There’s a new book out called The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient by business journalist Sheridan Prasso, who was based in different Asian cities for over fifteen years (this, of course, makes her an expert). Clearly aimed at a Western (read Caucasian) audience, the book claims to debunk the persistent stereotypes about the Orient, particularly about its women. According to an L.A. Times review, the book is divided into two sections:

Wait! Hold on, you mean to tell me that Asian women are human beings! Why didn’t anyone tell me this before? I haven’t read the book, so I’m not offering my own review. It may very well be a nuanced analysis of the ways fantasies of the exoticized East play out in a variety of social arenas. But I’m skeptical, and what makes me skeptical is the discourse surrounding the book—the way it’s being marketed, summarized, reviewed, blurbed and praised. When I first heard about the book, I thought, is it really, in this day and age, an argument to point out that Asian women aren’t really submissive sex kittens existing solely for the pleasure of Western men or manipulative and heartless dragon ladies who will eat their mates after sex?! Depressingly enough, people find the book “provocative” and “incisive” in the way it challenges these powerful fantasies of Asian women. Perhaps it’s the West’s lack of history and sense of the past (how’s that for stereotyping?) that makes it necessary to remind them periodically that Asian women really aren’t like that. But what’s so exciting about that news? How’s that gonna sell books? The real titillation, it seems to me, is in indulging in “our fantasies of the exotic orient” in the very act (the guise?) of giving up such ideas. Notice how the title itself (not to mention the cover image of a geisha) simply offers up the "Asian Mystique" with no sign of a critical stance. The book itself serves as a fetish for simultaneously confirming and denying one’s attachment to these fantasies, one’s belief in their reality. Need proof? The language of the reviews and promos mimics the rhetorical structure of the book itself—articulating in detail the contours of the fantasized Asian woman, only to reveal the illusory nature of those images. Here’s the book description provided on Amazon, almost identical to the L.A. Times summary cited above: It’s the language of revelation that’s key here, the penetrating scopic drive that aims to rip the blinders from Western eyes, to clear the foggy mists of illusion. The rhetoric effects a cultural striptease in which the Asian woman stands naked in her realness before the Western reader’s “unclouded deeroticized eyes” (Does that phrase even make sense? Is it the gazer or the gazed that needs deeroticizing?). But this very act of frenzied revealing—the fascination of the “reality tour” that offers a sense of intimacy with the women portrayed—repeats the structure of desire it claims to dispel. A blurb from Booklist, also on Amazon, makes clear how even stark reality can share in the eroticized fascination that is the book’s ostensible object of critique: Thankfully, (the writer implies) Prasso doesn’t let her scolding get in the way of providing the mise en scene for fantasies of rescue and “red hot” encounters. If the mystery, the “mystique,” weren’t so powerful, would the desire to know, to possess the truth of Asian women be as keen? The terms of discussion (reality vs illusion, truth vs fantasy) set up a false binary, false because the desire to know is in fact an extension, not a countering, of these persistent fantasies, which are based on yet another seemingly intractable binarism: the absolute difference of East and West. L.A. Times reviewer Seth Faison observes, “The cultural divide between East and West is so vast, even in these days of easy travel and instant access, that people on either side often want to believe remarkably inaccurate notions about those on the other,” and writes in conclusion: “In the end, looking at a deeply foreign culture is like looking at the future — it brings out our hopes and our fears and we imagine scenarios on either extreme. Yet the reality that eventually unfolds is inevitably more muddled, more human — and more interesting — than one ever imagines.” To be shown again and again that Asian women are in fact “fully dimensional human beings” is to be reminded of the distance that must be traveled to arrive at that revelation; that revelation can only be revelatory, surprising, compelling, provocative if one assumes from the get-go the impossibility of bridging such vast divides, such deep foreignness. Only in this way can the complex realities of a cultural other exceed one’s wildest imaginings and be as uncharted and unpredictable as one’s future. Not to pick on Mr. Faison too much, nor to oversimplify the complex issues involved in East-West cultural encounters and the cultural imaginaries that shape them. Certainly, as many Asians and Asian Americans believe in the incommensurable differences between East and West as do Westerners (all these terms, of course, are highly problematic in their essentializing tendencies). It’s a mutually constitutive process of mystification, as Faison himself points out. But what I want to emphasize is how inadequate (or more cynically, how disingenuous) this gesture of debunking is as a form of cultural critique; rather, it works to confirm and perpetuate the system of representation that produces “Asian women” as first and foremost a sexualized other. To illustrate this point with another example (and give this discussion one last creepy turn in the process): back on the Amazon site for Prasso’s book, there’s the convenient “customers who bought this book also bought” list, on which appears the title How to Attract Asian Women by Ming Tan (I kid you not). The subtitle: An Asian Woman Reveals It ALL. If Prasso’s book aims to be more high-minded, in the end it seems no less opportunistic than Tan’s. Positioning themselves as brokers of cross-cultural capital, these women promise high returns (truth! sex! possession!) on a very modest investment. Stay tuned for more fun with Asian stereotypes . . . I’m just getting started.

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