The Good Immigrant Read online

  Everyday Feminism’s piece, ‘5 Ways “Asian Women Fetishes” Put Asian Women in Danger’ is a basic, but on-the-nose, list. According to the piece up to 61 per cent of Asian women in America experience physical and or sexual violence from a partner in their lifetime, and over 30,000 Asian women are trafficked into the States per year.12 I’ll hazard a guess here: the fault lies not in the women but in the attitude towards us. A South East Asian woman I know said that the feeling of being objectified seems core to being an Asian woman.

  Powerlessness is a particularly heavy weight to fling off. In order to be attractive to men of any colour, we are expected to be small and pliable. I know there is an alternative stereotype – the cold, automaton, dominatrix, femme fatale Asian woman – but we don’t seem to be mail-ordering as many of them lot. There was a point in the past when I stopped dressing ‘prettily’ because when I was out with ANY white man, no matter his age or looks, I was talked over and looked down on. It was assumed that I was his escort or mail-order bride. A friend of mine meeting her white boyfriend for dinner was asked to leave a restaurant because they thought she was soliciting. I am sex positive and advocate sexual freedom of expression with consent, but I am cautious around any violent male desire to conquer/colonise a passive Asian body, especially if that male is white.

  Look up American performance-maker Kristina Wong. Her grotesque but smart comedic work both disrupts the objectification of the Asian female and experiments with sexually objectifying the stereotypically emasculated Asian male. Asian American Eddie Huang’s memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, has been transformed into a family friendly US TV series, but the rather more serious book addresses the sexlessness of the Asian male head-on: We’re allowed to play ONE role, the eunuch who can count. You seen Romeo Must Die! Jet Li gets NO PUSSY! It’s no overstatement to say that Aziz Ansari’s TV series Master of None is a game-changer. How many times in media have you seen an Asian male have a sexual life? MoN opens with Ansari’s character in the throes of sex. His sexual relationships are depicted as ‘normally’ as a white male’s, and he has an Asian friend, played by Kelvin Yu, who is held up as a hottie in the series. This is television history, and I hope that it is this kind of TV that takes over our hearts and minds. If you happen to spot an Asian in UK media today, they are more than likely to be reinforcing racial stereotypes. Sex and power are central to the way we understand the world and both male and female Asians are very low down on the power scale.

  Despite shyness and society’s strong message on what makes a nice English (ha ha) girl, I feel compelled to discuss sex and the way in which we construct and perform sexually attractive selves given our constraints. Not doing so is an extremely isolating experience for me. My feelings of humiliation – unwarranted, I know, but hard to shake – from being hypersexualised and generalised about on a daily basis because of my skin colour and gender, seem abated in the not unpainful act of exposing my shame. My body as a site of violence.

  Can this Little China Girl (RIP Bowie) ever step out, speak out and tell you, baby, just to shut your mouth?

  [The oriental woman] never spoke of herself … never represented her emotions, presence or history – Said, Orientalism.

  Remember the old white man in the pub and the young black bloke on the street who publicly projected Chineseness onto me? How did they know that I’m ethnically Chinese? Oho. Now I don’t know about you, but when my prompt is ‘East Asian’ not only do I think ‘yellow’, I think ‘Chinese’. Perhaps it’s the sheer number of Chinese folk – 50 million – who live outside China. There are Chinese takeaways in most towns in the UK. Chinese people make up roughly half of the total East Asian population in the UK, so yes, a yellow person on the street is most likely ethnically Chinese. Well done to the Chinese-spotting blokes! But in race monitoring exercises, yellow people – Chinese or not – have, historically, been thrown into a pot called ‘Other’ and data on life in the UK is sparse, and we’re so silent we don’t shout about the racist abuse we encounter, right?

  Hey, look, it’s Jackie Chan!

  Oi, chink! What are you staring at? Ching chong, ching chong!

