At this point, it is high time to acknowledge the proverbial elephant in the room. Several clients who came to see me have, by now, already remarked upon the overt themes of Asiatic culture and identity that infuse this entire platform. Suffice to say, it should come as zero surprise to my audience that, in terms of ethnic heritage, I am not even remotely Asian by any standard of measurement. This stark contrast probably strikes audiences as initially bizarre, because, after all, what could the world of Oriental sexuality possibly have to do with the career of some random white prostitute? Answering this question, to be sure, will not be easy for me; however, this is the question upon which I must base this writing, and I have faith in the power of the chautauqua to guide us to some semblance of a coherent answer.
Let us begin our meandering foray by reviewing the infamous case of Rachel Dolezal—a woman of overwhelmingly Germanic ancestry (with naturally blonde hair and blue eyes, no less) from Lincoln County, Montana, who, while on air with KXLY-TV's reporter Jeff Humphrey, set off a chain reaction of events that ultimately revealed her to have used hair perming and skin tanning technology to publicly masquerade, throughout most of her professional career, as a black woman with an extensive history of receiving racial discrimination and hate in a watershed moment in which Mr. Humphrey, with a picture of Dolezal's obviously white biological father in hand, confronted her about the veracity of her public claims to black ancestry.
Humphrey: Is that your dad?
Dolezal: Yeah, that's my dad.
Humphrey: This man right here is your father? Right there?
Dolezal: You have a question about that?
Humphrey: Yes, ma'am. I was wondering if your dad really is an African-American man?
Dolezal: That's a very–I mean, I don't–I don't know what you're implying.
Humphrey: Are you African-American?
Dolezal: I don't, I don't understand the question of—I did tell you that, yes, that's my dad. And he was unable to come in January.
Humphrey: Are your parents, are they white?
Dolezal: I refuse...
The date was June 10th, 2015. For an entire year leading up to this interview, Dolezal had been serving as the Spokane, Washington Chapter President of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)—an advocacy organization founded in 1909 to address racial discrimination that pervaded the United States prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. To be absolutely clear, a white individual serving as an officer in the NAACP by itself is unremarkable. The NAACP has no racial requirements to hold office, and even three out of the five original founders were themselves white (viz. Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, and Oswald Garrison Villard). What fueled the ensuing controversy were her extensive public claims to be a member of a racial group to which she did not belong, and using those claims as credentials to declare experienced "racial grievances" and install herself into positions of authority (the NAACP being merely one of the more illustrative examples).
What followed from the public outcry was utterly remarkable. Readers should note that, during this time, the firestorms of the trans-sexuality and gender identity controversy were just starting to emerge into mainstream public discourse. Case in point, in April of that very same year, Bruce Jenner proclaimed himself to be a woman in a 20/20 interview with Diane Sawyer, and, in the following July, a mere one month after the Dolezal scandal broke, subsequently appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine with the new name "Caitlyn." It was within the context of this zeitgeist that Dolezal, in an attempt to mitigate the public opprobrium against her, began to proclaim herself to be "trans racial"—a position that was inexplicably sufficient to earn her a book deal from BenBella Books, the result of which was her formally published memoir entitled In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.
I know people say "don't judge a book by its cover," but jeez...
There is simply not enough space in the context of this article to comprehensively disentangle the logical intricacies of this issue. That subject alone is sufficient to fill several books; therefore, I have no choice but to temporarily refrain from fastidiously layout out my position on transgenderism (though indeed, the list of things that I need to circle back to address continues to grow increasingly longer). However, I nevertheless feel compelled to briefly mention a glaring contradiction that, in my personal observation, appears to be completely absent in public discourse. Those individuals who emphatically proclaim that one's gender is wholly subject to personal definition also maintain that one's race/ethnicity is an nonnegotiable characteristic of birth. Case in point, Rachel Dolezal disappeared into obscurity. The trans activists never awarded martyrdom status to her, which is peculiar for two reasons.
First, maintaining that things like ethnicity/race or age are immutable characteristics makes the claim that "gender is subject to self-identification" completely arbitrary. Second, it's worth noting that, when compared to so-called "gender identification," it makes far more sense for one's "cultural identification" to incongruently "bleed over" or "misalign" itself across heritage boundaries. The intricacies of this subject could also easily fill an entire tome if my objective was to articulately organize the labyrinthine web of logical propositions that would necessarily constitute a comprehensive and unassailable position on this question—a task that would undoubtedly be valuable, but, like so many other proverbial stones left unturned throughout the course of my writing thus far, greatly exceeds the humble parameters of a single blog post extemporaneously striving to encapsulate unarticulated understanding, and will need to wait for later writings for further elucidation. However, as a temporary place holder for now, I believe it sufficient to point out how easily and unquestioningly modern people accept the notion of, for example, a Swiss citizen of Chinese ancestry (let's just call her "Angélique," for example's sake) who—born and raised in Lausanne (i.e. the largest metropolitan center of Switzerland's Francophone region sharing a border with France itself)—far more relates to French cultural norms and "identity" than her Chinese ethnic heritage. For those of us who live in the West, Chinese people who are completely unable to speak their ancestral language is such a common sight that, unless explicitly indicated, we pay it zero second thought. This is so normal and unremarkable to us because we all intuitively understand how the process of assimilation works. Of course Angélique speaks French rather than Chinese. Of course she considers herself to be more "French" than "Chinese;" it is a natural and normal consequence of where she was born and raised, right? Yet, despite the universally intuitive acceptance regarding this case and others like it, the modern populace recoiled from Rachel Dolezal. The boogeyman of "cultural appropriation" is a term that, for better or worse, now exists in our common contemporary vernacular.
