“I cast a spell to trip up the ninja,” says the white man playing the tabletop role-playing game I’m running, “but because we’re in Korea right now, I do it with an Asian flavor.” Then he demonstrates, physically, what his non-Asian character does. He stands up a little from his seat, bends his knees, adopts a wide-eyed (possibly cross-eyed? don’t remember) scowl, and casts his hands forward from his waist in arcane open-palmed gestures.
“No you don’t,” I say. I didn’t hit the X Card, but I probably should have.
The thing is, I know exactly why he’s doing everything he’s doing, because he’s parodying motions from East Asian martial arts training: wide, grounded stances to develop leg strength and endurance; a grotesque face like a warrior character on a kabuki poster; and specialized hand shapes for precision in defense and attack. If I asked him what he was doing and why he was doing it, he might even say so. If I asked him why his character felt motivated to mimic Asian movements while in Asia, he’d probably tell me he was just joking.
How would I explain to him what’s wrong with what he did?
Jim Carrey plays a karate instructor on In Living Color.
Trouble is, Western fascination with Eastern martial culture has driven the inclusion of nearly all the Asian content we ever saw in tabletop role-playing games, beginning with Dungeons & Dragons’ Monk character class in 1975. White folks might stay for the elemental wizards and spooky monsters and crime syndicates, but they came for the samurai and warrior monks. If you saw Asian people, places, or concepts in a RPG, you knew they’d know martial arts. If you saw an Asian sourcebook, you knew you’d find martial arts rules within.
The connection between Asia and martial arts features prominently in harmful stereotypes, but Asian martial arts and culture are real. How can creative media represent the latter without tripping over the former?
I got you, though. This article discusses how Asian martial arts stereotypes fit into orientalist dynamics, in which the Western gaze rewrites and reduces Asian experience to a cool violent thing for white consumption. I also point out how imperialist, exploitative attitudes complicate real-world martial arts practice. Finally, we’ll go over practical guidelines for representing Asian martial culture in your creative work. You’ll leave this article prepared not only to avoid racism, but also to craft stronger martial arts stories in general.
Are you gonna tell me white people can’t practice or talk about Asian martial arts?
I’m gonna tell you the opposite, actually. I think non-Asians who practice an Asian martial art or write about Asian martial culture respectfully set a crucial good example for others. We all like Avatar: the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. By embodying the spirit of cultural exchange rather than cultural appropriation, you make training, fandom, and hobby spaces a safer place for Asians and non-Asians alike.
Ready? Round one. Fight.
content warnings racism, imperialism racist violence, sexism, creepy guys flirting
A Sparring Match Made in Hell
How did the often creepy, occasionally fetishistic love affair between Western culture and Eastern combat begin? Because I live here, and because we’re gonna talk about Dungeons & Dragons shortly, let’s look at the United States as an example.
Western imperialism and military presence in Asia led to Asian people and culture arriving in the West. As we discussed in the fortune cookie article, United States industry’s appetite for cheap labor during the nineteenth century first instigated Chinese immigration, which racist laws immediately curtailed. Every time Americans conquered a country or fought a war in Asia, immigrants from that area flocked to the States—especially after World War II, when American GIs returned from the Far East with stories of Japanese swords, Chinese boxing, and the like. Asian martial arts schools proliferated in America under teachers like Bruce Lee and Robert Trias. A martial arts cinema and television boom followed starting in the late 1960s, further entrenching the Asian warrior in American commerce and pop culture.
Imagine you’re an Asian growing up during this time period. Before, all you ever got to be was a yellow peril, an expendable laborer, maybe a dragon lady if you’re lucky. The martial artist stereotype, while better, certainly isn’t good; but you’re so desperate for a break from constant accusations of undermining Western civilization and stealing white ladies that “honorable martial artist” feels like an improvement—kinda like certain other stereotypes taking root about then.
Oh hey. Wasn’t another hobby taking root in America during the 1970s?
Orientalist Adventures
According to E Gary Gygax’s preface to 1985’s (sigh) Oriental Adventures, European history and mythology inspired every Dungeons & Dragons character class save one …
CHAINMAIL dealt principally with European and Near Eastern history, and the same is true of the fantasy elements included in the work. When the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® game system was envisioned and created, it relied very heavily upon the former work, medieval European history, and mythos and myth most commonly available to its authors. Thus, D&D® gaming followed CHAINMAIL, and AD&D gaming followed after the D&D game. In its early development, the D&D game was supplemented by various booklets, and in one of these the monk, inspired by Brian Blume and the book series called The Destroyer [which is about a white cop who learns an imaginary Korean martial art(??) and turns out to be the avatar of Śiva(?????)], was appended to the characters playable. So too was this cobbled-together martial arts specialist placed into the AD&D game system, even as it was being removed from the D&D game. … The fact of the matter is that the admixture of Occident and Orient was an unsuitable combination. The games stressed a European historical base and mythology. Even though the AD&D game monster roster ranges far afield, it is still of basically European flavor. The whole of these game systems are Occidental in approach, not Oriental—at least not in the sense of what is known as the Far East: China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia.
While much of the material from 1985 has fallen by the wayside between then and D&D’s fifth edition, the class list remains largely the same. Sorcerers and warlocks, introduced during third edition, are still mostly Western in flavor. The monk remains the only explicitly Asian-themed class alongside eleven European classes, enshrining the trope of “there’s only one Asian and they’re a martial artist” in the character creation system itself.
