By Gabi Wy
AsAmNews Intern
Kristina Wong’s How to Pick Up Asian Chicks is a double-edged sword–funny, and incredibly important.
The comedian rounded up eighteen Asian American women to react to the genre of self-published books that fetishizes Asians and gives supposedly helpful tips on how to pick up an Asian girlfriend. The result: a six-part series Wong released on YouTube.
I’ve heard time and time again that Asians are the model minority, and people twist pure racism into a kind of backhanded compliment. Through this series, Wong combats those stereotypes by showing Asian women are more than those prejudices.
“I’ve heard all these stereotypes before, with white men describing our genitals,” she said. “I think it makes me feel distant to this idea of what an Asian woman is. It’s like, oh, they’re talking about me.”
With women featured in the series ranging from Asa Akira, a porn star, to Amy Hill of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Unreal, to ten-year-old Aubrey Anderson-Emmons of Modern Family, Wong provides a variety of unique personalities to prove these books ridiculous.
My favorite episode of the series is Asian Women Review Asian MILF Hunting.
The highlight of this episode is Anderson-Emmons reading the text with her mother, comedian Amy Anderson. As Wong stated in an interview with AsAmNews, she specifically chose Aubrey and Amy to read this specific material. Wong said it was eye-opening to see a “quote-in-quote MILF with her daughter reading about Asian MILFs.”
“Okay,” Anderson-Emmons says, “what’s a MILF?”
Her mother bursts out laughing. It’s funny, but also quite mind-blowing to think ten-year-olds are growing up in a world where men think this of Asian American women.
RELATED: Kristina Wong Series Combats Asian Stereotypes with Laughs: An Interview with Kristian Wong
It’s great that those featured in these episodes can take this genre of books and laugh at it, knowing it doesn’t mean anything about who they really are inside. This series brings together beautiful, hilarious and self-aware women.
Wong said her advice to young girls is this: “F*ck Sleeping Beauty.”
I hope Asian American women who watch this series feel connected to the women onscreen–all victims of the stereotypes, yet rising above and making us laugh at the same time. It certainly inspired me to be more confident in myself as an Asian American woman and resist being placed into a box by society and the men who wrote these awful pick-up artist books.
If any men actually looking for tips stumble across this web-series, good for them, Wong said.
“I hope that people will think these are tutorials, they’ll see us instead and then their erection goes away,” Wong said. “I’m a professional boner-killer.”
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