Lucy Liu And A Stereotype’s Shadow

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It's so much fun playing Ling, but I have this fear that people are going to run away from me in terror on the streets. They think I'm going to bite their heads off or something. Today we are investigating the Dragon Lady. This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts. I'm your host, Christina Rose. Let's go down the rabbit hole. Hey, witches, bitches, and sluts. Welcome to episode five. This is going to be a research rabbit hole where we look at the studies behind the labels, just like we did in episode three with the dumb blonde and the femme fatale. Except this time we are looking at another dichotomy of labels. But before we get to that, I want to remind you to follow us on Instagram at the.wbs.pod where I post photos, charts, graphs, episode announcements. Once again, that's at the t-e.wbs.pod pod. And now back to the quote I read at the beginning. That's actress Lucy Lu describing something that she worries would happen to her off-screen because of a fictional character she played, Ling Wu. The character was written as sharp, aggressive, genuinely dangerous within the show. What Liu is describing isn't that. It's strangers recognizing her on the street and treating her, a real person who'd done nothing but walk past them as if she personally carried that same danger. In last week's episode, we talked about Anna Mae Wong. And if you listened, you know she got stuck with two labels that sound like opposites: the Dragon Lady, dangerous, seductive, not to be trusted, and the so-called lotus blossom, meek, fragile, disposable. Hollywood gave her exactly those two options and basically nothing else for her entire career. Here's what we didn't get into last week because it's not really about her. These two labels didn't start with her and they didn't end with her either. They're older than her career and they're still running right now. In this episode, we're looking into the labels themselves, where they actually came from, what real published research says about them, and where they've ended up today. And you'll see that this was never really about one woman.

Fu Manchu And The Yellow Peril

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First, let's talk about where these labels came from. Before there was ever a dragon lady on the movie screen, there was a villain on the page. Starting in 1912, an English novelist writing under the name Sax Roomer published a series of books about a criminal mastermind called Dr. Fu Manchu, an evil genius bent on world domination, built almost entirely out of fear about a rising, threatening East. Roomer had a fairly ordinary working class background before he became a writer. Fu Manchu is what made him famous and rich. He wrote 14 of these novels over the next several decades. They sold roughly 20 million copies. And this wasn't some niche book series. It was mainstream bestseller material for most of the 20th century. The novels themselves were explicit about what they were tapping into. Fu Manchu's plots were built around a worldwide conspiracy, Roamer's own books called The Yellow Peril. The idea that Asia as a whole was a coordinated existential threat to the West. That phrase wasn't Roemer's invention either. It was already circulating as a piece of Western political fear well before he started writing, going back to anxieties about Chinese immigration and Japan's rising power in the late 1800s. Roamer just gave that fear a face, a name, and a hit book series. One of Fu Manchu's recurring characters is his daughter. In the books, a cunning, seductive operative doing her father's dirty work. If you recall from last week's episode when Hollywood started adapting these novels into films in the 1930s, that daughter character is where Anime Wong's most famous Dragon Lady role came from directly. Interestingly, this wasn't just a movie that didn't age well. Even in 1932, when MGM adapted these novels into the mask of Fu Manchu, the finished film already drew formal objections from the Chinese government. And the studio actually cut and partially reshot scenes before release because even MGM's own executives thought it went too far. Decades later in 1972, MGM theatrically re-released the film, triggering another round of backlash. The Japanese American Citizens League publicly called it offensive and demeaning to Asian Americans and asked MGM to pull it from circulation entirely. MGM didn't stop circulation, but they quietly trimmed out some of the most criticized material, including a line where Fu Manchu orders his followers to kill the white man. And CBS canceled a planned television broadcast of a different Fu Manchu film that same year rather than risk the same backlash. And it is the edited version that MGM released on VHS in 1992. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge that a white man wrote a fictional book about Chinese people in which he had the fictional Chinese character order his fictional Chinese men to kill the white man. And then this started a stereotype about real Chinese people that real white men started to fear. So even back then, they were creating non-existing things to be mad about. And yeah, I said it. So back to Fu Manchu's fictional daughter. She was renamed slightly from film to film, but the same character was played on screen across four decades by Anna Mae Wong in 1931, by Myrna Loy, a white actress in Yellowface in 1932, by another white actress, Gloria Franklin, also in Yellowface in 1940, and in the 1960s by an actual Chinese actress, Sai Chin, across five films. The industry didn't care which specific woman played the role or even whether she was actually Asian, it cared about the role staying intact. Whoever was standing there, real or in makeup, the label stayed the same shape.

