Eileen Cheng-yin Chow
About My Guest
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow 周成蔭 is Associate Professor of the Practice in Chinese and Japanese Cultural Studies at Duke University, and one of the founding directors of Story Lab at Duke. She is also Director of the Cheng Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan 世新大學舍我紀念館與新聞研究中心, and she co-directs the Biographical Literature Press and its longstanding Chinese-language history journal, Biographical Literature 傳記文學. Eileen also serves on the executive board of the LA Review of Books, and serves as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, Sinotheory. Eileen received her A.B. in Literature from Harvard and her Ph.D in Comparative Literature at Stanford.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (00:00):
One of the asymmetries in the Western academy is people who teach in English departments, and I don't mean to offend, or in Western or European literature tradition, literary traditions basically assume that everybody knows their tradition, but they don't need to know anybody else's. And this is product of empire, but teaching in the East Asia Studies Department means that we're perfectly comfortable with so-called Western canonical traditions, but we also have our own. And so I think part of that negotiation is something that I really strive towards in my classroom. We can talk Jane Austen, we can talk Homer, but we should also, in the same breath, be able to talk about Du Fu and talk about [inaudible 00:00:44] and talk about other stuff like that.
Shervin Talieh (00:47):
This is On Misogyny, a conversation series exploring sexism and misogyny. Like many men, I have a blind spot when it comes to the female experience, especially as it pertains to the systemic hostility, prejudice, and violence they face on a regular basis. This has resulted in me believing that I was a better ally than I actually was, and not fully appreciating how little it changed for women and just how much more needed to happen. In each episode, I speak with a guest who wants to help me learn. They share their stories and in doing so, they are teaching me. While I started this project as a personal quest, the lessons here can help others too. Pleading ignorance is no longer a satisfactory defense. With that, let's begin.
Shervin Talieh (01:38):
Welcome back to another episode of On Misogyny. This particular guest is someone that I've known virtually for over a year now. I'm really ectatic to have an opportunity to listen to her and her story. To begin with, could you please introduce yourself.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (02:01):
I'm Eileen, Eileen Chow. As you saw, my full name is Eileen Cheng-yin Chow. Since you asked me how it should be said, my name is really Jo Cheng-yin in Chinese. So Cheng-yin is my Chinese name. And Chow is actually pronounced Joe in my dialect Mandarin. But I go by Eileen Chow in English. I was born in Taiwan. My family was from the mainland of China, different parts of China. And they all ended up in Taiwan in the 1950s, after a stint in Hong Kong, as part of the larger nationalist party retreat after the 1949 PRC victory. But half of my family actually stayed in China.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (02:45):
I moved to the U.S., as I mentioned, as a junior in high school, and then sort of was dropped into American popular culture in one way. In other ways, I felt like I knew a lot because, as you know, anybody who lives outside the U.S., but is in this kind of larger sort of American pop empire orbit knows rock music, knows American films. So I'm kind of a 1.5 generation or first generation immigrant. And so my knowledge and interests and attentions are also shaped by that particular biography.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (03:21):
My name is a mistranslation. I was born when typhoon Eileen hit Taiwan. And so my parents actually called me Eileen before they settled on a Chinese name, a formal name. Then every recrimination parental moment in my growing up was, “Oh, you're just like a typhoon.” Stubborn or you break things or blah, blah, blah, bad temper. So it was such a big part of my identity that I was typhoon Eileen. Only a few years ago, I realized, “Wait with Google, I can check this out.” And so I, in fact, looked up typhoons that hit Taiwan and discovered to my horror and amusement that it was typhoon Ellen, but in the newspapers covering it, as you probably have noticed that typhoons have only become more non-Anglo in nature in naming in the last decade maybe. In Chinese, it was written as [Chinese 00:04:19]. So my parents assumed [inaudible 00:04:22] was Eileen, which one would assume. And so they thought the typhoon was named Eileen and therefore I was Eileen.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (04:29):
