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“As your leader, I encourage from time to time and always in a respectful manner, to question my logic. If you’re unconvinced that a particular plan of action I’ve decided is the wisest, tell me so. But allow me to convince you. And I promise you, right here and now, no subject will ever be taboo, except of course, the subject that was just under discussion. The price you pay for bringing up my Chinese or American heritage as a negative is, I collect your fucking head.” (Lucy Lui as O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill)
The above quote is a monologue delightfully delivered by Lucy Liu in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2000). If Anna May Wong were still alive, she would have probably lobbied for Liu’s role as O-Ren Ishii, considering she was all for challenging the role/representation of Asians in film. The script speaks magnitudes about Asian Americans’ representation in cinema: that your superiors’ logistics must be questioned, that Asian Americans are still considered a taboo subject, and ultimately, that Asian American characters rip off people’s heads in films. In other words, and more specifically, Hollywood films have created and recycled a formulaic American Asian character that is far from truthful to the real social body.
Although the representation of Asian American males merits its own discussion, in the following brief essay I will explore the representation of female Asian characters in Hollywood films. In passing, however, one must note that Asian men have also been stereotyped in Hollywood film, often as the emasculated, impotent, no-gunpowder-needed type (Prasso 109). Foremost, one must acknowledge the pioneering critical work of Edward W. Said, who has theorized that the East was “Orientalized,” as “a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said 3).” That is, the Occidental world invented an image/idea of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa by projecting dubious elements onto the Oriental Other to stave off the infiltration of Eastern culture into the West. According to Said Orientalism stems from imperialism, and that in an effort to maintain their (colonial) power the West created an essentialist, fallacious discourse of the East, which was nothing but their own invented version of the East. The Western philosophers whom Said...