The Rise of the Bitchy Asian Friend: How Today’s Media Creates Tomorrow's Stereotypes

From stage adaptations of Mean Girls, Heathers, and The Devil Wears Prada, to hit original Netflix shows like You, Asian women are stepping into the spotlight more than ever before. In a culture where we demanded more representation; producers heeded our call! So why don't I celebrate this apparent win for our community?

Films from a bygone era where all-white casts flew by unquestioned are given new life through “colorblind” casting. Although I am glad Asian women are gaining larger roles, I question why this role? I’ve noticed a deceptive pattern in our media. Blink and you’ll miss it! A new emerging stereotype for Asian women; The Bitchy Asian Friend.

The criteria required for me to consider a character an official Bitchy Asian Friend, are two-fold: White woman’s #2, and possess a deceptive manipulative side. The Bitchy Asian Friend is judgmental, controlling, and more deviously, they are schemers. They err on the side of betrayal. They are typically our white lead’s best friend or neighbor but always have ulterior motives and work behind the scenes on their downfall. 

(left) Brenda Koo playing Carol in The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

It's so easy to miss because these casting choices are thinly veiled with a veneer of progression. Media has a long history of marginalizing Asian actresses. At the dawn of the film industry, we were allowed to be docile and submissive sex objects, known now as Lotus Blossoms. This evolved into the demonized, evil Dragon Ladies. Eventually Asian actors were allowed to break into comedic roles. We became the angry landlords or cheap shop owners who hurled broken english at our heroic white protagonists. We then evolved into sidekick territory. We weren't the leads, and we certainly weren't his best friend, but we were allowed in the hero's group for the first time. All we had to do was dye a streak of our hair purple and know how to work a computer. Each of these steps could be seen as progress because actresses received a smidgen of more character depth with each evolution. 

(left) Memoirs of a Geisha, (top) Anna May Wong, (bottom) The Mysterious Mr. Wong, (right) Sky High

Similarly, elevating Asian actresses to the coveted spot of '“white woman’s #2” could be seen as progress. They are more prestigious roles, higher on the ticket, and yet I refuse to call this progress. The problem with the Bitchy Asian Friend is that it’s just another box. Maybe it's a bigger, shinier box; but it is still a box! A box that Hollywood producers shove the talent, skill, beauty, and charisma of Asian women into. 

I’d like to more clearly define the Bitchy Asian Friend with some examples. 

Ali Wong plays Doris in American Housewife opposite her white female lead, Katie. Doris is described as “keep[ing] up a brazen attitude and prides herself on manipulating people to get the results she desires.” Here we see she's already hitting some of the key criteria of the Bitchy Asian Friend; a rude and abrasive personality paired with the all-important selfishly motivated ulterior goals. She is portrayed in the show as a bit meddlesome in Katie’s life giving her sometimes “less than sound” advice for her own gain. 

Another prime example is Peach, played by Shay Mitchell, in Netflix’s You. She is described as “manipulative, emotionally toxic and often parasitic. She appears intent on helping Beck [white female lead], despite frequently engaging in sabotage and passive-aggressive behavior.” 

Some more examples include Brena Koo who plays Carol in The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, the “judgemental neighbor” to Anna [white female lead], Zoe Chao as Tiffany in Senior Year, the snooty nemesis to Stephanie [white female lead], Suzy Nakamura as Karen in Dead to Me, the annoying and meddlesome neighbor to Jen [white female lead]. I hope you are starting to see a pattern in the vocabulary used to describe these Asian characters. 

This is what these Asian women's stories are reduced to. That is the extent of the complexity of their characters. Annoying and judgemental at best; manipulative and scheming at worst. 

Turning our attention to Broadway, in each case, these productions were based off of pre-existing media where the characters were played by white actresses and cast as Asian actresses in the theater. Again, if we take a closer look at these thinly veiled progressive moves you will start to see the more strategic choices in where they decided to place their diverse cast members. 

