Imaginary Worlds - Asian Futures Without Asians

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

It’s a future we’re all very familiar with. The rainy streets are full of neon dragons, noodle shops, and other Asian iconography mixed up and decontextualized amid sci-fi flourishes, but something is often missing: Asian people. In her video presentation “Asian futures, without Asians,” the artist and writer Astria Suparak breaks down dozens of films and TV shows, showing that there’s a shadow genre across different sci-fi franchises which presents a future that taps into old anti-Asian stereotypes at subtle levels of designing sets, costumes and even props. I also talk with University of Utah Professor David S. Roh about his book Techno-Orientalism, which looks at the psychology behind these kinds of futures, and what they have to say about current day anxieties in America. And Jason Concepcion, host of the podcast X-Ray Vision, discusses how he tries to engage with these types of worlds as a fan and as an Asian American. This episode is sponsored by Inked Gaming. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Part of what makes up a genre, like science fiction or fantasy, is that certain tropes are repeated. And as a fan, it's fun to recognize tropes when they come up and appreciate how they've been adapted. But I recently learned about a genre within a genre that's been hiding in plain sight, or at least it was for me. I was invited to watch a presentation called Asian Futures Without Asians by the artist Astrea Superak.

Futures Without Asians by the artist Astrea Superak. Her talk looks at how science fiction often depicts a future full of Asian iconography that's mixed up and taken out of context, but there aren't many Asian people in these futures. And this is a talk that she's given in person and virtually, and her presentation has been paired with exhibits at galleries and museums. and virtually. And her presentation has been paired with exhibits at galleries and museums. Now, I expected her to cover obviously offensive things like Flash Gordon serials from the 1930s with Ming the Merciless. And that was there, but she really wanted to concentrate on more recent history. And it was eye-opening for me because I had seen most of the movies and shows that she referenced, but I was suddenly seeing them in a whole new light.

Apparently a lot of people feel that way after seeing her presentation. I mean a lot of people say it's like being red-pilled in a way where suddenly the veil has lifted and they see these tropes constantly. And people also say that people of Asian and Arab cultures that are represented in this project, in this presentation, will also say that. Like, I didn't even see that my culture was represented until you pointed these parts out. Now, I don't want to give away her entire talk, but I wanted to cover several different tropes that really stuck out for me.

Let's begin with costume design. How often do you think white people wear kimonos in science fiction films? I don't know if I could have come up with any before I saw her presentation, before I saw her presentation, but she showed images from the reboot of Total Recall, RoboCop, Alita Battle Angel, AI, Looper, and many more movies. Kimonos are used to mean like Zen samurai warrior,

like in Star Wars, to paint a population as neutered and pleasureless, like in Demolition Man, or to make someone seem ominously powerful or eccentric, like Jared Leto in Blade Runner 2049. They're also used on sex workers to indicate vacation or leisure wear for wealthy people. It's like a quick summary of the racist ideas about Asians and Asian cultures. Here's another one. Think about conical hats.

They're often made from straw or bamboo, and they protect people from the rain or sun. I thought I'd only seen them in Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War, but she showed images from all these different futuristic science fiction films where background characters are wearing conical hats. What would be like a waterproof headgear, which sure would be practical in a dystopia where it's perpetually raining. But how they're used in sci-fi, since the main characters are suspiciously hatless, they're not wearing these same hats as the other people running around the background and the extras are wearing the hats like regardless of weather conditions or

whether it's sunny out so you know it's not practical because they're not protecting themselves from the Sun or the rain when they're still wearing these hats indoors or at night it's like a shortcut to me not only an Asian or an Asian-like population, but also an overpopulated, an impoverished, an immoral, an expendable one. Can you give me some examples, too, of where that pops up? So Demolition Man, when they're underground, there's some of the people who are underground in the dark wearing these hats. In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, there's a beginning scene where a bunch of people are in the desert walking towards what I think is the marketplace.

Several people are wearing conical hats. And then one person has a conical hat on a turban. There's no logical reason to have these clashing different headgears. And then the weave of that conical hat is so open that, again, it's not protecting you from the sun or from possible rain. Oh, and then in Solo, a Star Wars story, there's this conical hat that's so huge and exaggerated that it completely covers the man's body like down to his stomach. So he can't even see out of the hat, even though his job is to see, it's to watch and guard this gambling den. That's really funny. Yeah. I think it's just used to me like, it's a tropical location where they do illegal things. And then there's food. These films have created a hierarchy where Japanese food is often presented as highbrow, while Chinese food is

presented as lowbrow. Of course, there's the really famous scene at the beginning of Blade Runner, where Harrison Ford is eating noodles in a rainy, dark, neon-crowded street. That image felt groundbreaking 40 years ago, but it set a template that got repeated from TV shows like Altered Carbon to films like The Fifth Element, where Bruce Willis orders Chinese food that is labeled as Thai and not ironically. It's bad luck, but grandfather say it never rain every day.

