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Why I'm Sometimes |
y relationship with the American media began, no doubt, one Saturday morning with a cartoon. I would alternately eat ramen and run around the family room in my floral PJs while keeping an eye on the TV screen. Those were blissful times. The world was a happily animated place that didn't encourage messy thoughts of identity and race.
Even when I began watching Saved by the Bell and Wonder Years, my life remained idyllic. The big issues of my life were whether Zack Slater should be with Lisa or Kelly and whether Screech would still look ugly if he bulked up a bit. [CONTINUED BELOW]
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The dawn of race-consciousness came in the form of kids pulling at the corners of their eyes and gleefully yelling, “Chinese, Japanese, Corean (Korean)!” That stunned me. I learned to pull down at my eyes to mock the Caucasian downslant. And to start taking notice of people who looked like me.
Unfortunately, the media rarely showed me one I wanted to identify with. I remember being especially embarrassed by the Asian women in war movies. They were desperately poor, selling their bodies for a pittance, always in love with a white GI, or under the heavy hand of tyrannical Asian husbands. Such images raised questions that cost years of blissful childhood ignorance. My embarrassment evolved into self-doubt, annoyance, suspicion, anger and, ultimately, defiance toward the media. One day after school I heaved my backpack into my dad's car and looked into the sideview mirror. Staring back at me was a face flushed a deep red-brown. It was an unwelcome surprise to discover that when I played hard, my cheeks didn't take on the delicate rosy hue like the honey-haired blue-eyed girls that seemed so universally beloved. Think Anna Chlumsky in My Girl. “Ewww, I'm all sweaty and gross!” was what I blurted. What I was thinking was, And my eyes are so small! Not like Kelly Kapowski's sparkly doe eyes or Winnie Cooper's big stuffed-animal ones that radiated innocence and purity. “No you aren't, Ness,” replied my dad. “You look radiant!” Uh-huh. Slouching, I folded my arms across my chest and frowned disconsolately, wondering if even my dad didn't think my eyes look like those of the backstabbing vixens and wicked villainesses. Or worse yet, those women in desperately poor warntorn Asian lands. But then his face was like mine, not like everyone else around us. I began searching the media for a sign that I wasn't an anomaly, that our family wasn't alone in the universe. I discovered Asian newscasters. There I sat, between my parents, watching the evening news (something that used to and still does bore me to tears), probably munching on some little treat, just to stare at newscasters like Connie Chung, Tritia Toyota, Wendy Tokuda and Sharon Tay. Their pretty faces and pleasant voices pleased me. I also sat up when I spotted the cute girl who played the Yellow Ranger on Power Rangers. I thought models like Debra Lin and Kelly Hu were pretty. But these Asian faces were so few and far between that the impressions they made were overwhelmed by the countless others that flooded my mind. Asian features seemed to fade in attractiveness by comparison to those that were everywhere I turned. I began wondering if dying my hair would help reduce the difference between my face and a Caucasian one. I longed for the kind of cute girl-next-door quality that so many white girls were blessed with. Coming into an awareness that Asian women were considered sexy and mysterious was no consolation. It only made me queasy. I did my best to distance myself from any hint of sexuality by cultivating a bubbly, perky exterior, and by dressing conservatively. My dawning awareness of sexuality made me begin taking an interest in depictions of Asian American men. All those bright pretty Asian females weren't being produced without a father. So where were they? It was as if they had all been abducted, or worse, as though they had never existed. Well, there was Pat Morita. Late at night as I'd finish up homework to the comforting background hum of Happy Days on Nick at Night or an old movie like The Karate Kid. Part of me was mollified. At first, I was just so happy to see an Asian male on TV that I wasn't even bothered that they were old and goofy. I was just happy to see them. But as I got older, I became impatient with seeing nothing but wrinkled sages. I eventually became annoyed at seeing any old Asian man in a movie, even if he was playing the grandfather to an Asian character. Ancient sages and fobby nerds with broken English got old after the fiftieth one! I even began preferring the new-age Asian male villains. At least now they were grudgingly allowed slick clothes and some sex appeal. Cary Tagawa may have been a bad guy in Rising Sun, but at least he went down in style, eating sushi off the bodies of nude women. It was a form of relief, at least for a while. I never considered myself white-washed. If anything I saw myself as being closer to one of those ghetto-talking azn priderz. In school when we were assigned papers on ancient cultures, I always picked an Asian country and proudly told people when they asked, that I was Corean. Yet I felt myself becoming alternately annoyed and frustrated with Asian Americans who displayed fobby characteristics. Didn't they know they were keeping alive those awful stereotypes? I know it's unfair to think that way. Recent immigrants can't help their accent any more than people who are nerdy or skinny or wear glasses. But they made me so frustrated. PAGE 2 |
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