Madame Butterfly And The Lotus Template

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Now, Dragon Lady came from a villain in a book, but Lotus Blossom traces back to something different. A real practice turned into fiction, turned into one of the most performed operas in the world. In 1887, a French naval officer named Pierre Loti or Lotai, L-O-T-I, published a semi-autobiographical novel, Madame Chrysanthem, which I'm assuming in English is Madame Chrysanthemum, describing his own experience taking a so-called temporary wife during a posting in Nagasaki, Japan. A real documented arrangement some foreign sailors made in Japanese port cities at the time. Loti's book romanticized it. Eleven years later, in 1898, American author John Luther Long published a short story called Madam Butterfly, modeled directly on Loti's novel and partly drawn from accounts his own sister gave him after living in Japan herself. Long's story got adapted into a Broadway play by David Belasco in 1900. And composer Giacomo Puccini saw that play in London later that same year, then decided to turn it into an opera. Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered in 1904. It's now one of the most performed operas in the world. The Metropolitan Opera alone has staged it well over 800 times. The plot: an American naval officer marries a young Japanese woman in what amounts to a temporary arrangement, then leaves to marry an American woman back home. She waits for him, devoted, certain he'll return. But he doesn't come back for her, and the story ends in her death. This is the exact template we discussed in our anime wong episode: a devoted woman, a white man, his eventual return to whiteness instead of her, a story built to only end one way. This history shows that it didn't start in Hollywood either. By the time film even existed, this specific stereotype had already been rewritten four times across four works across 17 years and turned into one of the most beloved operas ever staged.

Why “Hostile” And “Nice” Align

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Let's start with ambivalent sexism theory. That framework's whole argument is that hostile treatment and flattering treatment of women aren't opposites. They're two enforcement tools for the same underlying sexism, one delivered as punishment, one delivered as reward. The dragon lady is the hostile version, dangerous, punished, defeated by the story's end. The Lotus Blossom is the benevolent version, praised for being devoted and pleasing, rewarded for staying inside the lines. Then there's the stereotype content model, when people are stereotyped into one of four boxes, depending on how you rate them based on warmth and competence. We already put Dumb Blonde into the high warmth, low competence box, aka the pity box. This is also where Lotus Blossom would be. Devoted and eager to please, reads as warm, fragile and passive, but also low competence. And we saw that femme fatale went into high competence, low warmth. This is also where Dragon Lady would go, aka the envy box. In 2007, Fisk and her colleagues built on this with something called the Bias Map, B-I-A-S, which explains real-world harm, not just perception. They found the envy box produces a specific two-stage pattern. Under stable conditions, people mostly just tolerate or passively work with groups they envy. But the moment conditions feel threatening, economic strain, competition, a sense that status is at risk, that same envy flips into active harm. And that's not just a theory about hurt feelings. The FBI recorded a 77% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes from 2019 to 2020, right as the pandemic began. Reported incidents climbed from 158 to 279 that year and to 746 the year after, before dropping back down. That's a spike tracking almost exactly with the moment of national anxiety and blame. And this isn't just a perception that only shows up under pressure. There's an even longer-running study that shows the same thing. Starting in 1933, Princeton researchers asked students to rate 10 specific ethnic groups and national groups using the same list of traits. And different researchers repeated that exact same exercise with new students in 1951 and then again in 1969. In 2012, Fisk and a research team ran a fourth wave themselves and compared it against all three earlier ones. Across all four generations of students spanning 70 years, Japanese, Chinese, Germans, and Jews kept landing in the same place, rated as competent, but not warm. None of this is unique to Asian women in film. The Dragon Lady and the Lotus Blossom are a racialized version of the same sorting process this podcast keeps finding, episode after episode.

