Teaching the deaths of Asian American women and Orientalism in Hong Kong

Transnational solidarity, the classroom, and how we are connected.

(Published on March 23, 2021; links last updated on March 25, 2021.)

In a class called “Decolonizing Gender” at the University of Hong Kong, I teach readings based on an anti-imperialist/anti-racist, queer transnational feminist framework. The class includes topics such as Third World feminisms, tensions between Hong Kong & mainland Chinese women, Japanese and Korean feminisms, and problems of Western models of LGBTQ identity in Asia. As Hong Kong struggles with sweeping changes across society, I push students to look for feminist/queer solidarity and speak about the importance of empathy between marginalized groups.

This week, I revised my lecture on Orientalism following the shooting of Asian American women on March 16, 2021. A Taiwanese American scholar of Japanese studies, I felt the weight of teaching students in Hong Kong about U.S. histories of racism, xenophobia, and imperialism. As an Asian American woman, I have experienced incredible grief over the past week for the inadequacy of my voice as well as uncertainty about how far my words reach in Asia, where there is often a lack of understanding of Asian American experience, or in Asian studies, where Asian women do not come first.

I am sharing my lecture below — in solidarity with other Asian and Asian American women who are speaking and writing through their tears, and all women of color full of love and pain right now.

Before I begin my lecture, I want to thank you for sticking with this class and doing what you do as students. I have thought about whether I could teach this class in a way that didn’t require as much emotional labor — from me, from you — but this is not how I teach. I understand that attending this class is probably not the most relaxing two hours of your week; I understand that, if you are listening and responding, it pushes you in ways that other classes probably don’t.

Orientalism, the politics of reading in Hong Kong, and situating Asian American history

So, what is Orientalism? The most classic account is described in Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism. Orientalism is about images and fantasies of the non-West, how knowledge about the non-West has been produced in the West, how Asia and the Middle East have been conflated and described as inferior, alien, and backwards, especially starting around the 18th century. One of the key points you learned is that these discourses are highly sexualized: colonization is described in terms of sexual conquest, even rape. The Orient is figured as feminine, weak, and unintelligent, waiting for the West to observe it and conquer it.

This is a simple enough beginning, but how does it map out onto the readings assigned for class today? I originally planned for us to discuss Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism (2019) along with Shu-mei Shih’s essay on feminism, Chinese women, and diasporic intellectuals. But as I reflected on how to describe the range of ways in which Orientalism exists today, I realized that this was a mistake. Cheng’s book has a heavy focus on representations more relevant to East and Southeast Asian women; Shih’s essay is about Chinese women and the diaspora. This makes for a coherent theme for a single class, and I thought students might relate better to a focus on East Asia and Chineseness.

But there are many forms of Orientalism; Said himself focuses on Arabic culture and the Middle East. Most importantly, I realized that, for some students in this class, Chineseness has always operated as oppression through its status as the norm in Hong Kong. If I only taught about a “Chinese” or “East Asian” context, my class would function as yet another occasion in Hong Kong in which your perspectives are clearly sidelined in favor of the racial majority. So, a few weeks ago, I replaced Shih’s essay with Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages (2007). I thought about how to teach Ornamentalism and Terrorist Assemblages together — Orientalism in the former seemed like it might appear relatively harmless to students, while the latter was linked clearly to physical violence. How would I make space to talk about both? Ultimately, I wasn’t able to make equal space for both discussions. But this question of “how to make space” is one that I want to return to later today.

First, let me give you a barebones version of what each reading is about. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages is one of the most well-respected texts in queer studies. In this book, Puar challenges ways in which we might assume that LGBT subjects — as the marginalized — are innocent of complicity with problems of xenophobia, racism, and nationalism. She makes a powerful argument for the existence of “homonationalism” in the U.S. after 9.11. During this time, the U.S. carried out a “War on Terror” justified by its supposedly exceptional nature as a country promoting human rights and democracy. At the same time, a “national homosexual subject” appeared in the U.S., coded as white, middle-class, secular, and liberal. The existence of this queer subject simultaneously lent itself to the idea of the U.S. as an LGBT-friendly, thus righteous nation and shut out other types of queer subjects, specifically Arab or Muslim. Meanwhile, explanations about terrorists and their psyches often mark them as “queer” in a purely derogatory sense tied to older Orientalist images of men; terrorists’ violence is explained in terms of their sexual perversion and repression.

