THE ORIENTAL ACHE

Trapped in this space between hypersexualization and hyposexualization, I suppose we should keep taking Orientalism with a grain of salt.

Shibari-tied under the rough rope cuffs of succulent Otherness, Eastern people have been stuffed to the teeth with stereotypes. They’ve been painted with the broad strokes of a model minority and accused of being lovely only for their Orientality. For this, our humanity suffers.

As defined by postcolonialism’s father, theorist Edward Said, Orientalism is a critical concept describing the West’s portrayal of the East, or the Orient, as something strange, generalized, and even contemptible. Think gilded dragons and chopsticks, and all the spiced hallmarks of what’s associated with Asian culture. These caricatures from the West miss the mark entirely, and at the expense of breeding imperialist misinformation; our names have become pockmarked with ideas and commonalities that blur the lines between borders, and without borders, we have no idea where home begins and ends.

I was born to a red-white-and-blue dad from West Virginia and a travel-heavy Thai mom. They met when she was 25 and he was 46, and they were married two years later. My parents were a case of love at first sight despite never seeing eye to eye, and I blame it on fate’s cruelty. Why design a pair of lovers who were never meant to be? He fit any southeast Asian jungle woman’s archetype of princely Western perfection––blond with blue eyes and a straight, pointed nose, which stood tall and peaked just like the mountains he’d rolled down from. In Thailand, my dad was what every woman hoped to marry. He smelled like caucasity and spoke like America, and he looked like an escape. Meanwhile, my mom seemed the ideal “exotic” wife for a retired white man: her almond-shaped eyes and lightly tanned skin gave him a conversation starter at parties. He could always count on her elastic genes of coconut oil and palm sugar to keep her looking young.

But just as the universe favors chaos, so did their marriage, and it went down in blood and tears. At his best, my dad treated my mom like a show piece. He’d carry pictures of her in his wallet or on his phone: “My wife is from Thailand. See?” He’d tell her not to wear dark makeup around her eyes, he wouldn’t allow her to wear leggings in public, and her tattoos had to stay hidden; she became something of a show-and-tell, and he flouted her as his pretty little Thing. But, at his worst, he treated her like his wife. My mom stopped loving him a few years after I was born––she was too smart to enjoy complete subservience, and by the time I was four, his manic tendencies started with episodes of possessive violence. He started demanding her body and she became too afraid to deny him; in those moments, he swore he owned her. They inevitably separated many years later, after a climax night of bruise marks and beer cans. We haven’t lived with him since.

Their dynamic illustrates the tragic flaws inherent in surface-level love, and the consequences of rushing intimacy can be harsh. It represents how opposites attract, but also how such different people can want each other for equally different reasons––one wanted the other because she thought he seemed powerful enough to help her, and the other one was tantalized by curiosity.

The East has a looking glass for the West, too, but it’s a kinder one; it’s full of whiteness and wealth and envy. My mom saw my dad through this lens and loved him for his decorated level of humanity. She saw him as powerful, and she thought it’d be contagious. I feel sure my dad loved my mom in a sense, and he wasn’t entirely evil: he kissed her goodbye in the mornings up until he lost his mind, and he took care of the children while she was at work. But he was tainted with old-fashioned ideas of masculine dominance, and he was fascinated with my mom’s “otherliness” to the point of obsession. These colonizer traits, along with a blossoming personality disorder, eventually pinned my mother underneath his white grip of steel. Their crooked arrangement disavowed any sort of equality, but in order to hold a budding nuclear family together, she endured it for 18 years.

Through these Orientalist set of eyes, it’s apparent how Eastern bodies are sexualized to the point of inhumanity. They’re deliciously distorted until people cease to see them as entities to be partnered with, but rather, as something fun and observable. In this zoo of fetishization, I’ve seen a lot of things from grody little boys: “Damn, gimme some of that spice 😛 ” and “I’d eat your fried rice ;)” among the worst of them, and their words still plague my bones. To the latter, I’d responded, “My fried rice??” To which he said, “Yea, your Asian right?”

