Portrayal of people of Asian descent in American/ Western culture

the army's secret army of army armies

far as east asians in american pop culture, i was surprised to see an asian guy in the new fast and furious get the (white) girl. that was pretty unusual. but i still do see WAY more white guy/asian girl pairups on tv and in films than both-asian couples.

most south asian characters on british tv, they seem to be either given english names like that woman from mistresses, so have no relation to any concept of asianness (as if they did, they would prob have to succumb to any number of stereotypes/cliches) and/or seem to only get to be exciting when they are with white/non asian partners. its like some new blanding out of corny liberalism.

(dont watch eastenders to know what the asian family in there are like, but they look pretty cardboard)

*its like some new blanding out of corny liberalism (and white male wish fulfillment)

it's facking eastenders san, they're all facking cardboard

yeah i know but the asian and most of the non white characters in general tbh are really thinly/cornily characterised. they dont feel fleshed out or rounded out as the white characters.

id like them to be as crazy/unrealistic/idiotic (in an exciting, rather than boring, worthy) way as the white characters basically.

A girl i know was a member of the first Asian family in Eastenders. They were (rightly) written off by most Asian viewers as unrealistic and beset by terrible cliches but there was also a strange sense of pride in a lot of quarters, often from the same people, that there was at least some kind of representation, no matter how tokenistic or stupid.

I've caught bits and pieces of the new family and it just seems to be the same kind of arranged marriage / gay-son-horror / 'you will run family business!' stuff repeated again and again.

STOP LOOKING AT ME QUAN

― a board in which there is lively and fuiud debate? (dayo), Tuesday, May 10, 2011 8:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

thought this was hilarious, tbh

far as east asians in american pop culture, i was surprised to see an asian guy in the new fast and furious get the (white) girl. that was pretty unusual. but i still do see WAY more white guy/asian girl pairups on tv and in films than both-asian couples.

― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Wednesday, May 11, 2011 6:21 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

heh i was gonna mention this - as soon as i saw the am/wf action in Fast Five, i thought to myself "i bet justin lin considers this his greatest achievement"

anyway i thought this article wasnt that bad - the slate rebuttal is good too though

also the part where he talks about amy chua kinda made me want to read her book

half of my childhood was spent in extremely middle class asian american environments and most of this shit just comes off as whining to me

then again I kind of just skimmed it to look for lines to laugh at so

After Tran attended one of Mystery's bootcamps, he began to develop his own methods of attraction, concentrating on developing his own holistic approach to the art of seduction. Through his personal blog in which he talked about his adventures in the dating game, his successes and failures, he received a telephone call from a woman whose son was being harassed and bullied at his high school. She had been reading The Asian Playboy's blogs and believed that he could help her son overcome his shyness and help him to be assertive enough to get through the bullying. She paid for Tran to fly out to her home in Canada and he spent three days helping her son improve his confidence and social skills. This chance decision of flying out to Canada was the initial spark for Tran's career, and the starting point of his company, ABCs of Attraction, which he launched in 2005.

Tran introduced the concept of the ABCDEF structure which incorporates three main components, namely: thoughts, actions, and words. The concept teaches men how to develop their attitudes, change the manner of their dress, and convey sexuality while courting and dating women. The Asian Playboy mainly teaches shy Asian men confidence and communication skills.

Tran appears at a wide range of events and seminars, offering bootcamps which last from three days to several weeks. Each boot camps is designed to help men improve their social interaction skills. The Asian Playboy works along several instructors and coaches including Johnny Wolf, Andrew AKA Showtime, Ozzie AKA The Latino Gentleman and William AKA Man Cannon.

tiger in the sack mother

ok I actually read this shit and the entire thing isn't horrible or anything, the scope is just incredibly small. One immediate thought was that the only place where he doesn't really focus on financial success is with the seduction artist shit, which actually is pretty horrible now that I think about it.

I guess uh in the end my main critique is that the article makes the world seem so small and horrible, and the world is pretty horrible, whatever that means I guess since I've been typing the word a lot I'll keep typing it, but its so horrible in so many new ways to discover during your life

I sort of know W3sl3y Y@ng from school -- he was my good friend's boyfriend for a while but I never really got to know him [/pointless, unremarkable brag]

Unrelated admission of racist thought: there's this Chinese girl in my basketball weekly clinic -- she's relatively good and I couldn't help but notice that she had a very "disciplined" attitude, like she seemed to focus extra hard on every drill and be very demanding of herself. She also gets on my case about every little thing I do wrong and it's started to piss me off (I'm practically a beginner at basketball and I've been practicing my ass off and making huge progress so I really don't appreciate it). I had this massive urge to start calling her "tiger mother," like to her face, like as in "hey, take it easy there tiger mother." Obviously I don't actually think this is a good idea. Also I think I'm developing a crush on her. That is all.

She sounds pretty annoying.

