A case of literary yellowface makes us reconsider how we perceive names

Between Mainstream and Margin: Western conceptions of masculinity hold Asian men back in the dating market

Last Saturday night, I came across a Yik Yak post on the Bowdoin feed that read “White guys with yellow fever, this ain’t the school for you. please leave some asian girls for the poor asian guys here.” Less than 24 hours later, the post had been removed.
Aside from the troubling sentiment expressed by the user that Asian women (or any women for that matter) belong in some way to Asian men, I was interested in what the post might reveal at large about the state of Asian masculinity in America. In many ways, interracial dating (or hook ups) can provide an interesting framework for understanding how Asian men may measure their masculinity against western standards of beauty and manliness.
At center stage is the observation that Asian women have significantly higher rates of interracial marriage than Asian men. An analysis by the Pew Research Center found that among newlyweds in 2013, “37 percent of Asian women married someone who was not Asian, while 16 percent of Asian men married outside of their race.” The observation raises the question, “Why the discrepancy?” Perhaps for the Yik Yak user, a follow-up question might be ,“why are so many Asian women not choosing to be with Asian men?”
Of course, intimate relationships are highly complex and personal, and no one explanation is likely to fully encapsulate the experiences of an entire racial group. But here’s a start: In America, Asians as a group are perceived to be more feminine than whites and blacks. Research done by Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School, has found that associations of racial and gender stereotypes overlap in meaningful ways. In one study, participants who were asked to assign the femininity or masculinity of certain traits to Asians, whites and blacks consistently associated Asians as the least masculine.
The idea that Asians are perceived to be the least masculine has significant implications in the dating market. Given a heterosexual dating market where men generally prefer women who are feminine and women like men who are masculine, Galinsky showed that “the more a man valued femininity the more likely he was attracted to an Asian woman.” It also worked the other way: Women who valued traditional western norms of masculinity more demonstrated lower preferences for Asian men.
Whether by racial stereotypes or personal preferences, it seems fairly clear that Asian men get short-changed in the dating market. In some cases, western conventions of beauty and masculinity become internalized by Asian men, resulting in thought pieces on how to become more masculine. In a Thought Catalog post titled “How To Survive Being an Asian Male,” the author Gavin McInnes provides tips such as growing out your facial hair or getting a tattoo. And in a feature for New York Magazine, author Wesley Yang writes about the growing popularity of boot camps on attraction for Asian men run by JT Tran, also known as The Asian Playboy.
While in principle I disagree with the approaches of McInnes and Yang to define Asian masculinity within notions of western masculinity, I can see how in practice the dating realities of being an Asian man can sometimes be difficult. In a now-retracted post, Details magazine ran a full-page feature in its anthropology section titled “Gay or Asian?” that sought to draw attention to the similarities between stereotypes of gay men and Asian men. “Whether you’re into shrimp balls or shaved balls, entering the dragon requires imperial taste. So choke up on your chopsticks, and make sure your labels are showing.... A sharp eye will always take home the plumpest eel,” the introduction of the post read.
With satire like that, it’s no surprise that Tran has been invited to speak and share his insights at campuses including Yale, University of Chicago and the Wharton School of Business. Asian men, particularly young Asian men, are living the realities of a dating market that has decidedly turned its back on them.
To be clear, in no way am I supporting using the misogynistic practices of JT Tran’s boot camp to attract women. But I also don’t think that the solution is as easy as telling Asian men to “just be yourself,” or be your own version of masculinity. The impetus for changing how we understand masculinity should not fall solely on Asian men. But until that societal change does occur, it’ll take more than a little self-confidence for me to just be myself.

Between Mainstream and Margin

A case of literary yellowface makes us reconsider how we perceive names

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

September 30, 2015

When Joanne Rowling wrote her first book in the "Harry Potter" series, her publisher suggested she use a gender-neutral pen name (J.K. Rowling) to avoid putting off young male readers. Two decades later, when Rowling switched genres and wrote "The Cuckoo's Calling," she again opted for a pen name (Robert Galbraith), this time to avoid the hype and expectations that come with being one of the world’s best-known writers.

There is a long history of writers using pseudonyms, but where—if at all—is the line drawn between disguise and deception?

In early September, the editors of "The Best American Poetry," a prestigious anthology of contemporary American poetry, released their annual volume of best poems. Outside of literary circles, the release of a new edition typically receives little attention. But this year’s publication proved particularly controversial. The reason? One of the poems, “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve,” was revealed to be by a white poet named Michael Derrick Hudson who had published under the Chinese-sounding pseudonym of Yi-Fen Chou.

The reaction was swift and mostly critical. Ken Chen, executive director of the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, called the incident a blatant example of yellowface and accused Hudson of taking away one of the few literary opportunities available to Asian Americans. Chen explained that while nearly 70 percent of New York City residents are non-white, only 5 percent of writers reviewed by The New York Times are people of color.

Aside from the troubling racial disparities in the literary industry, what was most telling to me about the incident was how the editor of "The Best American Poetry 2015" responded. In a blog post, editor and noted Native American poet Sherman Alexie wrote that despite the Chinese-sounding name of the author, the poem “didn’t contain any overt or covert Chinese influences or identity...by referencing Adam and Eve, Poseidon, the Roman Coliseum, and Jesus, I’d argue that the poem is inherently obsessed with European culture.”

In short, Alexie was fascinated by the cross-cultural dimensions of a supposed Chinese American poet who wrote about European and Christian imagery. As The New Yorker's Hua Hsu observes, perhaps it was refreshing for Alexie to read something from a presumably Chinese writer that had nothing to do with being Chinese. It’s also possible that Hudson knew this and played into Alexie’s fascination by using a distinctly foreign-sounding name like Yi-Fen Chou, instead of a more Americanized Asian name like Ken Chen. Regardless of the intent, Hudson’s use of an “authentic” name like Yi-Fen Chou privileged him the disturbing fantasy of taking on the guise of the other.

Now, surely it would have looked bad if it appeared that Alexie backtracked and removed the poem on the sole basis of the author’s revealed identity. But we should also wonder what it means when a white person can perform literary yellowface and effectively get rewarded for it.

Alexie was in a bind, and in order to halt accusations of any editorial bias—namely, showing a preference for writers of color—he made the binary claim that he chose the poem because of the quality of its content rather than the skin color of its author. It’s a tiring and reductive argument to make, in part because we often do implicitly consider a person’s race when we make judgments on his work. But perhaps Alexie was thinking of race on a more superficial level when he says he wondered about the poem as “the life story of a Chinese American poet.” If that is true, should we think that differences between the “life story” of an Asian and white man can simply be boiled down to his name?

Hudson certainly seems to think so. In fact, even before "The Best American Poetry" incident, he claimed to experience greater publishing success for his poems using his Chinese-sounding pseudonym than when he used his actual white-sounding name. Hudson's Orientalist profiteering could potentially implant the same idea in the minds of struggling writers looking for a quick fix. (I would, however, like to stop and point out the comical image of literary publishers fighting among themselves to fill their book shelves with Asian American authors.)

Hudson is surely right about one thing: in a world far from a post-racial state, seemingly superficial differences like our names continue to affect how we are perceived and treated in meaningful ways. But these differences are built on the assumption that they are real, and when we try to manipulate or game the system to our advantage, we undermine the stories and experiences of those for whom race has been a source of marginalization.

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