Jesus. 

But in sophomore year of high school, I found myself sitting at a table full of OK friends during lunch hour. As it goes, the conversation careened towards sex. One guy spoke up boisterously, laughing, and said, “Bro, like, I can’t imagine Asian people having sex.” And then he started cracking up. And then everyone else started cracking up. “No, you’re so right, me neither, ha, what the fuck?” Then they all turned to me, the resident Asian (and half of one, at that), and started laughing even harder. “Right?” They said it like they were expecting an explanation. “Yeah, like I really can’t picture it.” They said it like I was supposed to agree.

I was shocked into silence, set still under the weight of a heavy pit in my stomach. I felt cold and nauseous. I felt confused and angry. In this time-space continuum of an existential crisis going down at a cafeteria table, I chose to laugh along because I didn’t understand the offense I’d taken so instinctually. It was as if a man had groped me under my skirt and then disgustedly pulled his hand away; I’m the victim, but why do I feel embarrassedly gross? 

Hours later, alone in thought, I understood why I’d felt so dirty and indignant: sex is a significant expression of humanity. Sex happens when you acknowledge someone else’s body as a beautiful, autonomous thing, and you want to celebrate it with your own. It’s such a specially tender and human way to love each other physically. Our transmission of affection is tuned by kisses and deep, emotional sentiment, and it’s something our ancestors have (obviously) been doing with each other since the beginning of time. So, when this clown of a 15-year-old boy decrees he can’t see Asian people having sex, that’s not really what he’s saying. He’s saying that he can’t see Asian people as people. He’s saying they lack the purely human desire to crave skin on skin, just as any person with a body could. He’s not giving them the credit to love and want each other, and when emotions of this type are precisely what categorize us as sentient, living beings, it feels like a big Fuck You. Or, I guess, an anti-fuck you.

In the wake of my parents’ separation, my mom stepped forward with impossible strength. She worked weekdays from nine to five; she got home and cooked the kids dinner every night; and she even loved me so fiercely that she sent me to Brown. The degree she worked hard to earn in this foreign country led to a decent tech job, and she started expressing herself without fear. Unrestrained by a man who thought he owned her, my mom started wearing eyeliner and eyeshadow again, and she taught me to always trust myself first. Because of her constant homesickness, my brother and I are fluent in Thai, and the three of us usually fly to her hometown summerly to see our family. There, in my grandmother’s oceanside house of spice, I see my mom in her natural habitat. I see her cooking in the kitchen, and she’s rejoicing because she’s using her own flavors and he didn’t order her to be there. I see her sitting on the floor, even when the couch is unoccupied, just because he used to say it was a filthy thing to do. She is terribly vulnerable but twice as strong, and in this way, she has become my very definition of humanity. 

So, trapped in this space between hypersexualization and hyposexualization, I suppose we should keep taking Orientalism with a grain of salt. While helpful in bridging the insurmountable cultural divide between continents, Orientalism is awfully rudimentary in its portrayal of the East. It’s a crooked portrait of what they think we are, and it’s inhumanely Othering––my parents’ separation and the desexualization from my classmates are the repercussions. But the hands of culture have raised us, given us a home, and filled us to the brim with humanity. Our stories and strength highlight how dynamic Asian people are, and the Oriental lens refracts them into static aliens. I’ve watched this postcolonial kaleidoscope shatter at the pitch of my parents’ screams, and, once in pieces, its glass is only reflective. The East doesn’t need to be reimagined in order to be understood; really, all you have to do is look in the mirror.

AUTHOR: Jana Kelly is in her first year at Brown. Jana loves the sun and the color green, and she's probably cold right now.

ARTIST: Angie Kang is in her final year of school. For breakfast, she likes both oranges and hardboiled eggs, but only really enjoys peeling the latter. Find more of her work here.