The cover to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons supplement Oriental Adventures, by Gary Gygax. The cover depicts a samurai in black armor brandishing a large Japanese sword and riding a white-furred mythic ungulate. A ninja dodges out of the way and prepares to counterattack with a kusarigama. All three look uncomfortable, somehow. Like the ninja’s face isn’t even visible and yet they still look vaguely embarrassed to be on this cover, which … well, to be fair, so would I. In the background is an Asian building.
Let’s look closer at the 5e monk. What Asian signifiers comprise this class? Sight unseen, I would expect a Shàolín Chán Buddhist fighter, like many Gordon Liu roles in Shaw Brothers films; or else a heavily armored Japanese sōhei wielding arquebus and glaive. That’s not what I find.
The Monk in Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition
If I didn’t already know this was an illustration of the monk in Dungeons & Dragons, I would describe it to you as “a woman in a cool dress from ModCloth holds her phone out and takes a photo with flash.” Actual description in the text below.
We first see an illustration of a human or elven woman with European features holding out her hands, which glow with some kind of magical energy. In the background stands a tall building with Chinese-style concave sloped tile roofs. Her outfit doesn’t look Asian, but its saffron-and-red colors evoke vestments from the Shàolín Monastery, where all this Asian fighting monk business started. However, as I mentioned in Best Practices for Religious Representation, the cultural influences in this class come from all over the place.
The hook paragraphs describe a half-elf using acrobatics and deflecting arrows with her fists as she beats up hobgoblins; a tattooed human breathing fire at some orcs; and a halfling ninja about to stab a bad guy. I get the first one, that works as a Chinese Shàolín monk thing. I get the second one, maybe he’s the Avatar. But why is there a ninja? Shouldn’t a ninja be a ranger or rogue? Sure, ninja know martial arts, but so do fighters, paladins, rogues, and rangers. Is it just an ethnic thing? Monks know martial arts, and when Asians are fighting it’s automatically martial arts? Influences: 🇨🇳🇯🇵
Next we hear about ki, the monk’s power source. Were we actually to follow Chinese or Japanese understandings of breath energistics, it would be as relevant to clerics, fighters, and rogues as it is to monks. Instead this game has redefined a basic idea of Asian medicine as a magic points pool. You can check the heading “Prāṇa, Qì, and Ki” in the religion article for more details, but for now, suffice to say it’s a little weird that this Chinese monk concept accompanies some Japanese vocabulary which isn’t even in common English circulation. Just as the monk sticks out as the lone regionally typed class, the game term “ki” sticks out as an incongruous foreign term in a book otherwise written in English. I guess it sounds more exotic than if they just called it spirit points or something. Influences: 🇯🇵 I guess
The monk’s most important ability scores are Dexterity and Wisdom. I would have expected Strength rather than Dexterity for a Shàolín monk, but I’m not finna overthink it because I find the way D&D maps real-world activities to the six ability scores inconsistent at best and mystifying most of the time. We’ll come back to Dexterity and Wisdom when we talk about Western conceptions of Eastern combat and its related stereotypes, though.
The monk primarily fights either unarmed or using a list of “monk weapons, which are shortswords and any simple melee weapons that don’t have the two-handed or heavy property.” I don’t understand where aversion to heavy weapons came from even as a stereotype. The Shàolín monk’s signature hand-to-hand weapon was the monk’s spade, a heavy staff with a modified spade on one end and a T-shaped blade on the other. The Japanese sōhei’s signature hand-to-hand weapon was the superheavy glaive called a bisentō. Maybe it has something to do with the monk’s Dexterity emphasis?
The monk fights without armor. That’s from wǔxiá cinema, I guess? 🇨🇳
The monk has various abilities listed as “martial arts” which involve, uh, attacking, defending, moving quickly, and jumping around. Like, okay, but other classes do these things too.
High-level monks can sustain themselves on ki alone, turn invisible, and astrally project. I think these abilities draw on Chinese sources, but … they’re actually from Daoist sources like the Lièzǐ, not Buddhist ones like Shàolín. Yes, some Shàolín monks studied Daoism. Yes, Daoism had its own monastic traditions. But conflating Daoism and Buddhism is not to be undertaken lightly. Still, the David Carradine television series Kung Fu notoriously featured Buddhist monks spouting Daoist aphorisms. Seriously, y’all, that was one scene in The 36th Chamber of Shàolín, not justification for confusing two different religions on a regular basis. 🇨🇳
So the monk mostly draws on Chinese sources, except culturally conflated with ki and ninja stuff from Japan. No other character class has any cultural signifiers like it, not even the barbarian or druid. The barbarian isn’t actually from a foreign land, they’re just angry. The druid is a wilderness magician who resembles a Celtic religious leader only in name and sickle proficiency. There’s one racialized class, and its race is “Asian martial artist.” Which Asian martial artist? All of them.
This ain’t it, daimyō.
Also, the illustration of a white lady reminds me of a guy I used to know, whom I’m sure I will soon meet again …
Enter the Colonizer
In short, having transported the Orient into modernity, the Orientalist could celebrate his method, and his position, as that of a secular creator, a man who made new worlds as God had once made the old.
—Edward W Said, Orientalism
So there’s this guy. He exists within both reality and fiction, his essence transcending the fourth wall. He’s not always a guy and he’s not always white, but when he is, it compounds the problem I’m about to describe due to the power structures which enfranchise him. Similarly, he’s just as capable of annoying African, Latin American, or Pacific Islander martial artists. But I think you’ll recognize him.
