Butterflies, Slumdogs, And Tiger Moms: Asian American Women And The Rescue Narrative

Slumdogs: Funny how these tropes go along animalistic lines, right? Okay, maybe not so funny. Anyway, this second trope is the one modeled on the ever popular fascination with “poverty pornography,” as exemplified by Slumdog Millionaire and other films. Like the butterfly trope, the Slumdog fundamentally undercuts Asian women’s agency. Consider, for instance, the Academy Award winning documentary Born into Brothels, which follows Western photographer Zana Briski as she teaches a photography class to group of children from Kolkata’s red-light district. Although Briski’s project, at one level, was to give these children the tools to represent their own world through their own eyes, the film itself undermines this message by casting Briski as its protagonist–a white heroine who is seemingly the only adult who cares for the children of Sonagachi. The film’s portrayal of the sex worker/mothers as, at best, neglectful and, at worst, horrifically abusive, is highly problematic, as noted in an open letter from a sex worker/ grassroots organizer to an Indian newspaper:

The film is a one-sided portrayal of the life of sex workers in Sonagachi. It shows sex workers as unconcerned about the future of their children….The documentary does not shed light on the valiant efforts of the sex workers to unite in order to change their own lives as well as that of their progeny…We fear the global recognition of such a film, giving a one-sided view of the lives of sex workers in a third world country, may do a lot of harm to the global movement of sex workers for their rights and dignity.

As seen in this year’s Saving Face, a documentary about acid-attacks in Pakistan, the Slumdog trope is favors by the Oscars–which seems to love films which teach “us” about a victimized “them.” So, too, mainstream filmgoers (lest you think the Slumdog trope is only relevant to South Asians, let’s remember the Amy Tan Joy Luck Club syndrome). Just consider The Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a novel and film about women’s friendship, yes, but also about the practice of foot-binding in historic China. There is a pleasurable voyeurism in learning about “exotic” and oppressive practices, and conflating the two (exotic/Eastern = oppressive), while usually ignoring on-the-ground, local, grassroots activism against such oppression.

Courtesy TVTropes.com

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