The Female Asian American Stereotype

The Asian woman is supposedly sexually active, exotic, overly feminine and eager to please. This character is termed "China Doll," and appears countless times in popular movies. Examples include Return to Paradise. The movie sets itself in Malaysia where three white male Americans spend their time laying on the beach, sniffing cheap cocaine and sleeping with the local girls. Even though the Asian female actors in this movie were not Asian American and only appeared for a few minutes in the beginning portion of the movie, nevertheless it still conveyed the message that Asian women take pride in sexually serving white men because the men are white and rich. When Asians are constantly depicted as one way in movies, it predominantly effects the way people see Asian Americans.

What Hollywood may have failed to portray about these Asian women is that these Asian women are prostitutes merely trying to support their families by offering sexual services to men whom they see rich. Because they come from poor families and lack education, some Asian women earn their living by these means, and preferring to sleep with a man due to his skin color has nothing to do with it: money talks.

Another example of the China Doll character appeared in The Year of the Dragon. The leading actor, a white police chief who is deemed racist towards Chinese in this movie, tries beyond his best to eliminate violence in New York's Chinatown. He befriends an Asian American female news anchor to get his crack-down-on-Chinatown-violence stories on TV broadcast. The police officer is depicted as arrogant and selfish man, and the Asian American woman dislikes him immensely because he makes derogatory remarks about her being Chinese. She refuses to air his story. However, when the police officer swings by the woman's house, he coerces her into having sex with him, and she submits to him, despite giving him rejection slaps on the face prior to engaging in sexual intercourse. This movie not only showed that Asian American women were passive and indecisive, but it also stressed that Asian American women do want to have sex with white men, even if she says no initially.