‘Revolutionary’ is the word Korean-American actor John Cho used to describe his casting
as the romantic lead in the short-lived sitcom ‘Selfie’. And Cho wasn’t exaggerating.
With few exceptions, Hollywood has historically portrayed East Asian men as either desexualized
nerds, desexualized kung fu fighters or desexualized villains. Notice any patterns here?
Quick note: while this racial emasculation can apply to men of any asian descent, in
this video I’m going to be focusing on how anti-Chinese and Japanese sentiment in particular
fueled this broad-sweeping and ethnicity-erasing stereotype in American pop culture. ’16
Candles’-z-z Long Duk Dong this caricature of the sexually undesirable, nerdy and unattractively
foreign Asian dude. But long before 1984, government immigration policy planted seeds
of prejudice that this stereotype has grown from for more than a century. Starting in
the 1840s, America saw an influx of male Chinese immigrants and until 1882 the passage of the
Chinese Exclusion Act, free immigration policies welcomed with open arms thousands of Chinese
laborers particularly to the gold-rush era West coast. With Congress breathing down it’s
neck to complete the Transcontinental railroad, the Central Pacific Railroad Company began
hiring more and more crews of dependable, efficient Chinese men on the cheap. Cue economic
and radicalized white panic that these suddenly sinister foreigners were coming in to steal
all the jobs and all the women. As a result by World War II, the US government had passed
policies explicitly excluding Chinese immigrants from obtaining US citizenship, blocking additional
Chinese immigrants from entering the country and requiring the government registration
of Chinese laborers in the US. Not to mention anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited whites
from marrying people of color and stripped any woman of her citizenship if she married
a man “ineligible for citizenship,” i.e. Chinese dudes. And further immigration restrictions
preventing Chinese women including immigrant men’s wives from entering the country. In
other words, the government practically drained the legally sanctioned dating pool. Adding
further fuel to the effeminate Asian male stereotype, there was a large enough shortage
of women in the wild West-era California that Chinese men fled more male-dominated jobs
where they were likelier to possibly face violence perpetrated by their white co-workers
and went into more typically feminine jobs like being cooks, waiters, tailors and launderers.
Is that how you say it? Chinese-owned laundries proliferated strategically to provide steady
self-employment in a safe, autonomous environment. Meanwhile, this anti-Asian anxiety and cultural
castration turned into box office gold in the 1920s with the debuts of both Dr. Fu Manchu
and Charlie Chan. Fu Manchu is kind of like an old school Mr. Chow from The Hangover,
only more statistic [laughs]-sadistic and hooked on opium. And the brilliant megalomaniac’s
goal? To overthrow the West and impregnate white women into order to breed a super-race.
Honolulu detective Charlie Chan was far more beloved, sure. But his broken English, his
fortune cookie-ish aphorisms and straight up yellow face weren’t exactly an improvement.
Once the US allied with China during World War II the mistrust and stereotyping simply
shifted focus to Japan. And in Hollywood Charlie Chan gave way to another yellow faced detective,
this time the Japanese Mr. Moto. If we hop, skip over the Korean and Vietnam Wars which
only reinforced this legacy of racial othering as well as the Kung Fu heyday of the 1970s,
we arrive in the 1980s when Japan’s economy is soaring and its auto industry is putting
US car manufacturers out of work not to mention a book called ‘Japan as Number 1: Lessons
for American’ was an angst-inducing bestseller. Goodbye bumbling detectives and mystical ninjas
without love interests and hello hapless nerds with tiny penises. So with white America yet
again grappling with the prospect of economic disempowerment, the stereotype of the sexless
Asian nerd presented the polar opposite of the white masculine ideal of the buff, sports-playing
popular guy with the hot girlfriend. ‘Math club?’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘I’m Asian. You guys
Asian?’ ‘That’s pretty racist man.’ Pop-culturally subordinated as forever foreigners,
Asian men were effectively denied full access to American manhood and it’s social privileges.
And this neutered representation has also fed into the model minority mythology because
according to the stereotype they can’t possibly possess any sex appeal to white women. So
yeah, it was pretty revolutionary when John Cho was cast as the lead in ‘Selfie’ and
yeah it’s even revolutionary that Glenn in ‘The Walking Dead’ exists or that ‘Fresh
Off the Boat’ exists but before we start patting ourselves on our little progressive
backs just stop and consider how ‘revolutionary’ today still just equals representing people
as people and not punchlines.