Modern Media Examples That Repeat

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Now let's look at the research directly studying these labels. In 2010, media studies scholar Shoba Rajkapal published a peer-reviewed article specifically tracing this line from Roamers' novels through decades of film and television casting of Asian women. Her core argument, this wasn't just one bad character in one old book series. Reused across nearly a century of media, specifically because it solved a problem for storytellers. It gave them a villain or a victim, without ever requiring the audience to see an Asian woman as a full complicated person. Her article makes the point directly in her own words. Her illustration is a modern one. Lucy Liu's character Ling Wu on the late 1990s TV series Alley McBeal, often shown literally baring her fangs and growling. Lu went on to play Oren Ishii, a sword-wielding assassin and crime boss in Kill Bill a few years later. Around the same time, actress Sandra O spent a decade playing Dr. Christina Yang on Grey's Anatomy, widely praised as a great character, but also in Raj Kapal's own description, brilliant but cold. There's a smaller, sharper illustration in the same article that demonstrates the Lotus Blossom label. In the 2002 action film, The Transporter, actress Shu Qi plays a major character opposite the white lead, passive, in need of rescue from her own father, defined entirely by the white hero's decision to save her. And on top of that submissive template, there's a simple erasure, unlike every white love interest in that same genre. Her character is never given a last name. She's just Lai. The plot's whole arc has the white hero rescuing her from a gangster father in a story that never bothers to name her fully. This one paper actually covers both halves of this episode. Liu, O, and Kill Bill's O-ren Ishii are the Dragon Lady updated. Competent, cold, dangerous, still ultimately defeated or contained by the story around them. Shu Qi's character is the Lotus Blossom updated, passive, in need of saving, not even fully named. The costumes changed, sharp suits and hospital scrubs instead of silk robes, but the split underneath it didn't move at all. Okay,

Measuring Real-World Microaggressions

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so the first paper looked at how Asian Americans get written into fiction. The same story told and retold until it sets expectations. This one asks a harder question. What happens when real people absorb those expectations and start treating real women accordingly? In 2018, a research team led by psychologist Brian Coomb built a validated scientific instrument to measure this directly in real women's lives. It's called the Gendered Racial Microaggression Scale for Asian American Women. They asked over 500 Asian American women a long list of specific, concrete questions about real things they've experienced, such as being expected to just go along with whatever's asked of them, having someone show sexual interest in them specifically because they're Asian, seeing themselves played as the same handful of character types on screen, being told they all look alike, etc. When they looked at how women's answers actually grouped together, four clear patterns came out of it. They called them one a scription of submissiveness, two, Asian fetishism, three, media invalidation, and four, assumption of universal appearance. Ascription of submissiveness is the lotus blossom. Asian fetishism is the dragon lady. Media invalidation is the same casting thread we've been discussing. Women in Coombs survey specifically flagged seeing non-Asian actresses cast as Asian characters, rarely seeing Asian American women in lead roles at all, and watching the same handful of character types get recycled over and over. Assumption of universal appearance connects even more directly in an uncomfortably literal way. What this factor actually measures is the belief that Asian identity comes down to a small, interchangeable set of physical markers, not real individual faces, which is the exact logic that makes yellow face possible at all. Tape a white actress's eyes back, and by that logic, she now looks Asian. Coombs team also found a direct psychological cost in the same paper. Women who scored higher on their gendered microaggression scale, meaning they reported experiencing more of the specific things the survey measured, reported measurably higher rates of depressive symptoms. A link that held up even after ruling out general racism. And general sexism separately. It was specific to having to face both racism and sexism at once. A 2023 review of the paper states the underlying finding as follows: Asian American women are commonly hypersexualized and simultaneously assumed to be passive and docile, both at once, not as a contradiction, but as the two halves of a single coherent trap. Researchers trace the specific pairing back to something they call white sexual imperialism, meaning the pattern isn't really about anything true about the women being studied. It's about a long history of white men treating Asian women as territory to be claimed. One more piece from the same research world because it connects directly to a modern illustration we'll return to later in this episode. A graduate study advised by Coomb himself used the same scale specifically inside the STEM workplace, labs, tech companies, engineering teams, and found Asian American women there reporting a specific recurring experience, being depersonalized as robots by colleagues, precisely because of their competence and accomplishments. So the last paper measured what other people project onto Asian American women. This

