Memo to fellow SF writers:

[mrissa]

Okay, fellow SF writers: Asian-Americans have been a part of America's rich tapestry since before their contributions to the railroads in the mid-1800s. They are us. They are totally normal Americans. Get used to it.

What does "get used to it" mean? It means that you be extremely careful in describing Asian-American female characters using the following words and/or references: exotic; inscrutable; dragon lady; or any martial arts metaphors. When you hit all four in less than ten pages, I will put the book down and gape like a fish. Why? Because the technical term for this is racist bullshit.* And if it's because of a character's viewpoint rather than the authorial viewpoint, you need to show us that fast, lest everybody run screaming from the racist bullshit.

When I pick up a Kim Stanley Robinson novel -- published in this decade, for heaven's sake -- I am totally not prepared for that sort of thing. It caught me completely off-guard. "We need to fix climate change!" -- that I expected. "This inscrutable dragon lady would be a great person to work on that problem!" -- uh, no. Nononono. Seriously, just -- no.

I'm going to give this book a chance to get past this, but it's a worse mismatch than "think of these characters as if they were movie stars!" for me to have such a relentless message that I am to think of this character as foreign and other -- even though she's clearly "good other" rather than "bad other." There is a lot of getting past to be done here. Uff da.

Seriously, "exotic"? No American in ordinary American clothes is exotic, whether her ancestors were from Yokohama or York or Yola. Just -- not.

Aiiiigh.

*You do not get bonus points for avoiding geisha and porcelain doll references; that avoidance is elementary civilized behavior.

Comments

[keilexandra]

Thank you.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Word.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

And not all black people have natural rhythm. And not every latina over the age of 25 is plump, motherly and makes her own tortillas. Okay, *I* am, but I'm not indicative of all my people.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I'm pale and repressed, too, but that doesn't mean one gets to assume.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

oh, "inscrutable." i love that one.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

He actually said inscrutable? For real?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It was worse than that: he had this line about how the character supposed that all faces were inscrutable really, and I thought, yah, and somehow you magically didn't think of it with the Italian-American or the Irish-American? Because you know, you know that you shouldn't call this Chinese-American woman inscrutable and you're looking for a way to do it anyway. And if it had been that in isolation, I'd have curled my lip and moved on, but in the context of the rest of the stuff around it, I just had to put the book down for a minute.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Then there's the fact that it's bad science. In an SF book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman

Sure, some cultural expressions of emotion involve smaller motoric changes than others, just like some cultures gesture smaller. But we have the same basic motoric/emotion correlations. No ethnic group is inscrutable unless you're so busy paying attention to Teh Exotic that you don't notice.

[tewok.livejournal.com]

Brava!

Nonfiction, too.

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= A friend of mine is Japanese-American and a gentle, soft-spoken California ski bum type. He made the news a few years back and a writer dubbed him The Samurai. "Dude? Where's your sword?" I asked him.

(In retrospect, there are some questions you shouldn't ask while hot-tubbing.)

Re: Nonfiction, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

At least if you don't want to witness the answer. Yah.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Oh, for crying out loud.

Having spent manymany years living with a cultural anthropologist in training, I came early to the conclusion that the word "exotic" cannot be used about anyone except in a satirical sense. Seriously. Ever. African Americans in leopard-print dresses, inscrutable Chinese women, Maori warriors, just can it all.

In my college, for reasons which are now obscured by the fog of time (at least I didn't say 'mist,' right? I get points for not saying 'mists of time'?) in the crowd I was partially identified with, there was a custom of using an orange highlighter on anything offensive. This was generally racism or misogyny, but could be broadened at need. The original orange highlighter sentence, from a few years before I started school, was found in an anthropology textbook. It read, "Man, being a mammal, suckles his young." After my first semester in college, I was never without an orange highlighter. It was very useful. If I had this Kim Stanley Robinson book, I think I'd be looking for one now.

No one is exotic, except maybe white women in middle America who really do wear housecoats, mules, and curlers. I might consider that exotic.

Maybe.

[bradipo.livejournal.com]

Do you really think "exotic" is a useless word for describing things that are outside the experience of a character?

Obviously the readers will have a vast range of experiences, and there's no telling what's going to be exotic to them, but I think that makes it all-the-more important to have a way to make it clear to the reader when something (clothes, food, language) is strange and different to the character.

Of course, when what it really means is that they're new to the writer, that's not good. And, if it's a sign that the writer is just being lazy and saying "exotic" instead of going to the trouble of showing in specific detail how the character views these new things, that's even worse. But I still think there's a place for exotic.

And, by the way, I really liked Kim Stanley Robinson's climate change trilogy. In particular, I liked the way he portrayed the scientists (especially the biologists, who are just like biologists I know, but also the people applying for and reviewing grants). I also liked the tree house.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call the word "useless" I (personally) would call it "hopelessly tainted." I feel that it has been used for much too long to sum up the way that other cultures, and most especially women from other cultures with complexions and hair different from those the POV of the text is accustomed to, are A: different, B: not real, and C: especially sexy because of how they are both different and not real. As a result, I feel like if we spent maybe 500 years not using the word, we might be ready to use it in an unbiased, interesting way.