This is good news guaranteed. Basically, like noodles and rice are eaten by commoners in impoverished Chinatowns. And sushi is indulged by the wealthy and powerful people of these worlds. So like in Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, there's these truckers who are eating noodles in their truck in a plastic bag. You would think that there'd be more scenes of people eating spaghetti or mac and cheese in the future. Also, it's like cheap foods that are also of a similar cost equivalent, I don't know, to ramen, etc. And then sushi, like the tech billionaire and ex-makina eats sushi made by a slave android named Kyoko. Virtuosity. I don't know if enough people will recognize virtuosity, but there is this evil AI program who escapes like of all places to a VR sushi restaurant.

Good afternoon. May I help you? Good afternoon, may I help you? Good afternoon, may I help you? Let's move on to set design. When these characters go to street scenes that are supposed to be exotic, the sets are often full of food vendors that are clearly based on Asian street markets. Yeah, street vendors are pretty prolific in future worlds. So they often have hanging or skewered food, which is supposed to be gross and weird.

So like in Firefly, they have a food stand serving grilled dog. In Cloud Atlas, there's a food stall with deep fried rats in this techno-futurist Korean city. This is where you live? This is where Union was born. In your research, did you find set designers talking about this and saying why they did this? Yes. So the set designer in Cloud Atlas,

in an interview that I had read, said, I think it gave a feeling of a classic Asian street market. The dressing team let their imaginations run with references from India, Thailand, and Vietnam. Yes, they were specifically trying to present this as like a dirty place where they eat rats. The design team may have thought they were letting their imaginations run wild, but that is an old pernicious stereotype. In her talk, Astrea compares that scene in Cloud Atlas to anti-Chinese propaganda posters from the early 20th century showing Chinese people eating rats. And those images helped to support a ban on Chinese immigrants to the U.S.

I should also mention that Cloud Atlas is the movie that infamously had several white actors playing Asian characters with makeup and prosthetics. Also in these futuristic cities, you see a lot of Asian architecture, advertisements with geishas, neon signs with dragons, people carrying Asian-style parasols, and red paper lanterns. And once again, when she said red paper lanterns, my first thought was, I don't remember seeing those in sci-fi films. And then she showed images from Mortal Engines, Total Recall, Ghost in the Shell, Firefly, Cloud Atlas, Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, Repo Man, AI, and Valerian. And these neighborhoods often have names like Paradise Alley, Rogue City, or The Colony.

Red paper lanterns are always markers for like you're entering a zone of illicit and degenerate activities. like you're entering a zone of an illicit and degenerate activities. Usually you see them in crowded urban areas where the residents are supposed to be impoverished and expendable. They're used for areas with sex workers like in Cloud Atlas and Valerian AI and Firefly. They're used to indicate black markets or other like filthy inner cities. And then the irony is like in real life, if there was a history of illegal work or unsanitary conditions in Chinatowns, it's because white American governments forced Chinese immigrants into like small,

undesirable tracts of land and wouldn't maintain their public infrastructures. Interior set designs follow similar patterns. She showed images from 10 different movies and TV shows where non-Asian characters that are supposed to be high-ranking lived in homes full of Japanese shoji screens. You know, those wooden grids with opaque white squares. In Demolition Man, the room that the sexually frustrated white hero, played by Sylvester Stallone, retires to is very clearly marked with shoji screens. What's wrong? You broke contact.

Contact? I didn't even touch you yet. But I thought you wanted to make love. Is that what you call this? In Gardens of the Galaxy, there's this home one of the white military officials lives in. They are very careful to have the shoji screens and all these like minimalist Japanese elements and to create this home. And then everyone in that home like tromps about, stomps about with their heavy boots. stomps about with their heavy boots. Like if you're making a point to reference a Japanese aesthetic in Japanese home, like that's a kind of a basic thing you've missed. And in the future, wealthy and powerful white people often decorate their offices with Buddhas

and Asian martial arts weapons. Maybe they're also like a shorthand to brag about how you master the fighting styles of this other culture. I'm not sure, but there's a lot of Japanese katanas in science fiction films. So many. And then there's also a fair amount of West Asian cimeters. Gorky Kukri, which are those double blades with this distinctive curve. Japanese shuriken, the ninja stars. And they're just hanging on the wall, sitting on people's desks.

