Stigma/ta: Eyes Slant like Chinks of Christ, or Chin-Kee of American Born Chinese

Abstract

Genuine pushbacks from Asian North American—off-white, yellow-ish—minority against white mainstream stereotypes are few and far between, given that the bulk of off-white (self-)representations blossom in English after a lifetime of nurture by, and internalization of, white culture. Thus, in their mother tongue of English, projected from the white patriarchal gaze, off-white visual culture reprises Western Orientalist polarization of the “Chink,” pardon my Americanism. On the one hand, the racial slur “Chink” stigmatizes the they-all-look-alike Asian Other as having eyes slanting upward and/or in long narrow slits, from Robert Hans van Gulik’s self-designed book cover to off-white Gene Luen Yang’s graphic books and Domee Shi’s animations. On the other, the West projects its own longing onto the exotic Other, whose visual, auditory, and sensorial differences “open sesame” to otherworldly, fantastical escapades. The offensive stigma of slant-eyed Asians hence morphs into, not to mince words, the crucified Christ’s stigmata, windows to the soul of transcendent resurrection. The West—white as well as off-white—manages to eat the body of the Other and to have it, too, as proof of the West’s spirituality. This project examines cases of Oriental stigma of slanting eyes transformed into stigmata of white and off-white spiritual triumphalism. I hereby talk back against the linguistic and cultural hegemony that schizophrenically splits the racial or immigrant other, skewing/skewering Oriental eyes, from Van Gulik to Yang, Shi, and the like. Let us turn our gaze to those strange, even monstrous, eyes in the mirror!