Written by: Tori Lopez
When I was in high school, most people could tell that I was mixed. Part of me was obviously Hispanic, as hinted my surname, but the other seemed more ambiguous. Like most mixed kids, my identity became a game, with classmates eagerly trying to guess my heritage. That is, until one study hall where an acquaintance asked if I was Asian.
To be honest, it took me by surprise. “How did you know?” I asked.
“Well,” she started, shrugging, “you’re quiet, you follow the rules, and you’re good at school.”
And so, the other half of my heritage was identified merely by a stereotype. I originally brushed this off since comments like these were commonplace at my high school. But as I grew older, I began to ask myself: why is it that my personality was associated with a tired stereotype of an entire group of people?
This is a shared experience amongst many women of color: to have your identity recognized for stereotypes based on your heritage. But for many Asian American women, it can be characteristics like being quiet, submissive, or, God forbid, a bad driver. These depictions are unique to the United States, stretching back to the 19th century.
Picture this: it’s the year 1850 in the state of California. The Gold Rush is an opportunity for the everyman to become richer than he could imagine. Men from all over the globe flocked to California, and thus, it didn’t take long for East Asian gangs to exploit this huge influx in population. Both Chinese and Japanese ladies were forcibly brought to the United States in the late 19th century. Here, they worked as prostitutes, which framed them as compliant, modest, yet sexually available. These stereotypes exist today for Asian American women regardless if they’re Chinese or Japanese.
Sex trafficking was so bad in California that a group known as the Mission Home formed to disrupt it. Pictured here are residents of the home. For more information about the Mission Home, visit here. Source: Los Angeles Times.
But surely there are Asian American women who don’t fit this. I mean, duh, these are stereotypes and there are over 22 million Asians in the U.S. Just look at Ali Wong: she’s fierce, she’s vulgar, and she’s constantly teasing her husband in her standup. She’s nothing like how the centuries-old stereotype depicts her. The thing is, though, is that a stereotype is something that’s forced onto us.
Sociologists Lisa Wade and Myra Ferree use the word gender strategy to define “finding a way of doing gender that works for us as unique individuals who are also shaped by other parts of our identity and the realities of our lives.” In other words, we find a strategy to avoid having tired assumptions pushed onto us. By portraying herself as brash and loud, Wong can evade cliched stereotypes, whether she recognizes it or not.
Regardless of how she depicts herself, being Asian is a part of Wong’s identity. And she uses that to her advantage. For example, she uses things that are unique to being an Asian woman ― such as joking about being bad at parallel parking, and therefore, being a bad driver ― in her stand up. She takes an idea used to degrade Asian women and turns it into a joke. From there, this becomes something that’s a part of her stand up as opposed to her own identity.
Ali Wong in her Netflix stand up special, Hard Knock Wife. Source: Netflix.
And it sucks that it has to be this way! Asian women (and women of color as a whole) shouldn’t have to resort to gender strategies to escape a caricature.
So why can’t Ali Wong just be a bad driver?
Why can’t I just be quiet?
Why do these traits have to be emphasized just because we’re Asian American women?
As I said, this sucks. Thankfully, there’s another solution outside of strategies: taking these stereotypes and turning them to our advantage. For Wong, this means using it in her stand up. She’s become popular with other Asian Americans because she’s honest about what it means to be Asian American (and she’s funny, so there’s that too). So much so that she’s profited off of jokes meant to degrade us. She even admits to paying for her husband’s graduate school tuition.
To add on, it simply means being comfortable with ourselves. No matter what I do, I’m going to be associated with a caricature that I wasn’t even alive for. People are going to make assumptions about me. About you.
In the end, though, these stereotypes don’t define Wong, or me, or you. She may be a bad driver and I may be quiet, but there’s so much more to the both of us. And it’s important to recognize that, even when people make assumptions about any and all of us.
Being an Asian American woman might include being a bad driver or quiet. But it also includes being loud, or fearless, or vulnerable, or bold, or something else entirely ― something that makes us distinctly us.