A little side note to this is I've spent most of my life correcting people snippily when they call me Ellen. So my point is, I guess it doesn't really matter in the end how my name is said, but another issue that's come up recently in social media and a lot of places is people call me doctor or professor or use my formal title and things like that. And I'm a very Eileen kind of person, meaning I'm a very first name casual person. But my first year of teaching and my first job was at Harvard. It's a very conservative institution, very conservative department, and also was my undergraduate institution. So I still felt like a student, even though this was my first job as a assistant professor. I noticed that students called me Eileen instead of Professor Chow. They did it mainly out of a kind of, they weren't trying to insult me. They just said it casually, or they thought they were being friendly. And I didn't even notice because, as I said, I'm a first name person. I also did my graduate work in California. So it's a much more casual environment.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (05:38):
But then finally I realized that I was called Eileen and say, colleagues who were exactly my rank or age were professor this and that. I was also the only Asian woman at my rank. So I thought that I should make a stand. In fact, I decided to tell a student, I said, “I'm totally comfortable with Eileen, but I hope you also call my next door office neighbor, Michael, instead of professor so and so, or David instead professor so and so.” And they were so shocked. Like every student I said this to were just real in shock and some were defensive and some were embarrassed. I realized that for them, it was really intuitive to treat me not, you know, like that a white male professor was someone distant far away, especially at a very conservative institution like Harvard, like very kind of steeped in legacy, et cetera. And so it would never have crossed their mind to call their professors by first name, their male professors. But somehow I was seen as not what a professor looks like.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (06:49):
It's not really a misogynistic encounter, but I think it does speak to a larger issue that comes up even with naming, who gets to be called what, how do people assume. I like that you asked how people's name should be said, maybe this is because of your name too. But as you know, I moved here my junior year of high school and of course when my name was said out loud, people would laugh and make chow chow jokes and you know, you get it. So there's a double whammy of recognizing that immigrants with so called less familiar names are always a little bit subject to dismissal, or maybe sometimes ridicule and also as a woman, especially as a young woman, there's no particular recognition of expertise. I think the older I get, the less this is in the shoot because now I'm older than my students buy a lot. But it's something that when a few years ago, I think last year when people on Twitter and everything, women scholars were all adding PhD and doctor on their names. I think it was part of this feeling and it was weird for me because this had happened to me 20 years earlier.
Shervin Talieh (08:07):
Yes. With a name like Shervin. I have some, some sense, but I have no understanding of what it's like to be a professor at Harvard, given your experience now and who you are today, if you were to go back and have this conversation again, would it sound the same or would you point something else out, or how would you approach the topic?
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (08:31):
I think I would actually approach a topic pretty much the same way. I think a lot of things done with a little bit of humor or a little bit of gentle prod works well. Some of my colleagues, women colleagues, or colleagues of color sometimes would be really ... It was just yet another really hard burden on you. When you're at a elite institution, you're already feeling like a fraud and you have all these additional burdens and pressures. One is not being acknowledged by your senior colleagues, because they all think you're some sort of flavor of the month, like young person doing cultural studies or something like that. You already have that pressure. You have to be twice as good. You can't show up in t-shirt and jeans. You have to look ... This is true for, I think POC professors of all genders, that they dress well. So I remember my first couple years of teaching, it was this incredible, I mean, I've always liked fashion, but I haven't really liked say academic fashion, but you felt like suddenly you had to show up in suits and whatnot to look like a grownup and look like a ... You know, to be acknowledged seriously. So you have those additional burdens.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (09:52):
My first visit at Harvard Faculty Club, actually a colleague, senior colleague who was very kind, recently just passed away, Ezra Vogel. He always made a habit of taking out young colleagues who arrived, which is rare, believe me. And he asked to meet there and I show up and they didn't let me in because they didn't let students in. I think I was a little annoyed and I said, “I'm sorry, I'm not wearing my beard and my tweed jacket.” I think my first few years, there was a lot of these kind of microaggressions. I think looking back, I probably wouldn't do things differently, but maybe I would take it less personally. Now, I just see that this happens all time and you just kind of roll with it. But I see it more as education, like I see it more as opportunity to educate someone.
Shervin Talieh (10:44):
Speaking of education, what is it that you teach?
