ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN ON THE BIG SCREEN

In my Asian American sex history class, we watched a film about Asian American women in films and how we're portrayed by the media. Early Hollywood films, Asian American women were perceived as lotus flowers or dragon ladies, but never both. Asian American women were submissive, weak, and meek or they were displayed as promiscuous, exotic, and dangerous. These perceptions have caused men outside of the Asian American community to think that this is how Asian American women act. Perceptions like these create thoughts that Asian American women can easily be used, mistreated, and manipulated into sex toys and women who would bend over backwards for their man. This mindset is dangerous to the Asian American woman because these thoughts can lead to different types of violence like rape. In all actuality, Asian American women are not just lotus flowers or dragon ladies, but a mixture of everything. The portrayal of Asian American women in film now is a bit different than before. Asian American women roles are more realistic to the common Asian American woman next door. There are roles that display Asian American women as submissive, promiscuous, exotic, and dangerous. The more degrading traits as weak and meek rarely occur. I think these roles have changed in order to relate to Asian American women of today, instead of some made up idea created years ago by American producers and directors. Nowadays we have actresses, celebrities, and models that portray Asian American women in a better light such as Lucy Lu, the Asian girl who played the female Wolverine in X-Men 2, Kimora Lee Simmons, Masuimi Max, Margaret Cho, and much more.
Besides the overall portrayal of Asian American women in cinema, the issue of interracial relationships occurred. In the film we watched in class, it displayed Caucasian women playing Asian American roles due to the fact that interracial relationships were not allowed. This was interesting to me because the overall perception of Asian American women by ethnicities outside of the Asian community brought out generalizations and stereotypes of Asian Americans. Hollywood felt that chinky eyes and a submissive weak or dangerous personality fully represented an Asian American woman. To some extent, that was more offensive than giving an Asian American woman a stereotypical role because I felt the average Asian American woman was being mocked and misunderstood by the media and different films were giving the message to its viewers that these representations were okay and valid. If it was not for the film "Walk Like a Dragon", the idea of interracial relationships would still be unaccepted.