Martial Colonizer Guy arrives at your martial arts school appearing to be one of many well-meaning, respectful, prosocial white people who take and teach self-defense classes for good reasons. But this guy—usually secretly, occasionally openly—thinks he is an underdog because he is a white person. Hell, he might even be an underdog in a limited sense, where his background makes a martial art slightly harder to learn instead of restricting his access to employment or housing. He likes the narrative of being the scrappy little guy working his way up in a system rigged against him. This class grants him a controlled way to experience it. After he walks out of the class or flies home or whatever, he can go back to experiencing systemic empowerment. That tiny little window of being an underdog lives within a much larger context of being the overdog, which this guy may or may not even understand he enjoys.
Sometimes, to make matters worse, he’s there for the thrill of beating another country at their own game. Cultural exchange thus becomes his personal frontier, where if he gets good enough at fighting to beat the Asians, he gets that imperial satisfaction of conquering the unknown and bringing back a prize (wrestling skills or whatever) to show off to his own people.
But these things aren’t necessarily a large-scale long-term problem, since they live within the realm of intention. Sure, they’re bad reasons, but lots of us come to something for bad reasons and then learn to love it in a healthy way. So I’m happy to train with Martial Colonizer Guy in hopes things will get better. Usually they do, or else he switches to another martial art once things get challenging.
They get bad when Colonizer Guy acts out these weird impulses. He most often does so outside the training hall, using his martial arts experience to speak ex cathedra about Asian topics, drowning out actual Asian voices, as in this story from Daniel Kwan. Other times they start to teach the style they’ve been learning—all too often after all too short a study period, or without formal approval from their teacher or training organization. As teachers, they benefit from white privilege or Western citizenship while pushing the narrative that they’re cultured underdogs. Rather than helping their students connect with the art’s origin culture, they position themselves as the style’s final authority, edging teachers from the origin culture out of business. Before this point we were just looking at cultural exchange. Now his behavior harms people of color. Now it’s cultural appropriation.
In his final form, Martial Arts Colonizer Guy breaks with the organization which trained him and forms his own new school or style (or combination of schools or styles) in opposition to the old one, denouncing their former organization as stuck in the past, run by charlatans, or otherwise lacking the Mandate of Heaven. At this point, far-fetched claims about service in elite military units, championships in underground tournaments, or training in extinct or endangered martial arts—all so secret no one has heard of them or can verify them—begin to pile up. He’s taking airtime, interest, and ability to make money away from the style’s originators—not to mention discrediting other outsiders who have been perfectly responsible and respectful. His conception, or misconception, of what a cultural expression is eclipses the truth of what it is. That’s orientalism at work.
This is, by the way, to say nothing of how this dynamic plays out in acting and stunt work. While non-Asians may choose to become known for their martial skills or not to, stereotype and casting demand force Asians into it.
We Were Warned
Martial arts fiction and history abound in stories warning us about this guy! He has always existed, throughout history: a newcomer to a culture, not from a subaltern population like the Mahābhārata’s Ékalavya, but from a systemically enfranchised group, arriving to appropriate martial secrets. In Shàolín vs. Wǔdāng, the Qīng overlord fills this role: he’s from the Manchurian ruling class which seized control of China from the Hàn people. He then manipulates different groups over whom he has power into fighting one another so he can neutralize the threat they pose and steal their secrets.
The Manchu overlord (Ron Yuan) taunts the Shàolín and Wǔdāng fighters (Brian Le and Andy Le) in a reimagining of Shàolín yǔ Wǔdāng’s climactic battle, from Wu-Tang: An American Saga.
There’s a similar story in Mifune Toshirō’s Kikuchiyo, the farmer-turned-samurai in Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai—but the lesson is different. The other six samurai, who have real noble pedigrees, treat Kikuchiyo like a joke for most of the film; but in the film’s most emotional scene, Kikuchiyo reveals that he comes from a peasant family. His own conception of what it means to be a samurai, and who the other samurai are—as well as his empathy for the farming village he defends—come from personal experience coping with knightly oppression. But Seven Samurai’s final lesson is, of course, that “the victory belongs to the farmers.” Kikuchiyo suffered under samurai, then became a samurai to embody the virtues his oppressors failed to. His monologue expresses Kurosawa’s own personal guilt, coming from a samurai lineage which elevated him at the expense of ninety per cent of Japan’s population. The Qīng overlord punches down. Kikuchiyo punches (or, well, slashes) up.
Mifune Toshirō as Kikuchiyo, wearing piecemeal armor, leaping triumphantly into the air with an arquebus in one hand.
Despite these antecedents, Western martial fiction about Eastern topics abounds in Martial Colonizer Guys who are their stories’ heroes. You know their names: John Blackthorne. Richard Dragon. Iron Fist. Wolverine. Captain Nathan Algren. The aforementioned Destroyer, Remo Williams.
Fred Ward as Remo Williams and Joel Grey (in yellowface) as Master Chiun in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, the movie adaptation of The Destroyer which we all wish we didn’t know about. Note: An earlier version of this caption erroneously listed that Grey was in blackface, not yellowface. I corrected it, but by my articles’ standards, how far-fetched would it have been …?