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (10:46):
I teach all sorts of things. My degree is in comparative literature. I primarily teach literature and film, especially in the East Asian arena, especially Chinese and Japanese, cultural studies, literature, film, but I'm interested in all sorts of things. And so one of the really real joys of transitioning, moving to Duke in the last decade was on the outside Duke looks like a very similar institution and pretty much it is, but it encourages a lot of faculty creativity, and so innovation. And one of the things that I was able to start was something called Duke Story Lab, which was just a experimental humanities lab that would allow us to run courses and events, workshops, and gatherings for the university at large.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (11:39):
So it didn't need to just be for faculty and students, but we had employees join us, we had one of the custodial workers as well as one of the kitchen workers who want to write stories join us. I wanted to really experiment with thinking about not literature and film in a kind of more scholarly lineage, literary history, which is what I do and film history, but rather have a space where people can just really revel in the joys of storytelling, kind of like on Telepath when everybody's going on about films or TV. I mean, that's the kind of joy and that's the kind of conversation that texts enable us to have. And so I wanted a space within the academy that could do that too, but maybe with a little bit more scholarly perspective.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (12:28):
I also wanted it to be not an English Department thing. One of the asymmetries in the Western academy is people who teach in English departments, and I don't mean to offend, or in Western or European literature tradition, literary traditions basically assume that everybody knows their tradition, but they don't need to know anybody else's, and this is product of empire, but teaching in the East Asia Studies Department means that we're perfectly comfortable with so-called Western canonical traditions, but we also have our own. And so I think part of that negotiation is something that I really strive towards in my classroom. We can talk Jane Austen, we can talk Homer, but we should also, in the same breath, be able to talk about Du Fu and talk about [inaudible 00:13:15] and talk about other stuff like that.
Shervin Talieh (13:19):
That sounds like centering, an example of something that many of my guests have brought up. Sticking with comparative literature and your background and your area of expertise, let's talk about feminist tradition, feminist literature, feminist cinema. I'm, as a neophyte, having only been exposed to canonical Western examples, if you will, and the framing, which is also a very Western, first wave, second wave, et cetera. I'm curious to get from your perspective, is there a different honored Asian tradition of feminism? What does that look like? And what would it look like if it isn't done as a relative to sort of the Western framework? What is the Eastern framework for feminism?
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (14:14):
Well, you know, it's really top on our minds, right? Because we're in this moment of everybody thinking about Afghanistan again, and that part of a larger, you could say project of empire the last two centuries has been to say, we're saving other people's women, right? Even in the 1890s and the late Qing dynasty missionary discourse in China was all centered around liberating Chinese women from Chinese men. This sounds, I'm sure, familiar to any tradition that you're familiar with. So if you think about how people talk about Muslim women, how people talk about ... So I think that there is something both incredibly liberatory and important about the traditions of feminism within East Asia, which is what I study. But there's also a kind of sheen of this is also a discourse that is used to justify warfare and justify colonization.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (15:20):
One of the biggest missionary groups in China in the 19th century when Western missionaries were kind of entering on mass was the bound foot thing, which I'm sure everybody hears about this, that Chinese women traditionally had bound feet. Well, actually not all Chinese women had bound feet, peasant women often did not, but it is true that this was a particular kind of body modification that was torturous. But it was really the backbone of missionary discourse. This was the whole backbone of why Chinese culture is evil and needs to be rescued, like women need to be rescued and anglicized and westernized. So I guess I'm saying that there's always this slightly complicated relationship with feminism. There has been a long tradition of feminist women and before that, literary women.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (16:13):
So I would say, I think I'm not a pre-modern historian, but I think pre-modern China historians and also Japan historians would point out that literate women, of course, these are women of privilege, these are women who are from the aristocracy, or from wealthy families, but were actually well educated and probably better educated than your similar socioeconomic counterpart in the West. So there's actually a huge amount of literary writing by Chinese and Japanese women. Of course, everybody knows like Tale of Genji, or are some of the earliest poems in Japanese, the [Heon 00:16:56] poems. These are all written by court women. And in the Chinese tradition, one of the greatest Chinese poets is a woman. And the story always went that she was, Li Qingzhao is her name, Li is her surname, and she wrote this sheath of poems and her husband, the emperor wanted to see his work and her work, but was completely unimpressed by his work and said, “In this giant packet of poems that you sent me, I only like these three lines.” And of course those are three lines from his wife that he kind of mixed in there.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (17:33):
But I think these kinds of anecdotes, whether apocryphal or not tell you a lot about that writing and literary women were actually quite prominent in Japan and China, the two traditions I studied, but this is a sliver of women. And what modern Western feminism brought for say Chinese and Japanese women in the turn of the century was stepping outside the household. So these were very literary women who mainly were bubbled. They were in their with their sisters and their relatives and their cousins. This is very much like middle Eastern women poets too. So whether Sufi or whether ... Like Arab women poets. I mean, so that they have a great amount of autonomy, but it is within the house, within the larger household.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (18:18):