This is my opinion, which is mine. *ahem*.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

'Exotic' is like 'big': it's completely relative. Maybe 'foreign' is a better comparison. If you describe a character as 'foreign-looking', you have not given the reader any information. What is foreign? I don't know until you tell me what is non-foreign. If you describe something as 'big' in an SF story with characters ranging from house- to ant-sized, you haven't told me anything. 'Big' only works if all your characters are the same size or close to it, and even then, the reader has to know it. 'Exotic' and 'foreign' are even more difficult, because they require you to have told us what the opposites are and they are generally used in a way that assumes the reader is that opposite. I've never seen a middle-class white man described as 'exotic' even when the characters were not middle-class white men.

The Cuban family who lives across the street from my parents are kind of exotic relative to my close family, but not exotic at all relative to my *entire* family. The Chinese calligrapher I saw lecture at the library last summer was exotic relative to me sitting there, unless I considered that he's my labmate's father and she is not exotic at all, which makes him not exotic relative to me in the context of my life.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Foreign" is exactly the problem. Describing a Chinese-American woman at her job in America as "exotic" says, "You don't belong here. You are a foreigner. Being born here, growing up here, going to school here, going through your career here -- none of that matters." So completely offensive.

This morning I've picked up the book again, and I've discovered that I am a great deal more hostile to this character's viewpoint than I was when reading the last book, when this had not yet come up. If there's a reasonable way and a somewhat assholish way to take one of his observations, I am inclining towards the latter. We'll see if that proves to be enough, and/or if it ruins the book for me.

[redbird]

How about an inscrutable Maori warrior in a leopard-print tuxedo and curlers?

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmaybe.

Awesome, definitely. Exotic...I'm still not sure.

Tempting, oh, yes.

[redbird]

I figure such a one would at least not be a cliche. A joke, perhaps, some ET's idea of an appropriate outfit as "an Earthling" for a costume party, perhaps. Or an intelligent, fierce warrior wanting people not to take her seriously too soon.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

No American in ordinary American clothes is exotic,

I beg to differ. Not to you, maybe, but to someone foreign with no experience of Americans, definitely. (To me, maybe. And what is "ordinary American clothes", anyway?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Ordinary American clothes" means "not blatantly a costume," in this context. And sure, an American in ordinary American clothes might well be exotic on the steppes, but in a novel set in Washington, DC? No. "Look, it's an American woman in business attire! And I am an American man in business attire! But she's exotic because I'm white and therefore normal!" No. No, no, no, no.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

I was objecting to the general statement; I agree with the specific example.

Even in the US, though, a Hawaiian (used to other Hawaiians and typical tourists), or a West Virginia hillbilly, might consider someone in a 3-piece 1980's Wall Street Lawyer suit to be exotic.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who grew up in Hawaii... "exotic" is not the word you're looking for.

"Foolish", perhaps (at least in the context of wearing said suit in a non-air conditioned area of Hawaii). Exotic, not so much.

[zunger.livejournal.com]

Um. Twitch.

Regarding the use of "exotic:" I think that Phil Foglio answered the matter fairly well. (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20050223)

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Yes. Thank you.

Also, wtf? Shouldn't KSR know better?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Sad to say, there are authors in this genre who would have gotten a muttered, "Dude, ick!" from me, and not this post, because I would have expected half the comments to read, "What did you expect?" But I expected better of KSR, is what I expected.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

You know, my first reaction was "You could use that in character POV." And then I thought, "No, if I wanted to show that a character was provincial and racist, I'd want to find something less cliched and over-the-top."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right, that's what I meant about getting to the text's contradictions of the character viewpoint quickly: might work, but only if it isn't completely off-putting first.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Ugh! How weird...I don't recall any of that nonsense in The Years of Rice and Salt, but that book was soooo dry that I've been bogged down on page 511 for about 2 years now (which means there are only about 250 pages of meandering barely-connected tales left before me, should I choose to soldier on), so I might have just failed to notice it in my slogging. None of the POV characters in that book are white, which probably makes a difference...I recall the descriptions as generally focusing on physical details without falling back on stereotypical bozo words.

I don't think "exotic" is tainted, exactly, but it says more about the speaker than about the person being described.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I can't hear "exotic" without following it with "dancer," "disease," or "locale"--none of which seem to be words one would want to associate with most characters in most books.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Oh, authors. You and I both know you're not supposed to be eating that paste. :/

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Holy crap. Yes.

(A topic close to my heart, for obvious reasons.)

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

Sad. I'd been seriously considering reading KSR, since I'd heard repeatedly how great his writing was. I'm not sure I want to try, now.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It didn't continue into this book, and I don't recall anything of the sort in previous books of his (but I haven't read any for awhile, so I can't swear to it). On the other hand...you know that "national character" thing old SF writers do, where the French people are all one way and the Russians are all another way and so on? He has sometimes walked the line between that and portraying people as strongly influenced by the culture in which they were raised. It can be a fine line: it really isn't the same thing to be raised in Peru, Nebraska, as in Peru, the country. It will affect how people see themselves and the world around them. But I think the key is making sure that it's affecting different people in different and sometimes opposite and sometimes orthogonal ways.