Asian American Women: Suzie Wong Sterotype

Asian American women have been portrayed in many sexual stereotypes for years. The many stereotypes include the images of dragon lady, dominatrix, sluts, whores, easy Asian girls, and a hooker with a heart of gold. This last image was made popular from films like The World of Suzie Wong (1960). The main character was portrayed as submissive, passive, and exotic, with a desire to sexually please her man. Because of films like this, today Asian American women are born into a world of hypersexuality that forms and shapes the general consciousness.

Films such as The World of Suzie Wong (1960), Madame Butterfly (1932), and the Broadway play Miss Saigon (1989) formed the “Suzie Wong” stereotype of a submissive and erotic Asian woman.

Suzie’s sexuality can be contained within her Chinese exoticism, wearing a Chinese-cut dress: “cheongsam”.

Suzie Wong stereotyped Asian women as truly “feminine”, content at being passive, subservient, dependent, domestic, and slaves to “love”. (Marchetti, p.116)

In the film the Flower Drum Song, the main character’s role is as a “good” woman, but she cannot resist the call of wild music and dances inappropriately. Her “true identity” is as an untrustworthy entertainer who derives pleasure from revealing and manipulating her body for public display, barely dressed. (Shimizu, p.82)

Today on TV and in films, Asian American females portray characters such as prostitutes and sex slaves. (Shimizu, p.12) It is difficult to find Asian women in roles beyond sexual ones in today’s mass media. UC Berkley Professor of Asian American studies, Elaine Kim has argued that the stereotype of Asian women as submissive sex objects has impeded Asian women’s economic mobility and has forced increased demand in mail-order brides and ethnic pornography. Today the exotic image of a woman in a cheongsam is even more sexualized and made popular by celebrities.

In popular media today some characters combat the Suzie Wong image. In the past Asian female characters would choose to kill themselves when forsaken by a white man, love interest, such as in Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon. In the film Sideways (2004), Sandra Oh’s character instead beats up her white male love interest when she finds out he is engaged and has treated her love as worthless. (Shimizu, p.268)

Sandra Oh plays many positive, strong, smart, sensitive, multi-layered characters today such as a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy. The Disney film Mulan portrays a young Chinese female as a strong, confident woman who fights for her family and for China.

Videos:

We think this video definitely portrays an asian's woman infatuation for white men.

Against the Asian stereotype