  – a selection of insults commonly shouted at yellow people

  I did not know that Chinese people are more likely than any other minority ethnic group to be subject to racial harassment and property damage (‘The Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities’). We don’t see this on our screens. Violence against yellow folk doesn’t spring to mind when people mention hate crime. I think of African Americans being shot in the street over nothing. I remember documentary footage of a Muslim woman being knocked out on the street. Chinese folk across the UK are abused, not only frequently but repeatedly – Chinese takeaway workers are sitting ducks. Owners and their families are often the only yellow family in town. A BBC Newsbeat (January 2015) article discussed the under-reporting of these hate crimes: it’s because we’re spread out across the country, and because hate crime dispensed little and often is rather difficult to prove or stop. I wonder if it’s because the sexiest, most quotable statistics I could find easily on the internet13 sound dated, dull or inconsequential unless you step back and consider what the evidence seems to indicate as a whole but can’t prove quantitatively, i.e. that proportionally, Chinese people experience higher levels of fear and violence than any other minority group in the UK. Violence is only as visible as we are. Who knew that after WWII, some 2,000 Chinese seamen in Liverpool who had helped in the war effort were deported ‘home’ without warning? This violation was so swift and hidden that for decades their British wives and families thought that they had simply been left. There are a few articles online now, but only if you know what you’re looking for.

  What with the whitewashing of history and the darkness surrounding slavery and oppression, I don’t feel as if I own, or am allowed to own, ‘real suffering’ because of the colour of my skin. Instead, I bear a different kind of badge, one I’m supposed to be pleased about: ‘model minority’. Is yellow too pale a colour to shout about?

  Yellow. What unites a Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Taiw... anyone yellow in the UK? It’s not our wildly disparate cultures nor our real or imagined homelands. It’s hidden histories, made-up sex lives, violence invisible to others. In forms, the plurality of our immigrant narratives is boxed up as ‘Other’ but we are here. I see you.

  7 ASEAN is the Association of South East Asian Nations, established in 1967 in Bangkok by the five original member countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, joined by Brunei (1984), Vietnam (1995), Laos and Myanmar (1997), and Cambodia (1999).

  ‘Asia Pacific’ is a loose term that usually refers to East Asia, South Asia, South East Asia, Australasia and the Pacific Island nations, but may also include countries on the coast of the Eastern Pacific Ocean.

  8 ‘Approximate’ because strangely, it doesn’t take into account first generation immigrants. Data is fuzzy also because East Asians have historically only had the option of ticking , ‘Other’ in ethnicity monitoring exercises.

  9 Note that this is the American usage of the word Asian, which includes East Asians, South East Asians, and those from the Indian subcontinent. It is a particularity of the UK to use the word to refer to just the Indian subcontinent. For a discussion on sexual fetishisation, the American definition of the word Asian seems more useful.

  10 Please note that my examples here are from a heteronormative perspective but the experiences of Asian LGBTQ+ and the intersection of sexuality, gender and race would certainly shed more light on how we classify and interact with people.

  11 ‘Traditional’ as opposed to feminist, queer, or ethically made porn.

  12 Yes, most data available on yellow women is American. Recall how basic information on the number of East Asians in the UK is difficult to find. Perhaps this says something about how the UK’s third largest ethnic minority group is (dis)regarded.

  13 Sue Adamson et al. Hidden from public view? Racism agai
nst the UK Chinese population, Min Quan report, (The Monitoring Group, 2009).

  Kendo Nagasaki and Me

  Daniel York Loh

  Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.

  In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.

  (Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie)

  So begins Tom Wingfield, the narrator character in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.

  On any given night when The Glass Menagerie is performed, though, Tom Wingfield transports the audience back to 1930s USA, where a ‘huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind’ – whereas, ladies and gentlemen, I give you 1970s Great Britain: a place that many believe was a land of joyous liberty before the totalitarian oppression of The Political Correctness Brigade committed the heinous Stalinist crime of actually making it a bit difficult to take the piss out of ethnic minorities, gay or disabled people, and only ever regard women as either battleaxes or sex objects.

