“Introducing Lotus Blossom, geisha girl first-class.”
Asian women are highly fetishized in our society,
especially by white men,
“The Oriental woman has always held a certain fascination
for you Caucasian men.”
and one of the roots of this problem is the lotus blossom stereotype —
also known as “china doll” or “geisha girl.”
“She say she very happy to belong to handsome captain.
She say she gonna serve you well.”
So what does this stereotype consist of?
The lotus blossom is quiet, docile and submissive to her male partners.
“I will love you asa, if that is your desire.”
Sometimes also called the lotus blossom baby,
she projects a hyperfeminine, baby-like innocence,
“She's enchanted me with her innocent charms.”
which can lead to her being treated as empty-headed.
She’s almost always paired with a white man —
“I think I will enjoy very much serving under you.”
playing into the male fantasy of being the lotus blossom’s “white savior,”
while Asian men are desexualized and removed from the equation.
The lotus blossom is above all hypersexualized,
and is often portrayed as a sex worker.
“Me so horny! Me love you long time.”
This notorious line of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film,
Full Metal Jacket,
both reflected and perpetuated that association in a lasting way.
“That butt you got makes (me-me so horny).”
“She'd be like, ‘Oh me so horny, me love you long time.’”
The innocent lotus blossom is the flipside of the deceitful dragon lady,
“My vengeance is inspired tonight.”
who weaponizes her sexuality for nefarious purposes.
But both tropes perpetuate the overt and excessive sexuality
that has long been linked to Asian female characters.
In short, the lotus blossom trope portrays Asian women onscreen
as objects of desire — but ones which are disposable.
“Get out, be a prostitute, I should have never touched you in the first place.
I can get 10 like you in 2 minutes.”
They’re lusted after only as long as they continue to project traits
like obedience, subservience and a baby-like lack of agency
or individuality.
Here’s our take on how the lotus blossom trope fetishizes
Asian women — with dangerous real-world consequences.
“For many in the asian community Tuesday's attack was a culmination
of a narrative in which Asian women are hypersexualized and fetishized.”
Before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended all Chinese immigration
into the US, the Page Act of 1875
prohibited the immigration of East Asian women for “immoral purposes.”
In practice, this effectively banned all Chinese women from entering the country.
“Legislation in the United States, such as the Page Act,
discriminated and barred Asian women.
They've been stereotyped as a seductress, as subservient”
Hollywood’s earliest portrayals of Asian women
solidified the lotus blossom’s counterpart, the dragon lady,
as the female embodiment of Yellow Peril,
or the perceived threat that Asian immigrants posed
to an American way of life.
“You will first have the torture of seeing her beauty
eaten slowly away by this hungry acid.”
Chinese actress Anna May Wong was famous for roles like
the scheming Mongol slave in the 1924 silent film The Thief of Bagdad
to the duplicitous Princess Ling Moy in 1931’s Daughter of the Dragon.
“Just merciless vengeance”
The trope of the lotus blossom portrayed the Asian woman as both
sexual and submissive,
originating with Pierre Loti’s semi-autobiographical 1887 novel
Madame Chrysanthème, about a naval officer’s temporary “marriage”
to a Japanese woman.
This influenced the 1898 John Luther Long story Madame Butterfly,
about an American naval officer who takes a temporary “wife” called “Butterfly”
“She's like a porcelain doll”
but abandons her (and the child he doesn’t know about)
to return to America, where he weds an American woman.
Both literary works inspired Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera
Madama Butterfly, which changed Long’s ending:
while in the story, Butterfly doesn’t go through with hurting herself,
in the opera, Butterfly takes her own life after giving her son an American flag.
“Goodbye, my little love!”
As film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu told Vox,
“They were romanticizing the compatibility of a docile war bride,
as an ideal American wife, because she was sexually
servile but also a domestic servant.”
In the second half of the 20th century, the extensive US military presence
in Asian countries created something called the military-sexual complex,
“What do we get for $10?”
“Everything you want.”
which institutionalized US military prostitution
through agreements with Asian governments and contributed to the
hypersexualization of Asian women in Western media.
“The heat is on in Saigon/ The girls are ready to screw”
Many poor or working class Asian women were forced to go into prostutition
to survive following the disruption of war, putting them in a position
to be exploited by American soldiers.
As Khara Jabola-Carolus, the executive director of Hawaii State Commission
on the Status of Women, tweeted,
“White men have been trained, peer pressured and hazed
by the U.S. military to release their anxiety,
self-loathing, and hatred of the enemy onto Asian women’s bodies.”
But strikingly, this relationship is depicted romantically in Western media,
particularly in the award-winning 1989 Broadway musical Miss Saigon.
“You’re the one good thing I’ve found out here.”
