Of Lotus Blossoms and Dragon Ladies

Mapping Anti-Asian stereotypes in media and their roots.

Among the United States’s most prolific exports, two of its most iconic are Hollywood movies and American-style racism. Twin engines of the American propaganda machine, the American film and mass media industries, the largest in the world, is a tastemaker on an international scale. In this case, however, the pervasive modes of Hollywood and the Golden-age racial hierarchies presented therein have become influential tastemakers in western perceptions of classical anti-Asian tropes. Particularly, the interesting dichotomy of portrayals of Asian women in American film history, new and old, reveals a modern, filmic chapter in a long history of sexual politicking and fetishism of Asian women.

Asian women in western films, especially early films, have historically done little to characterize these figures beyond their stereotypes. You’ll typically find one of two types of Orientalized woman, based on much longer-lived colonial tropes. Asian women are expected to either be mysterious, domineering, alluring and sexually lascivious, or they are expected to perform an extreme mode of sexual innocence, traditionalism and demurity. These stereotypes are sexist, yes; however, they are particular to intersectional sexisms specific to Asian communities. In the American context, these tropes, in film and in public life, overwhelmingly formed with respect to East and Southeast Asian populations.

In particular, these stereotypes served as the intersectionally racist and sexist companion to more traditional Yellow Peril narratives which began in the 19th century and persisted well into the Cold War. Racist caricatures and propaganda surrounding this fear depicted Asians, especially East and Southeast Asians as an existential threat, defined by a total unintelligibility of culture, value and primitivism. Asian populations were particularly characterized by the perceived exoticism of culture, emphasizing their difference of dress, custom, food religious values, and often emphasizing the fear of the Eastern “occult”, the racist notion that Eastern religions were fundamentally corrupting and mystic.

In less obtusely racist depictions, the “Magical Asian” trope in particular offensively characterizes Asian folk and religious practices as tangible magic, typically representing a character’s foreignness in an overtly mystical and threatening sense. This can be seen in characters like Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid (1984), Pai-Mei, the mentor to the cast of Kill Bill (2003), or by characters like the shopkeeper from the infamously bad Wish Upon (2017). In Asian women’s hands, however, this typically serves to enforce her allure and danger.

The Dragon Lady stereotype is a classic Orientalist stereotype which draws on the perceived mystery, exoticism and sexuality perceived in insubordinate or even modestly assertive Asian women. She is characterized as evil or morally compromised, domineering and overtly sensual. The Dragon Lady is more often than not involved in stereotypical Sinophobic models of “triad” mobs or organized crime, and often characterized as practicing magic or witchcraft.

The name of the trope, Dragon Lady, comes from the early 20th century comic strip Terry and the Pirates, created by Milton Caniff, in which the Dragon Lady is a character considered particularly emblematic of the trope. Beginning in 1934, the popularity of the strip coincided with, and fed on the same tropes as much of American mass media. In the world of Hollywood, the coinciding career of America’s first Chinese and Chinese American major actress, Anna May Wong, was also hitting its stride. Anna May Wong, due to the extreme Sinophobia in America and racist Hayes Code, was typically relegated to these roles despite her varied career, and was routinely denied her ability to play romantic leads in order to ensure a leading white couple would prevail.

The Lotus Blossom stereotype, conversely, emphasizes the perception of Asian women as alluring by virtue of their extreme, fetishized submissiveness, femininity and demurity. This is in part due to, by virtue of persistent colonial presence in East and Southeast Asia, and especially later US Military presence in the region, as infamously portrayed in the 1904 Giuseppe Giacosa opera Madama Butterfly. The Lotus blossom is still subject to the particular ire of acting as mistresses, war brides and victims of assault, harassment or otherwise acted upon fetishism within the text. She forms the opposing half of the dichotomy alongside the Dragon Lady, herein removed of her agency and sexual awareness, rendering her almost childlike or pre-adult.

Recently, one poorly considered reaction to these historic tropes has emerged. This is that of the “rebellious” Asian female character, usually younger, “cooler” and more independent. Unlike the previous two stereotypes, little explicit attention is typically drawn to her ethnic or racial background and is often portrayed as explicitly culturally assimilated. With a now-comedic degree of consistency, the hot topic punk aesthetic, light attitude and dye-streaked hair (usually purple) form an unsavory new companion to other forms of media Asian fetishism. Without offering Asian female characters agency, independent personalities or more complex relationships to their own background – especially through Asian creators – we’re far from breaking the recursive media cycle and aspiring towards better-written Asian characters in media.

Take me back home!

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