RepresentAsian, contesting stereotypes
I’m not a fan of how ‘representation’ is being used. Not least because every time someone with the same skin colour as mine wins a gold medal or Oscar, my fellow Asians crow about this being a win for ‘RepresentAsian’. Just because it’s a pun, doesn’t make it true.
To really consider ‘representation’ is to acknowledge complexities. Representation involves relationships of power and perception, meaning and interpretations - relationships that are always fluid.
Oh, that’s where I went wrong… I forgot to dream big 🙄
My various projects are never done with academia in mind; they are generally sparked from small observations and then I develop a method for creatively exploring them. But after I launched Asian Slaw Alliance this year, I happened to read the cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s 1997 lecture ‘Representation And The Media’ (read or watch) and emitted a retroactive Eureka!
Hall is a brilliant communicator and thinker, which makes his ideas easy to digest. Here’s the basic gist of the lecture, in which he takes apart the role of mass media in deciding what is represented:
Old world definition of ‘representation’ = visual representation gives meaning. That meaning is fixed by those with power (media). Therefore distorted representation creates a gap between the image and your perception. E.g. EEAAO swept the Oscars. Media gives it a meaning: this is a win for all Asians.
A newer reading = ‘representation’ constitutes many meanings decided by the audience, because meanings have many interpretations. The power swings a bit more towards the viewer, and meanings crucially can be defined by what is visible but also what is absent or different. E.g. EEAAO swept the Oscars. But I am South Korean and Decision To Leave was snubbed at the Oscars! Therefore I don’t feel represented and Oscars are trash.
Stereotypes are an attempt to fix a preferred meaning to an image. (Only those with the upper hand in a power dynamic can create stereotypes.) Winning Oscars is the gold standard of representation, and we see that only certain ‘types’ of Asians win Oscars.
Creating anti-stereotypes is just as problematic because you’re still attempting to fix a meaning to the image. Why do we look to Oscars for validation? Let’s create our own Asian Oscars. But we will still define what is worthy of awards.
Then comes Hall’s proposed solution: to contest stereotypes, we must take images apart, from within.
The strategies of the politics of the image has to take a very different and much less guaranteed route, in my view. It has to go inside the image itself… because stereotypes themselves are really actually very complex things. It has somehow to occupy the very terrain which has been saturated by fixed and closed representation and to try to… turn the stereotypes in a sense against themselves; to open up, in other words, the very practice of representation itself – as a practice – because what closure in representation does most of all is it naturalizes the representation to the point where you cannot see that anybody ever produced it. It seems to be just what the world is. It’s just how it looks; that is just what reality is. The very act of opening up the practice by which these closures of imagery have been presented requires one to go into the power of the stereotype itself and begin to, as it were, subvert, open and expose it from inside.
Hall talks about sexual fetishisation as an example. Instead of ignoring it, hoping it’ll go away, he suggests we need to “change the relationship of the viewer to the image… [to] intervene in exactly that powerful exchange between the image and its psychic meaning, the depths of the fantasy, the collective and social fantasies with which we invest images, in order to, as it were, expose and deconstruct the work of representation which the stereotypes are doing.”
What’s the psychic fantasy at work here, when we buy into images of representation? Why do we need to see Michelle Yeoh accepting an award in order to feel represented?
It’s not about cabbage
I think most assume my Asian Slaw Alliance project is a collection of cabbage recipes. Actually, for my recent interviews I’ve been spending a minimum one hour conversation with each person learning about who they are, where they came from and where they feel like they sit in the world. Interviewing people requires more skills than you realise, and I feel like I’m continually learning how to be an artful conversational blacksmith. The subject is hot iron, and I have 60 minutes in which to hammer out a lethal, single-pointed weapon.
Woven into the different conversations have been my nudges to talk about Asian slaw, Asian-ness and cabbage:
Asian slaw: a stereotypical dish that incites various feelings in my subjects (apathy, confusion, bemusement, frustration).
Asian-ness: a label that has different meanings for different people.
Cabbage: a raw ingredient that empowers my subjects to apply cultural and practical knowledge into creating something delicious.
