Oriental Outrage

This poem collage focuses on how the media portrayed the immigration and sexualization of Asian women in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Through this project, I wanted to highlight how the media impacted the image of Asian women at the time and their journey becoming American citizens. Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, specifically a branch of it called the Page Act of 1875, Chinese women who were not married to an American merchant were considered smuggled prostitutes. The Page Act was not repealed until 1974, and it left behind a legacy of perceiving Asian American women through a very racialized and sexualized lens. This legacy continues to impact the lives of Asian women today, considering the women who were killed in the Atlanta Spa shooting a year ago.

The blocks of text incorporated in the poem are from historical newspaper archives that covered stories on Chinese immigration and Oriental women in general. Much of the text I included was from California newspapers, but I also included a segment of the Page Act of 1875. Since clothes are a significant part of a woman’s identity and how women are portrayed in the aftermath of a rape or sexual assault, I created a digital collage of materials and patterns that would be seen in traditional Chinese and Japanese clothing. These patterns were included in clothing that used to symbolize pride and status in both China and Japan, but it has evolved into something that caused people to look down upon Asian women as foreign. And now it is clothing deemed acceptable to be worn by white women when they want to look sexy on Halloween or follow fashion trends.

I titled this piece “Oriental Outrage” in an attempt to encompass the perverse image created about Asian women and the treatment toward these women that follows in consequence. However, as a woman of Chinese ethnicity who is from the Bay Area, this also encompasses my own anger about how this image, and the treatment that comes along with it, continues to hurt my people.