subvert the expectations of a nasty guy in search of petite naked Asian bodies by showing him the full ugliness of ‘sweet Asian girls.’”
Inside, the Harem of Angst offers a menu of distinctly unappetizing
choices. Madame Bootiefly sits on the toilet, trousers around her shins, face obscured. Annie, “an expert in the ancient and delicate art of flower arranging,” lolls in a red wig, toting a vacuum cleaner and dragging off a long cigarette. Mikki, a man in drag, is “thirteen, and still in pigtails.” She says, “You will also notice my dainty feet, large and unbound, perfect for giving the oriental (back walking) massages. I’m sure you will cry tears of joy with my petite 200 pounds crushing the small of your back.”
The site also features such treats as downloadable audio pranks, in which BBCM and her friends crank-call sex-industry companies; the BBCM’s Memoirs of an Anti-Geisha (“I have gigantic size 9½ feet, crater zits that break out through my ‘silky skin’ … I have a little pot-belly, I have an ass that needs to go to the gym”); and a Frequently Unasked Questions page that addresses questions commonly asked on mail-order-bride sites.
Q: Will my bride make an easy adjustment from her Asian Culture to the liberal American lifestyle? A: … You may be able to buy yourself a nice little Asian Porno, a buddhist bracelet, or some other object that your capitalistic lifestyle Orientatize[s]—but you cannot buy these women. They are not for sale.
Wong—who lives in Los Angeles and works as an actor, performance artist, and writer, supplementing her income by selling random items ( Iron Chef promotional fridge magnets, for example) on eBay—explains that her porn/mail-order-bride spoof site was built as a final project for an Asian-American studies class at UCLA and came out of the evolution of her political consciousness. When Wong was introduced to Asian-American studies, she suddenly felt she had a context for “every awkward experience I had growing up.” With her newfound sense of political awareness, she says, “I was literally walking on campus and fuming.” By her second year, she was exploring ways of expressing herself through performance and art. She had also begun to notice that the political agenda in Asian-American studies classes was annoyingly homogeneous. “A lot of the same issues kept coming up, especially about stereotypes and representation.” All anyone wanted to do, it seemed, was tear apart Asian Americans on TV, in media, in literature: Amy Tan emasculates Asian men, Margaret Cho isn’t funny, Lucy Liu is a dragon lady, and so on. In her eyes, her peers’ attitudes limited Asian-American identity to narrow, fragmented roles. Such attitudes,
says Wong, also imply that individual Asian Americans should be held accountable for representing the whole group.
Wong created Big Bad Chinese Mama as much to poke fun at the righteous indignation of her classmates as to put herself on the front lines. She wanted to confront the “nitpicky people”—who she felt were getting too comfortable in their academic bubble—with the reality of racism in the real world. The site’s metatags, which juxtapose keywords like “American,” “Asia,” “feminism,” and “ass-kicking anti-geishas” with “mail-order,” “Orientals,” “cock,” “suck,” “lesbians,” and “teen on teen,” bring the two worlds skidding toward each other. Wong expected her peers to be insulted. “I expected [them] to say, ‘How can Kristina Wong represent Asians that way?’ Then I want them to look at the [negative] responses in my guest book from all the white men, and black men, and Asian people … and see [that] this is the ignorance out there that we’re not experiencing in our highfalutin class where we get to talk about how wrong sweatshops are as we wear sweatshop clothing.” Instead, more people than she expected responded positively, posting congratulatory messages
Inside, the Harem of Angst offers a menu of distinctly unappetizing
choices. Madame Bootiefly sits on the toilet, trousers around her shins, face obscured. Annie, “an expert in the ancient and delicate art of flower arranging,” lolls in a red wig, toting a vacuum cleaner and dragging off a long cigarette. Mikki, a man in drag, is “thirteen, and still in pigtails.” She says, “You will also notice my dainty feet, large and unbound, perfect for giving the oriental (back walking) massages. I’m sure you will cry tears of joy with my petite 200 pounds crushing the small of your back.”
The site also features such treats as downloadable audio pranks, in which BBCM and her friends crank-call sex-industry companies; the BBCM’s Memoirs of an Anti-Geisha (“I have gigantic size 9½ feet, crater zits that break out through my ‘silky skin’ … I have a little pot-belly, I have an ass that needs to go to the gym”); and a Frequently Unasked Questions page that addresses questions commonly asked on mail-order-bride sites.
Q: Will my bride make an easy adjustment from her Asian Culture to the liberal American lifestyle? A: … You may be able to buy yourself a nice little Asian Porno, a buddhist bracelet, or some other object that your capitalistic lifestyle Orientatize[s]—but you cannot buy these women. They are not for sale.
Wong—who lives in Los Angeles and works as an actor, performance artist, and writer, supplementing her income by selling random items ( Iron Chef promotional fridge magnets, for example) on eBay—explains that her porn/mail-order-bride spoof site was built as a final project for an Asian-American studies class at UCLA and came out of the evolution of her political consciousness. When Wong was introduced to Asian-American studies, she suddenly felt she had a context for “every awkward experience I had growing up.” With her newfound sense of political awareness, she says, “I was literally walking on campus and fuming.” By her second year, she was exploring ways of expressing herself through performance and art. She had also begun to notice that the political agenda in Asian-American studies classes was annoyingly homogeneous. “A lot of the same issues kept coming up, especially about stereotypes and representation.” All anyone wanted to do, it seemed, was tear apart Asian Americans on TV, in media, in literature: Amy Tan emasculates Asian men, Margaret Cho isn’t funny, Lucy Liu is a dragon lady, and so on. In her eyes, her peers’ attitudes limited Asian-American identity to narrow, fragmented roles. Such attitudes,
says Wong, also imply that individual Asian Americans should be held accountable for representing the whole group.
Wong created Big Bad Chinese Mama as much to poke fun at the righteous indignation of her classmates as to put herself on the front lines. She wanted to confront the “nitpicky people”—who she felt were getting too comfortable in their academic bubble—with the reality of racism in the real world. The site’s metatags, which juxtapose keywords like “American,” “Asia,” “feminism,” and “ass-kicking anti-geishas” with “mail-order,” “Orientals,” “cock,” “suck,” “lesbians,” and “teen on teen,” bring the two worlds skidding toward each other. Wong expected her peers to be insulted. “I expected [them] to say, ‘How can Kristina Wong represent Asians that way?’ Then I want them to look at the [negative] responses in my guest book from all the white men, and black men, and Asian people … and see [that] this is the ignorance out there that we’re not experiencing in our highfalutin class where we get to talk about how wrong sweatshops are as we wear sweatshop clothing.” Instead, more people than she expected responded positively, posting congratulatory messages
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