Year of the horse I have waited for you. I’m not a fan of New Year’s Eve parties. Never have been. They’re uncomfortable and tacky and provide little comfort to all the fears condensed in my mind for one more go at a year of existence. Thankfully, half of February and his doomed predecessor do not count. The last snake shed has gone by and I check my chinese zodiac horoscope, it looks pretty decent. I panic took out the trash and sweeped whilst I still safely could. Catch myself making jokes that are undoubtedly negative and knock on wood shaking my head. No negatives for now, my humour can take a step back. Oddly enough it’s a common thing to do now. Lunar new year. An event, with pop ups beyond the still mostly segregated historical chinatowns of cities around the world. How peculiar, new entertainment it seems can be found anywhere for people who never cared for their neighbours with a different life path. Why am I seeing all these non-asian people telling me what we should and should not do for Chinese New Year because they’re in their “Chinese era”? The same people staring at my bento on school field trips suddenly want the dumplings’ recipe? Sorry I missed a chapter but since when was it ever okay to make a whole culture a trend?

What a privilege it is, to be able to try on someone else’s identity for a day without inheriting any of the consequences. To pick out the parts that you like and adorn yourself with them, then to peel it off when you tire of it, hanging it up in the back of your closet to collect dust.

Faith xue

Background Role Problems 

Not unseen, not erased—but recognised only through a script written long before you arrived. You know your cues. You know where to stand. You know which version of yourself will be tolerated in the frame. From watching your image circulate freely while your interior life remains untranslated. From realising that visibility is not the same thing as presence, and that recognition often arrives stripped of authorship. 

In Interior Chinatown, everyone lives inside a show that pretends to be neutral. The script exists prior to the person. Willis Wu does not audition for a role so much as orbit it—Generic Asian Man, Background Oriental, Kung Fu Guy. These are not jobs; they are gravitational fields. Even when he moves closer to the centre of the frame, he remains peripheral to meaning. He is visible, but never central. Audible, but never listened to. The script insists it is simply reflecting reality, when in fact it is manufacturing it. Willis Wu does not want fame, exactly. He wants permission. Permission to move from background noise to narrative substance. From “Generic Asian Man” to something with interiority. He wants what so many of us want: to be legible without being reduced. But the trick of the system is that it offers visibility only in exchange for compliance. To be seen, you must flatten yourself into what the audience already knows how to consume. When Willis exaggerates his accent, when he performs his own stereotype more faithfully than anyone else ever could, it feels humiliating—but also inevitable.

There is no role otherwise. Silence or caricature. Choose one. That is the lie we have been told repeatedly: that if you wait long enough, assimilate cleanly enough, perform well enough, the camera will eventually turn and stay. But the camera is not neutral. It does not simply record reality; it manufactures hierarchy. Some faces are meant to be foreground. Others are atmosphere. This logic extends far beyond television.

Convenient Inclusions

We like to believe we live in an era of representation, but what we really live in is an era of managed difference. Difference that photographs well. Difference that can be monetised. Difference that does not threaten the underlying structure. The centre remains untouched; the margins are invited in as decoration. We live now in a moment where Asian aesthetics have escaped the margins without freeing the people attached to them. Eyeliner techniques, skincare routines, facial features—circulating freely, detached from bodies that once carried them under threat. This is where the illusion of progress sets in. It feels like inclusion because the surface has changed. But surfaces are cheap. This is where appropriation becomes confused with admiration.

The phenomenon now called “asian fishing” is not simply about imitation; it is about extractive visibility. The desirable parts are borrowed, worn temporarily, monetised, and then discarded once the trend shifts. What remains unborrowed is the history: the mockery, the violence, the conditional belonging. The racialised body becomes a mood board, while the actual person remains overdetermined by stereotype. Asianness is allowed to circulate freely so long as it is detached from Asian people. It is safest when worn to be quickly shed. The moment it is embodied permanently, historically, politically, it becomes inconvenient again. Asian fishing is not about envy; it is about extraction. The features that once justified exclusion suddenly become desirable once filtered through whiteness, wealth, or celebrity. The face is admired; the life attached to it remains disposable. What is being copied is not identity but effect—the aesthetic residue of a culture stripped of its context. It reinforces a familiar lesson: desirability is not inherent. It is granted. And it is almost never granted to those who live permanently inside the image.

The cruelty lies in the asymmetry. You can try on my face. I cannot take mine off.

This is why the discourse around the so-called Oxford study felt so violent, even before it was revealed to be misused, distorted, or in some cases entirely fabricated. It reduced intimacy to data, flattened desire into statistics, and then weaponised those numbers against the very women being measured. Asian women were positioned simultaneously as hyper-desired and morally suspect, fetishised and blamed, visible and voiceless.

What disappears in these conversations is power.

Fetishisation is not flattery. It is not a compliment to be ranked “most desirable” in a system that historically barred you from humanity. Desire under unequal conditions is never neutral. When Asian women are hyper-sexualised and Asian men are desexualised, both are trapped in roles that predate them. One is punished for being wanted; the other for being ignored. Neither gets to simply exist.

Mechanisms that persist

To ignore this is to pretend that centuries of exclusion, exoticisation, and infantilisation have no afterlife. That representation does not sediment into fantasy. That being cast repeatedly as Pretty Oriental Flower or Submissive Love Interest does not eventually shape how you are touched, approached, consumed. The violence here is not just interpersonal; it is structural. It is the insistence that Asian women must carry the burden of everyone else’s projections while being denied interiority.

And yet, blame travels downward. Women are asked to account for structures they did not design. The system watches quietly, untouched, while its actors fight over crumbs of validation.

What all of this shares with Interior Chinatown is the same central mechanism: roles that masquerade as identity. You are either too much of something or not enough of anything. You are legible, but never whole. You are allowed to exist only in halves. Representation does not fail because it is absent—it fails because it is conditional. You can be visible if you remain predictable. You can speak if you say what is expected. You can succeed if you do not ask to change the rules. And so many people internalise this bargain. We curate ourselves, in the end. We are told that representation has improved. And it has, on paper. More faces, more leads, more narratives. But access does not automatically dismantle architecture. Sometimes it just renovates the lobby.

The question, then, is not whether we are visible. It is who controls the script.

This is uncomfortable, because scripts provide certainty. Even oppressive ones. They tell you where you stand. They explain why things are hard. They offer a warped sense of belonging. To leave them is to accept ambiguity, misrecognition, and loneliness. It is to risk being misunderstood without the protection of stereotype. Not everyone gets to be the protagonist. But refusing to be a prop is already an act of authorship. The fantasy of progress tells us that visibility is victory, that being seen equals being free. But visibility without agency is just surveillance with better lighting. Being desired is not the same as being respected. Being included is not the same as being safe.

We are not living in a post-racial, post-feminist, post-anything world. We are living in a world very good at appearing past its problems while reproducing them with updated aesthetics. The background roles have better costumes now. The dialogue sounds more progressive. The structure remains intact.

We’ve shed and now we’ll rise. 

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