Listen, we don’t like that we have to be martial artists. We want to be anything and everything we are in real life. Henry Golding, John Cho, and Hailee Steinfeld are progress, sure. But until we get to be everything we want, racism says “martial artist” is all we can be. So when white people steal even that away from us? It hurts.
“What about when Blacks and Latines do it?”
Sure, it can still be bad, but the power gradient is worlds different than when white folks do it. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. You’ll have to wait for that Wu-Tang Clan article.
Combinations
“Thus one ends with a typology—based on a real specificity, but detached from history, and, consequently, conceived as being intangible, essential—which makes of the studied “object” another being with regard to whom the studying subject is transcendent; we will have a homo Sinicus, a homo Arabicus (and why not a homo Aegypticus, etc.), a homo Africanus, the man—the ‘normal man,’ it is understood—being the European man of the historical period, that is, since Greek antiquity.” —Edward Said, Orientalism
Asian martial artist stereotypes are comorbid with other Asian stereotypes which, taken together with anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, position Western identities, bodies, values, and social norms as the golden mean of human variety. Casting its misconceptions of Asians on the one hand and Africans and Indigenous people on the other as humanity’s antipodes, Europe claims the proverbial middle ground for itself.
It should surprise no one that Europe likes claiming ground for itself.
The Feminized Asian
I’ll quote here some text I originally wrote in “Less of a Question, More of a Comment.”
The West ties its portrayals of Asian identity to Asian masculinity and femininity. Asian identity narrows the range of acceptable performances; Asian gender narrows it further. Generally speaking, the West hyper-feminizes the physical signifiers, behaviors, and roles of Asians of all genders, binding women into patriarchally defined characterizations (conservative, studious, submissive …) and men into permanent outsider status (nerds, instructors, support professionals, etc.). Asians who are neither men nor women get classified as grotesque “feminine men” regardless of their self-definition. …
Then there are positive Asian portrayals. Even when those don’t fall into offensive territory—actually, especially when, in some ways—only a narrow range of gender performances don’t start trouble with the white patriarchy. I use he/him pronouns so Imma zero in on masculine portrayals here. For Asian men, the safest archetype is the Strong Silent Type. There is nothing wrong or even really racist about a strong silent Asian man. Lots of real Asian men are strong and silent. Lots of Asian heroes like Ogami Ittō, Kyūzō, and Tsubaki Sanjūrō fit into this category (although Westerns heavily influenced all those heroes). But consciously and unconsciously, we tend towards strong silent Asian men because the Western patriarchy doesn’t see them as serious threats. Asian men who are sexy, funny in non-self-deprecating ways, or—worst of all—better at something than a white man without cheating upend that narrative.
Asian martial arts stereotypes over-emphasize the delicacy, finesse, and philosophy of Eastern combat—the Dexterity and Wisdom rather than the Strength and Constitution, we might say. Of course, actual Asian martial arts exhibit the same range of grace and force, refinement and brutality as combat everywhere else in the world. This trend may also explain the list of “monk weapons” in the Player’s Handbook. Nicoli on Facebook mentions:
So what strikes me now that I didn't pick up on then (because I was between 8-11 when a lot of this racist bullying happened) was that I think white boys and men in particular were mocking martial arts as a way of perpetuating toxic masculinity, and showing their beliefs that martial arts weren't "real" fighting. Even though I was the one being mocked, I recognize that it was Asian stereotypes they were using for their mockery (overblown Hollywood stereotypes of martial arts sound effects, facial expressions, and movement when they imitated martial arts fighting around me). They used anti-Asian slurs as well. They were constantly trying to bait me into fighting matches, which I resisted, because of the principles I was taught in martial arts classes (specifically Kung Fu). A large part of this was also because I was an out transmasculine kid at that time, so even as they were mocking me for not being the right kind of masculine or feminine, they were also being racist (but not against me - against people who weren't even present to defend themselves, and I had to defend both myself and a whole mass of people they were stereotyping). Which...try doing that with a huge group of 8-to-14-year-olds when even the camp counselors are watching and don't care what happens. I wasn't the most articulate kid when I was being bullied, but I knew they were in the wrong, so I just came off sounding preachy and defensive.
The Ineffable Mystic
Calling back to the religion article once again: the ineffable Asian mystic relates to both these gender stereotypes and the martial artist stereotype.
An Asian mystic is an inscrutable, phlegmatic individual who appears as a supporting character in someone else’s narrative. They spout mystical aphorisms, often in broken and/or accented English, which encourage other characters to follow a confounding path toward enlightenment which will come with self-acceptance or self-denial or figuring out a riddle or whatever conceptual direction the story needs. Those aphorisms are flavored with a mishmash of half-remembered Asian religious traditions including Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and … well, it usually turns out actually to be Neoplatonism.
The mystic combines religious, racial, and gender stereotypes. The religious stereotype comes from Western mistranslations and misconceptions of Eastern religion and philosophy, which compress the grand dialogue of Hinduism to Buddhism to Jainism to Daoism to Confucianism to Shintō to Sikhism together with Islam and Zoroastrianism into bite-sized pieces which sound like Westerners failing to translate things correctly, or else just expressing Western philosophical concepts in creepy accents.
The accompanying gender stereotypes display the West’s tendency of the West to hyper-feminize and de-masculinize Asians of all genders, according to that classic Western gender binary you know and hate. The mystical Asian master is often a decrepit old man, implying a lack of male potency and virility. His recommendations and advice are all words, no substance, contrasting with the western European hero’s blunt practicality. In championing religion, he advocates self-denial and submission. He’s passive, weak, sidelined, and most useful when supporting a Normal Guy Hero.