Another iteration of the Madame Butterfly story,
Miss Saigon focuses on the doomed love story between Chris,
an American GI, and Kim, a 17-year-old Vietnamese prostitute
who has his child after he leaves Vietnam.
“Some nights I wake up, wishing for him.”
When he returns with an American wife, (like in Madama Butterfly)
Kim selflessly kills herself so that Chris’ wife will consent to
take and raise her son in America.
“You’re still mine but I can’t go along”
But while it’s played as a tragic love story showing individuals
trapped by impossible circumstances, the real story here is the
huge power imbalance between Chris and Kim,
“I'm seventeen and I'm new here today”
and the underlying white savior narrative in the implication that the only chance
for a good life that Kim or her son have is for Chris to come back
and take them to America.
“You will be who you want to be.”
Later media examples have often perpetuated these early stereotypes.
Numerous films have continued to pair white men with Asian women,
often without digging deeply into the problematic power imbalance at play.
“Let's just look at Phuong... this beauty… mistress of an older,
European man.
Well that pretty well describes the whole country, doesn't it?”
Films like Sayonara, The World of Suzie Wong,
Year of the Dragon, and The Quiet American
reinforce the feeling that Asian women are representative
of an exotic “other” meant to be dominated by white men.
“I hated you in Vietnam. So why do I want to fuck you so bad?”
“I can't say what made me fall in love with Vietnam.
That a woman's voice can drug you?”
Tom Cruise’s character Nathan Algren in The Last Samurai actually ends up
having a romantic relationship with a Japanese woman, Taka, who he widowed.
“I killed her husband?”
“It was a good death.”
The “white savior” element to many of these stories implies that the woman
is lucky that a man from a wealthy Western country is interested
in “rescuing” her.
“How would you like staying with me?”
This trope in turn emasculates Asian men, suggesting they’re an
inferior romantic option compared to the white male —
and contributing to the way that Asian men are widely emasculated
in American pop culture.
“I did read somewhere that the people that do worst on the apps are
Asian men and black women.”
“Well, it's great white people finally have an advantage somewhere.”
Media portrayals also often exaggerate the exoticness of the lotus blossom,
particularly through the way she dresses.
In The World of Suzie Wong, a film about the relationship that forms
between Robert, an American architect, and Suzie, a Hong Kong prostitute,
it’s clear that Robert values Suzie because of her foreignness.
Robert disapproves of Suzie wearing Western clothing,
“You look like a cheap European streetwalker.”
claiming she’s more beautiful wearing her “normal” clothes.
“You haven't’ the faintest idea what real beauty is.”
But what he’s really saying is that he wants Suzie to conform to his idea
of what an “authentic” Chinese girl looks like.
And this “othering” of Asian women through appearance has helped to
perpetuate the stereotype that they are actually different physically.
“Every guy is going to leave you for an Asian woman.
They laugh like this because they know men hate when women speak,
and how do they bring it on home for the win?
Oh, the smallest vaginas in the game!”
Meanwhile, Japan’s portrayal of Asian women in anime and manga —
in particular, the image of the big-boobed, blushing Japanese schoolgirl —
has also perpetuated the lotus blossom stereotype
among Western audiences, because this kind of material
is what sells.
An adult obsession with these types of characters is especially uncomfortable
and problematic given their youth.
Meanwhile, when portrayals of Asian women on screen
seek to move away from the obedient lotus blossom type,
they can end up conforming to the dragon lady trope.
“Sex is a weapon.
In my club the women basically control the dumb stick
and take the men's money”
Asian women of different nationalities also tend to be homogenized onscreen,
with a carelessness that reduces them to generic Asianness.
The film Memoirs of a Geisha, despite taking place in Japan, came under criticism
for casting Chinese actresses for all three female lead roles.
“You cannot call yourself a true geisha until you can stop a man in his tracks
with a single look.”
Similarly, many Asian characters have been given names which simply “sound”
Asian by white creators, a practice harkening back to the days of Fu Manchu,
a stereotypical Chinese villain whose name was made up
by English novelist Sax Rohmer.
“Death, to Fu Manchu.”
“In the Face of Fu Manchu.”
In Mean Girls, Trang Pak’s name
“Trang Pak?”
is actually the combination of a Vietnamese surname and a Korean surname
and Harry Potter’s Cho Chang combines a Korean surname and a Chinese surname.
The Office finds humor in Michael’s using a sharpie to tell two Asian women apart —
and even if the joke is supposed to be Michael’s callousness,
“Which one is she?”
“It’s… it’s one of those two.”
it still reduces the characters to set-up for this punchline.
“This is now how he's going to be able to determine which one of these women
is his girlfriend.