And what modern Western missionary education brought to China for example, was that a generation of women suddenly were in schools and were meeting sisters, lovers, comrades who are not necessarily related to them. And so that's the big transition. I do think that was a really valuable thing to have happen in China. And that was a generation that did start a lot of the revolutionary movements and feminist movements in China. That generation that was able to step outside of one's patriarchal household, even if you were very well read and had good grade within the household,
Shervin Talieh (18:58):
You mentioned your own experience when you would say your name and some kids would make fun of it or laugh or whatnot. I want to bring up a sensitive topic, which is the shootings in Atlanta and this topic of fetishizing and how white men in particular have objectified and fetishized all sorts of women, but in this case specifically Asian women. I wonder if, given your knowledge of the history, because this goes way back be before Atlanta, if you could speak to that and speak to where we are today.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (19:50):
Couple different things that I can immediately respond to. The coverage was really shaped by a kind of lack of coverage. So the initial response, the first day after the shooting basically we heard so much from the shooter, the killer, and saying he had a bad day, or that he was obsessed with Asian women or massage parlors or sex work. He got a lot of air time, more airtime than, unfortunately, sadly, in the U.S., we have a lot of shootings. And as Michelle Lee from the Washington Post pointed out, there's so many shootings that anybody who covers U.S. news has a protocol, like relatives and how to shape the coverage. And what this revealed was there was a paucity of coverage. So basically there was a lot of airing of this one particular murderer's viewpoint.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (20:45):
And so unfortunately for so many of us, it immediately tapped into this longstanding fetishization in popular culture. And so people immediately responded to that in all sorts of ways. But I'm teaching my Chinatown seminar right now, so I guess I should have mentioned that one of the things I teach is actually Asian American studies. And right now, I teach a global history of Chinatowns. And as I tell them that a lot of things that we mystify or think of as cultural often have very specific policy and history roots.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (21:25):
One of the things of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which meant that Chinese were the only group and really the only group until the Muslim ban as it were to be denied entry by ethnicity. So it wasn't by country. In fact, if you were a Chinese person from France, you counted as Chinese person, not a French person. So the Chinese Exclusion Act itself was a product of politics because Western industrialists in the latter half of the 19th century were very leery of suddenly inheriting emancipated, slaves, free black men labor from the south. And so they were really trying to fill their labor shortage with other possibilities because they didn't want to ... They were racist, but also they didn't want to inherit the kind of civil war issues.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (22:21):
And so they turned to looking at the British empire and how plantations were run. They also turned directly to China for basically indenture servitude, contract labor, and the work that was available was backbreaking and of course, primarily male. So building railroads, gold mining, silver mining, stuff like that. But part of the idea of the contract labor and avoiding kind of Southern migration was to say, these people will go home again. And so the first very important aspect of that, and this was true for British plantations at the Caribbean too, as well as in North America, is don't let them bring wives and families. Have just the men come, leave the women at home, then they will go home for sure. Don't let them settle.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (23:11):
And what that meant was Chinatowns and subsequent Chinese laboring forces in all these places, not just North America, were primarily male, completely single sex, male working class enclaves. And so whatever women who did seem to be there tended to be wives and daughters of merchants, because merchants could bring family. You're a random student perhaps, but very rarely and they probably wouldn't be living in a working class Chinatown or sex workers. And so this longstanding association of Asian women in the physical space of Chinatowns and North America and Europe is that they were sex workers.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (23:59):
So you already have that very, very historically specific reason for thinking women as sex workers because often they were, but they were workers. So you have that sensitivity there, you have the missionary discourse that was constantly trying to save Asian women, child prostitutes, but that also sexualize these children. So every time you saw a Chinese girl walking around Chinatown, these missionaries were trying to save her. She could have been the daughter of a merchant. So this kind of really hypersexualizing for whatever reason women in the Chinatown spaces. And also Chinatowns were also places where Bohemians, San Francisco Bohemians of the late 19th century went and slummed it. They went to the opium dens and the brothels and the gambling dens. So this stereotype of the hypersexualized Asian woman is very much rooted in laboring practices and also immigration policy. I guess just want to point that out.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (25:07):
The other thing is, and this is a good example to talk about white feminism versus feminism is right now, we're talking about like suffrage and celebrating women's right to vote. And another really sort of landmark in American feminism is the Cable Act of 1922. The Cable Act of 1922 basically allowed women to disaggregate their nationalities from their husbands or in most cases, former husbands. And this is right after World War I. So it was really important for women who didn't identify with say like German husbands or whatnot, to be able to say, “Hey, I have my own ... So I am an autonomous being and I am American, I'm an American citizen and so what if my ex-husband was German or my husband's German, I shouldn't be counted as a, you know, war criminal.”
