“That’s not nice,” Irene said. “I know, but she drives me nuts,” Kay said. “At first I thought it was the
language barrier, but it turns out she’s the worst stereotype of Asian female –meek and voiceless.”
Nora and Sophie nodded. “She’s Japanese,” Irene said. “If she was raised that way-“
“The other Japanese girls aren’t like her.” “Well, if that’s her nature-“
“Mom, imagine if that was our nature. Wouldn’t you have raised us to speak up?” Fei, 2010 : 174
This part showed how Kay did not like Tomoko because she was the perfect portrait of Western people’s point of view and stereotype toward Asian women:
meek, weak, and voiceless. Even when her mother, Irene, tried to defend the girl by saying that maybe she was raised that way, Kay replied by saying the other
Japanese are not like her. Kay added her reply by remembering her mother that Irene educated them to speak up and not become “voiceless and meek” like
Tomoko. By having this kind of point of view, Kay made herself peculiar in the society she lived in. While the society stereotyped her to become a silent,
voiceless and obedient woman like Tomoko, Kay acted the other way around, willing to speak and defend herself against the stereotype that the White people
forced onto her. Her background and her understanding of Orientalism made Kay understand fully that all of those stereotypes are only an “image of Others”, “a
false construction of Western people that has no truth about Asians” Fei, 2010 : 213.
Kay’s fighting, however, became harder because media helped the stereotypes to spread. In addition, this made the Whites judge Chinese or Asian
people based on what they see on media and not bother checking whether the stereotypes were true or not. As Fei notes
In college, her roommate asking where she was from, originally, then rhapsodizing about Thai food; a floormate wanting to consult her on feng
shui; a society throwing a “Geisha and Concubines” party, and when she expressed consternation over the girls’ getups –satin bursting at the seams,
eyes drawn slanted, hair pinned with chopsticks –being told it was an annual tradition, and “ironic.” Withdrawing, becoming the quiet Asian girl
in seminars, spending weekend night in library, until she learned, in sociology, how to interpret such incidents in the context of Orientalism –
the dominant discourse of an exoticized, essentialized “East” in the superior, modern “West” Fei, 2010 : 213
In college, Kay needed to face her friends who expected her to become a Chinese that they had seen in the media movie, magazine. They expected Kay to have a
kind of concubine-like family, knows kung-fu and feng shui. They also failed to acknowledge her as Chinese and treat her like other Asian people such as Thai,
Japanese and Koreans, a sign that the Whites have ignored the differences between Asian races. At first, Kay did not understand the reason behind all of this.
However, soon after she studied and read a lot, she found the main reason is that her American friends believe in false-impression about Chinese people in media.
They kept this false-impression and believed it as a true expectation and way of life of the real Chinese people. They did not burden themselves by researching the
truth and just blindly believed on those false-impression called stereotypes. In other words, they simply believed media’s steretoypes about Chinese and
overgeneralized and projected to Chinese people in the real world. Having been taught to speak and stand for herself, Kay then decides to fight. In the beginning,
she fought by studying the concept of Orientalism so that she had sufficient information about what she was facing. After that, she joined Asian-American
organizations and started to make petitions against events that degrades Chinese identity e.g. Geisha and Concubine party. Her efforts succeeded in making some
of the stereotypical events like Geisha and Concubine party in her college stop. However, she still failed to eradicate the “Orientalism” stereotypes among Whites
as these stereotypes have rooted for years. This way of thinking seeing Chinese-American inferior to White-
Americans was also considered as a stereotype due to its match with Feagin’s theory. In addition, Said’s theory of Orientalism also needed to be shown as well
in this case because it provides the reason behind this way of thinking. As stated before, this way of thinking in seeing Chinese-American as inferior is a
stereotype. Considering that the White-Americans were higher than the Chinese- Americans supports Kitano’s definition of overgeneralization beyond existing
evidence knowledge and identification toward certain races. There was no solitary proof that the position of the Chinese-Americans were lower than the White-
Americans. This false way of thinking was generated by Western people’s false image toward Easterners, which was incorporated in Said’s Orientalism.
Orientalism notes that the Westerners White-Americans thought themselves to be superior toward the Easterners Chinese, or mainly Asian-Americans. The
Easterners were seen as inferior, voiceless, and obedient Fei, 2010: 174, 213.
Therefore, as long as the Orientalism way of thinking existed, this way of thinking would persist.
C. Kay’s Reaction toward the Stereotypes to Esablish Her Racial Identity
This part analyzes Kay’s reaction toward the stereotypes that she faced in order to find her racial identity. For this part, Kitano’s theory about racial identity
will be used in order to relate Kay’s reaction toward the stereotype to establish her personal identity. According to Kitano, identity is “how an individual perceives
and feels about self remains that serves as the end result of a process of socialization that includes the family, the community, the ethnic group, and the
society” Kitano, 1985:82. Therefore, identity is how people see themselves to belong to a certain group family, races, society. In this research, the one
analyzed is racial identity; how Kay perceived to which race she belonged. Kay’s case was unique due to her shift of racial identity in the latter part as a reaction
toward the stereotypes addressed to her. In order to make the analysis more readable, the writer divided Kay’s reactions toward the stereotypes to find her
racial identity into three categories of stages: rejection and fighting, questioning identity, and finally embracing.