When Stereotypes Get Internalized

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one measures something harder to look at. What happens once a woman has taken that projection in and made it her own? In 2024, psychologists Thomas Lee and Lydia Ahn surveyed over 200 Asian American women directly about their dating preferences and experiences. The study measured something specific: how much a woman had internalized race's narratives about her own racial group and how that connected to her actual dating choices. The finding: women who'd internalized more of these narratives showed a stronger preference for dating white men and a weaker one for dating Asian men. Lee and An tie this directly back to the pattern this whole episode has been describing. In their own words, quote, Asian American women face gendered racial microaggressions and model minority stereotypes that produced internalized racism. Since we haven't talked about the model minority myth yet, in short, it's a stereotype that praises Asian Americans as quiet and hardworking, then uses the same praise to demand more of it. The same pattern as episode one's benevolent sexism, but applied to an entire race. It was coined in 1966 by a white male sociologist and used against black Americans specifically, which then resulted in major racial conflicts between Asian and Black Americans that continue to today. Now, back to the paper. Meaning the pattern from paper two didn't stop once a relationship already started. It just kept running on the inside now as much as the outside. It shapes real decisions Asian American women make about their own romantic lives generations after Wong's own career. Three papers, three different methods, critical media analysis, a clinical psychology instrument, and a large-scale dating survey, tracing one continuous arc from the fiction to how that fiction gets projected onto real women by other people to how some of those same women end up carrying it themselves. This isn't one scholar's opinion, it's a pattern multiple independent research traditions keep finding using different tools, arriving at the same conclusion. So,

War, Law, And “Racist Love”