Yeah, sometimes they're in special display cases. Yeah, often behind the big, bad, evil person's work desk. I was also interested to see which movies and franchises came up the most in her presentation. And Star Wars comes up a lot. Even though it's a very fantastical world, that's not supposed to be our future. Now, in previous episodes, I've covered Asian influences in Star Wars, from Buddhist philosophy to samurai fighting styles. But Estria says Star Wars also falls into the trope of creating a hierarchy of Asian cultures. Star Wars pits East Asian cultures against Swana cultures, Southwest Asian, North African cultures. So the way East Asian culture, especially Japanese culture, is used is a way to attribute a group of people specifically the Jedi to

like a higher level of being you know and this is through Japanese clothing design hairstyles armor fighting styles Buddhist practices and then also in the East Asian culture is that Lucas and his team take elements from our Imperial Chinese Korean Tibetan Mongolian traditions, especially with Queen Amidala's fashion and makeup in The Phantom Menace. In fact, after we talked, I happened to be watching The Book of Boba Fett. There are two minor characters, which are part of Jabba the Hutt's clan. They're twin Hutts who are carried around Tatooine on Asian style litters.

The female Hutt is fanning her gigantic face with a human sized Asian paper fan. And in those same episodes, I noticed a droid carrying characters on a rickshaw through the crowded streets. If I hadn't talked with her, I never would have noticed that before. She also points out the original cantina in Star Wars was inspired by a real tiki bar called the Tiki Tea Cocktail Lounge. George Lucas used to visit there when he was a student at USC. And the son of the owner of the Tiki Tea talks about seeing George Lucas sketching out characters that would later be used in Star Wars. It's fitting in a way because tiki culture itself is this inauthentic pastiche of widely different cultures,

like also initially constructed by and capitalized on by white Americans. Another franchise that she brings up a lot is Firefly and the movie Serenity. The premise of that universe is that in the far future, China and the U.S. have merged into a single galactic federation. You know, we're told the culture is combined. We hear muddled Mandarin, we see Chinese newspapers, and we see Buddhist sculptures and chopsticks and other East and Southeast Asian cultures like strewn about in every scene. again, none of their like friends, lovers, any of the government officials or any of the leaders in any of the groups that we meet across the galaxy, like on multiple planets, none of them are Asian. I've been waiting for like a sci-fi nerd to correct me and say like, actually, there is an Asian. There's like two, maybe three background Asians in the entire series.

One's a prostitute and one is a server in a bar wearing like a full geisha getup for no reason. So that is not what I expect to see when I hear that this is like a galaxy run by China and America together. In her talk, she also examines the 2014 film Ex Machina. It's about a tech billionaire who creates super realistic androids. Go back to your room. The main android, Ava, is played by a white actress. She is a complicated character, both sympathetic and dangerous. Are you ever going to let me out?

Yes. The other androids are played by Asian women. There's two Asian women robots. There's Kyoko, who's built to be a language-less Japanese servant in sexual slavery. And then there's Jade, who's one of the earlier prototypes who's stored in a bedroom closet. And both of these Asian robots are used by the white robot Ava. They're used like tools for her to escape from their shared captor. That trope comes up a lot. Androids played by white actors are typically used as metaphors to show that we can find a common sense of humanity in characters that are seen as less than human. But androids played by Asian actors often don't get the same level

of agency or empathy. The white robots in a lot of these sci-fi stories are complex protagonists, love interests, someone that we want to root for, that we want for them to achieve self-actualization in contrast to the Asian robots who are fundamental threats, like in Ghost in the Shell and Ex Machina. So if we're to think of Asian futures without Asians as a genre with its own consistent rules and tropes, what is the backstory? What happened to most of the Asian people in the future? Estrella wonders if there was a war between the East and the West, which led to a genocide or mass sterilization. Are these Asian cultural artifacts like trophies from the victors in the West? Maybe.

But she thinks the genre might be tapping into the opposite anxiety. So it's like this fantasy of having been colonized by an Asian country and then at some point successfully fighting off these colonizers and then weirdly choosing to preserve their like the colonizers aesthetic and lifestyle like still dressing up in the fashion of your supposed oppressors like safeguarding rather than toppling your oppressors religious effigies and then continuing to protect and rehearse Asian art forms, like the fighting styles, still putting up Asian signage

on your buildings and restaurants. In the real world, the backstory as to how and why this genre came about is pretty complex. And it actually goes back to the beginning of modern science fiction in the early 20th century. We'll explore that after the break. I have a birthday party on Wednesday night, but an important meeting Thursday morning. So sensible me pre-books a taxi for 10 p.m. with alerts. Voila! I won't be getting carried away and staying out till 2. That's stop-loss orders on Kraken. An easy way to plan ahead.

