- Current
Nikkei View
- About
- Roots
- Nikkei
Links
- IMDiversity Job Bank
- Secret Asian Man
- More
about Gil:
xxxGil's Home Page
xxxResume
xxxFave Web Site
xxx1957 TimeLine
xxx"Toy Book" Excerpt
xxxWriting Samples
xxxThe Gillery
SUPPORT THE NIKKEI VIEW!
Amazon.com now offers a way for you to sponsor the Nikkei View column! Just click below for more information!
Search Amazon.com using keywords such as "Japan," "Japanese American," "Tokyo," and others for books or videos. I'm now an Amazon.com Affiliate. I urge everyone to support their local independent businesses first, but if you search Amazon.com from here, I earn a percentage of your purchases. It's one way you can help underwrite the Nikkei View. Thanks!
ARCHIVES
LATEST
COLUMN
2003 COLUMNS * 2002
COLUMNS
2001 COLUMNS *
2000 COLUMNS
1999 COLUMNS * 1998 COLUMNS
24 February, 2003
"Hot Asian Babes" -- Then and Now
"Hot Asian Babes." That's one of the common lures of pornography, and a phrase that sparked controversy a year ago when some misguided students at Colorado College used it in an April Fool's satire issue of the school newspaper.
 Do Thi Hai Yen, beautiful, mysterious and so very Asian, in "The Quiet American,"` a film about Vietnam in 1952. |
The film is about the shadowy involvement of US CIA agents covertly fighting communism in Vietnam in the early 1950s, a full decade before America finally publicly admitted to being mired in the long-running military conflict. It's a moody, humid film that seems to capture the intrigue and growing political desperation of the final years of French colonialism in Southeast Asia.
The story is narrated by London Times correspondent Thomas Fowler, played by Michael Caine, and revolves around his friendship with Alden Pyle (Brendan Frasier), "the quiet American" of the title. Fowler slowly realizes that his young acquaintance isn't just a medical aid worker helping to bring eyeglasses to Vietnam's poor, but a CIA agent involved in one of a series of attempts by the US to back a leader in South Vietnam who can effectively fight the communists from North Vietnam.
| Fowler, the aging Englishman, wants to keep up the façade of earnest relationship intact like the centuries of colonialism that permeated Asia. |
What complicates the story, not surprisingly, is the fact that Pyle falls in love with Phuong, Fowler's lover, who is played by Do Thi Hai Yen. Fowler is married with a wife in London who will not grant him a divorce; as the movie begins, he celebrates his second anniversary of living with Phuong but both seem to understand that their relationship has immutable limitations. Once Pyle arrives on the scene and professes his attraction for Phuong, Caine is left like an older cuckold, unable to protect his relationship except for by feebly lying that his wife has agreed to a divorce.
The symbolism is ripe.
Phuong, a former taxi dancer who would have gone out on the dance floor with anyone who purchased a ticket at her sister's seedy club, is an unspoiled Asian beauty whose moist, blank eyes are made to mirror any desire projected onto them. Fowler, the aging Englishman, wants to keep up the façade of earnest relationship intact like the centuries of colonialism that permeated Asia. Pyle, the energetic, virile young American, comes to Saigon willing to do whatever it takes to save Vietnam - and the girl. Each character represents their country's character in Greene's worldview.
The movie's politics are interesting to me as history. Caine as usual is excellent, and I enjoy seeing Frasier in movies other than comedies and one-dimensional action thrillers. But Do's depiction of Phuong gnawed at me as I left the theater. I'm sure she was guided by director Phillip Noyce to play Phuong as the impenetrable blank slate that serves as a sexual magnet for the men in the story. But it was a troubling, one-dimensional stereotype. Movie critics who raved about the film and about Caine typically gave Do little notice: The LA Times called her "quietly enigmatic," and the New York Times said she "embodies the Asian feminine stereotype of compliance and impenetrable erotic mystery."
 Marlon Brando and Miiko Taka in the 1957 film "Sayonara," which also takes place in 1952. |
Even reviewers fell into using established, clichéd standards to judge the character and the performance.
Maybe I'm being too judgmental and using today's standards. Erin pointed out that the common image of Asian women back then was indeed that of the irresistibly silent, servile siren - especially to Western men. So in making any historical film of this type, any female Asian characters may have to play to the stereotype.
Take "Sayonara," for example. The Marlon Brando film version of the James Michener novel was made in 1957, and takes place in 1952, during the Korean War. The plotline involves Brando, a fighter pilot war hero who watches as his airman buddy (played by Red Buttons) falls in love with and then marries a Japanese woman (Miyoshi Umeki) against military brass directives.
Brando toes the line at first but finds himself falling in love with a dancer played by Miiko Taka, and realizes that love doesn't always follow orders. Interestingly, Taka's character is a performer who plays men's parts in an all-women revue, so she carries an extra layer of exoticism on top of her very typical reserved, soft-spoken stereotype.
But Umeki's character, who is in the tragic relationship with Red Buttons, is the embodiment of the stereotype, with her passive countenance, willingness to serve her GI husband and his friends, her habit of looking down at the ground and bowing repeatedly, and even her exotic kimono and of course her open prettiness. I happen to like "Sayonara" very much, partly because I think it captures the reality of the relationships - and stereotypes - of the era.
 Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki play the tragic lovestruck bi-racial couple in "Sayonara." |
This storyline wasn't made up by Michener - beginning after World War II, thousands of US military men fell in love with Japanese women, even in the early days of the Occupation when General MacArthur tried to prevent "fraternization" with the locals. Mostly, these love affairs were serious and sincere - I know many mixed-nationality couples from the '40s and '50s who are still happily married, and my father, a Nisei from Hawaii, met and married my mother in Hokkaido when he was stationed there during the Korean conflict.
In the months immediately following WWII, there was even a name for Japanese women who dated American GIs: Pan-pan girls. For many, dating GIs was a way of being protected and surviving the postwar turmoil and deprivation. Also for many, these affairs ended in heartbreak - often with Hapa, or half-Japanese, children, left in their wake.
Similar scenarios of love and heartbreak were played out during and after Korea, and of course Vietnam.
I like "The Quiet American" and even like the fact that Graham Greene used this love triangle as a plot device. It makes the story more real. I just wish the film's depiction of Phuong was also more real, instead of playing up to the cliché of Asian women.
I'm more sensitized to his issue because I just finished reading "Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture," a dry academic tome that covers the treatment of Asians from early Chinese immigrants to America during the mid-1800s to contemporary movies including "Rising Sun," "Menace II Society" and "Mississippi Masala."
The book's author, Robert G. Lee, points out the many instances throughout pop culture where Asians - including Asian women - have been stereotyped. He traces the imagery back to immigration patterns and restrictions, including the first waves of Chinese and Japanese prostitutes on the West Coast and how they were perceived. Lee notes, "when the Chinese woman was portrayed at all, she was portrayed as victimized, passive and silent."
The book was slow going, but offered food for thought that I chewed on after seeing "The Quiet American."
Now I want to take a break and shake things up by seeing one of standup comic Margaret Cho's raunchy videos. She's loud, overweight, sassy, sexually frank and very funny about her Asian American family dynamics. She's real, and she's today. She's the kind of "Hot Asian Babe" we need more of.