The Honor-Bound Traditionalist
I complained about this one in “Less of a Question, More of a Comment" as well. A last European misconception of Asian culture points to a perceived Asian over-emphasis on social norms, rules, and strictures. When the European casts indigenous people and Africans as lacking culture and society, while Asians evince an over-emphasis on social structures and rules, the European then gets to occupy a happy medium, the imagined synthesis at the end of the dialectic. In this stereotype, Asian society and Asian people are hyper-adherent to rules of social etiquette, social hierarchy, and power structures handed down by governments, families, armies, or crime families. They’re obsessed with bowing, the strictures of honor, and the laws surrounding martial practice, sword handling, ritual suicide, and organized crime. This is the origin of ideas like “when a samurai sword is drawn, it must taste blood before it returns to its sheath” (wtf, how would anyone ever practice) or “Asians are obsessed with bringing honor to their families.” Of course, Western societies are equally structured; the structures are just as difficult for foreigners to learn, but Europeans can’t see the backpack on their own backs.
The Orientalist Time Freeze
Intersecting with all of the above: orientalist depictions of Asia frequently cherry-pick certain romantic times in history—Japan’s Edo period, for instance—as definitive of a country’s true nature, even into the future. That’s why Asian RPG sourcebooks set in the future still have incongruous katana and ninja and samurai everywhere. This is where we get the common misconception that samurai didn’t use gunpowder, or thought it was dishonorable, when in fact there were as many muskets in Japan in 1600 CE as there were in all Europe put together.
Taken together, these stereotypes bring us back to the transformation of the martial race into the mythical model minority.
“Does this ever actually come up for you?”
ha ha ha OK so I posted this question to social media the other day:
Hey, Asian people: has anyone ever said something racist or insulting to you that involved a martial arts stereotype? I’m writing an article about Asian representation and martial arts and I’d like to include some of your stories.
And oh, did I ever get responses.
Sebastian Visconti said …
I got asked "Is Bruce Lee your dad?" a lot …
Rachel Chung said …
My high school health teacher asked if I knew all the “karate pressure points”
Mahar said …
“Do Filipinos even have a martial art?"
..."No, kali is INDIAN, and escrima is SPANISH."
Suuuuuuure.
Holly Angela-Lu said …
Yeah, don't be mean to her man, she probably knows Kung Fu/can kick your ass
Steve said …
I was once working during the graveyard shift, wearing business casual clothes, and a forklift operator stopped their truck next to me and asked, "Hey, do you know kung-fu?" This was in IN.
[redacted] said …
Many times, people just assume I know martial arts. My kids as well. I've been "accused" of having an advantage in martial arts because I'm Asian...
Lemmie of Lucky Hand Dice said …
You mean you don't want to hear a white guy using a nondescript Asian accent to talk with you when he finds out your ethnicity? So he can tell you about all of the specific Asian things he likes? My PERSONAL favorite is people trying to out-Asian me, like that will make them better at martial arts. 🙃
Jeeyon Shim and I had this conversation …
JS: A white adult speaking to young karate-uniform clad Jeeyon (age 7): "Oh! So you ARE Japanese!"
mndz: oh yeah, anyone wearing a gi immediately becomes japanese
mndz: this is assuredly a real thing
JS: Me talking about wanting to take a martial art as an adult, being interrupted by a white dude who kept insisting I should take tae kwon do because it's "culturally relevant to me"
mndz: oh my god
JS: Yeah this came after me saying specifically, "I want to take a martial art as an adult but with my bad ankle I'm not sure what's suitable"
JS: Tae kwon do is literally. Kicking
JS: Kick kick kick kwon do
JS: Not as much as muay thai maybe but like...bruh
mndz: what a guy
JS: Mmmhm
mndz: … i mean, in competitive muay thai punching is at least legal
in competitive tkd you don’t even punch
JS: Yeah but you know
"culturally relevant"
mndz: Yeah your cultural +2 to taekwondo and hapgido will make up for the ankle
or have you considered archery
or starcraft
JS: OH oh one time when I was in high school I was hanging out with my best friend, who took years of karate, and she was flirting with some dude and karate came up and he looked at us and pointed and me and was like, "is she your sensei? do you fight together? that's hot"
mndz: aaaaaaaaaaaa[aaaaaaaaaaa]aaaaaaaaaa
JS: Lmaooooooooooooooooooo
I had this exchange with Adam McConnaughey et al …
Note: I was walking around Big Bad Con in a gi on Saturday for reasons. At one point I was in the elevator with Adam and another random hotel guest who had some excited questions about what I was wearing and why.
Adam McConnaughey: the elevator lady who was v curious about your apparel, the interaction did not stop when you exited the elevator. she kept talking to her partner like "he's not supposed to be wearing that out in public! that's like a sacred thing" and after a couple statements like that i said something about it being a weird assumption that you were "out in public" since we were in a hotel and you appeared to be going to an event of some sort, which she seemed to accept. idk
AR: what is a sacred thing?
Adam McConnaughey: oh his black belt, i think
AR: *blinks* k....
OM: Pffffft. Black belt...sacred. Sure, respect your belt, but not being allowed to wear it in front of people because it goes against some Martial Arts Law? Please.
mndz: Last week, Sensei rifled through my bag and got out my belt to tie his daughter's backpack to a tree so we could throw swords at it.