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Drink responsibly. Copyright 2024. Bacardi. It's trade dress and the bad device are trademarks of Bacardi and Company Limited. Rum 40% alcohol by volume. After talking with Astrea, I wanted to check in with Jason Concepcion. He is the host of the pop culture sci-fi fantasy podcast, X-Ray Vision. And full disclosure, I did a promo for X-Ray Vision a few episodes ago,

but that is unrelated to me reaching out to him. Jason is a journalist in Los Angeles. He's a Hollywood insider, and he also moderated one of Astrea's virtual presentations. He told me that as an Asian American, he was certainly aware of a lot of these tropes, but her talk was still unsettling for him. It just kind of like brought home what a big part of the genre this is, you know, visually at least, which is something I'm

still processing. I had not really reckoned with how, not just pervasive as a stylistic flourish it is, but how kind of part of the fabric of the genre it is. One of the reasons I was curious to talk with Jason is because so often in my show, I examine popular culture that I love while I'm also critical of it. And it's sometimes hard to strike that balance.

And I was wondering, how does he deal with this issue as a fan? Like sometimes I, as I process these things, I kind of do a cost-benefit analysis of, well, on balance, this is positive with the kind of paucity of Asian representation in American popular culture, Western popular culture. Sometimes like a positive depiction is good enough sometimes. And then also thinking about for something like Star Wars or Blade Runner, which came out 40 years ago, what was the level of cultural understanding and empathy at that given time? You know, did everybody do the best that they could at that particular time? And I think the answer is like, sometimes it's like yes and no.

But I have to, with each story, I kind of take it – I kind of take them on their own merits and just – a lot of times it's honestly just like a gut check. And then there are things – there are times in stories where I'm like, oh, that stands out as – that's not good. That's bad. But what am I going to do? Like not take part in culture. At a certain point, it's like I can reject things and just kind of wall myself off from stuff that has offensive slash problematic material in it, or I can engage with the stuff I like about it, use my voice to say this part of it sucked, and hope that we get better as we go forward. So how do we get better?

Jason says if a production design team is going to mix and match foreign cultures to create something new, which is what production designers do because they're from Earth and there's only so far that their imaginations can stretch, then they need to do their own gut checks

throughout the entire creative process. Generally, when you take something, when you lift something out of a culture without any kind of like attempt to reckon or understand the milieu from which it comes, that is generally, I think, where you cross over into the kind of like problematic zone. You know, essentially, you're saying here's this fantastical world that's going to be we want to present something as slightly strange. So when you take something from a culture and you put it in that context, what you're kind of saying is, look how weird this is, but from whose perspective, right?

So just being open to having those conversations and to really doing the research about where things come from. Do you think things are getting better in that regard or is everyone kind of on autopilot? It's hard to say. I think that better in the sense that these are conversations that people understand happen now. It feels as if platforms and creators and production companies are aware that there are fault lines out there and that they're trying to avoid them. People at least feel the anxiety of, oh, let's not mess this up

because this, even if it's for as cynical a reason as the publicity would be terrible. If that's the pressure point that we have, that's the pressure point that we have as people who take part in the marketplace. So in that sense, I think it's better than it has been. But there's also signs that it could get worse. I worry that it could get worse too. I think with the growing geopolitical competition between the US, the West, and China, like the fact that the Chinese look different,

I think, than the way America thinks of itself, that has every potential to kind of like amplify some of the worst aspects of nationalism, etc. You know, like one of the – I was doing some research on early sci-fi and one of the things that really influenced the arc of early sci-fi was Japan's defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. Just a quick reminder, if like me, you haven't thought about this since your high school history class, the war between Russia and Japan lasted from 1904 to 1905. And it was a war that Russia went into with overconfidence. overconfidence. That was like presented as like a wake-up call to the West and the white ruling class. And a lot of dystopian and early sci-fi came out of that. And a lot of it was framed as how do we keep these Asian hordes from rising up? We have to make sure that we maintain our technological edge. A lot of

it, a lot of this early sci-fi from that era was presented as, you know, like a warning. The Japanese have modernized. If they teach the Chinese how to modernize, all of a sudden we're outnumbered. We have to keep this technological edge. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of stories like that from the early decades of the 20th century that are direct responses to a European country being defeated by an Asian country in a major war. What Jason just said has a lot in common with a book of essays that I found called Techno-Orientalism. The book was edited by David Rowe. He's a professor at the University of Utah. edited by David Rowe.