1. Rejection and Fighting
Since she went to school, Kay knew that there was something wrong in her society in seeing her differently from other children although at that time she did
not know the reason yet. She finally understood the background and reason when she was in college, as Fei notes
…Withdrawing, becoming the quiet Asian girl in seminars, spending weekend nights in the library, until she learned, in sociology, how to
interpret such incidents in the context of Orientalism –the dominant discourse of an exoticized, essentialized “East” in the superior, modern
“West” She researched the psychological effects of racism, finding studies that
showed the more subtle it was, the more damaging; and racism these days was nothing if not subtle, mostly unintentional, and ubiquitous. She
surveyed the other Asian students and found a pattern of being caught between impossible choices –either obligingly answering the same
questions about birthplace and food and quaint customs, or being invisible, or being the hostile person of color in the room; seeking social comfort in
Asian cliques and risking the charge of being a typical Asian, or accepting honorary white status and risking the charge of self-loathing; a general
sense of not belonging, even as they felt they had no right to complain. After all, they weren’t being denied jobs or mortgages, only space to exist
as they were Fei, 2010 : 213-214. This part shows Kay’s enlightenment and realization in her study to discover why
Chinese people were stereotyped in the first place. It was because the Orientalism point of view, a thought that the Westerners are superior than the Easterners,
which still exists in white people’s mind. Because of this point of view, the Chinese people, or particularly Asian, had been trapped in “impossible choices.”
They can be normal persons, but need to repeatedly be asked about their origin and custom or being invisible. So according to Kay, Chinese people have several
choices regarding their way of life. First, they can be hostile to the people who treat them differently with the consequences that White people will dislike them
and even create a further stereotype about them. Second, the Chinese can have comfort and security by joining their friends in Asian cliques; however, White
people would consider them being typical Asian that made the stereotypes persist.
The last choice was that they could accept the “white status” as Americans in the consequences of feeling not belonging because they in fact are not White
Americans and thus made the Western society not giving them “space to exist as they were.” It is clear by this fact that all the choices brought uncomfortable
consequences toward the Chinese-American people like Kay. That was why Kay decided to fight.
The way Kay fought the Western society was not by force or manpower, both things she did not have. She fought by using her intelligence, something that
she is very good at. At first, she joined the Asian Student Club and reformed it by showing Asian-American or purely Asian movies and not stereotypical ones that
the Western people had created Fei, 2010 : 214. In addition, she also petitioned to put a stop against any stereotypical events like Geisha and Concubines. She
then joined the Asian American Cultural awareness project Fei, 2010 : 214. Here, she did many greater things. With a mission to change Western people’s
view toward Asians, she wrote many letters and organized boycotts and petitions to make a change in the white people’s point of view. These efforts proved to be
almost pointless and made her rarely watch TV or read the newspaper without feeling angry, paranoid, or defeated Fei, 2010 : 215. She then comforted herself
by saying that “maybe they just need to wait,” which means that she was through with her way of convincing them. She suggested to comfort herself and that she
just needed to wait for those people to change their way of thinking.
A new chapter began when Kay’s director asked her to start a mentorship program in Chinatown. Having given up her struggle to convince White people
and feeling a fresh start, she decided to teach people in Chinatown about Chinese- American history so that they could defend themselves against stereotypes and
questions of origins from the Western people. Her teaching mainly focused on how the Chinese people helped the Americans in the past and therefore they have
the right to be called Americans. However, unique things happened here, causing a big turning point for Kay. When she taught fifth-graders in Chinatown about
their history in America, a child asked her “Where are you from?” When she answered that she, just like people in Chinatown, were Americans, the child that
questioned her answered “But I come from China. Fresh from the boat. Where do you come from?” When Kay still insisted that she is American by answering that
she is from Queens, the child fell into a laugh of “urgent Chinese.” Soon, knowing what happened, the whole class laughed and fell into Chinese which Kay did not
really understand the reason at that time. She had no idea what was funny and guessed that perhaps the reason was that although she has the same physical
features like those children, she was unlike them: Kay expected to be treated like any other American Fei, 2010 : 217. Kay’s persistence was due to her mother,
Irene, who brought her up as an American citizen and never told Kay about their history or taught her Mandarin so that Kay could blend in easily with the Western
society. This act made Kay believe that she is an American despite what other people and society said otherwise. Due to this fact, after the event with the boy,
over the next month Kay refined her curriculum to be better so that she could teach the boy and their friends better. However, the boy never spoke up again to
Kay. She then understood that through teaching she became more ignorant toward the fact that the boy –and perhaps the whole class- already chose Chinese as their
identity, something that she was not able to do due to her insistence that she is an American. This experience, her curiosity on why Chinese people really held on to
their Chinese identity and her resolution to find her own history urged her to make her decision to take a scholarship to China, where a new chapter of her life started.
China became a new chapter in Kay’s life. In China, she saw many things that are different from America. The culture, the way of thinking, the people, and
the places were different from what she thought she knew her whole life. At first, her motivation was to find out what made the Chinese people so proud of their
identity even when they have moved to another place like America. Therefore, she still brought her idealism that she is American. However, things started to change
day by day she lived in China. In China, she had the same question, as if the American had asked her, from Chinese people “Where are you from?” The answer
that satisfied them also is the same: China even though Kay still insisted otherwise at that time Fei, 2010: 68. Living in China also made her change her
way of thinking over things. When she was still in America, she had a common sense shared among Asian-American activists that they were protecting something
endangered Chinese people against something dangerous American stereotypes. However, as she lived in China, which consists of more than one