Yoshi Creelman told me this story …
So in high school I was on the baseball team. I wasn't the best player by any means but I had pretty good fundamentals and form.
One day we were about to do some batting practice and the coach asked me to step forward and slowly demonstrate how I would throw a punch. I stood up took a stance, wound up and slowly threw a punch... with an open palm.
Lots of snickers and laughs. It took the coach 5 minutes to calm people down so he could use the analogy of the form, wind up, and follow through of a punch to hitting a ball with a bat.
I was not happy to be the only Asian on the team at that moment.
“But the punch you threw was correct for what the coach wanted to teach, right?” —mndz
Yeah totally, he didn't really care about the palm/fist. He just wanted to show the wind up and follow through he assumed I would do based on my batting swing. Basically how I leaned back and wound up before starting the punch, rather than starting from a perpendicular position with no wind up (which I am guessing some players were doing on their swings).
Allayas had quite a few.
In the third grade, I was called chigga. The white boy made it explict that he meant a Chinese nig÷π×. He wanted me to give him my lunch money, unless I had "deadly ninja moves my dad taught me."
In fourth grade, I beat up someone. He was picking on my friend, and I hit him in the jaw bone, ironically because my dad HAD taught me these things. When I was in the principal's office for discipline reasons, it was said over and over that I was dangerous because of deadly martial arts. My friend's glasses and nose were fucking broken. The bully, and my victim, wasn't suspended, but I was.
In 5th grade, I was punched repeatedly over and over in the gut. Mockingly, the person who was doing it asked where all my kung fu moves were. I had literally zero people willing to tell my side of the story, to the tune of "well if it was that serious he knows SOME self defense, it was just a little teasing."
In 6th grade, football was a mandatory PE activity. I said I didn't know how to play, and they didn't believe me. The first time someone tackled me, I threw them over my shoulder. My dad, later, was sitting in the principal's office, explaining very carefully that … I had never expressed an interest in sports beforehand and thus didn't know, that of course he hasn't taught it to me, and no, I was not deadly. The explanation that I was NOT trained to seriously injure ppl—in the sixth fucking grade—was repeated to the god damn principal.
In 7th and 8th grade, the way most ppl turned me down for homework study buddies was citing something like "aren't you busy with Kung Fu training or something?"
In 8th grade, I was nearly expelled for kicking a stool at someone. I had sat in their seat, and in reflex to them pulling it from under me, I kicked it at them. It was a long conversation about how that wasn't a DELIBERATE attempt to seriously injure him—he also turned out to be just fine, while my head had hit the table. I had a concussion—he bruised his tail bone. I was the one who needed to be controlled, and moved to a different class.
In 9th grade, PE gave us mandatory workouts for PE, tailored to the sport we participated in or a general fitness program. They didn't ask me. My training was based on stuff Bruce Lee did. Literally said from the coach's mouth. I was never asked.
I needed help in Honors Biology. I did NOT excel. I first went to my classmates for study groups, and was initially scoffed at " aren't you knowledgeable about anatomy?" I said no. "Oh, I just figured, you know all the kung fu. You seem like the type."
There were four kids with the same name in ninth grade, including myself. Naturally we all had nicknames. Although no one said it to my face, I was "hyaaa~" for a whole year. Just the karate chop sound effect.
In one summer camp over the course of a week, three people picked fights with me. Wanted to "see my moves." They were subtle enough and played the victim that I was always the one in trouble. The floor supervisor figured since I was the common thread, I was the one causing the fights.
I had an Asian roommate, naturally, the only Asians on the floor. He was the real deal. Always wore metal knuckled gloves. Apparently, he had gone to everyone on the floor and threatened them. Everyone was afraid of me all of a sudden.
A self proclaimed psychic was convinced I had killed someone with secret martial arts taught to me by my family for generations. I was a line cook at a hole in the wall restaurant.
My forearms are unusually strong. I can lift heavy pans with my left hand casually. EXCEPT for the sushi restaurant, all my co workers not only make a big deal out of the spectacle, but ask what martial arts I'm trained in. In the middle of the god damn dinner service. I ignore them. SOMEONE says "ah, it's his Shaolin meditation. Can't get to him." In fucking English, they want me to hear. They are native Spanish speakers.
I suck at fighting games, but I'm a natural at many other things. "That's funny" some remark, "you're Asian and did martial arts, you'd think that fighting would be your thing." Those are gamers. They should know it's very different.
Have dated women who liked that I felt mysterious and dangerous. Dangerous? Really?
I've been told, "I don't want *you* hurting anyone," as opposed to, "I don't want any fights, you hear me?" I've been the dangerous one.
I honestly have too many. They're really all stories of racism funneled into martial arts.
I was traumatized by my fighting experience. I'm not afraid of it so much as I am conditioned to behave a certain way without appropriate cause.
People in my life, time again and again, have tried to bring that OUT of me. They want to see me get serious, or show off, or fight. Why not ask the basketball player, the rape victim, the ex ballerina, or god damn anyone else? Why have people wanted the martial artist, traumatized by fights, who bled on the god damn kitchen floor of his parents' home because no matter what his dad was FAR better than him, see him relive all of that, and in that scene recreated in present time, show real martial arts?
I become an animal. I am only interested in exploring my animal as much as any dancer, artist, shaman, or therapist. Why have I been asked to fight when I've said no? Why has friendship been conditional on opening up about fighting? Why have OTHER martial artists seen me hold back and ask for more?
