The Asian Mystique

What I did for the last two nights instead of my homework =P This was for Vox.

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Book review: Sheridan Prasso’s The Asian Mystique
ISBN: 1586483943 (paperback edition)

Usually when someone says of a manuscript that it sounds like it was researched in bars, it’s an insult. With this book, it’s the truth.

I first heard of the book when visiting a Singaporean classmate from college. She pointed it out to me while we were wandering around Kinokuniya, and I scribbled down the title to see if it was cheaper online. Since I’m a Malaysian English-speaking banana with a vested interest in intercultural issues and women’s rights, it piqued my interest. Although admittedly my concern with Western perceptions of Asia previously extended mostly to getting annoyed at people who would ask “Do you have computers in Malaysia?”

The premises of the book, to “uncover the origins of Western fantasies and fallacies” and “encourage a clearer understanding of an Asia unclouded by Mystique” sounded promising, but the outcome is a let-down. From the author’s own narrative, she seems to have gone through her travels with her thesis fully formed, selecting subjects who would prop it up.

As mentioned before, Prasso spends a lot of the book hanging out in bars with prostitutes. She also hangs out with feminist writers, air stewardesses, the famous retired geisha Mineko Iwasaki (who stopped befriending Arthur Golden after he twisted her story in “Memoirs of a Geisha”), and Japanese housewives. Why Japanese housewives, if the book’s about Western perceptions and interactions with East Asia? I suppose the point is to show that Japanese women aren’t all that exotic after all, but unless you like reading about a bunch of aunties taking care of their kids and chit-chatting with their friends, you can skip the better part of the sixth chapter. (However, it’s useful to learn that a good Japanese excuse for getting rid of salesmen is “I’m sorry, I must ask my husband.”)

On the non-Hello Kitty side, sex tourism certainly is one of the more disturbing aspects of globalism. However, the two chapters spent on prostitution aren’t good enough to justify the space they take up in a 13-chapter book. Again, Prasso seems to be selectively deaf here – if you’re in a red-light district, you’ll find dirty old men. She fails to make a coherent argument that their mindset is representative of the Western mindset toward Asian women, or any coherent argument at all. Her research the Philippines is pretty much just a narrative of a bar crawl.

This book would have been better for examining the lives of Asian/white couples and the effect that culture and perceptions have on their various trajectories. However, Prasso only looks at one long-term relationship in depth – Yukie and Chris, Japanese and American, and it terminated badly. Even from the biased narrative, it sounds like it was more the woman’s fault for not considering the consequences of asking a spouse to give up everything and move to a country where he literally couldn’t do anything. (Gasp! Can I write that on a feminist website?)

One dot’s not enough to make a picture. Among my relatives and acquaintances, there are a number of long-term (long-term = old enough that I call them aunty and uncle) interracial couples. I know two ladies, sisters from Penang, who both married white men and settled overseas. One couple had very different personalities, didn’t communicate, and were openly bitter. They are now divorced. The other two are pretty straight-laced but easygoing, outreaching people, and are together after more than two and a half decades. As one of the young Japanese women in the first chapter says, “Junin toiro!” Ten people, ten colours, and yet this author seems determined to paint all Asian-inclined white men with the same brush.

The one welcome break from this comes in “The Communities and Fetishes of the Net” where a couple of pages are allocated to a website attempting to refute stereotypes about fetishism and racism toward Asian girl/white guy relationships (asianwhite.com, which no longer exists). Excerpt: “Some men have an attraction to Asian QUALITIES. Less healthy men have a fetish for Asian women as OBJECTS.” Prasso doesn’t seem to have anything to say about the site, presumably because she can’t come up with anything nasty to say.

One of the failures of this book is neglecting to look at interactions among students. Uni students are young and horny, and by definition at least smart and educated enough to get into a university. International students are likely to be interested in other people’s cultures, or at least willing to experience them briefly. Put all these factors together, and ka-ching! Mixed couples. I’ve lost count of the number of “yellow fever” couples I’ve seen walking around campus here. Students are important to look at for an author to consider trends, because as the cliché goes, we’re the leaders of the future.

Instead of spending time to observe everyday life around a few American campuses as she does with the Japanese housewives, Prasso mainly takes sound bites and essay excerpts from a handful of students who seem to have been selected for having spoken out on the subject before. The few students (few compared to the number of whores in later chapters) featured are mostly Asian-Americans, who, from a foreigner’s perspective, are American for all practical purposes. They’re even more banana than me.

[Disclosure: I’m inclined to believe that middle-to-upper class Asian-Americans tend to be somewhat neurotic and self-conscious, because of exogenous pressure from the model minority stereotype and endogenous pressure from well-educated, skilled immigrant parents. This is especially noticeable in the statement from one young lady that a diagnostic of “yellow fever” is “You see a guy walking down the street, hand-in-hand with another Asian girl, and he still checks you out as you walk by him.” This fails to take into account normal male behaviour: GUYS WILL LOOK AT PRETTY GIRLS, PERIOD. Insert dick joke here.]

Yes, there are a lot of jackasses here who think everyone outside the U.S. of A. is living in a third world slum with no electricity. Yes, they still think “Vietnam War” when they think of Vietnamese. Yes, there are idiots who will catcall “Sayonara!” and “Arigato!” at Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipina, Indonesian, or even Japanese – hey, even a broken clock is right twice a day - girls. Yes, there are creepy hamsup otakus who think Asian girls are kawaii like anime characters. But I think the influence of these ignoramuses on international relationships is marginal. As stated above, the movers and the shakers and the ones who are shaking their bon bons together are more likely to be those who are educated, professionals who know better.

Prasso’s annoyingly elitist tone saturates the book, from her description of a sniffling Filipina prostitute to her explicitly disdainful tone toward a Chinese school administrator, who wants to marry her long-term boyfriend and have babies. I thought the point of women’s rights (and any other “rights” movements) was to let individuals do what they want to do, not what some wanker with a diploma wants them to do. Even the interview with the famous Madame Iwasaki seems exploitative, as the author can’t seem to stop congratulating herself on how much the ex-geisha likes her. By the end of this book, I was prepared to bellow “YES!” at her admission that “As a Caucasian woman, I cannot eschew membership in a group that…has been guilty of racist “sour-grapeism.””

One unintentionally funny sentence is where she rags Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific for pandering to foreigners: “no flight on Singapore Airlines or Cathay is ever domestic.” Perfectly correct – I don’t know about Hong Kong, but Singapore is a nation that you can bicycle across in a matter of hours. (My athletic sister at NUS did that one night with a bunch of her crazy friends.)

At the end of scientific papers, the authors sometimes declare that they “have no competing interests”. This isn’t a paper, but I have to declare that I do have a competing interest: I’m dating a white guy. I have an interest in refuting Prasso’s typifying of Asian women who date Western men as green-card-chasing gold-diggers, and of all Western men who like Asian women as chauvinistic, domineering, closet paedophiles (I kid you not). He freely admits a preference for the physical features of east Asian girls, but we’re in a university town full of Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese students, the vast majority of whom are better-looking than me. He wants a girl who won’t be afraid to argue with him, not the stereotypical Oriental who’ll look demure while he inserts foot in mouth. My favourite angmoh and I are together because we’re antisocial science geeks who get along like a house on fire. Or in his words, “Intelligence is sexy.”

Not so much my ebony hair, tea-coloured skin, or petite figure, but the invisible part – brains. Damn syiok.