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ASIAMS.NET |
ASIAN AMERICAN ISSUES
Relations between Asian and Non-Asian Women
(Updated
Wednesday, Jan 22, 2025, 06:38:55 AM)
veryone has an opinion on how Asian women are perceived by men. Reflecting those stereotypes across the gender line, we might assume that non-Asian women would see Asian women either as sexual threats (the exotic tempresses/sexual predators stereotype) or objects of pity and condescension (the passive victims of sexist cultures stereotype). Or, inside the halls of academe and of corporate America, perhaps as superhuman competitors for grades and promotions (the grinds with no lives stereotype).
Friend or foe?
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In actual social encounters such preconceptions translate into a plethora of mostly subtle but detectible responses -- hostility, wariness or exaggerated solicitude. In extended dealings these attitudes might subject Asian women to excessive amounts of malicious gossip, campaigns of isolation, or an effort at taking under the wing or even outright domination.
These types of negative interactions are common enough that, in an effort to neutralize them, Asian American women seem to have evolved distinctive personal styles. Many AAF make a point of being unusually aggressive and outspoken in social interactions. Others flaunt their educational or economic status. Still others take a take-no-prisoners tack and play the ultra-feminine siren capable of punishing rival females by turning their mates into yo-yos. Some manage to adopt all these tactics and become alpha females against whom resistance is futile.
But of course not all interactions between Asian American women and non-Asian women are of the arms-length variety. At times these women also do relate to one another as best friends, sisters-, daughters- and mothers-in-law, collaborators, teachers, doctors, students, attorneys, fellow soccer moms. Each such relationship introduces aspects of Asian women that defy easy stereotypes but may nevertheless reveal the peculiar role they seem forced to accept in American society.
Not that all non-Asian women start with a negative impression of Asian women. We kick off the reader comments with a post from a woman with good reason to want to see warm relatioins between AF and non-Asian females.
We invite women of all perspectives to air their perceptions, concerns and observations on relations between Asian and non-Asian women.
This interactive article is closed to new input.
Discussions posted during the past year remain available for browsing.
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WHAT YOU SAY
[This page is closed to new input. --Ed.]
I wouldn't mind being friends with Asian women at all, but I feel like the times that I have tried to become friends with an AA woman they haven't seemed very interested in being friends with me. My boyfriend's friends are almost entirely Asian American, and they are very nice people, but they are a tight-knit group, and sometimes speak in Chinese, so when I'm with them I can enjoy talking with them but I always feel kind of excluded, and different. I don't think it's part of any conscious plan to exclude me, it just seems that they are much more comfortable talking to each other than with me, which I can understand.
There are all of these vague references to "cultural differences" between AA women and non-AA women, but what exactly are these differences? Do we really think and live that differently? Are we not individuals with our own ideas and ways of living?
curious girl
Wednesday, August 28, 2002 at 10:06:18 (PDT)
I was thinking for a long time to write to this topic, but I was kind of lazy recently (don't feel like writing). I guess that for me being friends with Asian girls was just the same as being friends with any other girl (just as long as we share something in common, like we can understand each other). I remember my first female Asian friend. It was in gr. 9, I just came to the area (city), as well as the country after about eight months of staying back home in Europe. So I didn't really know anyone in that school, and since it was grade nine... it is already a big transition for people going from elementary to high school, so being all new was just a compounded stress, I guess. Well anyways, at that time, we didn't have much money, we were in a complicated family situation and so on, so I couldn't buy all the nice clothes and be 'cool', in fact the few clothes that I had that time were rather "crappy", if you will. Plus I was also very shy and still in a kind of shock over our family circumstances that time, so I found it kind of harder to approach and talk to people. I was always thinking that I'm such a blunder - that anyone who will look at me will see me like something of a geek or so on, that I will embarass myself tremendously. Low self-confidence, I guess. So basically, I became friends with this girl because I found her easy to talk to and friendly - she didn't