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where do these labels stand today? Two quick names before we get into more research because they show the pattern moving forward even after Wong's career ended. In 1957, Miyoshi Umeki became the first Asian woman to win Best Supporting Actress for Sayonara, a role built on exactly the Lotus Blossom Template. Three years later, in 1960, Nancy Kwan starred in the world of Susie Wong, the same character mold, three decades after Wong's own pee. But the acceptable version gets rewarded, and only for one reason, because it's controllable. In their own words, stated flatly, there is racist hate and there is racist love. Their own example was Fu Man Chu paired with Charlie Chan, the same villain we talked about in the beginning of the episode, matched against Hollywood's acceptable detective version of a Chinese man. And these labels didn't only target the Chinese. It was the Chinese in the Fu Manchu era, but then it became the Japanese and then the Vietnamese. Sociologist Nancy Wang Yen has laid out the process directly in an interview with today. American soldiers serving in multiple wars across Asia were, in real and significant numbers, customers of the local sex trade near their bases. And that direct content built an association in soldiers' own minds between being in Asia and Asian women and paid sex, an association that came home with them into American media. Yen also connects this directly to a much older law, the Page Act of 1875, which restricted Chinese women specifically from immigrating to the U.S. on the presumption that they were likely involved in prostitution. In practice, it functioned to bar nearly all Chinese women from entering the country at all. That's the same assumption showing up decades before Hollywood ever dramatized it. Chinese women treated by default as morally suspect, written directly into federal law. Japan is the clearest case. During World War II, American propaganda about Japan was almost entirely hostile, dehumanizing yellow peril material. Then Japan surrendered in 1945. Nearly 450,000 American troops were stationed there. Between 1947 and 1975, an estimated 45,000 Japanese women immigrated into the U.S. as wives of American servicemen, recast in American media as devoted, submissive housewives. The same pattern repeats less than 20 years later as American involvement in Vietnam escalated. U.S. military bases again created a large sex industry around them, generally called camptowns. Historian Heather Stirr, in her book on gender and the Vietnam War, found American servicemen sorted Vietnamese women into fixed types. Dragon lady, girl next door, or just straightforward sexual object. And here's a name worth mentioning. Tran Lee Sun, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, known to American readers as Madame Nu, was the unofficial First Lady of South Vietnam in the early 1960s. American's own ally in the war, not the enemy. American press called her Dragon Lady directly, by name, throughout the war. Even her 2011 obituary in The Guardian described her as, quote, the archetypal dragon lady of Asian politics. End quote. So I am definitely not defending her moral character. I'm just pointing out that because she is Asian, they went straight to the Dragon Lady label. And it didn't even require her being an enemy at all. Just being a powerful, outspoken Asian woman anywhere near American military and political involvement in the region. And it wasn't really about China, Japan, or Vietnam specifically either. An entire nation went from the enemy to the ideal submissive wife in the American imagination in about two years. Not because the women changed, but because the story America needed to tell about them changed. Once that template exists, it's available for anyone, enemy, ally, a real political figure, or a character in a film.

Geisha Myths And Who Profits

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And Tran wasn't the only real person affected by these labels. There are multiple versions of the Lotus Blossom archetype, including the China doll, the shy Polynesian beauty, and the geisha girl. Geisha literally means person of the arts. Real geisha trained for years in traditional music, dance, and conversation, specifically as performers and hosts, not sex workers. Japan historically had a separate, legally distinct category for that, courtesans called Oran, if I'm pronouncing it right. And the two were never the same profession. Remember the World War II occupation section from earlier in this episode? That's specifically where this got scrambled in the American imagination. American soldiers stationed there applied geisha loosely as a catch-all term for any Japanese woman offering companionship, regardless of her actual profession. And some sex workers, aware of what soldiers were already expecting, adopted the label themselves to draw in customers. Both sides of that confusion fed each other, and the soldiers carried the flattened version home with them. The geisha girl, most Americans picture, isn't really an exaggerated version of a real profession. It's a wartime mislabeling that stuck. And in 2005, the film Memoirs of a Geisha, based on a best-selling novel, was nominated for six Academy Awards. The novel was written by a white American man, the film directed by a white American director, and Chinese actresses were cast to play Japanese characters. Movie critic Noe Thrupkew called the result a white man in geisha face. Some readers reportedly told Thrupkew they liked the book more, specifically because it was written by a white man. Even the book's own reputation for research doesn't hold up the way it's usually credited. Golden based the novel partly on around 100 hours of interview with a real geisha, Miniko Iwasaki, one of the most celebrated geisha in Kyoto, heir a parent to her own geisha house before she retired at 29. She agreed to talk to him only on the condition that she and her family stay anonymous. Golden broke that agreement, naming her directly in the book's acknowledgments. She sued him specifically over how the book had portrayed Geisha, musicians, and performers, as courtesans and sex workers. The case settled out of court in 2003, and Iwasaki then wrote her own memoir, Geisha A Life, specifically to set the record straight on her own terms. A real geisha telling her own story.