He's a professor at the University of Utah. And David says techno-Orientalism is playing off the term Orientalism, which was first coined by the late scholar Edward Said. His argument was that the West needed something to define itself against, and so it models the East as basically the opposite of the West. So if the West is rational, the East is irrational. If the West is masculine, then the East is feminine. If the West is modern, then the East will always be pre-modern. That worked for a while, but there was a problem

in that the East was quickly rising as an economic threat and competitor during the 70s and 80s. And this mostly manifested in the Japan panic in the 1980s, where Japanese manufacturing and the automotive industry in particular was seen as almost an existential threat to Ford and GM and Detroit. potential threat to Ford and GM and Detroit. And that was a real kind of difficult moment psychologically for the American psyche because Japan was this tiny island nation that had very few resources and had been completely decimated by the war a couple of decades before. And how is that going to work if, according to Orientalism, they're always going to be pre-modern?

They should not be able to compete on this level. The idea of Orientalism had to be revived or re-rationalized. So the logic of techno-Orientalism goes like this. Japanese auto manufacturers can do well because they are really good at copying and stealing. So they're just taking what we have done and building upon it. You can see that discourse now being applied to China and Chinese manufacturing. It's just the same old story in a new form. So according to techno-orientalism, the East is catching up and pulling ahead because they don't value original ideas and they abuse their workers. In contrast, the West

respects creativity and humanity, but that may not be enough. It's their very inhumanity that is allowing them to compete with us in this way. And that led to that logic being manifested in a lot of science fiction because we had this projection of Western anxieties and fears about the East as a competitor in the future being projected onto the screen and in literature. And that's how we get these futuristic dystopias, where white characters live in worlds dominated by Asian culture. But the thing I wanted to stress is how that sort of pre-modernity is emphasized in sort

of a hyper-modern space, right? So the future may look Asian, the future may look Japanese or Chinese or Korean, but there's still an undergirding of this idea of premodernity. So you have these weird contradictions where in these science fiction films and novels, you'll have like cybernetic samurai or android geisha. And it's not just film or TV. A lot of these ideas were first explored in early cyberpunk literature, like William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, which took place in a Japanese city.

And then, of course, William Gibson's Neuromancer has like the cybernetic ninja that's always skulking around in the background, right? Again, this reinforcement of pre-modernity in the hyper-modernist setting. And what is really interesting about it is that Gibson never had actually been to Japan before he wrote Neuromancer. And so it's a really great example of the fact that orientalism and techno-orientalism is a complete fabrication, right? It's a projection by the Western consciousness of what the East should look like.

And in this future, this cyberpunk, cybernetic future, what is really unsettling about it to the reader is that it's a future in which the body has just become meat, right? And it's just an apparatus for other sort of modifications. And so that speaks to the anxiety about what it means to be human. Now, why do you think that science fiction was a particularly apt way to express these anxieties? Because a lot of the questions of science fiction are about the future of humanity. What is human versus what is non-human? What is unsettling is to see how pliable techno-orientalism is and how quickly it adapts to changing geopolitical conditions. I had mentioned

how it's not so much driven by Japan panic anymore, but mostly by China panic and increasingly visions of South Korea and Hong Kong and so on and so forth. Science fiction is a genre where there is no limit, except our imaginations. So what we have here is a failure of imagination. Everyone I talked with agreed there's one obvious thing that the entertainment industry can do to fix this problem. Again, here's Estria. They should hire Asians behind the camera, like Asians in decision-making positions and multiple Asians, not just one consultant or one person. Like, I mean, I would say we could still suggest that they not represent cultures that

they're not a part of. And if they absolutely have to, like it's integral to the story, they didn't write the story, they were assigned to it and can't change it for some reason, then hire people of those cultures and people who know how to properly care for and treat and represent the culture. And especially like not in a way that's rigid and ancient or mystical or foreign, because a lot of people of those cultures live here in the U.S. too. a lot of people of those cultures live here in the U.S. too. And there are organizations like CAPE, which stands for Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment. They're a nonprofit that has consulted with Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Warner Brothers, and other companies to create works that are more culturally aware.

I talked with a spokesperson at CAPE, and they told me the success of these collaborations depends on how seriously the studios take them. If Cape is brought in early with access to top talent, and the talent are open to suggestions, they can make a big difference. But sometimes Cape is brought in at the last minute to see a movie that's almost finished so they can highlight any potential red flags. That approach is less productive. But the first step towards any kind of progress is acknowledging that there is a problem and having the humility to ask for help so they can tell new types of stories.

That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Astrea Superak, David Rowe, and Jason Concepcion. Also, thanks to the organization Gioppo for inviting me to watch Astrea's presentation. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook and Instagram.

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