care if I was not cool or anything and didn't make subtle little hints making fun of me, like talking behind my back or giggling at me or giving me funny looks or anything. She was actually an immigrant herself, Chinese, but born in Macau, and she came here as a kid too, not as a little child, but still younger than I was when I came. They teased her in school that year, but not as much as they talked about me (behind my back, I found out later). The other friend I had that time was from Sri Lanka and she was also an immigrant. Then, when I got to gr. 10 and things cleared up a bit for our family, I was a little more self-confident, though still not much. My first semester in gr.10 I was taking a French for beginners class, and there was this Korean guy in the class who I think liked me, even though he never actually spoke anything on the topic. But he started to make contact with me, like seek out my attention, and then I started to think that he might like me (before that I never even noticed him, actually; he was just like any other ordinary classmate). Like he would come and ask me for help, or I would go write the answer to the question on the board and he came and write the other answer on the board beside me, and before he wrote it he turned to me and asked me if it was right... Plus he also marked my second test (our teacher got us students to mark our tests, then she would collect them, check them, write down the marks and give them back). So this guy marked my test and then even though we weren't really supposed to go and show it to the people before the teacher has seen it (I think), he came to me and said "You only made one mistake here", despite the fact that we didn't really talk before... yet he still knew who I was! :-) And then, once we had to choose a partner for a dialouge presentation, but we had to pick someone who we'd not been working before. And so he asked me if I want to do it together? And I actually liked it; because by then, I kinda started to get interested in him too. I mean, I noticed he was interested in me and I appreciated it, even though it was totally unexpected to me (in most cases the guys that start to like me are a total surprise to me, because I kind of never notice them before but then all of a sudden they start to like me and bring their attention to my attention). So then we did the project and that whole class period in which we were doing it, I was just talking! :-) But he didn't mind, he was actually pretty good at listening and being very attentive. Now that I look at it in retrospect, I think he may have been trying to impress me or something like that... It was really funny in the positive sense. And I noticed that that whole time he was looking at me too. So after that I was pretty sure he liked me and then I kinda started to like him too. It was unexpected for me in the sense that I would never thought I would like date or be girlfriends with or maybe even be interested in an Asian guy, I mean first of all when I was young I didn't really think much about who would be my eventual marriage partner, and secondly even when I slightly thought about it later on (gr.9), I was always thinking that I would marry someone from my country, or from Germany or other eastern-european country at most. Cause that's where I came from and at that time, I think I only had the short-term vision (or dream) of being able to return there someday. But once I started to like this guy, I kind of pushed aside my longing about that for then. Well, anyways, after that I started to be really interested in Korean culture, like I would read books about Korea and so on, because of course it was connected with him. Before I met him, I was never cared about Korea, it was just a place on a map for me. And when I was in gr. 11, I made friends with these two girls who were Korean. With the one girl, I at first didn't know that she was Korean, but I really liked her anyways, cause she was a nice person and -to me, anyway- had a kind of charisma. So when I found out she was from there, it just kind of added to her charm, or how to say it. And the second girl I met was in my math class, and I started talking to her and we became quite good friends. I have to admit it was a little bit because of that guy, but not because I would want to use them to further my relationships with that guy, it was just like he's Korean, they're Korean, they have something in common so I like all three of them. I never actually made a mention to anything about him to them. With me it's like that, once I start to like a person (especially a guy who likes me too), then I get all interested in them and their culture, and it's almost like I've started to like all people from that country. At least that's what it used to be like for me; I think I'm a little bit changed now. Later on I made some more Korean friends, but by then I wasn't really thinking about him, so it was not so much of that previous feeling, but they're still great friends anyway and we keep in touch.