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (26:06):
That was actually a huge step forward, thinking about women as autonomous subjects, not part of a household. Instantly in East Asia, even until very recently, women are part of households, household registrations. So Cable Act on the surface look good, but one of the really important tenets of the Cable Act was this is only applicable if you are married to a eligible alien. So a non-eligible alien in that time would be Chinese, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Mongolian was a category that was named, but not Japanese because Japan had their own arrangement with the U.S., with the Gentleman's Agreement with Thedore Roosevelt. So in that case, a woman, if she decided to marry an ineligible alien, so basically a black and brown and yellow person, she would lose her citizenship.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (27:07):
What that meant was, and I should point out at that time, the only other way to lose your citizenship was if you were a spy. So you're either a spy or you're married to a Chinese guy, then you lose your citizenship. So it sounds like, okay, maybe there weren't lot of white women marrying Chinese men, and maybe they didn't worry about losing their citizenship. But how about the fact that since women usually couldn't immigrate as easily, they tended to be born in the U.S. They tend to be daughters of merchants or sex workers, or however they ended up. But the small number of women who were in Chinese American communities were born here. So they were U.S. citizens because they had birthright citizenship. They would lose their citizenship if they marry some guy in Chinatown because most guys in Chinatown were first generation and most women in Chinatown were American citizens.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (28:00):
One of the stereotypes in group, like if you meet kind of Asian insults on men's rights groups, a huge, big talking point is why are Chinese women, Japanese women, Korean women so into white guys, like they always want to marry out. So there's this kind of right-wing Asian men critique of Asian women. I point out to my students, for Asian, maybe there's a kind of historical reason that Asian American women were basically taught not to date Asian American men because they would lose their citizenship. Is it a surprise that for a lot of women they chose to marry out? No, but ... I guess what I'm saying is like a lot of these things, sexual stereotypes, prostitution, Asian women wanting white men, Asian women as dragon ladies, a lot of these stereotypes actually come from policy and come from politics, rather than just say movies or something.
Shervin Talieh (29:06):
Wow! The way you connected those dots, it makes so much sense. And it's also really interesting how you can weaponize a manifestation of something that whether it was intended consequences or unintended consequences, it's quite alarming because I have seen that, I've read that, I've become aware of that, and I did not know the direct correlation between decisions that were made, with nefarious decisions. Let's be clear. I mean, those are very intentional by design. And that's also sort of the ongoing of colonization of patriarchy, nation building, et cetera.
