I’m interested in representing Asian women outside of the typical stereotypes offered in the West in literature or popular culture. Just today I was reading this analysis on the vilified and anonymous representation of Asians in the film No Escape, an action movie set in a nameless Asian country with white people as the only central characters. The critic elaborates: “Meanwhile, not a single girl of color or woman of color speaks an important line of dialogue in the entire film. In fact, women of color remain the most indistinct group of all in No Escape. They are more likely to be referenced in relation to sex work than they are to speak. Which taps into another racist, misogynistic tradition of exotifying and hyper-sexualizing Asian women.”
This poem [“My Idea of the Circus Is My Idea of the Circus Otherwise Known As: My Mother Was a Celebrated Stunt Motorcyclist, Vietnam, 1958 to 1962”]is my way of answering back to these kinds of stereotypes and lack of true representation and is part of a series that I am developing. Part verse meditation and part documentary on 1960s Vietnam, it is a poetic narrative that includes a verse biography on my mother, Diệp Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman circus troupe. My aim for the series is to investigate historical, personal, and cultural pressures of the period—as well as the difficulties of distance, memory and language itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment