New York City Noir

Interview with Asian Model J.

J. was another model who contacted me in response to my Craigslist post.  Though born in the U.S., her family had originally come from Cambodia.  Now J. lives with her bf on 83rd Street but to the west of my own address.  She's a student at Hunter where she's majoring in studio art.

J. and I met at Cafe Lalo and talked for about twenty minutes while I explained my project to her.  She was interested and wanted to participate.  We also talked about Cambodia and Southeast Asian in general.  One of my ideas has been that in a few years I would relocated to Thailand, where a fixed income would go further, and spend my time traveling to Buddhist monasteries and photographing the ruins and images of the Buddha.  I don't know if I'll actually be able to carry it that far, but at least I can return to Thailand for a few weeks at a time and do my photography then.  In the meantime, I learned from J. that if Cambodia is not quite stabilized, it's still much safer to travel through than it was a decade ago. 

Interview with Asian Model G.

G. contacted me in response to my post for Asian models on Craigslist (see my January 19th posting for the text).  She works at an upscale Manhattan restaurant but lives with her husband in Jamaica, which she described as a "rough" neighborhood.  She is a petite woman who had modeled in Taiwan prior to coming to NYC and who will be returning home to celebrate the lunar New Year.We met in the Madison Square area and sat and talked for about a half hour at a coffee shop on 23rd Street.

When interviewing models prior to scheduling a shoot, I am first of all interested in determining what the model looks like in real life.  I know better than anyone how different a woman can look wearing professionally done makeup in photos.  Beyond that, I look for common ground, what might better be described as empathy.  It's important to me that a model understand what I'm trying to do in my work and be sympathetic to my goals.  If a model has an attitude or just wants to pop in front of the camera for a few minutes before collecting her pay, there's no way I'm going to work with her.

G. was both mature and very sweet person and someone I thought I could work with very easily.  A big plus is that she worked as a figure model in Taiwan and is not necessarily biased against nudity as long as she feels she can trust the photographer.  While I want the photos for my online project to contain images only of clothed models, I regularly work with the female nude and always like to make contact with models who are willing to do figure work. 

She was also a Buddhist and we discussed the different schools at length.  She herself belongs to the sect which believes in chanting "nam myoho renge kyo" as a means to enlightenment.  I told her honestly that my problem with that was that I could not understand how chanting for material goals could bring one to enlightenment when the whole concept of Buddhism, as I understood it, was to free an individual from attachment to material possessions.  G. suggested that it was a type of trick in that the real goal of chanting was to bring out the Buddha within one and that chanting for material goals was simply a technique to give beginners a reason to begin chanting in the first place.  The idea being that once a person has chanted for a while, he or she will be enlightened enough to realize they do not really need the things for which they had originally begun chanting.  It was an interesting concept and one I had not thought of myself.

 

Buddhism via Existentialism

Existentialism, for our purposes anyway, could be defined as the realization that nothing exists beyond the physical world surrounding us.  It's the logical endpoint of The Age of Reason (no accident that one of Sartre's novels bears that title).  As scientific thought advanced from the Renaissance to the modern era, there has been less and less room for traditional religion.  When faith is replaced by empiricism, it becomes obvious that there's no God, let alone a heaven or a hell.  That's what Nietzsche meant when he claimed, "God is dead."

While it's obviously positive to replace superstition with knowledge, it poses a terrific problem.  If there is no God, then there is no reason for us to be alive beyond the accident of our births.  We're here on our own until the day we die, and any action we take in our lifetimes is meaningless. When we die everything comes to an abrupt and absolute end.  Except for fear of being punished by the law, there's no reason to live a good life any more than a bad one.  In fact, the whole idea of a "good" life ceases to make sense.  As Nietzsche remarked in Beyond Good and Evil, "There are no moral phenomena, only the moral interpretation of phenomena."

It's this dilemma, and little else, that has kept the major Western religions alive into the twenty-first century -- without a belief in a higher power, life would have no point for their adherents.  Why even bother to get out of bed in the morning?

But this is only a problem for Western religions, which alone has sought to place God in time and space.  Their beliefs hold that God is an actual entity who has acted in real (historical) time.  There are those fundamentalists who believe they can calculate the exact age of the planet from a reading of the Bible.  In their minds, religion has been moved from the realm of myth to that of fact.

In Asian thought, the idea of a God overseeing creation has never taken hold.  Rather, in Buddhism, the goal is not to act as a good person for reward in the afterlife but to perform good acts, throught the eightfold path, in order to bring out the enlightened being dormant within.  In that sense, Eastern philosophy is mre mystical than it is eschatological.  There is no need for any belief in life after death.  Nirvana is a state of mind, not a place.

I read once -- it may have been in one of Joseph Campbell's books -- that the difference between the Hinayana and Mahayana schools of Buddhism is this:  in the former, people realize they are traveling on a boat that's headed nowhere and they freak out and start wailing how terrible it is;  in the latter, people realize they are traveling on a boat that's headed nowhere and think, "What a blast.  Let's party."

Buddhism accepts the inherent absurdity of life.  It's only when the total meaninglessness of existence has been accepted that one is free to enjoy life. 