  Like Tom Wingfield’s memories of the 1930s, everything about the seventies in my mind seems to happen to music. No ‘fiddle in the wings’ though. Instead it’s a soundtrack of Gary Glitter and Rolf Harris introduced by Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall to an almost constant chatter of sexist smut and racial jibes dressed in dodgy Y-Front underpants. A world where younger readers will have to imagine no Sky TV or BT Sport and where all football matches kicked off in unison at three o’clock on Saturday afternoons and the only live match you ever saw on TV was the FA Cup Final once a year.

  A world where a lonely half-Chinese schoolboy in the West Country found a curious ‘hero’ in the inveterately cheating shape of what appeared to be a villainous Japanese wrestler called Kendo Nagasaki.

  Because Kendo Nagasaki was a fellow ‘oriental’ (the acceptable term of the time) and far from being a dull passive silent one, Kendo Nagasaki was a badass.

  In the seventies we watched World of Sport on a Saturday afternoon. World of Sport was what was known, I believe, as a ‘sporting omnibus’ programme. It began around midday on a Saturday, showed what mainly seemed to be fairly obscure sports such as skiing and bowls (no disrespect intended), and went all the way through to teatime when we would eagerly catch the football scores on the hilariously primitive ‘vidi-printer’ before turning over for Basil Brush and Doctor Who. World of Sport was introduced by a plummily spoken smoothie called Dickie Davies, who had the cheesiest seventies ’tache you can possibly imagine, compensated for by an endless and seemingly genuine enthusiasm for this cornucopia of sports that no one on the planet seemed much interested in.

  What we really watched World of Sport for, though, was the wrestling. Usually on in a two-hour block and showing a succession of fights, the wrestling was de rigeur Saturday afternoon viewing in our house.

  Nowadays it seems to be common belief that professional wrestling is staged pantomime and not a competitive sport at all. I for one will make no attempt to either confirm or debunk this, although whenever I’ve seen the supposedly ‘genuine’ Olympic wrestling it seems to consist entirely of two men in leotards grappling tediously on a mat while being awarded points for undetectable (to the layperson’s eye) displays of ‘skill’, lacking any of the blood, thunder and, yes, theatre of the pro wrestling I grew up watching.

  Certainly I don’t know of any professional wrestler who has, fessed up in public to the sport being fake. It’s entirely possible they sign some form of ‘secrecy contract’ (like the Magic Circle perhaps) but when I have seen interviews in the press or on TV with professional wrestlers they fiercely deny there is anything ‘staged’ about their craft at all. I’ve even seen a couple of interviews where wrestlers have offered to put their press interrogators in head or arm locks to ascertain for themselves whether the sport is faked. If any professional wrestler is reading this, then please rest assured I am completely willing to take your word that it is a genuine competitive sport with no need for physical demonstrations as proof.

  At the age I was at the time, it made not a jot of difference whatsoever whether it was ‘real’ or not and I was thrilled, every Saturday, to the exploits of the great characters of professional wrestling with ludicrous monikers such as Giant Haystacks (he was indeed giant), Big Daddy (whose sole but popular tactic was to butt his opponents with his sizeable belly), The Dynamite Kid (he was supposed to be quick … I think) and, er, Mick McManus.

  Whether it was actually panto or not there were certainly heroes and villains with much booing and hissing as well as some hilarious slapstick anarchy, the two-fighter-per-team ‘tag’ matches in particular usually descending into riotous chaos with fighting continuing into the auditorium as the crowd bayed and roared. It was thrilling, hysterically funny, full-blooded entertainment, and made dismal provincial winter afternoons that much more bearable.

  Before Kendo Nagasaki there was another ‘oriental’: a Japanese wrestler who appeared briefly. He was chubby with a bum fluff moustache and didn’t appear to win any fights at all. He was mercilessly baited by the crowd despite appearing only to resort to the traditional wrestling villain’s stock-in-trade ‘dirty tactics’ when it was painfully obvious he was getting thoroughly beaten. I have no memory whatsoever of his name but he was referred to by the commentator (who also seemed to despise and ridicule him) simply as ‘The Japanese’, as in ‘oh, The Japanese is cheating now’, etc.

  But he was nothing like Kendo Nagasaki.

