Sep272013
Sep242013
We refuse to buy Miss Saigon — literally and figuratively. We will not pay for tickets to a show that says Asian American women are subject to the whims of white men, or that they are nothing but objects for sexual gratification. We refuse to believe that human trafficking is something at which we should gape. We do not support the myth that U.S.-based adoption is the best and only option for Asian children. And we roundly challenge a Southeast Asian wartime narrative that ignores colonialism and racial privilege.
Sep232013
I am a Vietnamese woman. I am queer. I am somewhere between masculine and feminine. I was born in Saigon and now a US citizen living in Minnesota. Miss Saigon missed the boat my family and I took to get here.
Sep232013
by ALISON ROH PARK via RaceFiles “[S]mall, weak, submissive and erotically alluring…eyes almond-shaped for mystery, black for suffering, wide-spaced for innocence, high cheekbones swelling like bruises, cherry lips…. When you get home from another hard day on the planet, she comes into existence, removes your…
Sep232013
by BAO PHI via 18 Million Rising (Italicized words are lyrics taken from the libretto of Miss Saigon) Miss Saigon is a musical about Vietnamese women, who are all victims in need of rescue from the Third World. It is a musical about the inherent goodness…
Sep202013
Prostitution is not a love story. But by focusing on this love story, Miss Saigon ignores or slights the dehumanization and exploitation of prostitution and instead tries to romanticize human trafficking. The musical ignores or slights the fact that this prostitution existed as a result of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam.
Sep202013
As a Korean American adoptee in my early twenties, I think of myself not as Asian American, but just as a person, doing my thing, working for my pay, trying to get along. I am weaving my way through crowded streets toward the restaurant, an Asian woman on a bike. A young White man yells to me, grinning invitingly, drunkenly, “Heeey Miss Saigon!” Miss Saigon is being performed at the Orpheum, just blocks away. I realize I cannot ride a bike in my own city to my own job without being read by random White people as a prostitute.
Sep202013
“Miss Saigon thrives on the corrupting Orientalism that is no longer culturally permissible among people of taste and good will. It is cultural trash that demeans both Vietnamese and Americans. It overflows with the quasi-racial condescension that cruelly stereotyped Vietnamese nationalists as moral midgets. It is an insult to all those who fought and died for freedom and justice for the people of South Vietnam.”
Jan291995
“Miss Saigon” and its ensuing publicity show us that publicly acceptable racism and ethnic fetishes of Asian Americans still prevail in the national consciousness.