Assimilation good. Cultural appropriation bad.
Okay, but how exactly are these two things fundamentally different? What exactly "went wrong" in Dolezal's case that indelibly separates her from the "hypothetical" Angélique?
For starters, there appears to be a fundamental difference between how these two individuals "claim" their identities. Angélique never tries to convince anyone that her ethnicity is anything other than Chinese, let alone French or any other subcategory of "white," nor does she ever try to use civic inclusion to insist that others embrace her as "French." She's not even a French citizen—she's a Swiss citizen. Given these constraints, what is it exactly that Angélique can do? The answer, I believe, exists strictly at the level of culture, which is exactly what makes Angélique so authentic whenever she speaks about or—far more importantly—embodies the French cultural identity. There's nothing inauthentic about her being completely at home living and working in places like Lyon or Marseille (i.e. the French provincial capitals sharing the border with Switzerland), and as such, the people of each of these places fully embrace her as a full standing member of their community, their "group." On the other hand, Rachel Dolezal appears to have embodied several fundamental errors, the most egregious of which was to base her self-presentation to others on fraud. Although Angélique's case demonstrates that ethnic heritage is not a prerequisite for one to authentically partake in a given culture, Dolezal's case very clearly demonstrates that there's an extremely wrong way of doing that. I mention these case studies with such punctilious detail because they represent the framework within which I attempt to essentialize the key phrase in this entire subject: "to authentically partake in any given culture." When done properly, I believe it to be fully possible, even for an ethnic "outsider," to accomplish this in a way that not only does honor to the culture in question, but also contributes to its continuity through time. What seems to be wholly lacking in a case like Dolezal's is the idea of "earning." She did not "earn" the standing to engage in the behavior that made her infamous. Indeed, that's exactly what made her fraudulent.
Case in point, an individual like Jazmine "Saichko" Ross—a British woman not only born and raised in Japan, but who also completed 100% of her education in local Japanese schools all the way up to the graduate level—is an incontrovertibly real-life demonstration of what this "earning" process can look like in an Oriental context.
One of the things that struck me about this YouTube interview was her very justifiable unfamiliarity with the land of her inherited citizenship. Altogether, she has only ever spent a handful of months in the U.K. For all intents and purposes, Japan is really the only thing she has ever known. She, like Angélique, is wholly authentic in her embodied participation in a culture—an Oriental culture, no less—to which she personally has zero genetic connection.
But now, after all this exposition, the fundamental question that initiated this inquiry still remains—why the Orient specifically? There is something deeper at play here than simple generalized xenophilia. Indeed, I have traveled the world more extensively than most U.S. Citizens, which—given that most Americans do not even own a passport—might very well be a low bar; and the general narrowness of the American mind characterized by pervasive ignorance, if not outright indifference to anything that occurs beyond our borders, is wholly repugnant to me. However, at different points in my life, I have observed various individuals who embodied an unarticulated connection to antiquity that is wholly lacking in American society, and these individuals have largely been of East Asian descent. I by no means seek to insinuate that the cultural groups native to places like Egypt, Persia, or the Hindustan peninsula do not possess civilizations as equally ancient and rich as what one may find in the Sinosphere. However, if I allow myself to fall back on Robert Pirsig's terminology, there exists a unique Quality in the Orient that is extremely difficult for me to describe let alone explain, not least of which is due to the fact that I myself am still just a novice in this field. However, that Quality serves as the power that continually draws me to the Orient, though my citations, for now, are still somewhat rudimentary.
To wit, I remember the first time I ever saw Portrait of a Beauty (美人图)—a 2008 South Korean film that presents a fictional biographic retelling of Sin Yun-bok (申润福), who was a real-life painter from that country's Joseon Dynasty period (i.e. 1392-1897 A.D.) and widely lauded as one of the greatest Korean artists to have ever lived. In this dramatic retelling, the "actual" Sin Yun-bok died in childhood due to parental-pressure induced suicide, and the "Sin Yun-bok" who went on to achieve historical significance was in fact his younger sister who, at the behest of their father, used cross-dressing to assume her dead brother's identity as a way to enter the Korean Royal Academy of Painting (i.e. "图画署;" pronounced "Do-hwa-seo") and avoid that institution's admissions ban levied against women.
