Okada inSTALLments
volume I, issue 9

Social Misconceptions About Gay Asian Americans: The China Doll Syndrome

by Ameeta Patel

Just the cutest things; small and dainty like China Dolls. --geocities web site

A "china doll." What images does the phrase elicit? Something fragile, delicate, exquisite. Something decorative, exotic and feminine. A toy to be played with... The Asian American gay man has found himself facing a fairly serious misperception of society, that of the "geisha boy." The term "geisha" has often been used by heterosexuals in reference to Asian women, and perpetuated by media representations of them. This inaccurate, overgeneralized stereotype seems to have managed to carry over from labeling heterosexual Asian women to attach itself to homosexual Asian men.

The social identification as "Asian American" carries with it a long history of typecasting and marginalization in American society, from barred immigration to the model minority stereotype, all affecting each subculture within the Asian American community. One of the subcultures now gaining some attention in American society is the Asian gay community. Like so many other minority contingencies, the gay Asian American male has been forced into a corner of definitions and stereotypes. Situated in a triple jeopardy of sorts--a jeopardy of race, class, and sexual orientation--the gay Asian faces unique obstacles asserting his position and identity in contemporary American society. Previous silence on the subject of Asian homosexuality has finally been breached as Asian Americans have come to be increasingly comfortable with the fact that "Asian American" and "homosexual" do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive identities. The experience is a synergistic combination of two distinctive minority experiences, inextricably entwined.

The history of homosexuality has long been seen as a scale measured by standards of heterosexuality. Homosexuals were categorized as masculine and feminine: masculine homosexuals desired feminine homosexuals and vice versa, in keeping with the qualitative measures imposed by heterosexual analysts. (Ellis 1905). Working within that framework, it becomes more apparent why the social institutions of the model minority and the China Doll Syndrome are in existence. Believing in the myth of the model minority attributes passive "feminine" qualities to Asian men, effectively neutralizing the threat to the masculine White man. By the same token, the perpetuation of the Asian man's feminization works to make them desirable as "femme" gays who submit to Caucasian men, whereby the Caucasian man's masculinity is reaffirmed, keeping him in power. If this reasoning seems to lead in a cycle of "oppression," it is because it does indeed function in a cycle.

Perhaps what must be most guarded against is internalized "Asian-phobia." In such a situation, Asian American gays may identify so much with their sexual identity that they exclude or "forget" they are Asian American, and all the underlying social issues that affect them as part of a minority group.


1999 June     ...     Okada inSTALLments vol. I, no. 9