Shervin Talieh (30:10):
You've discussed movies and films, obviously, on Telepath, in addition to poetry, which I always love getting your posts. In sort of the Western world, there's this mythology of Asian women, it comes across in many movies, and I want to talk about either the ... What else should we be consuming other than sort of the stuff that's uber popular. Tell me what sources there are, tell me maybe what I should be looking at or reading or watching that would show a different, more accurate light, if you will, on Asian tradition and specifically maybe Asian women's tradition and feminism.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (30:59):
First, to disaggregate those, and that's a great question. So one is, there is a wonderful Asian tradition of Asian women's writings and more of it is getting translated so that's great. And so I think that one place to start is really looking at Asian women's creative work, so film and television and writing. I think it's funny that K drama, romance is always kind of poo-pooed, women's genre, et cetera. K drama is actually fabulous, but one of the really unexpected ... Because Korea is a very patriarchal society. Somebody told me 70% to 80% of head writers and producers in K drama are women.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (31:51):
So there's no other television industry if you think about it, that's that skewed.And it's consumed by everybody. It's not seen as a niche thing. It's not like just romance because a lot of K drama is like detectives, serial, and thrillers, like all genres. And so I was thinking, wow, that's really interesting. So there's a television industry that is woman dominant. So when you're watching K drama, a lot of people love K drama because they do really explore relationships, but not necessarily romantic ones. Does that make sense? So there's a lot of depth in thinking about men's interiority, as well as women's interiority, generational.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (32:33):
When I was in my 20s, I went back to Taiwan, won the trip, and everybody around me somebody was watching K drama and I was like, “What? What happened?” People used to be into J drama because a lot of people in Taiwan still speak Japanese, piece of the colonial era and also of course, Taiwan drama, Chinese drama. And the first response I got from all the women I asked, older women, like middle aged women was because the men are better looking. Okay, fine. The other is at that point, now they don't dub, now they subtitle. But then, everything was dubbed and they're all kind of ... A lot of these dramas, especially the earlier generation was happening in urban spaces and not like kind of nondescript urban space. So I was like, how do you tell if you're watching something that was dubbed you, you know, that it was originally Japanese or Chinese or Korean.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (33:21):
And then somebody says, “You know it's Korean when people are like, when some mom slaps some son.” And it's true. But what it says really is that K drama is actually really interesting intergenerational dynamics. So the relationships are never horizontal, it's always about people of many different ages. And so I was thinking like, is that because it is a kind of women written, generated, produced body of work so that it's not necessarily feminist, but it just seems to have a different sensibility. It seems to really kind of push in that direction.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (34:01):
So I would say one way to get a sense of contemporary Asian, of course, you subtract out all the fantasy aspects of television. I mean, of course, everybody's incredibly good looking, everybody's wealthy, all of this stuff, in charmed lives, but the kind of the nugget, the core of the interacting with people and the sort of really paying attention to women's and men's interior lives maybe is the hallmark of women's writing. So that's one suggestion I would have. That's easy because a lot of it is on Netflix now.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (34:36):
I think a show I've mentioned before on Telepath, actually I had a student who wrote a master's thesis on it, Anisa Khalifa, and Crash Landing On You on Netflix, which is a big K drama, and it's a kind of a alternate universe, sort of what if this incredibly wealthy, chaebol South Korean executive accidentally paraglides and lands in North Korea. So it's kind of a cross war zone relationship. I'll leave aside talking about the plot, but one of the things that a lot of people like about that show is the lead male who's played by this actor Hyun Bin. Of course, he's handsome and he's very handsome, but I've heard a lot of people write about and talk about how he's kind of like the opposite of toxic masculinity.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (35:36):
So he's a north Korean soldier and he's very stiff and he's very much a military guy. So you would think that, especially if you watch Western shows, that connotes a certain type of personality, but he's actually really patient. He cooks, he's very much a caretaker. He actually cries a lot. He's very emotional. So you have one stereotype of what a kind of really strict military man would be like, and yet it's nothing like what you assume that. And then so a lot of people like the fact that you can have someone who is coded very masculine, but have all these different kinds of ways of expressing emotions. Like he's very, very ...
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (36:15):
Yeah, the plot points are all really about how he deals with his depression because his brother dies and he has to kind of ... Before the show. It's not a spoiler, but so he has to kind of remake his life once his older brother who he idolize dies and before the story proper begins. And I thought, “Oh, that's really interesting.” So it's not showing him as this kind of haunted, closed down man that a woman has to soften and change. He himself changes because he encounters love, but he's already that sensitive, emotional, care taking kind of guy. And I thought, well, this is a very different kind of characterization than Western drama. Sorry, that's just like a little digression about K drama.
Shervin Talieh (37:03):
No, it's so on point because when we talk about like misogyny at its core, it's men either hating women directly or creating an environment that's very unsafe for them. I mean, that's at its core, right? And for that to work, it requires men to take on these really “masculine or toxic masculine,” or just really destructive traits, if you will. And to some extent, stoicism and some of those other things maybe fall into it and not being in touch with their feelings or whatnot, which is ... I not heard of this particular show and what I'm seeing from younger men right now is a willingness to explore this spectrum of their personality in a very different way. And I think this is one of the tropes, one of the stereotypes that Western men have had of Asian men is also very hurtful and very damaging, and it continues to perpetrate that save your modality and some of these other things that all play together.