The Physical Dangers of Racist Stereotypes

So why is a white guy writing about Asian Fetish if he isn’t into it himself?

Over ten years ago, I lived with Julie (not her real name), a beautiful Korean woman in her early twenties. I wasn’t in love and neither was Julie – we’d just happened to have been going out together when she’d lost her apartment and had been forced to stay at my place for a few months. It was a typical story for Manhattan, where affordable apartments are always hard to find.

Two things about Julie:

One, she was the first Asian woman I’d gone out with for any length of time. Julie had graduated the year before summa cum laude from a prestigious university in Massachusetts where she had been very active in Asian student organizations on campus. She brought me up sharp when I innocently used the word "Oriental" in conversation and introduced me to Said’s seminal work on the subject. As Julie and I discussed Asian stereotypes, from the casting of Charlie Chan films to the libretto of Madama Butterfly, I gained a new perspective into what it means to be Asian in America. I also learned to enjoy Korean food, which Julie cooked incredibly well.

Secondly, horribly, Julie had been viciously raped a few months before she had met me. It had been one of those nightmares where the attacker jumped a woman just as she had put her key in the door and then pushed his way inside after her. The experience had, not surprisingly, totally traumatized Julie and had filled her with an anger that surfaced uncontrollably at unexpected times and places, once memorably over dinner at the Union Square Café.

I never put the two points above together until several years later, when Julie was already long gone from my life. It was then that I read a news article on the web about a particularly nasty rape that had occurred in the Pacific Northwest. The attackers in this incident were apparently a pair low-IQ backwoods types. The pair had somewhere heard the urban legend of crowded Japanese subways where women stand submissively with eyes closed, too ashamed to complain, while perverted salarymen press themselves against the women and grope their breasts and buttocks without fear of retribution. The two rednecks had swallowed the story whole and had deliberately targeted a Japanese woman to abduct and rape. They’d naively assumed there would be no risk in attacking a Japanese woman because, once she’d been released, her sense of shame would prohibit her from approaching the authorities. In the case at hand, of course, the victim went directly to the police once she was freed and immediately identified her attackers and had them arrested.

It was after having read this article that, thinking back, I first began to wonder if Julie had also been deliberately singled out by her own attacker. Had he too bought into the myth of the submissive Asian woman? Did Julie’s Asian ethnicity and petite size make her an unwitting target? Ultimately, these are questions that cannot be answered. To the best of my knowledge, the rapist was never caught. Even if he had been apprehended and questioned, he might not have known himself the extent to which he’d been influenced by the racist stereotypes so pervasive in American culture.

The idea stayed in my mind and eventually became the basis for the novel I’m now writing. I want to demonstrate in my fiction that not only are stereotypes of Asian women completely fallacious and degrading, but that they can also be dangerous, in the most literal sense, to the physical safety of the women themselves.

It bears noting that, of the many Asian women I’ve met in NYC, not a single one has ever conformed to the stereotype of the submissive "Oriental" sex doll. On the contrary, and without exception, these Asian women have all possessed forceful characters as varied and individual as those of any other ethnic background.

Japanese "Pink Film" (pinku eiga)

One source of Asian Fetish that's not usually discussed is the extent to which Eastern views of Asian women influence the growth of racial stereotypes here in the U.S.  Most sources, such as Prasso's Asian Mystique, view the development of racial prejudice as something that has developed full blown in American culture independently of any Asian influence.  But one has only to watch a Japanese "violent pink" film to realize how incorrect this assessment is.  There is a long tradition in Asian culture, now being questioned assiduosly as the demand for equal rights has grown, that holds women to be in all respects subservient to men.  The question is then -- if Americans see Asian women as submissive sex dolls, are the attitudes towards women in certain Asian cultures at least partially to blame?

Specifically, and most dramatically, there is a sub-genre of Japanese pinku eiga ("pink film") called "violent pink."  These films are not strictly pornographic because they do not show actual intercourse, the genitals of either sex, or even pubic hair.  These elements are masked primarily through the use of camera angles but also with a digital blur over offending areas in those shots where they would othewise be visible.  But if these films don't show actual sex, they do contain graphic scenes of intercourse and reenactments of violence against women and of forcible rape.  In do doing, they attempt to be sexually exciting but instead end up being deeply disturbing.

The most notable example of violent pink is the Angel Guts series of five films made by Nikkatsu studios in the 1970's.  (Although Nikkatsu is the oldest studio in Japan and at one time the most successful, its fortunes fell during the post-WWII years, and it began to crank out violent pink films until its name became synonomous with the subgenre).  The Angel Guts series has an ambivalent point of view and is strangely sympathetic to female characters themselves.  Notably, the screenplays were written by Takashii Ishii who went on to direct Flower and Snake. perhaps the kinkiest of all violent pink.  Unlike most other cult films, it has incredibly high production values.

So, in my novel, I intend to make one of the three male protagonists a former director of Japanese "violent pink" who's now cranking out S&M films here in NYC.  Echi definitely is twisted, a pervert who embraces violence against women, not only in his films, but in his lifestyle as well.  The overriding problem in his characterization, though, is to reveal this to the viewer/reader without actually pandering to the same stereotypes that are already so reprehensible.