By Dorothy Chan

In 2012, I had a breakdown in my aunt’s apartment in Kowloon, Hong Kong. I cried in front of the television after watching a series of commercials for weight loss pills, coffee, and condoms.

I remember the weight loss pill commercial vividly. A conventionally attractive Hong Kong actress—size 2 with delicate features and pale skin—took center stage. Skin whitening products are advertised across East Asia. Chances are, if you buy a beauty or skincare product there, there’s a skin whitening element to it. In the commercial, the actress was asked if she ever felt “fat.” Her response: “Maybe I feel a little fat sometimes.” Cut to an image of fat, followed by an image of the advertised weight loss pill.

My anger was building up from this overt body shaming, and increased with the next advertisement for coffee, depicting the “perfect” Hong Kong nuclear family getting ready for the day. On the heels of one offensive ad, the second’s heteronormativity felt deliberate, almost aggressive. The final commercial for condoms was so heteronormative that I turned around to ask my mom: “Does Hong Kong hate queer people?”

My rage didn’t come out of nowhere. My emotions were pent up from earlier that afternoon, when a cousin told me she stopped watching an American music video I’d sent her because of its gay themes. That same cousin kept asking me if I had any men in my life. The night before at a family dinner, another cousin had made snide remarks about my weight and appearance.

Watching television that afternoon, I felt a lot of erasure in a city that I have always had complicated feelings towards. It’s not that I dislike all of Hong Kongnese culture. I simply find many of their beliefs on “beauty” and “romance” to be terribly outdated, especially when I only visit once a year and get subjected to relatives who constantly pry into both my appearance and private life. The advertisements highlight this. They are a reflection of what a culture desires, reinforcing those desires until there’s room for little else. And what was so clearly missing in all of the ads was someone who looked or felt like me.

But these feelings also aren’t limited to Hong Kong media. Substitute the actors, and both the coffee and condom commercials could have played in the U.S. Sure, the weight loss commercial would have been deemed politically incorrect in America, but American media is undoubtedly obsessed with skinny bodies. It’s still challenging to find a TV show cast with a wide range of body types. I know there are companies, media outlets, and public figures who are advocating for the body positive representation I’ve looked for my whole life. But there’s a lot of work to do. I am always yearning for greater LGBTQIA+ representation; I’d love to see two queer women of color in a loving relationship on my screen.

I’ve been opposed to heteronormativity for as long as I can remember, and I’ve questioned traditional beauty standards for a long time. Yet even when I think I’m immune to the biases of the dominant culture, these nagging phrases from my father haunt me: “If you marry a Chinese guy, it’ll make my life easier” and “Maybe you should try to look and act more ladylike” and “You certainly have a lot of opinions. Why can’t you keep them to yourself so that you can find a suitable partner?”

When these scenes replay in my head, I want to punch something. Maybe I want to be provoked. Because now I have something to protect against the harmful notions that have been perpetuated by media almost everywhere. The thing is, I’m in love with a woman. We’re both women of color with jet black hair and red lips. We love poetry. I love that we don’t have to explain things to each other. That we share the same values and imagine the same kind of future, where something as benign as watching a television show doesn’t have to be a fight against all the systems that render us invisible. Invisible to the world, but much worse, invisible to ourselves.

My dad’s life would be easier if I married a Chinese guy. But a lot of people’s lives would be easier if they could unabashedly display the love they choose.

BIO:

Dorothy Chan is the author of Chinese Girl Strikes Back (Spork Press, forthcoming), Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She is a 2020 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University, and a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Poetry Editor of Hobart. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com.