The immensely talented Alice Lee was chosen to portray Heather Duke in the beloved musical Heathers. Heather Duke is a cold character who so quickly pushes off her grief of recently deceased Heather Chandler [white female lead] to capitalize on her death for her own gain. 

In 2018, it was announced Ashley Park would play the part of Mean Girls’ Gretchen Weiners. A character known to be “full of secrets” who spills these secrets as a means to fabricate Regina George [white female lead]’s downfall from popularity. 

Another recast in a musical is Emily in The Devil Wears Prada. An iconic but generally insensitive and judgemental character which casted Megan Masako Haley for the role. 

I don’t think it's a coincidence that these Asian actresses were not cast as the leads; as the Veronicas, the Cady Herons, the Andys. They are allowed only a limited spectrum of emotions, motives, and moral alignments. Asian women have not earned their full personhood yet. Cathy Hong Park write’s in her essay Minor Feelings “We're so post-racial we're silicon.”  

The lead character serves as the audience's point of access to inject themselves and experience the story. And at least according to Hollywood, white audiences struggle to put themselves in the shoes of an Asian actress. White audiences may see marketing of an Asian-led cast and deem it a story “not for them” even if just subconsciously. “It's an Asian movie.” 

And I'm here to present why that is. Why do white audiences struggle to empathize with the emotions of Asian women? 

The Asian experience in America is incredibly different from the Black experience in America and I wouldn't want to imply that they are the same thing. However, I think we can learn alot from a more established media stereotype like the Sassy Black Friend. Erica Gerald Mason discusses in her article The Effects of the Sassy Black Friend Trope; “Day or night, the SBF must be available to offer sympathy, then crack an outrageous joke. Most importantly, SBFs never have problems of their own.”

(left) Da’ Vine Joy Randolph as Cherise in High Fideloty

She goes on “Hell, I love sassy Black women, but the real, human kind. Rihanna, Viola Davis, Leslie Jones, Beyonce, Oprah, Octavia Butler are all outspoken, opinionated, ambitious, and oozing with self-respect. But the way media portrays Black women is often in broad strokes and without complexity”

Da’ Vine Joy Randolph as Cherise in High Fidelity

“Grouping Black women’s sparkle under the blanket term of ‘sass’ is lazy at best, insulting at worst, and harmful in even the most casual of situations.” And this is where we start to see similarities with the Bitchy Asian Friend.

We are allowed only a limited range of preapproved emotions based on our race. We are not granted the complexity of a full spectrum of emotion. That is reserved for our white leads; And then we wonder why it's hard for white audiences to put themselves in a POC’s shoes when all their lives they've been trained, conditioned through our media that POCs have less emotions: have less complexity.

Anna May Wong in 1931. Famous for both Lotus Blossom and Dragon Lady depictions.

Eugene Franklin Wong writes in his book On Visual Media Racism: Asians In The American Motion Pictures that “Stereotypical delimitations, which have been created, established and maintained by Whites in the motion picture industry, present a property that is not only responsible for retaining a finite set of character depictions, as opposed to the unlimited potential for Whites, but also accountable for the institutionalization of racist stereotypes.”

Wong argues Hollywood has the power to socialize the American people and define what we accept as the status quo. “Repetitions of such stereotypes in film over the years have served to strengthen their perceived validity by the viewing audiences, and subsequent generations are more likely to tolerate the degrading images.”

“Images from (from left) Madame Butterfly, Austin Powers, and The World of Suzie Wong are shown. Scholars say they are examples of negative representations of Asian women in the entertainment industry.”

The status quo is a mere construct: just as gender roles or beauty standards. It is not real. It is not a law of physics. It does not have physical qualities. It is set, molded, created, changed as needed by the ruling class. 

It becomes easier with each generation to accept racist portrayals of Asian people because the status quo established by films has deemed it the social norm. This is particularly scary because these racist ideas turn into racist actions. Wong writes “Such stereotypes promote an ideology that validates certain practices toward racial minorities.”

