemic about anti-Asian racism, it seemed that the media sought to regain its control over the AsAm narrative by calling into question the validity of independent AsAm media organizations and figures.
The prevailing thought in America is that AsAm are essentially white-adjacent minorities that don’t go through any real discrimination and are also an impediment towards progress for other minorities. In this framework, Asian men to the public are conferred almost all the same privileges as white men, and have a vested interest to protect their proximity to whiteness and patriarchal power. By tapping into these pre-existing orientalist ideas, the media first establishes the idea that any dissent from the mainstream view of AsAms are from MRAsians14. Then, using the public perception that MRAsians are almost equivalent to white men, disagreeing with the AsAm establishment is “punching down” or “mansplaining”, and thus does not have any valid standing.
How Do We Decouple the Asian American Narrative from the Media?
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
- Malcolm X
True solidarity comes when groups are able to have free and honest dialogue about difficult conversations. It’s no surprise to me that we’ve still been unable to figure it out, as AsAm still do not even consider ourselves a unified group. Until we are able to build an independent AsAm media platform untethered to mainstream interests, we will never be able to find common ground.
Unfortunately, as long as the media is white controlled and owned, there will always be incentives for AsAms to turn on one another. While AsAms perform well in technical fields such as medicine, law and finance, media is much more of a subjective field where power is concentrated in the hands of a handful of decision makers. Voices that align with pre-approved scripts will be boosted while those that challenge the status quo will be silenced. Does this mean every AsAm in media is a race traitor or a sell out? Of course not. Some AsAm journalists have told me that editors would repeatedly edit their work with unapproved changes or reject their pitches on stories about AsAms. But there are many AsAms with ambitious career aspirations like Fang and Talusan who know that the way to play the game is to cater to mainstream sensibilities and to deny access to those who try to challenge them.
Because of the lack of a space where AsAm can come in good faith, I have seen time and time how the conversation unfolds:
AsAm with a white male partner and a large, mostly white audience says something either orientalist (e.g. pathologizing a traumatic personal experience as endemic to one’s own race) or colonialist (e.g. not finding one’s own race attractive, attributing Asian men to be uniquely misogynist)
Some AsAms challenge the AsAm figure’s views
AsAm figure dismisses dissent by virtue of their platform
AsAms angrily message AsAm figure hateful messages
White trolls use burner accounts to further fuel the flames by pretending to be AsAms on either side of the debate
AsAm figure picks the worst of the messages received, ignoring ones actually coming in good faith, to prove the harassment they’ve been receiving and painting all dissent as wanting to control Asian women’s bodies as a form of sexual commodification
AsAms feel further alienated from the conversation and react defensively and stereotype AsAm figures based on whether they date a white man
AsAm women who get caught in the middle report the spillover harassment, further strengthening the narrative that these AsAms are all MRAsians
Rinse and repeat as the original unresolved conflict cascades into many more unresolved conflicts
Are Asian men misogynist? Yes, of course, but no more/less misogynist than other men in America. Do some Asian men who harass Asian women with misplaced anger? Yes, of course, but I would stop short in claiming that this is exclusively endemic to a specific ethnic community. There are actual Asian men who are Proud Boys. These are the true MRAsians, who acknowledge and support white patriarchal supremacy, as long as they get a piece of it themselves by aligning themselves with white men. But the term MRAsian is most commonly used as an intellectually bankrupt racist dogwhistle that highlights orientalist stereotypes of backward, Asian men coming from misogynist cultures in an effort to link Asian men to white male supremacist movements. This simple flattening does not account for the very real differences in how society views Asian men and women vs. how it views white men and women and how we respectively behave.
AsAms are the only race in America where the men voted for Trump (28%) much less than Asian women (40%). AsAm women also report the lowest rates of Intimate Partner Violence out of any race. AsAm women are the only racial group in America that experience more violence (pg 297) from men of other racial groups vs men from their own race.
MRAsian also reduces the concern of emasculation to one’s dating or sexual life. There is an orientalist undercurrent behind these stereotypes, one that implies that Asian men are valued only for their labor but are not welcome to exist within American social contexts. This affects our basic human needs of a social life, self-image and mental health.
Many of these conversations are new and messy and AsAm are going to get them wrong as we struggle to even find the language to describe our specific lived experiences in America. There are AsAm women in media unfairly attacked for simply having a white partner by angry misguided Asian men, and harassment is not an effective tool for dialogue. But what also needs to be called out is when some AsAms designate all disagreement as harassment in order to silence other AsAms to avoid having a conversation at all. I disagree with many of r/aznidentity’s takes but I believe in the subreddit’s right to exist.
My expectations for an honest conversation anytime soon is slim. Why? Throughout virtually all of these discussions, some AsAm feminists in media seem to never admit that there are material benefits in dating a white man in America whether intentional or not. Does this mean that AsAm women don’t ever face discrimination when dating a white man or that Asian men don’t have certain privileges as a man? Does this mean that fetishization doesn’t come with violent outcomes for AsAm women? Of course not, but it’s not mutually exclusive to both have more access to privilege from white power structures but also suffer from misogyny. When this false dilemma is continually peddled, it leads me to believe that some AsAms are still not coming in good faith and are not interested in actual conversations about the real effects of gendered colonialism.
Until there is an established media platform that solely represents AsAm interests, there will always be people questioning the narrative within the community. Without it, whoever controls the platform in the public square can shape the narrative. My hope is that more AsAms start to research their own immigrant history and think critically about the media and how it typically speaks over us, instead of with us, so we can start to build our own voices and seize control of our narrative.
He would leave other employees at the restaurant of non-Asian descent on purpose, stating he only had problems with Asian men.
Spoiler, it was.
Asians are still essentially synonymous with Chinese in many parts of America.
Most AsAms came post-1965 with the Hart Celler Act.
e.g. cooking, dishwashing, laundry, etc. the only jobs available to most Asian men during that time
Full Metal Jacket’s Vietnamese prostitute’s line of “me so horny”
Miss Saigon’s racist and misogynistic portrayal of Vietnamese women as prostitutes who needed saving from their home lands
Western expats who travel abroad for sex
Mostly girls from the Korean Church Network in the NYC tri-state area
At the time, Scarlett Johansson drew the most ire from AsAms in entertainment
e.g. “say what we want or we’ll find someone who will”
Though it’s likely that some of the worst messages were from white trolls masquerading as Asian men. It is hard to believe that one would leave an extremely hateful message through her website and put their real email address identifying who they were.
I feel so sad now
Great read. Glad to see a very level headed response to the wild and malicious accusations thrown around by blue check Asians. I listen to the Plan A and can’t wait till they discuss this piece. Respect.