The result, a multilayered conversation that allows my guests to process their feelings about stereotypes and labels. At the end, they share a recipe that reinterprets Asian slaw, a dish whose exoticised meaning is traditionally fixed by power. By infiltrating this trope of Asian slaw I’m inviting my guests to - in Hall’s words - “go inside the image itself [and] intervene in… that powerful exchange between the image and its psychic meaning”.
ConversAsians
See what I did there? After digesting Hall’s lecture, I realised that my project is not concerned with this contested topic of #RepresentAsian. In fact, none of my projects are. I try my best to equalise the power dynamic in the room through conversation instead.
Read some personal highlights from my interviewees below, then click their names to read the full transcript and cook their fabulous recipes! By the way, one of my aims of Asian Slaw Alliance is to get those recipes into the top Google search results. This is surely one way to contest a stereotype.
Meet the Alliance:
Peter Jo
I relocated to Korea in 2020 because I wanted to go deeper down the rabbit hole of identity and Korean cuisine, and I was also done with ‘whiteness’ and not having avenues or networks to really discuss cultural and identity issues. But a homogenous society like Korea has its own ignorance issues and again I am trying to figure out how to navigate a very different environment.
Zha cai may have been the predecessor of kimchi which we had called ‘chim chae’. My first thought was exploring what may have been the first version of kimchi before Korea was introduced to red chilli, today’s common garlic and Napa cabbage.
I have chosen this recipe as I believe it shows how little we know of our cuisine. It was very humbling for me to know how little I knew about the history of our culture and cuisine. I believe still to this day that I have only scratched the surface, and it’s helped me acknowledge that I myself as a Korean am unable to be an authority on my own cuisine.
Ragini Kashyap
I think the first time I came across both the labels ‘Asian’ and ‘brown’… was when we immigrated here and I was sixteen years old. It’s one of those things that you become a little desensitised to over time because they’re so heavily used around you. But I remember thinking, I don’t really want to define myself as brown - what a strange way to talk about myself!
As a standalone thing, yes, [I enjoy Asian slaw] in the same way that I would enjoy a chicken tikka masala. I mean, it’s not bad but like, what is it?
I realised the only place in the subcontinent that I’m aware of, where [cabbage is] used as a cold salad, is in Goa. Cabbage came with the Portuguese so the use of cabbage there is different to the rest of the country.
Su Scott
I thought I was going to be great at being a mother, if I’m honest, but the moment my daughter was born I fell very ill… That made me really search my soul and ask a lot of questions: Why am I here? What am I doing? What’s my purpose? Where am I from? Who am I? Then my post-natal depression hit me in a subtle, creeping way.
What’s lovely about trying to recreate memories is that you unlock a lot of small details that make you realise, Oh, that’s why that happened. Sometimes it’s nothing to do with food but it brings another layer of understanding that you didn’t have before. I think I came to understand my mother a lot more.
When I was doing research for this book, I had very little idea about Korea and the impact of its geographic location to the nation’s cuisine and history, like the wars and trading routes. We often forget about North Korea. Sure, we’re a different country now, but there was a time when we were three kingdoms spreading to China in the north and Russia on the right. The evidence of trading and influence of Chinese cuisine is really evident.
Kenji Morimoto
My name is Kenji, both a family name, as well as chosen due to its ability to be shortened to a Western name, a vehicle for assimilation.
I remember experiencing a tinge of guilt when I realised my favourite order at my family’s go-to lunch takeout restaurant was ‘Asian Chicken Salad’. Did it legitimise this pan-Asian and arguably confused ‘Asian’ salad that my Japanese American family ordered this? Does this even matter? It wasn't nearly as good as my family’s versions, but nostalgia is powerful and it does tick that ‘Asian American’ all inclusive box sometimes.
My four grandparents taught me an immense amount about resilience, family, and the role food plays as a cultural driver within one’s identity. They were constantly in search of the nostalgic flavours of home throughout their life: from their time in internment camps during WWII where they had limited access to Japanese food, to creating their own traditions with their families in white majority communities after the war.