Mickey Rooney in yellowface for Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Nancy Wang Yuen, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Biola University writes in her findings “When there is a lack of contact between racial groups, people tend to rely on media stereotypes to formulate ideas about people outside of their own race… Furthermore, the media’s tendency to fuel racial misperceptions can contribute to public support for harsher punishments for people of color.”

The way media portrays fictional people of color affects the daily lives of real people of color.

Asian-ness is something tacked on to my personhood. I am an Asian person. White people are simply people. According to the film industry, I am a human with asterisks. 

By no means do I wish for the aforementioned shows, and especially not the actresses, to be “canceled" nor am I saying that you can't enjoy these shows. I love some of these shows and the actresses gave incredible performances!

None of these roles on their own are particularly harmful; the same way a white girl playing Gretchen Wieners isn't harmful. But because there were a whole array of other roles for white women with varying temperaments, moral alignments, and personalities to contrast it, Gretchen Wieners and her negative characteristics don’t come to serve as a representation of white women. 

Margaret Cho starred in the first Asian family sitcom All-American Girl in 1994. She carried this impossible weight of representing ALL Asian women resulting in heavy scrutiny from Asian consumers. She explains, “The weirdness of being the first Asian American star, is that people are constantly judging you. They're asking ‘Where do you fit on this idea of who we are?’ The panic comes from not seeing Asian Americans on television, so the few images we do have of them become overly scrutinized.'' 

On the second ever Asian family sitcom, Fresh Off the Boat, which adapted Taiwanese chef Eddie Huang’s memoir, Constance Wu experienced very similar scrutiny to Margaret Cho. She experienced harassment on set from producers but felt an immense pressure to not speak out. “That show was historic for Asian Americans and it was the only show on network television in over 20 years to star Asian Americans and I did not want to sully the representation of the one show we had representing us.” 

Youtube duo Stef and Terrance write in thier video essay Fresh Off the Boat and The Limitations of Asian Representation, “With the historical lack of cultural representation, each time an Asian story is told we've needed it to be perfect, to finally get it right. There's a pattern of projects about Asian Americans being met with a surge of disapproval and dissatisfaction; they're held to an often unreasonable standard in presenting the culture.”

They continue, “A bigger selection allows for specificity instead of generalities. With more variety, a show about a Korean American woman or a Taiwanese American kid wouldn't have to represent every Asian family; they could just be about Margaret Cho and Eddie Huang.”

If you thought of some positive representations of Asian women while reading this article, they were probably complex leading characters written by Asian writers, like Jenny Han’s To All The Boys I Loved Before, Never Have I Ever by Mindy Kaling, Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan, and the amazing Everything Everywhere All at Once by Daniel Kwan.

I fight less for representation through diverse casts, although a good step, I fight harder for Asian writers, producers, stage managers, costume designers, goddamn it even PA’s! We need more Asian people telling our own stories. The end goal cannot be simply more Asian actors on screen. We need to fight for the space to tell our own stories. That is where we see real success stories. 

Eddie Huang felt Fresh Off the Boat sanitized the pain and struggle his family faced and that the writers changed many plot beats (from his true life) to glorify American culture. Huang relented on the Karen Hunter Show, “Everyone wants representation, and I feel like representation is not enough. It's too easy, because Hollywood's answer is ‘aight cool we need to put these faces with this skin on television and movies to get yall to watch, cool, but we're gonna put our words and our stories in their mouths.”  

On All-American Girl “none of its 11 writers were Korean American”. Margret Cho was barred from any creative involvement. She “did not write, direct, or produce any episodes like her contemporary comedian-turned-network stars [were given the opportunity to].”

“How can we actually be authentic if we were not trusted to tell our own story?” said Cho. 

This article is my best persuasion attempt; This article is me screaming into the void “I exist! I exist! I exist!” But in the words of Cathy Hong Park, 

“Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.”

I exist! 

I exist!

I exist.