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ble” story of a Frenchman duped by a Chinese man masquerading as a woman always seemed perfectly explicable; given the degree of misunderstanding between men and woman and also between East and West, is seemed inevitable that a mistake of this magnitude would one day take place. Gay friends have told me of a derogatory term used in their community: “Rice Queen” - a gay Caucasian man primarily attracted to Asians. In these relationships, the Asian virtually always plays the role of the “woman”; the Rice Queen, culturally and sexually, is the “man”. This pattern of relationships had become so codified that, until recently, it was considered unnatural for gay Asians to date one another. Such men would be taunted with a phrase which implied they were lesbians. Similarly, heterosexual Asians have long been aware of “Yellow Fever” Caucasian men with a fetish for exotic Oriental women. I have often heard it said that “Oriental women make the best wives.” (Rarely is this heard from the mouths of Asian men, incidentally.) This mythology is exploited by the Oriental mail-order bride trade which has flourished over the past decade. American men can now send away for catalogues of “obedient, domesticated” Asian women looking for husbands. Anyone who believes such stereotypes are a thing of the past need look no further than Manhattan cable television, which advertises call girls, from “the exotic east, where men are king; obedient girls, trained in the art of pleasure.” In these appeals, we see issues of racism and sexism intersect. The catalogues and TV spots appeal to a strain in men which desires to reject Western women for what they have become-independent, assertive, self-possessed-in favor of a more reactionary model-the pre-feminist, domesticated geisha girl. That the Oriental woman is penultimately feminine does not of course imply that she is always “good”. For every Madonna there is a whore; for every lotus blossom there is also a dragon lady. In popular culture, “good” Asian women are those who serve the White protagonist in his battle against her own people, often sleeping with him in the process. Stallone’s Rambo 11, Cimino’s Year of the Dragon , Clavell’s Shogun, Van Lustbader’s The Ninja are all familiar examples. Now our considerations of race and sex intersect the issue of imperialism. For this formula-good natives serve Whites, bad natives rebel-is consistent with the mentality of colonia-

lism. Because they are submissive and obedient, good natives of both sexes necessarily take on “feminine” characteristics in a colonialist world. Gunga Din’s unfailing devotion to his British master, for instance, is not so far removed from Butterfly’s slavich faith in Pinkerton. It is reasonable to assume that influences and attitudes so pervasively displayed in popular culture might also influence our policymakers as they consider the world. The neo-Coionialist notion that good elements of a native society, like a good woman, desire submission to the masculine West speaks precisely to the heart of our foreign policy blunders in Asia and elsewhere. For instance, Frances Fitzgerald wrote in Fire in the Lake, “The idea that the United States could not master the problems of a country as small and underdeveloped as Vietnam did not occur to Johnson as a possibility.” Here, as in so many other cases, by dehumanizing the enemy, we dehumanize ourselves. We become the Rice Queens of realpolitik. M. Butterfly has sometimes been regarded as an anti-American play, a diatribe against the stereotyping of the East by the West, of women by men. Quite to the contrary, I consider it a plea to all sides to cut through our respective layers of cultural and sexual misperception, to deal with one another truthfully for our mutual good, from the common and equal ground we share as human beings. For the myths of the East, the myths of the West, the myths of men. and the myths of women-these have so saturated our consciousness that truthful contact between nations and lovers can only be the result of heroic effort. Those who prefer to bypass the work involved will remain in a world of surfaces, misperceptions running rampant. This is, to me, the convenient world in which the French diplomat and the Chinese spy lived. This is why, after twenty years, he had learned nothing at all about his lover, not even the truth of his sex. □ David Henry Hwang, New York City, September, 1988.