About the stereotypes... I didn't really grow up in multi-cultural society before I came to Canada, so I didn't get to know about that. Also, even after I came here, I didn't really became familiar with any stereotypes about Asian women, partly because I was too young for such things (at least in my opinion), and even when I did make friends with those Asian girls somehow the stereotypes didn't get to me. I don't even think there were any around. The first place that I actually encountered them were these Asian discussion groups. I mean, when I was a kid I would never imagine that someone could think like that. I guess I was naive or something, but I just didn't grow up with that kind of way of judging things or how to call it. In my opinion the amount of physical qualities that girls would judge about guys were limited to their face and maybe their height... But leaving that aside. In actual fact, I don't really care about stereotypes of Asian women; I form my own opinion about somebody after I've met them. So they don't make much of an impression on me. It's more like it's interesting to read what people come up with, for example when I read the article for this discussion. Quite frankly, none of that would have ever even occurred to me when I made friends with that Chinese girl, or even with those Korean girls, to me they were just people like everybody else. When I first came to Canada it was interesting to see people who looked different from me, like see people of Chinese and Asian background, because it was certainly something new, and I remember thinking from when I lived in Europe, how those people in China and East Asia are like, like they must be so different from us in thinking or so on.
But, as the first couple of years that I stayed in Canada were in predominantly a better, I guess you could say "Canadian" area, even the few Asian kids there were kind of Canadianised, like they spoke fluent English and were at home in this environment, so it seemed to me like they're just as adapted as anyone who is of European ancestry, like even though they might have Asian background you can still talk to them just like to anyone else... like they've somewhat lost the exotic touch I've had about them when I still lived back home. I don't know if I am making myself clear, but I don't know exactly how to define it. So by the time I came to my High School which had a much larger immigrant population than any schools I've been in before, it didn't really matter to me, it was like I've got adjusted to Canada and I made friends with other immigrant kids as well.
I don't know if this is a good enough response concerning the relations between Asian and Non-Asian women. I guess if I should summarize it, I never really had too much bad experience with Asian girls, or rather even the bad ones were probably outweighted by good ones. But I just have one more thing to say. One time my boyfriend, who was Chinese, took me to this Japanese restaurant, It was on a Friday night and the restaurant was not too big, so eventually there was a line-up of people waiting to be seated. And I noticed in the line there was this Asian(Chinese??) woman who was staring in our direction and particularly at me! Well, I have to say I didn't really appreciate it because I could plainly see that her look was not friendly, it felt like it was almost penetrating me. Do some Asian girls take offences if an Asian guy goes out with white girl? I don't really care if white guy goes out with an Asian girl; I mean, it was their decision, hopefully they've made it together, hopefully they're happy, and if that's so no one really has the right to mind into their personal relatioship. If a guy from my country would be dating a girl from somewhere else I wouldn't care, as long as they are happy and respect each other, as long as the girl also acknowledges our background and traditions. Then it's great. But it seems that nowadays people sometimes take culture as an excuse to mind into other people's personal relationships. It's different when people do it because of concern; like let's say the guy would want to impose all of his rules and restrictions on the girl, he would beat her, he would want to take her away from her family, he would force her to come to his country and prevent her from being able to return (have you heard about "Not Without My Daughter"?), and so on. But if it's just because of jealousy or dislike... well then I don't find that as a justification to intrude into someone's private life. I think that if it was a couple of the same nationality, and another girl or guy of that same nationality would try to cause disrupt between that couple... it would be thought of as they're an intruder who wants to break their relationship and that's rude. But people sometimes use culture as a means to do this very same thing and even make it seem legitimate, and I don't think that's right. Well, that's all I've gotta say.
eastern-european canadienne girl
Tuesday, August 27, 2002 at 19:11:50 (PDT)
I would have to agree that many people have a tendency to hold stereotypical views of those with whom they are not familiar with, but it certainly goes both ways. I am white and have an Asian husband. In the beginning, many of my AA friends/associates held certain stereotypes concerning myself - automatically assuming a certain amount of ignorance when it came to AA and their culture. It was especially difficult concerning his parents. Fortunately, my family could see right away that we were really not so different - we were both Americans born and raised, whose grandparents or parents came here from another country. Therefore, we were already multi-cultural to begin with, and were able to embrace our differences instead of allowing them to be an impediment. If I may say, without meaning offense, I've noticed that our Asian friends have more of a tendency to stereotype Asians (of a diffferent culture) than our white friends do. Perhaps this is a natural tendency, one born out of lack of association with the people we are stereotyping.
diroffers
Sunday, August 25, 2002 at 19:29:17 (PDT)
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