Bai Ling eradicates 100 years of feminist struggle with “Shanghai Baby”
by guest contributor Jennifer Fang, originally published at Reappropriate
(Hat-tip to Angry Asian Man)
I feel dirty. Very, very dirty. You see, I just watched the trailer for Bai Ling’s new movie: Shanghai Baby.
Let’s play a drinking game. First, make sure you’re not at work: this trailer is most definitely NSFW. Then, pour yourself some alcohol. And then, take a drink every time you see:
1. Bai Ling being sexy/flirty/coy with a man (1 shot)
2. Bai Ling having sex (2 shots)
3. Bai Ling’s nipples (2 shots per nipple)
4. Bai Ling orgasming (just down the bottle)
Be careful — that level of alcohol in your bloodstream will make you go blind. But then again, maybe that would be preferable to actually seeing this travesty:
The idea — the very concept — that anyone would make a movie version of Shanghai Baby is completely revolting to me. This movie is yet another vehicle for Bai Ling to perpetuate the hypersexualized Asian whore stereotype for salivating American male audiences, although, frankly, I’m just about done with Bai Ling’s sexuality spilling all over the screen. Don’t get me wrong — it is certainly empowering for an Asian woman to seize control of her sexuality, but a) this movie is all about how CoCo hasn’t seized control over her sexuality, and b) I’m done with the unchanging portrayal of Asian/Asian American women as the nymphomaniacs of the world.
And that’s just scratching the surface of this film’s plot. It’s no coincidence that one of only two lines of dialogue in the trailer are Coco’s friend asking her who she would pick: Tiantian or Marc. That’s the entire plot! Coco is a freelance writer, but the plot doesn’t worry itself about her life and her independence — no, this is a book about a woman who falls in love with an Asian man but lusts for a White man. And her life falls apart because she can’t have them both.
Yes, her life — her very being — revolves around the men in her life. This film takes the whole “whore” stereotype to the next level, with a story about an Asian woman who is so motivated by her attraction to a White man that she willingly puts her career on hold to pursue a role as his mistress, uncaring that he obviously has a family of his own.
Coco leads an intense life in the lively subculture of the boomtown Shanghai. It revolves around endless nights spent in the Shanghai club and art scene, sex, literature and the writing of her first novel.
Her life takes an unexpectedly complicated turn when she suddenly feels attracted to two very opposite men.
One is the young Chinese artist Tiantian, a melancholic and sensitive painter with a complicated family history. He leads the live of a true bohemian, sustained by the money his mother sends from abroad.
In their quest for art and beauty they are soulmates. Coco develops feelings of exceptional tenderness for him. He seems to be her ideal love.
Marc from Berlin is completely different: masculin, physically very attractive, he is an internationally active business consultant who begins a passionate affair with Coco.
Coco is torn between her love for Tiantian and Mark‘s physical attractiveness – even when she learns that he is already married, has a child and will possibly return to Berlin.
Coco briefly succeeds in experiencing both lust and love with the same intensity. But when the melancholy Tiantian ultimately sinks into heroin addiction and progressively deteriorates, Coco‘s dilemma comes to a head.
She is caught between Far-Eastern traditions and Western lifestyles, between romantic love and unbridled lust. Too late she discovers that she has succumbed to Mark. Lossing both men and without any stable orientation, she errs through modern-day Shanghai, and only on a trip to Berlin she can recover herself.
Check out the same tired race-based stereotypes perpetuated by the men in this film. Tiantian is the Asian male: hopelessly romantic, sensitive, and devoted — the very antithesis of Hollywood masculinity (whether you agree with this definition or not). He’s so pathetically in love with Coco that when he can’t have her, he becomes addicted to heroin. Marc, on the other hand, is the aggressive, handsome, attractive, dominating White male Adonis fantasy, sweeping Coco off her feet with his libido. He uses and discards Coco to satisfy his own sexual appetities. If that’s not playing into the White male sexual fantasies of American audiences of this film, I don’t know what is.
There was a time when I was enraptured by Bai Ling. Here was a woman willing to stand up to her country in order to help tell the story of government oppression in Red Corner. I thought that was pretty courageous. But y’know what? I’m done — just done — with trying to imagine feminism in her antics.
Everywhere I turn now, she’s selling her sexuality for bit roles in films that only sully her race and her sex, and in so doing, sullies all who happen to share those identities with her. Excuse me, but I need a shower.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Hmmph. « neverending story. on 17 Jul 2007 at 3:53 am
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