  By now, the Chinese/Japanese thing was getting thoroughly confusing. I’d finished at one school full of white kids calling me a chink and transferred to another school full of white kids calling me a chink and singing songs about ‘Chinese and Japanese’ having ‘dirty knees’ (it rhymes, geddit?).

  Sometimes I got angry with the singing chanting white kids and tried to hit them or throw things at them. As a result of this, as well as singing chanting white kids calling me a chink or a Jap and hurling allegations at me about the cleanliness of my knees, my world suddenly seemed to fill up with red-faced white adults shouting loudly at me that I needed to learn not to lose my temper when white kids were calling me a chink or a Jap.

  I grew up surrounded by white people. At that school, there was me and my brother, plus two black kids who were also brothers. Their names were Godfrey and Geoffrey and the four of us seemed to cop racial abuse off the entire school all day every day.

  Of course, the Golden Rule that all ‘minority ethnic’ people learn when we’re growing up in Britain is that we’re simply not supposed to get angry about any of this. To do so is to invite all kinds of accusations about having a chip on both shoulders and so forth. Occasionally one can join in with the rest of the majority populace and vent one’s spleen about politics or inflation or the bus being late, but we soon learn we’re supposed to be ‘reasonable’ about racism.

  Even now, the ‘victory’ we ‘politically correct killjoys’ have ‘won’ has come at a price, in that we’re rarely allowed to point out the indignities of having one’s race/gender/orientation/disability used as the butt of jokes without being implored to ‘get a sense of humour, for God’s sake’.

  I can remember just a couple of years ago being invited on to a Radio 4 programme to discuss the broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson’s use of the racist slur ‘slope’ when referring to a Burmese man on a sloping bridge (geddit?); I was assailed, in a preliminary pre-programme interview (it’s a serious business you know), by a BBC journalist in the pressured tones one imagines an impatient farmer using to herd a particularly recalcitrant bovine animal into a field, repeatedly asking ‘So, Daniel, are you outraged by this? Are you outraged ?’

  Confused by this and suddenly feeling unsure of my #AngryEthnic credentials I took a pause during which I could hear said Beeb journo breathing impatiently down the phone. I was shopping in Hammersmith Primark at the time (I’m ashamed to say) and took the call on my mobile phone, so you can only guess how surreal this ‘outrage assessment’ felt.
Eventually I responded ‘I just think Jeremy’s a dick, basically’. Evidently disappointed by my insufficiently humourless chippiness, they relegated me to the closing 45 seconds of the discussion, to which I contributed after decamping to my favourite Hammersmith Indian restaurant (Shilpa in King Street if you’re interested), where I attempted to sound articulate and measured whilst surrounded by chapattis and chutney that were admittedly far more enticing than the prospect of being outraged by the rather tired antics of a millionaire who hangs out with the Prime Minister, likes to drive fast cars, and who uses the n-word despite allegedly trying everything in his power to avoid doing so. The seventies though was the veritable heyday of political incorrectness and it was where I spent a somewhat traumatic childhood. I also had one of those haircuts that Chinese kids the world over appeared to have at the time that seem to have resulted from placing a bowl over the child’s head and cutting the shape round it. Life was difficult.

  From the ages of five till around 10 my ‘anger’ became a major issue. After being shouted at by white adults for losing my temper over being called a chink or a Jap, I would then be sat down by other white adults who would try to get to the bottom of why I was so ‘aggressive’ when I was called a chink or a Jap. I saw white child psychologists who actually gave me tablets – presumably to enhance the serotonin in the brain that prevents one from taking offence or feeling humiliated by gangs of white kids calling one racist names loudly and repeatedly.

  At this point I was being called ‘Chinese’ and ‘Japanese’ so much I was beginning to think that ‘Chinese’ and ‘Japanese’ was literally all the same thing. I learned later of course that they are two very different and separate cultures and that the two countries have even fought wars against each other. Sometimes I wonder about a world where a solitary white kid is abused in the playground by a gang of ‘ethnic minority’ kids shouting ‘English, German, giving us a sermon’ (well, the principle’s the same).