Shervin Talieh (38:25):
What is it that, as a teacher, you are seeing so many young minds, young people coming through your doors, you've had so much influence on them, obviously and on people like myself, what would you want us to know, or rethink, or reconsider to hopefully really create some momentum around the dismantling of misogyny?
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (38:54):
You mentioned the were centering earlier, and that's actually a really great advice. I think that there is a kind of liberal self-flagellation when people talk about things like cancel culture, or white supremacy or toxic masculinity, and there's a little mea culpa and let's beat ourselves up. But to me, I feel like that gets you nowhere, you just feel bad.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (39:19):
I mean, often, you should feel bad, but the point is feeling bad is not doing anything, feeling bad is just you feeling bad. And so it's much more important to say, how can I center somebody else's feelings and do some good in the world, or to counter it a little bit? So instead of like, you know, slap, slap, slap, I'm such a bad man, or I'm such a racist. It's really about like, so what can you do for somebody else? And centering their stories and their narratives. And so to hear how women tell stories and how non-binary people tell stories and how people from different culture tell stories gets you a little bit outside of yourself.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (40:04):
So I think that's what I try to do when I teach literature and culture and for people to see things a little bit without having to be in the story themselves. One thing, especially for white people and also for, I mean, I think for Anglo Americans in the last two centuries of British and American empires, it's very hard to decenter. Even scholars who do post-colonial studies, white colleagues, they're still talking about themselves, you know, “Oh my gosh, we're such bad people that we conquered half the world.” Well, like, so? I don't want to hear about this. Why don't you tell me stories about people in these places. I don't want to hear about your guilt. And so I think that's something that is really the, a lot of underlying pedagogical motivation for me sometimes is to let us hear these other stories.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (40:58):
Another is that when you let people be creative and constructive, good stuff comes out. So you mentioned every night a poem. This is a hashtag I started on Twitter in late 2016. So I've always been a poetry lover, even though I study narrative and I grew up memorizing poems as part of my family tradition. And at end of 2016, the thing that made me most ... There were so many horrors of the Trump era, but one of them was the blather. Everybody was blathering all the time, Trump especially, and then everybody felt licensed to blather alongside him. The kind of empty talk, we're still seeing it.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (41:41):
And I thought, instead of saying, quote, tweet, blather, outrage, outrage, that gets nobody nowhere. I said, let me show you what words can do. And poetry is what words can do at their utmost. And let me show you how, if I said something in poetic language, it cuts to the heart, cuts to the bone of something in a way that a million hours of blather doesn't. And so to me, that is a kind of way of making something happen, by really just shifting the terms and making us look at the beauty and look at the precision of when you do something well.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (42:27):
And then the Ted Lasso discourse is non-ending on Telepath, but one of the things I love about Ted Lasso is people apologize all the time, and that's a kind of something I really like. So rather than say, “I feel bad, I'm a bad person.” It's just, “I apologize I'm sorry that I did this.” And I allow you to then take the ball and say what you want to do with that. And I think that is sorely missing.
Shervin Talieh (42:55):
I love that. One final question. Who should I be reading right now in terms of a poet that you recommend I should be familiar with?
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (43:06):
Well, you know, a really interesting poet who has already passed away, but has been kind of ... is Muriel Rukeyser. So Muriel is M-U-R-I-E-L. Rukeyser is R-U-K-E-Y-S-E-R, I think. She's a really interesting poet. She was also a labor activist. She actually covered sort of black lung cases in West Virginia, I think. But you would not expect that of her because she was like a New York poet and Jewish and her poems are great. They're frank and they're salty and they're direct. I just think that there's something, you know, that kind of directness. And one of her poems says, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” And so the poem, that poem where this line comes from is exactly what you're doing. This firm belief that if you really got women to tell stories about their lives, the world would split open.
Shervin Talieh (44:17):
Eileen, I am so, so grateful to you.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (44:21):
Oh, not at all. This was fun.
Shervin Talieh (44:23):
And you've given me a lot of new content to go out and discover. And I'm so grateful for you. Thank you for your time.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (44:33):
Oh, thank you for doing this. This is a great idea.