This moment really made me cringe.”
“It made me cringe too.
I just don't think this storyline would have been written today.”
Worst of all, media portrayals of Asian women —
whether through the lotus blossom or the dragon lady trope —
consistently emphasize their sexuality.
And this is often mined for comedy.
“Trang Pak made out with Coach Carr! And so did Sun Jin Dinh!”
“You little slut!”
“You're the little slut!”
In I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, the only Asian women in the film
function as sexual objects meant solely to reinforce Chuck’s heterosexuality.
“The girls are here. The girls, they want the Gatorade.”
And there are numerous other examples where sexualized Asian or
Asian-American females are used as bit parts or almost set dressing in a story
that’s not really about them.
“I'll take that one right there, she's got to come.”
“Oh yes, she's very nice.”
“She is nice but I hurt my back and my neck
and I need a little bit more massage, so I’mma take her in the pink too.”
This limited portrayal of Asian women on screen in turn limits how Americans
perceive Asian women in real life.
“You know how many people have said to me he's doing his lawyer,
the Chinese dragon lady?”
The fetishization of lotus blossoms has undeniably contributed to the fact that
Asian women are seen as the most “desirable” racial group
to date for men of all races, as well as more likely to experience
sexual violence from intimate partners than any other racial group.
The 2021 Atlanta shootings further reveal how racism and misogyny
are inextricably combined in the problematic way
Asian women are fetishized in our society.
“Asian women are always racialized even if they’re sexualized”
So where is the lotus blossom trope today?
In the past decade, there have been a number of Asian women on screen
who are not “china dolls” or “dragon ladies,”
but real, three-dimensional characters.
“But all I saw was fear in your eyes. And I was confused
and scared constantly.”
Ambitious, intimidating women like Cristina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy
and agent Melinda May in Agents of SHIELD
might come across as a stereotypical dragon ladies at first,
“Bambi, don’t say another word until after the hunter shoots your mother,”
but their emotional depth, complexity and evolution
make them much more than that.
“Sometimes that's the price of doing the right thing.
No one will understand, and it hurts like hell.”
Films like Crazy Rich Asians and Always Be My Maybe explore
the complexity of a relatable female Asian protagonist,
as well as move away from the practice of pairing Asian women
with white men,
letting fully-formed Asian male protagonists take the spotlight.
“Hello my name is Marcus, with lyrics for your carcass.”
These more recent portrayals also explore Asian identity in a way that
leaves behind the homogenized portrayals of lotus blossoms in earlier media.
In Crazy Rich Asians, Rachel struggles with her identity as an Asian American
in contrast to her boyfriend Nick’s Singaporean family.
“How are they different? They’re Chinese, I’m Chinese.”
“Yeah, but you grew up here. You’re different.”
Awkwafina’s character Billi in The Farewell
grapples with the difference between her expectations and values as someone
raised in America and those of her Chinese family
when dealing with her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis.
“That's the difference between the East and the West.
In the East, a person's life is part of a whole.”
Recent depictions of Asian women in media have helped to break down
the hypersexualization of the lotus blossom and dragon lady tropes
and showcase their humanity.
“Because the more people you let into your life the more can, um,
just walk right out.”
But despite this progress, even in the past decade multiple films
based on Asian source material have cast white women as leads,
denying those roles to Asian women and preventing them from having
the opportunities to dismantle these stereotypes.
“Oh captain ring...”
“It’s Ng”
“It’s the first movie with an asian lead since Ghost in the Shell and Aloha.”
“I’m sorry!”
And on social media, it’s clear that the Lotus Blossom trope
is still alive and well.
In some cases, it’s even become a joke for half white, half Asian kids to exploit.
“My dad. My dad is a conservative with an Asian fetish.”
But it’s also clear that many people still buy into it with dehumanizing
and harmful results.
And this objectification is especially evident on dating apps.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with female Asian characters
who are sexy badasses or “perfect” wives —
the problem comes when Asian or Asian-American women often aren’t allowed
to be anything else.
“I also think Austin Powers is very sexiful.”
And as shown by the negative experiences Asian women still encounter today,
dehumanizing portrayals that reduce these characters to fetishized,
sexual objects
“Why do Chinese girls taste different from all other girls?”
shape how our society views and treats Asian women.
“C’mon, we’re going to Asian Hooters.”
In order to truly move past the trap of the lotus blossom trope,
Asian women need the opportunity to play characters who challenge those narratives.
And with 91 percent of executives at major and mid-level studios
being white as of last year, that isn’t always so easy.
Asian women are so much more than lotus blossoms —
and they deserve to be seen that way onscreen.
“I want to see the people who have been stereotyped given their own story
because the danger of a stereotype is that they're one-dimensional.”