The China Doll
The World of Suzie Wong (1960)
In The World of Suzie Wong, Asian women were represented as sexual servants or were embodied as sexual adventures through the portrayal of Suzie Wong. She was a true China Doll model - a Hong Kong exotic, giggling and dancing sex machine, working in a bar of white sailors. Late, she madly fell in love with Robert Lomax - a Western “Nice Guy” painter, who already had a lover and seeked for inspiration in “The Other”. The hypersexualized stereotype of Asian female being docile and obedient was at its peak when Suzie told Lomax, “I’m not important”, and “I’ll follow you until you say – Suzie, go away”. This misperception rooted in the war period since 1940, when the US military was based in various Asian countries and the first impression of them with Asian women was that those women were there to sexually please them (Zinzius 2005). Unfortunately, part of this impression still remains years later.
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