Technoorientalism And Robot Fantasies

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Zoom out from Iwasaki's specific case, and there's a broader academic frame underneath everything this episode has covered so far, not just the geisha material. Scholars studying how Western media has historically depicted Asia and the Middle East describe a recurring pattern. The East gets consistently imagined by Western storytellers as exotic, dangerous, and fundamentally different from and inferior to the West, regardless of what's actually true about the people or places being depicted. That framework was named Orientalism by scholar Edward Said in 1978, and it isn't specific to Wong or to Asian women or even to film. It's a centuries-old storytelling habit. The dragon lady and the lotus blossom are one particular gendered expression of it, applied specifically to American film in the 20th century, and even into the imagining of the future. Leslie Bow, a professor of English and Asian American studies, has argued that technoorientalism, a term coined by media scholars in 1995 to describe the West imagining Asia through technology, advanced but cold and mechanical, has a specific gendered shape. Her book on the subject is called Racist Love, the same title deliberately as Chin and Chan's 1972 essay. Across science fiction films and shows, X Machina, Cloud Atlas, Battlestar Galactica, The Series Humans, the artificial human-like characters built to serve and please are disproportionately styled to look like young, attractive Asian women. Bao's own explanation from a talk she gave on the subject. When you start making robots in the form of sexy Asian women, there's another kind of affective or emotional relationship because it invokes the idea of domination. Bow's own work doesn't stop at fiction. She's given academic talks specifically on real-world Asian fetish, sexual and romantic stereotyping of Asian women off-screen entirely, arguing fetishization looks like admiration from the outside, but it's still a story about control. Her description matches the benevolent sexism theory exactly. And remember the STEM robots finding from the second research paper we talked about? That's the same exact pattern in the workplace instead of the bedroom. Competent enough to be valuable, dehumanized specifically because of it. And the robot pattern Bao describes isn't only theoretical. In 2017, it showed up directly in one of that year's biggest releases. Paramount released a live action version of Ghost in the Shell, casting Scarlett Johansson as Major Matoko Kusanagi, a cybernetically enhanced Japanese character. Exactly the kind of artificial human-like figure Bao's research is describing, not a hypothetical example. And it revived the specific casting question. This episode already traced back to the Fu Manchu series at the very start. Johansen's response was, I certainly would never presume to play another race of a person. Diversity is important in Hollywood, and I would never want to feel like I was playing a character that was offensive. Also, having a franchise with a female protagonist driving it is such a rare opportunity. Now, before I go on, I want to say that I am a huge fan of Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow. And as I explained in episode one, I am focusing on the mechanisms that allow these labels to continue. I am not blaming any one person for anything. That said, her response is very similar to the logic used to defend Louise Rayner's casting over Wong's in the Good Earth decades earlier. The opportunity's rarity used to justify giving it to someone else without. Addressing that the same rarity would have meant even more if it had actually gone to an Asian actress. And this is also part of why I wanted to make this podcast to educate. And one other thing I want to educate people on is that when you are responding to accusations about racism, don't make it about you. Quote, I would never want to feel like I was playing a character that was offensive. Centers yourself and your feelings over the people that were offended. This episode already showed you what happens when Asians have no control over their own stories. Anna Mae Wong's own Fu Manchu derived roles had no Asian novelist, no Asian screenwriter, no Asian anywhere near the production. A studio system with no Asian creative input at any level, and the label is at its most brutal. An

