Came across another discussion thread in which the subject of Asian men and their lack of attractiveness came up. I thought I’d post a brief excerpt from that thread:
There have been countless papers and books written on these subjects. For issues of Asian American men being considered “inferior” compared to men of other races, you might want to read the play David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and the criticism surrounding it (it’s a story about a white man who falls in love with an Asian man pretending to be a woman; based on something that actually happened). Frank Chin has quite a few things to say on the subject, and although many of his views are now outdated it’s interesting to read his opinions on how he considers Asian American culture to be traditionally masculine and how he thinks it’s been emasculated by American stereotypes of Asia as submissive and silent. Much of what he had to say was in response to Maxine Hong Kingston (author of The Woman Warrior), whom Frank Chin despised for supposedly distorting authentic Chinese culture and perpetuating the stereotype of the Asian male as either violent and overbearing or inept and powerless. Actually, you might want to do a search on articles about Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club – there are plenty of articles criticizing how it panders to the Western expectations of Asian cutlture. And of course, Said’s Orientalism is good background reading on Asian stereotypes in general. You might also want to read Yellow by Frank Wu, and War Without Mercy by John Dower (the latter talks about Japanese stereotypes during WWII). I also recommend Re/collecting Early Asian America, which gives a good overview of early Asian Americans in Canada, the US, and South America and how the stereotypes we are familiar with now developed over the course of history. The Chinatown Trunk Mystery is also an interesting read, particularly in light of the VTech shootings – it talks about an unsolved murder of a white woman supposedly committed by a Chinese man back in the 19th century, I think, and how American society reacted to it at the time.