Here’s Mine: Gang Violence at the Container Store
I worked at the Container Store on Lexington Avenue and 58th Street in Manhattan for about a year, many years ago. I like to think I was a pretty good employee, but maybe not by Container Store standards, because the Container Store is like the Seal Team 6 of retail. TCS puts new employees through more and more structured training than any other workplace where I’ve been. There are systems, protocols, and manuals for everything. You don’t approach customers and suggest that they buy things; you approach customers and become their friends through half an hour of targeted emotional labor before daring to suggest that perhaps they might purchase a container. I think this experience prepared me well for a future in cultural consulting, but there were some bumps in the road, like when I almost started a gang rumble in the closet section.
The Container Store at the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue and 58th Street in New York, New York, seen from the intersection. The motion blurs in the foreground indicate that a rumble between Chinatown gangs is under way.
It was sometime in the late afternoon. Two young men wearing expensive clothing were standing around in the sector of the store where things for closets are sold, a region we called Closet Plinth because, uh, there were some plinths and they had closet things on them. They had just asked my manager for some of those long shallow boxes that go under your bed, and she had cheerfully told them they would arrive in twenty minutes. She immediately departed, and the men began to complain and swear loudly about the twenty minutes it was going to take. In an attempt to mollify them, I approached and explained, “You have to understand that in order to get to the stockroom, you have to take the elevator several floors down, walk all the way under the store next door, and, like, fight a dragon. … OK one of those things was a lie, you probably know which one.”
I started walking away and that was when the shouting started.
I didn’t turn around, because why the hell would I validate this, but they started screaming profanity, insults, doubts regarding my parentage and bravery, and most of all:
“SHOW ME HOW THE DRAGON FLIES!”
I had no idea what that meant. Apparently my throwaway dragon joke had not gone over well? I went and hid somewhere so that I did not have to throw hands in the middle of Closet Plinth.
It turned out—though I did not realize this until much later, when Rob Donoghue looked it up—that these young men had interpreted my dragon quip as evidence that I, an Asian, belonged to the Chinatown-based Flying Dragons street gang, and that I, a uniformed Container Store employee, was attempting to establish Closet Plinth as Flying Dragons territory, an assertion which could not stand in the minds of these two customers who belonged to … I dunno, some gang which has a really expensive dress code.
At the end of the day, Brian the manager called me into his office and made a valiant attempt to turn this experience into a teaching moment about listening to your customers or something. He was trying very hard.
But if you don’t believe me, go to the Container Store and ask for Brian, and ask him how the dragon flies.
Rules of Engagement
But you can help fix these problems, right now, in your own creative works! Our governing principle is to avoid Orientalism, in which Western æsthetic conceptions of the East overwrite legit Eastern æsthetics and experience. Avoid those Western misconceptions. Depict Asians the way Asians depict ourselves—which, I might add, Asian collaborators can help you do most efficiently. Am I saying you need Asian collaborators on every Asia-related project? … actually, yeah, if you have any collaborators, I really hope you avoided being Martial Colonizer Guy and found an Asian. If you need help with that, email me. We are rather populous.
In this process, you’ll craft a less conventional, less cliché portrayal of Asian martial culture, making for more interesting, exciting games and fiction.
On Martial Arts Research
A lot of the topics I blog about are tough to research. It’s hard to find people who want to talk to you about the intense, personal, possibly traumatic experiences which come with living with systemic oppression. You should approach those topics with gentleness, care, readiness for the person to say no, and a willingness to compensate your interlocutor, possibly even with cash.
This is not the case with most martial artists. Martial artists want to talk to you about martial arts. In fact, they want to talk to you forever about martial arts. It’s like asking someone to tell you about their character. If you buy the first beer and say, “Hey, I hear you know karate—tell me about that!” then the karateka whose week you just made will likely buy beers two through eight and tell you every last detail of their training history, so get comfortable (and hydrate).
The Rogue One Rules
Usually there are no Asians. If there’s one Asian who’s a stereotype—martial artist, computer nerd, ineffable mystic, monk, whatever—and nothing else, we gonna be mad. The more Asians in your material, the easier this all is. So here’s your quick and dirty rule. You can generalize this to other ethnic stereotypes, too, replacing “Asian” with that ethnicity and “martial arts” with whatever stereotype you’re dealing with.
If literally every major character in your piece studies martial arts, you may include a single Asian character who studies martial arts, so long as they also have other things going on in their life and character with nothing to do with martial arts. More than one would be better, though.
If not every major character in your piece studies martial arts and you want an Asian martial artist, then you need at least two Asians: one who studies martial arts, and one who doesn’t. If the one who doesn’t represents some other Asian stereotype, though, you still messed up. More Asians than that would be better, though.
Jiāng Wén as Baze Malbus and Donnie Yen as Chirrut Îmwe in Rogue One: a Star Wars Story.
If you have no Asians, Asians will be mad at you about that instead, so don’t think that’s an easy out. Personally I’d rather you put in a bad representation of an Asian that I could at least criticize than none at all.
Don’t Give Characters Formal Martial Arts Just Because of Race
How many times have you seen a random Asian supporting character suddenly turn out to know martial arts which seem to have no grounding in their character beyond their ethnicity? Don’t give Asian characters formal martial arts training if it has no connection to any other aspects of their life. If you need them to win a fight, have them win because of some other characteristic: their strength, their perception, their emotional drive. If a character knows martial arts, those martial arts should be a part of their life and background.