While Puar’s analysis focuses on how “brownness” and men are constructed through discourses of Orientalism, Cheng’s Ornamentalism is about the “yellow woman.” Cheng’s “yellow woman” is not meant to be a political identity; instead, it calls attention to the racialization of a particular type of female Asian figure in European and American culture. She makes clear that she isn’t discussing “real” Asian or Asian American women; that said, her examples usually focus on images most related to East and Southeast Asian women. Namely, through Orientalism, Asian women are made into objects — specifically, into ornaments: beautiful, decorative, unthinking, unfeeling. Cheng notes that the identity “Woman of Color” usually centers African American women; Black and brown women of color are seen to be “resistant, subversive,” and angry, protesting injury. Meanwhile, the “yellow woman” is not angry, and she is neither injured in the same ways nor injured as much. She is a woman of color, but her story is never centered.

Cheng asks, “Is the yellow woman injured — or is she injured enough?” Cheng’s book is highly theoretical and makes many points that are difficult to immediately grasp, but this question tells us what is at the heart of her project. She goes on to say, “This project is about wounds that the indifferent public, the impatient legal system, the well-intentioned liberal, and sometimes even our loved ones tell us are no longer wounds.”

As the context for our discussion today, I provided a timeline to explain a history of discrimination against Asians within the U.S. that has often been ignored or forgotten, especially when involving East Asians. Long before the “Chinese virus” or “kung flu,” Chinese people were already stigmatized as the “yellow peril”; Chinatowns were seen as full of disease and filth. I also wanted to explain how the category of “Asian American” is tentative, unstable, and troubled. It names and erases at the same time — it covers a vast range of people and cultures, and some, such as East Asians, are often the ones most visible.

But this timeline also places these facts alongside those of settler colonialism, slavery, U.S. imperialism in Asia and the Middle East, and the civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter. Narratives of racial discrimination and xenophobia “at home,” as well as imperialism and brutal violence in far-off countries, are all linked. We must understand how they are linked in order to decolonize. We need to recall how others in the past have recognized how injustice is linked, how they have worked across racial and cultural lines of identity that we take for granted. If we do not carefully study these histories, if we fail to see what is really keeping us apart or pitting us against one another, we also fail to create a better world for the marginalized.

The racism and homophobia against Muslim, Arab, and South Asian Americans described in Puar’s writing are not a separate problem from the plight of the “yellow woman” in Cheng’s book. They are linked by an Orientalizing understanding of “non-Western” others as foreign, exotic, backwards, inferior, and undeserving of respect or humanity. Orientalism does not pick and choose carefully; it has no interest in where someone is “really” from, the language or languages they actually speak. White supremacy has no racial barometer to help distinguish between Asians actually divided by histories of colonialism and war trauma, with blurred lines as well between who is East Asian and Southeast Asian and South Asian.

The other side of erasure is shared pain and, sometimes, solidarity. With today’s class, I want you to understand how the United States has always been racist, xenophobic, and imperialist and continues to be. But where I want us to end is learning about what it means to forge solidarity and find community across difference.

And today, I want to focus on drawing out the implications of Cheng’s theory of the “yellow woman” and Ornamentalism. Today, this is what I had to make space for.

Asian American women, Orientalism in Asian studies, and the guilt of the silenced

As a story about the real-life implications of what Cheng discusses, last Tuesday eight people were killed in a shooting rampage on massage businesses in Atlanta, Georgia, in the U.S. 6 out of 8 were Asian women, and these businesses were places where the majority or all workers were Asian women. Concerning the shooter’s motives, the representative of local police explained, “[it] was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.” A few days ago, the director of the FBI stated that the shootings didn’t seem related to racism. The shooter claimed that he killed these women to deal with his sex addiction.

It is clear that the lives of sex workers are treated as disposable; the lives of working-class Asian women in the U.S. are also disposable. It is not clear whether or not any of these women were actually sex workers. The 1875 Page Law viewed all Chinese women attempting to enter the U.S. as prostitutes; as the U.S. military fought wars and killed civilians in Asia in the 20th century, they were also encouraged to enjoy sleeping with local women. Asian American women today still encounter random men on the street saying that they remind them of women they slept with in Korea or Vietnam. Asian American women are seen as hypersexualized, submissive, and sexually available. We are temptresses to blame for any violence committed to us. We exist as objects, as ornaments, not people.

This problem has never been prioritized in discussions of racism in the U.S. A movement of Asian American men spews hatred against Asian American women for supposedly benefitting from their sexual attractiveness to white men. My Asian American female friends and I know that we are “white-adjacent,” although we know we are not white. We are all assumed to be middle- or upper-class. We know that our place among women of color is contingent; we are not trusted as allies, our injury rarely counts enough for us to speak. And yet this past year, thousands of hate crimes against Asian Americans have occurred, the majority experienced by women. The murder of Asian women now prompts us to ask again, in Cheng’s words, “Is the yellow woman injured — or is she injured enough?”

