1 March 2001
Stuart Wood

There's a new ad for a leading brand of instant noodles which has caught Dimsum's attention. Trigger-happy after the 'crouching tiger' fracas, we're primed and ready to pounce on anyone who dares to mess with chinese stereotypes and these ads are, frankly, like a red bull to a Fag.

They feature various family set-ups presumably in Hong Kong or Taiwan, in which odd-ball chinese characters eat noodles and grin. They are each goofy and I suppose intended to reflect the diversity and charm of the chinese community. The most arresting image in this campaign is of three generations of chinese women arranged in a traditional portrait. The gawky daughter smiles through her tooth brace and the grandmother sits demurely in her glad rags.

It brings to mind a noughties kind of Joy Luck Club where the womenfolk might sit together round a bowl of noodles and swap stories of their various journeys - even if little missy's only tale is of how crowded Top Shop was yesterday.

Staring at one of these posters on the London Underground last week it occurred to me that this image would have been unintelligible only five years ago. Scarcely anyone would have found a family portrait of chinese women in their mental image bank - still less associate it with health, wealth and happiness. So why now? How did the chinese woman get into our heads?

East Asian images of women have come and gone in the last century, as Paul O'Grady demonstrated in his grumpy tour of Asia on TV recently. From the notorious Shanghai Lil, to the more dubious Annabel Chong, the typical feature of 'Oriental' women has been their effortless sex appeal. They have been styled as strong sassy vamps - a kind of 'Mae East' if you pardon the pun.

Somewhere between the late eighties and mid nineties things shifted. Perhaps with the seminal influence of Jung Chang's masterly Wild Swans a window opened in our media-saturated minds and we started to read about real people. We devoured every new tale about Fortitude in the Face of Struggle or Making Do with Mao; and the image started to shift. Suddenly, our bookstores were awash with inspiring tales of hope and self-belief. Shelves were stacked with cover designs featuring women shot in sepia with calligraphy overlay and reviews from the ubiquitous Amy Tan.

And then it started. We turned old sassy Shanghai Lil into a new and more dangerous breed - The Survivor. The Chinese woman sold in bookstores became a thinking man's Gloria Gaynor. She saw struggle on the horizon and just kept on walking.

So where did it all go wrong? How did these real heroic stories of survival turn into self help texts? There's certainly something of a flood going on, both in terms of content and image. New tales of 'one woman's struggle in post-Communist China' emerge every month, much to the consternation of my Auntie Judy over in Singapore who's been there and done that thank you very much. She has little time for the bandwagon, and I imagine nor do many Chinese women of that generation many of whom were themselves abandoned on roadsides or sold to circuses. She would go along with the sentiments of chinese poet Shu Ting, who has been the darling of the chinese poetry world for years. She writes:

Not every tall tree is split asunder by storm; Not every seed finds no rich soil to root; Not every true emotion wanders lost in the desert of the human heart; Not every dream's willing to have its wings clipped;

No, not everything is what you claimed it to be.

Probably not many people are ready to hear that, I imagine. Our hunger for survivors is still pretty healthy.

On top of this literary appetite someone has clearly caught on to the idea that pictures of chinese women sell stuff. And this goes for noodles, mobile phones, IT software and casual basics as much as it does books.

Of course in a way this is a happy thing, as the image is starting to say things like, "I am clever" or "I know the future" rather than only singing "I will survive". But even so, there is still a pernicious air of stereotyping around, and as I said earlier, we're like coiled springs. So watch it, noodle people.

'This Too is Everything' Shu Ting, from Women of the Red Plain - An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Women's Poetry, Trans. Julia C. Lin, 1992, Penguin Books, London.