Representation Rises With Creative Control

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actual villain with actual danger. From there, if you look at four more examples across the next 60 years in order, a clear pattern shows up. Not a steady climb, but something that tracks control directly, rising and falling with it. The more creative control Asian Americans had over telling their own stories, the more the label softened or disappeared. The less control, the more it came back. The next film we're looking at is 1961's Flower Drum Song. It was directed by Henry Coster, who was German born and adapted for the screen by a non-Asian screenwriter. But this time there was an Asian creative voice somewhere in the chain. C.Y. Lee, the Chinese American novelist the story was based on. That's the film that split its two female leads directly down the Dragon Lady Lotus Blossom line. Virtuous devoted May Lee against sexualized independent Linda Lau. Now it's worth being precise about how far that split had actually softened with just that much Asian involvement. Neither woman ends up with a white man. May Lee marries Sammy. Linda marries Ta, both Chinese American. Nobody dies, nobody gets punished or abandoned. The structure is still fully there, doing its usual work of sorting the virtuous woman from the sexualized one. But the most brutal consequences the labels used to carry going back to Fu Manchu are gone. Partial control, even just a novelist with no power over the film itself, already changed something. Now jump to 1993. The Joy Luck Club sits at the opposite end of the flower drum song on both counts. Full creative control instead of partial, and the binary fully absent instead of just softened. Director Wayne Wang, born in Hong Kong, sought the project out himself, approaching novelist Amy Tan directly about adapting her book. Tan co-wrote the screenplay and co-produced the film alongside him. Full creative control at every level that matters, and there's no dragon lady, no lotus blossom anywhere in the film. No woman coded as a dangerous threat, no devoted woman abandoned by a white man for someone of his own kind. While the story does draw criticism for how it portrays some of its Asian male characters, on the specific binary this episode is tracing, though, full control and the binary simply wasn't there. And now here's proof that this isn't just time marching forward and things naturally getting better. Five years later in 1998, Ling Wu showed up on Allie McBeal, the character referenced by Lucy Liu in this episode's opening quote. Creator David E. Kelly wrote her entirely himself, specifically for Lucy Liu, with no Asian writer anywhere near the character. Zero creative control, and the label came back at close to full intensity. Sharp, aggressive, entrance music borrowed from the wicked witch of the West. Progress isn't something that only moves forward as the years pass. It's tied directly to who's holding the pen in that specific room that specific year. And in this case, the room went backward. And almost 20 years later, 2017's Ghost in the Shell, directed by Rupert Sanders, a British director with no Asian creative control anywhere near the production, brought back Yellow Face. And only one year later, in 2018, the same test comes out the other way again, at real commercial scale, though this time for a different reason than Joy Luck Club. Crazy Rich Asians, based on a novel by Kevin Kwan and directed by John Chu, both Asian, doesn't route Rachel Chu's romance through a white man at all. Nick Young is Singaporean. Where Joy Luck Club avoided the Lotus Blossom specific tragic structure, even with white men present in the story, crazy rich Asian sidesteps the question entirely. There is no white love interest for the label to attach to in the first place. Full creative control, and like Joy Lutt Club 25 years earlier, the whole binary wasn't part of the story. And this time it was in one of the biggest box office hits of the decade. Again, I must note that this film drew separate real criticism for colorism and sidelining South and Southeast Asian characters. Progress on one front isn't the same as the problem being solved everywhere at once. And the one-year gap between Ghost in the Shell and this film says it plainly. This was never about how far into the future we'd gotten. It was about who was in the room. And the research backs up what these examples show individually.

What Changes When We Hold The Pen

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Researchers at USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, including Nancy Wang Yen, the same sociologist already quoted earlier, studied this relationship systematically across 1,300 top-grossing films. Those with API, and API stands for Asian Pacific Islander, directors and casting directors put significantly more API actors into real named speaking roles. Yen's own assessment of the industry's progress, in her words, unfortunately, when representation looks like tokenism, Hollywood is doing the bare minimum for inclusion. This through line across almost ninety years isn't time passing, it's control. The label doesn't fade on its own gradually as attitudes improve. It recedes specifically and only where Asian American creators actually hold the pen. And it comes right back the moment they don't, no matter what year it is. And now I'll wrap up with a quote by Constance Wu that demonstrates the change when Asian American women get more control. I hope Asian American kids watch Crazy Rich Asians and realize that they can be the heroes of their own stories. This has been A Witch's Bitches and Sluts Research Rabbit Hole. Thanks for listening. I'm Christina Rose, and I'll see you next week when we look at the life of Patty McDaniel, aka Manny.