There is no balance to my discussion of Orientalism today. I failed to do justice to other stories; I had to talk about this one — for myself, for other Asian American or Asian women who have spent the past week grieving, for an Asian American friend in Hong Kong who wanted to talk about these murders to her students but started crying at the very thought. In a recent article, Cheng wrote, “Too often, attention to nonwhite groups is only as pressing as the injuries that they have suffered.” She asks, “Are Asian-Americans injured, or injured enough, to deserve our national attention?” How do you have to be injured in order for your pain to be deemed reality? How much do you have to be injured in order to have the right to ask for change? Do more of us need to die, in greater numbers, in order for people to care?

As an Asian American woman and scholar in Asian studies, I am particularly well-situated to comment upon certain aspects of Orientalism, racism, and sexism.

My main area of research is Japanese literature, which is situated in broader fields of Japanese studies and, even more broadly, East Asian studies. Orientalism, you might recall, is (among other things) about knowledge produced about the non-West. The field in which I work is one built on Orientalism, promoted by the U.S. government as a way of surveilling enemies and gaining allies during the Cold War. Asian studies is dominated by white male scholars; historically speaking, Asian women have often been cast in the roles of spouses of white men or language teachers with lower status.

Several years ago, I saw a white male Japanese literary studies scholar in the U.K. publish an article in a major English-language newspaper in Japan: he compared the qualities of Asian women whom he had dated, going through one Asian country after another. Now, though, he only dated white women; he knew enough about Japan that he didn’t have to depend upon a Japanese woman to help him with the language or culture. A few people in Japanese studies complained; others said nothing. In this white man’s story, Asian women exist purely as sexualized native informants to help him in his conquest of Asian cultures until we are no longer needed.

Over the past week, as I read words of long repressed pain written by other Asian American women, I felt indescribable guilt that I had not known their stories. In the past, I wrote an essay in which I described my life in academia in terms of gender, race, and queerness as one with “the accumulation of countless moments feeling like papercuts digging into my skin.” I spent my twenties surrounded by white male academics, believing that my value as a human being was to be found only in my physical beauty. Even now, I take it for granted if I am sexualized, infantilized, or ignored by male colleagues. I am sad thinking how many years it took for me to truly believe that I had real intellect — that I might even possess intellectual brilliance lacking among the men around me who always looked and sounded right.

White supremacy and misogyny are internalized by women and non-white people as well. It is not only white men and women who are nasty, but also senior Asian women known for favoring white male students. I often avoid reaching out to younger women of color in Asian studies, because their internalized racism and misogyny mean that I am often not treated with the same respect as a white man.

Telling myself that I was okay, sometimes feeling okay, I assumed that other Asian American women were okay as well. Certain that being loud about my complaints was a failure of solidarity with other more marginalized groups, I contributed to a collective silence in which Asian Americans are continually assumed to be privileged and gaslighted in conversations about racism. I understand that I myself have been gaslighted by frameworks of race that don’t allow for my experience.

Nonetheless, I sit with the sense that I contributed to the deaths of women who look like me and share the same identity. “Going home” for me now means going to Taiwan; I chose to spend my life learning about Japan; I moved to Hong Kong. When did I make time to learn about Asian American women? What do the paths we choose mean for our forms of solidarity — both their reach and depth, and their limitations?

Questions — making space, transnational solidarity, and minor connections in the classroom

In discussion today, I want to know what you felt and thought about the readings for this week. I also hope that my extension of this week’s theme of Orientalism — tying it directly to an event from the past week — is one that leads to questions and thoughts that you want to share with the class. And finally, I want to end by posing two broader questions.

First, how do we support and make space for other marginalized groups without silencing ourselves? How do we avoid creating damaging hierarchies of oppression? Second, how and why do we build solidarity across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and other difference, especially on a transnational level? Why should students in Hong Kong care about anything we read and discuss that is not “about” Hong Kong? Thinking and feeling in terms of solidarity is work. Sometimes we are asked to do it when dealing with our own grief in a society that refuses to acknowledge our injury. Nevertheless, these two questions are at the core of this class.

In response to the second question, at least in terms of why today’s discussion matters in Hong Kong, I would like to offer the following: first, the murder of Asian American women is tied to histories of colonialism and imperialism as well as white supremacy that are not unrelated to problems existing in Hong Kong today. Racial hierarchies and misogyny in Asian countries are refracted versions of what exists in the U.S., and vice versa. This analysis is challenging to articulate clearly but deserves careful thought.

