Orientals Need Apply: Gender-Based Asylum in the U.S‪.‬

Every other year I teach a course entitled "The History of Asian Women in America," which focuses on the experiences of East, South and Southeast Asian women as they journey to these shores and resettle. Using autobiographies, poetry, journal writings, interviews and academic texts, the students learn from the women what political, social, cultural, economic and ecological conditions prompted them to leave their homelands and why they chose the United States. We learn of their rich cultural backgrounds, their struggles to create a subculture based on their home and host experiences, and the cultural gaps that often appear between the first and subsequent generations. And we also learn how patriarchy affects their lives transnationally. In spite of all this information, inevitably one student always asks "why are Asian cultures so oppressive to women?" I always cringe when this question is asked because it reveals, among other things, the pervasiveness of "Orientalism:" an ideological view of the East as being dark, mysterious, chaotic, feared, and in need of governance; and the persistence of American Exceptionalism: the notion of a U.S. that is civilized, powerful, and has the "God-given" right to govern the East. (1) No matter what or how I teach, it is very difficult to dislodge these ideological, ethnocentric, and racialized patriarchal beliefs.