After several years of hiding her true identity, however, this state of affairs grows increasingly unsustainable. She eventually falls in love with a roguish street brawler who inadvertently discovers her true gender and ultimately returns her affections. Their budding romance reaches a high point in the middle of the movie where, protected in the privacy of a rarely visited storage chalet, with red tapestries hanging from the ceiling while flowing in the wind, she is finally able to shed the male garments that have for years constrained her daily life and reveal her womanly figure to the man who captured her ardor. She disrobes and climbs on top of him, and lets her long hair down (it was in a male bun on top of her head). The curvature of her back is perfect. She begins to rock her hips back and forth on top of him, and starts sensually moaning. He too had long hair, and when he rolled on top to mount her, one could see it draping down his back.
Holy fuck; step aside, "50 Shades of Grey" 🤤
I found this sex scene to be so visually stunning. There was something that gripped me about Sin Yun-bok's sensuality, her long hair falling down her back, allowing her lover to see her in her fullest, in her most feminine. But also, there was something powerful about her position of being on top—the proverbial "star of the show." As a metaphorical "object of worship," it was her pleasure that mattered. The man, by contrast, was a kind of "vessel," but even more crucially, he had earned this scene. He had earned seeing her in her ultimate naked beauty. He was strong, a fighter, but significantly, he also possessed a sensitivity to him—a sensitivity nearly unheard of in Western men. He was not fighting nature, even though he could. He was working with nature, like someone forming pottery, going with the motion of the clay, slowly shaping it into something of worth, moving it from formless chaos into useful order. He was looking at her beauty and seeing what could be.
Initially, it might seem to be a very odd juxtaposition, but I compare and contrast this scene with another from the first season of Netflix's Marco Polo, where the Taoist warrior monk named Hundred Eyes (百眼), while teaching the newly arrived Venetian traveler the rudimentary fundamentals of martial arts, has the following to say about the meaning of the word Kung Fu (功夫)—a word whose meaning that we also mostly just take for granted in English:
If you one day make it back to the West, what will you tell men of this strange word—kung fu? Will you tell them that it means to fight? Or will you say, like a monk from Shaolin (少林), to summon the spirit of the crane and the tiger? Kung fu—it means supreme skill from hard work. A great poet has reached kung fu. The painter, the calligrapher—they can be said to have kung fu. Even the cook, the one who sweeps steps, or a masterful servant can have kung fu. Practice, preparation, endless repetition, until your mind is weary, and your bones ache, until you're too tired to sweat, too wasted to breathe—that is the way, the only way, one acquires kung fu...
I find this commentary on a single Chinese noun to be so profound. For one thing, he says it outright—Sin Yun-bok, by virtue of her painting, embodies kung fu. Even in the sex scene between her and her beloved, she uses her brush to paint a bamboo landscape on his back as a form of postplay after extensive sexual climax, and then sensually presses herself against him so that the picture also gets imprinted on her chest.
For Western audiences, Hundred Eyes is a semi-familiar sight, because we see truncated echoes of the warrior sage archetype in our own narrative characters like Obi Wan-Kenobi from the original Star Wars trilogy or even Master Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It's more intuitive for us to associate "one who has attained kung fu" with the masculine, and Hundred Eyes gives us a much clearer picture of this masculine manifestation of kung fu because age has yet to wither his virility.
What Chad actually looks like
What we see, then, when comparing Sun Yun-bok and Hundred Eyes, is a kind of polarity—a polarity in which true "kung fu" equally, though very differently, manifests between masculine and feminine forms. But what happens if we extract this idea one step further? What is the fundamental commonality between Sun Yun-bok and Hundred Eyes with regards to their kung fu? It is an embodied supreme attention and pursuit of excellence. This is exactly what Robert Pirsig was talking about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he used the allegory of the mindful craftsman (in contrast with the insouciant technician) to describe the idea of Quality. Imagine that...an entire civilizational ideal predicated, as the most fundamental idea of heritage, not on justice (*ahem* Plato), or happiness (*ahem* Aristotle), or even God (*ahem* Moses), but on excellent Quality. This, right here, is always what drew me to Oriental culture, and indeed, is fundamentally the reason why I decided to join Erotica Sinica—I'm here, in large part, to pursue and attain my own "kung fu," and I have good reason to believe this is the best way to achieve that objective.
But there are even more layers at play, here—layers that arise from Sun Yun-bok's presentation of feminine kung fu, particularly regarding sexuality and sensual eroticism. In other words, her kung fu is exactly what expands and enhances her salaciousness; that's what made her sex scene so hypnotically captivating—the medium of her kung fu oscillated between her brush and her body. Her femininity is both bound to and made more powerful by her kung fu in the same exact way that Hundred Eyes' masculinity is to his kung fu. Permitting myself to use more colloquial slang from our current era, this connection to excellent Quality via one's "kung fu," which makes Hundred Eyes such a "Chad," is exactly what makes Sun Yun-bok such a goddess, particularly in that sex scene. Now, compare this with the state of affairs of what we have here in the West, and the stark contrast is nothing short of appalling...
End Part 1
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