And finally, by taking this class, through the very act of doing the many readings assigned in this class and entering into this conversation, you are already performing transnational solidarity. And as your instructor, I teach this class in a particular way because of who I am. I teach race the way I do not only because I have conducted research, but because I am an Asian American woman; I grew up with the constant refrain of “Where are you from?,” with men calling out “Nihao” to me on the street in the U.S. and Europe, without being able to carry full conversations with my parents.

I carry all these experiences with me; I carry the fact that solidarity is always possible between the marginalized. We need to address why Asian women often feel that they don’t have a place among women of color in the U.S. Racial minorities in the U.S. are pitted against one another; it is painful not to be trusted, and not to trust others. As someone moving between many places, I take in everyone else’s sadness and rage, but what happens to mine? I don’t know yet who’s listening, or who will listen in the future, but I know that it is untrue to say that people cannot care for one another. This weekend, I saw Black female comedian Amber Ruffin say to Asian American women: “We hate this, it’s not right, your feelings are valid, you deserve to feel safe, you deserve to be safe, we love you.” I cannot express how much it means to me to hear that Black women love Asian women back, too.

Importantly, when I teach in this class, I carry encounters with previous students — often female, queer, and/or racial minorities — in the U.S. and Japan. I remember their experiences of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. I changed as a teacher and a person because they gave me their stories, trust, and gratitude for what I do by stepping into a classroom as who I am. Their warmth and empathy meant that I did not become completely embittered or disillusioned; when I feel empty or drained, I am filled up again, if only a bit, by remembering what has been given to me — by students, by feminists and queers in different places where I have lived, by people who have shaped and marked me through their friendship and solidarity. You are connected not only to me, but through me, to all of them: these people unknown to you, living their lives scattered across the world. Maybe this is a minor connection, a very thin one, but there is no doubt that it is real, and it exists.

So, how are we connected? How do we learn to be connected in better, more life-giving ways? How will you respond to this question, not in general terms of how we should care, but in specific detail about the obstacles, labor, grief, love, and agency experienced through acts of caring?

View of Mong Kwok Ping Garden (蒙國平花園) at the University of Hong Kong

To learn more about Asian American women in the context of the March 16th, 2021 shootings in Atlanta, Georgia:

• Patricia Park. “The Madame Butterfly Effect Tracing the History of a Fetish.” bitch media, July 30, 2014.
• David Vine. “‘My body was not mine, but the US military’s.’” Politico, November 3, 2015.
• Jennifer Ho. “Opinion: To be an Asian woman in America.” CNN, March 18, 2021.
• Interview with Cathy Park Hong by Morgan Ome. “Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different.” The Atlantic, March 18, 2021.
• Shaila Dewan. “How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women.” The New York Times, March 18, 2021.
• Jiayang Fan. “The Atlanta Shooting and the Dehumanizing of Asian Women.” The New Yorker, March 19, 2021.
• Interview with Tina Tchen, Min Jin Lee, and Sung Yeon Choimorrow by Alisha Haridasani Gupta. “Tales of Racism and Sexism, From 3 Leading Asian-American Women.” The New York Times, March 19, 2021.
• Interview with Nancy Wang Yuen by Ailsa Chang. “For Asian American Women, Misogyny And Racism Are Inseparable, Sociologist Says.” NPR, March 19, 2021.
• May Jeong. “Opinion: The Deep American Roots of the Atlanta Shootings.” The New York Times, March 19, 2021.
• R. O. Kwon. “A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts Are Still Breaking.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2021.
• Interview with Yves Nguyen by Lulu Garcia-Navarro. “The Long History Of Sexual And Physical Violence Asian Women Face In The U.S.” NPR, March 21, 2021. Nguyen is an organizer with Red Canary Song (transnational grassroots collective of Asian & migrant sex workers).
• Karen Leong & Karen Kuo. “US has a long history of violence against Asian women.” The Conversation, March 22, 2021.
• Durba Mitra, Sara Kang, and Genevieve Clutario. “It’s Time to Reckon with the History of Asian Women in America.” Harper’s Bazaar, March 23, 2021.
• Elene Lam, Chanelle Gallant, and Vincent Wong. “One Thing We Can Do To Honour The Women Killed In Atlanta.” Chatelaine March 23, 2021. Elene Lam is the founder and executive director of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network).
• Corina Knoll, Michael Forsythe, Frances Robles and Linda Qiu. “2 Immigrant Paths: One Led to Wealth, the Other Ended in Death in Atlanta.” The New York Times, March 24, 2021.
• “Cathy Park Hong and Chanel Miller on Making Art Out of Grief: A Conversation.” By Mattie Kahn. Glamour, March 24, 2021.