Yeah, like on one play in a drill I made a bad cut that would have cut off the guy with the ball from getting to the rim, and the coach says to me "Where were you going with that cut?" and SHE says "I don't know coach" -- or we'll be doing some simple full-court running and passing drill where we have to make some ostensible effort to score and she'll actually talk to her group about what she thinks is going wrong and why they're not scoring.

lol pp

http://www.noisetosignal.org/images/posts/warushmore09.jpg

l-r: hurting, Chinese tiger girl

it's kinda a harsh double bind cuz nymag are saying azns are pussies, but then if an azn was to be assertive and actually do something about it like shoot up their offices or collude with the chinese govenment in a massive ddos attack on every company that advertises in nymag, ppl would be all 'lol crazns be crazy'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-n7aeqMzis

I actually want this wesley yang fellow and The best of Marc Loi : Facebook Feminist to duke it out

maybe in a kung fu match

because they're both asian, you see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1S0oFoyucs

damn this is old school. i remember downloading this song on napster. i even made my website peaceoutside . org because of this track heh
D0CH0LIDAY 10 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMOZRk74QrY

Did Jin get any attention when he did Learn Chinese?

I definitely had that tai mai shu mp3 when I was 12

true fact: mc jin is now in hong kong doing raps for the government

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te-TiL9YVaE

(dude with the bow tie is donald tsang, chief executive of hong kong)

Ha! That's awesome.

damn I never would've guessed that that tai mai shu shit would hold up well

Maybe the whole tiger mother thing prepared me for that article, but i wasn't too upset by it... well, the PUA stuff was kinda depressing. And the article was way too long. And especially by the end it got kind of self-gratifying. So it wasn't actually... good, but I don't know, I do think there is still a painful lack of self-awareness / willing self-blindness to these issues, so I can forgive it a little? The tiger mother article, OTOH, seemed to actually be encouraging those cultural stereotypes to non-Asians, though I think in the end it the sample was selected to court controversy.

But at the same time I can slightly cop to AAM's take of "eh we've heard it all before, who carez".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbW-XYqbol0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx67ZUY9c2o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61fXa9hTowY

Minus: asian tech support guy there to answer the white lady's questions
Plus: white lady actually flirts with asian guy

i'd say this video is thoroughly unproblematic. he doesn't even seem like a great tech support dude, just a bewildered salesman.

http://theaerogram.com/how-many-times-has-your-favorite-actor-played-a-guy-named-raj-a-guide/

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/star-trek-beyond-george-takei-sulu-really-unfortunate

making an asian character gay = another way to ensure the asian male in a major hollywood films doesnt get to 'get the girl'.

yeah, a little torn on this one. i get that it's a personal tribute to Takei and in the show's progressive fashion
but ya know, of course it's the Asian guy
otoh Harry Kim was probably worse on the whole

personal tribute, shmersonal tribute. its BS.

There's nothing wrong or worse about a male character "getting the guy" instead of "getting the girl", and your comments are suggesting you think otherwise. I hope that's not what you actually believe. But I do agree that if the person you're supposedly paying tribute to thinks there's something fishy about your tribute, you should maybe actually listen to them.

"There's nothing wrong or worse about a male character "getting the guy" instead of "getting the girl", and your comments are suggesting you think otherwise. I hope that's not what you actually believe"

theres nothing wrong with it, in isolation.

but looking at the history of asian male representation on american tv and in the movies, i see it as the latest attempt to demean asian heterosexual men.

thats not to say that i think being gay makes one less of a man, but hetero asian men are the majority of asian men in the US, and they are routinely denied sexual agency on screen.

so i cant help but see it as a victory for gay men/gay asians, but not really a victory for the majority of asian men in the US, who are still under represented in hollywood.

basically, its interesting that they will allow a notable asian character to be gay, but wont let him be heterosexual.

i hope Simon Pegg dies

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/simon-pegg-defends-gay-sulu-after-george-takei-criticism

zzz

I want to talk about Crazy, Rich Asians. I enjoyed it for a lot of reasons –– and I was struck by the use of female gaze. It's an old-fashioned kind of movie, but from a significantly different perspective. I suspect it'll be dismissed as conservative rom-com pablum by (white) (male) (American) audiences, but I think there's a lot of canniness to its construction and its politics of representation.

there is and there isn't. i mean, it adheres pretty strongly to rom-com cliche and basic story has been done to death a million times...

but i admit i saw it opening night last week just to support the Asian/Asian-American casting and existence of the film. every time I read the factoid about "25 years since The Joy Luck Club!" i palm my face

I liked this movie a lot but I don’t really have anything smart to say about it vis a vis Representation. It was a delightful romantic comedy with a phenomenal cast of oughta-be-stars (Michelle Yeoh and Ken Jeong were probably the most famous people in this movie, at least in the USA).

Rly the notable thing abt this movie to me is that it’s a big genre movie marketed towards a general audience that really does Just Happen To Be about Asian and Asian-American characters. It didn’t have to do anything to justify itself to white audiences–no “white friend” character added due to studio notes, nothing about being Chinese was the Motivating Problem or Second Act Twist for any of the characters. Certainly it should’ve been a no brainer that such a movie could be successful but maybe the $100 million domestic box office his movie will do will provide the motivation Hollywood needs to make more movies like this.

It wont