Depict Martial Culture From Internal Perspectives
Martial arts stories about outsiders who rise through the ranks as unexpected underdogs are sometimes cool, and as we’ve seen above, sometimes they’re about colonizers or other individuals in positions of power pretending to be disenfranchised within the walls of a school. That narrative is played out. Instead, why not hunt down the less common insider narrative? Better yet, have multiple main characters who represent different perspectives on similar kinds of training.
Now, you don’t have to be accurate, necessarily—but when you look at a martial art’s mythology, don’t draw primarily on outsiders’ vision of what that martial art is. That vision leads to that Orientalist dynamic, where the Western conception of an Eastern thing eclipses the truth of that Eastern thing. Instead, draw on a martial art’s own internal mythology about itself! This is a really fun thing to do because when you dig down into a martial art’s own origin story, the legends and lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, you’re likely to find something fascinating. For example, several Japanese styles have origin stories involving boxers from China immigrating to Japan and teaching the foundational skills which evolved into their art. You needn’t take these stories literally: it is just as plausible that Japanese people developed them independently, although the frequency of this origin story does say something about the privileged position which Chinese cultural expressions had early in Japanese history, and about Japan’s own history of migration and influence from the mainland. But the stories of those monks’ specific origins (often fleeing religious or political persecution) and martial abilities are fascinating in their own right. Chinese martial styles tell similar stories about Tibet and India, with figures like the superpowered Indian monk Bodhidharma bringing South Asian martial arts to China. Capoeira’s origin story involves secret African martial arts fortresses in the Amazon Rainforest fighting back against the European oppressors, and … well, that story’s actually completely true, but later on you’ll find the romantic outlaws of the Cangaço and the armor-skinned were-beetle capoeirista Besouro Mangangá.
Focus on the Practical, Which Comes From Context
There’s this common misconception that some martial arts are practical and efficient, and others are (choose one): mere sports, mere philosophy, mere brute force, mere religion, mere fakery. Generally speaking, the practical martial art is the one the person talking to you practices, and the impractical martial art is all of the others except maybe krav maga or Thai boxing or Marine Corps combatives. If you’re making fiction about martial arts, you might as well run with the assumption that every long-established martial art, without exceptions, is practical and efficient at something. Not every martial art is practical and efficient at the same things, and that’s fine; but I feel like I’ve seen the scene where Martial Artist A from the Very Practical Style completely blindsides or overwhelms Martial Artist B from the Too Much Time Spent Doing Forms Style or whatever enough times for my entire life, thanks. Instead, if you’re gonna seriously depict a style, find its strengths. Learn what context developed it, and how it adapted to fit that context.
How does this principle relate to culture and representation? Well, exotification and misunderstanding often come from misunderstanding the context around a cultural representation. We often end up deriding expressions by relating them to our own current context, because it’s present and obvious.
Depict Non-Asian Martial Arts the Same Way
In order to depict Asian martial culture equitably, we need to depict non-Asian martial culture as well! Reject the dichotomy that says French kickboxing, German scholastic fencing, and Nigerian boxing aren’t really martial arts because they’re not Asian. Systematized combat systems exist everywhere. Comb through your descriptions of different countries’ fighting styles to make sure you haven’t reinforced the misconceptions that Africans are brutish, Europeans are practical and scientific, and Asians are mystical and feminine, for example.
Break Honor Down Into Its Component Parts
As I’ve discussed in “Less of a Question, More of a Comment,” the word “honor” covers so much ground that its use in relation to Asian culture tends to denote a general Asian-ness of behavior rather than a concrete code which individuals know how to follow. Whenever you’re tempted to talk about honor, instead show us what honor means. Is it family reputation? Antique chivalric virtue? Battlefield glory? Get specific.
Find Something Pop Culture Doesn’t Already Know
One of the most reliable ways to avoid cliché and stereotypes is to find something new. Dig deeper. Take some classes. Learn something. Show us what you’ve learned. I promise you’ll like how that feels.
Finishing Moves
There was a moment during the Gen Con iteration of the Azn Panel when the moderator asked how many of us had studied martial arts. We all raised our hands, and people laughed.
Then I had a thought. I asked, how many of us studied a martial art from our own ethnic background? No hands went up.
How different were we, really, from the white folks who populate most American taekwondo schools?
Like many Asian American martial artists, I have a complicated relationship with the stereotype. I love martial arts. It’s my favorite activity in the whole world, more even than role-playing games or dancing or telling people they’re racist. Studying martial arts keeps me emotionally and physically healthy, introduces me to beloved and lifelong friends, and enriches my other interests. There’s no feeling quite so magical for me as fighting a stranger or new friend from a different style to the point where we learn something valuable from each other. I won’t let my fear of embodying that stereotype stop me from doing something that’s good for me and makes me stronger. After all, denigrating us for the way we fight is how they keep us weak.
So I want to talk to you about martial arts. I want to play games about martial arts, too. I know most of them will overflow with racist tropes which will break my heart; but I want to try them anyway, because identifying and criticizing their failures will teach me to make better martial arts media. It’s like I told you about my other problematic fave: if something racist is in a game, I’m gonna go reclaim that thing, because that’s how I can protect it.
Next time I play Dungeons & Dragons, I think I might roll an orc monk.
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