Geisha girls and Madame Butterflies

I'm glad that Zhang Ziyi - or must we now call her Ziyi Zhang? - is finally playing against type. She won't be a bratty, overly gifted practitioner of martial arts but a much sought after creme-de-la-creme geisha in this fall's Memoirs of a Geisha. Okay, she'll still be a character who rises above her peers, is skilled beyond compare, and attracts heaps of attention. But I think she won't be bratty in this film.

The trailer in high definition is up on the Apple website and it looks marvellous. I'll certainly be catching this for the costumes, the music (John Williams!), the cinematography, and Gong Li, even though she unfortunately plays Sayuri's rival. Wasn't Ziyi once called the little Gong Li? In this film, she leaves Gong Li's faded geisha deep in the dust as she achieves great success as the geisha du jour. But I'm certain Gong Li in real life is no faded film star.

As the promotional team hammers us with images of Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh - one journalist labelled them as "Asian dolls" - I wonder about the image of Asia that the film will send to western audiences. As it is, the original geisha whom Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha, consulted was up in arms about his inaccurate portrayal of geisha (and she wrote a book in direct rebuttal). Geisha of Mineko Iwasaki's district, High Gion, were of the highest class, and were never deemed as prostitutes, nor did they ever have their viriginities auctioned off the way geishas of lower districts might have had. Other minor details like kimono being hung up - they are actually folded and stored in drawers - rang false to those in the know. Presenting geisha as girls little better than forced or willing victims of men's desires isn't going to help the current image the West has of the East.

And what is that image? Think about our famous Singapore Girl of Singapore Airlines. Beautiful, clad in a tight sarong, ever ready to prop up your pillow, store away your carry-on luggage, and obtain the meal of your choice. Asia in all its feminine glory (why did we never have a Singapore man?) beckoning to the masculine West. Sex and service. According to Sheridan Prasso, the author of The Asian Mystique, few westerners can look at the East without prejudice, without preconceived notions of exoticism, sexual fantasies, and power (theirs, never ours).

Sheridan Prasso served as BusinessWeek's Asia editor for about fifteen years, and for this book, she travelled around the region interviewing women and men, both white and Asian. Several chapters deal with the real geisha of the Gion district - that would be Ms. Iwasaki, and not the fictitious Sayuri - and what a Vietnamese woman would do if she were in the place of Miss Saigon, woman of the famed musical. Miss Hoa did have a one-night stand with an American GI and she did bear a child, but of killing oneself, she remarked, "Why would I want to kill myself?" According to her, Vietnamese women are stronger, far more persevering and determined than what the musical portrays. The character in Miss Saigon is merely another interpretation of Puccini's Madame Butterfly, the long-suffering, self-sacrificing Asian woman who lives and dies only for the strong, white man. It's what many westerners used to - and some still do - believe of Asian females. For that reason, I love M. Butterfly, the play by David Henry Hwang, which tears apart these stereotypes and reveals them to be the shallow and ignorant beliefs that they are.

I've nearly finished the book and Prasso has certainly covered much ground - why Asian men are viewed as asexual or worse, as wimps; why Asian actors never get to kiss the girl; how foreign investment bankers of the 90s made goals out of bedding Cathay girls (of Cathay Pacific Airlines); how women in Southeast Asia know exactly what white men want, and eagerly sell it to them (demand always creates supply). Prasso even tackles the martial arts aspect - are female practitioners really emotionless creatures who live only by the sword? - when she speaks to three women from the Singapore Wing Chun Kuen training center, asking them for their views on females studying kung fu.

Anyone else interested in such topics would do well to read Edward Said's Orientalism. Sheridan's work has already been favorably compared with it. What I wish she'd explored further is the idea of occidentalism, the way Asians perceive and stereotype westerners in turn - white fetish, the Pinkerton syndrome, the belief that westerners are hedonists etc. For that, there is a little-known book titled Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. It's an apt companion for Said's work.

The East has its own positive and negative assumptions of the West - the white man who is allegedly funnier, wittier, more of a gentleman than the meek, vertically challenged Asian man who expects his wife to cook and clean all day (actually, many white men who suffer from the worst kind of yellow fever expect the same too). Or how about the evil West that indulges in debauchery and decadence?

While I like to think that we've come a long way from colonialism, white supremacy, Aryan dominance and the likes, many people still harbor strong feelings about the folks on the other side of the world. I'll confess that when I see an aging Caucasian man with a young Asian girl clinging ferociously to his arm, I tend to wonder about the sincerity of that union. Folks might say I'm prejudiced, but many of us are, even if we don't admit it. I'll say too that I question the girls who unabashedly claim they will only date white guys because Chinese guys just don't cut it. Surely a guy is just a guy. And even if the girls - often extreme Anglo- or Europhiles - insist it's a matter of cultural preference, that they just happen to fancy someone with a posh accent and it's no different from how men prefer women with huge breasts or blonde hair, their preference for white males goes beyond aesthetic and often suggests a desire mainly for what the men symbolize.

I'm glad that there are interracial relationships which are true, lasting, and transcend cultural and racial boundaries; several of my friends are terrific examples. But even these have at one time or another received unfair accusations from both ends. Either the girl is a green-card-seeker, potential Delilah or the fellow is a faithless Asian fetishist. The other view would be the female is a sweet, submissive darling of a girl and the male is a white knight who will bring her to a fairer pasture. This reminds me of one of LK's friends at Michigan, a Japanese girl, who actually had to hide from her parents the fact that she was living with a Singaporean man. They told her that when she went to university, she had to date and eventually marry an American. Anyone of Asian descent would not be acceptable. And so the races continue to overestimate and underestimate each other.

Posted by Monoceros at October 24, 2005 10:30 PM