1.Introduction
On the surface, yellow seems like an innocuous characterisation of Asians’ skin. Crazy Rich Asians (2018) corroborates this claim by featuring a Mandarin cover of Coldplay’s song Yellow, celebrating the colour as part of Asian identity (Ho, "How Crazy Rich Asians..."). On the other hand, three years later, the Asian-American media company 88rising posted a “yellow square” on Instagram to express their solidarity for the Asian community in the wake of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic; the post was soon taken down amidst criticisms of performative activism and racist overtones (Song "88Rising"). These seemingly contradictory events sow doubts about the meanings of yellow, which oscillates between proud self-identification and racial derogation.
While existing scholarship has scrutinised the ways in which Western media represents the Asian community (Ono and Pham), there is still a lack of critical analysis surrounding how Asians contest and resist meanings of yellow that are still very much centred around a Euro-American epistemology. This paper shall address this scholarly gap from a visual-cultural perspective, focusing on visual representations of the colour yellow in authorship by and on people of East Asian descent. While Western media and colloquial discourse often fail to distinguish between the varied cultural and national identities subsumed under the umbrella term “Asian,” an attentiveness to the plurality of the term is crucial for a meaningful discussion about yellow. Here, people of East Asian descent (POEAD) refer to those from East Asia and the East Asian diaspora.
In this essay, I examine four predominantly visual contemporary texts—Crazy Rich Asians (2018), YELLOW (2020–), Yellow Fever (1998), and Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption (2016)—to outline the two main strategies adopted by POEAD surrounding the idea of being “yellow”: either countering stereotypes to celebrate the colour as a positive part of one’s identity, or rejecting the capacity of yellow to index race altogether. Using Wendy Brown’s concept of “wounded attachments”, I argue that while the former strategy of resistance might reinforce and reproduce the value-system that oppresses POEAD, a silver lining lies in mobilising another colour to repudiate the totalising nature of yellow as a racial index.
2. A Brief History of Yellow
A brief account of the history of yellow is critical to comprehending the motivations and implications of how a text negotiates and contests the meanings associated with the colour. While yellow appears in many East Asian cultures (such as the “Dragon Robes” donned by emperors from this region),, it is almost never ascribed to human subjects (Schuyler 297–321). The closest association between East Asian ethnicities and the colour is captured by a term for the Chinese diaspora—“Sons of the Yellow Emperor”—that refers to the mythical ancestor of all Han people (Leibold 181–220).
Michael Keevak contends that East Asians were first identified as yellow in eighteenth century scientific discourse, at a time when Western ethnographers began to study indigenous people in other parts of the world (3). These ethnographers quantified bodily features such as skull size, eye characteristics, and skin colour, developing a racial hierarchy in the name of medicine that dichotomised the healthy-white and the pathological-yellow (52). In the political sphere, “yellow peril” captures the West’s anxieties towards a terrorising East. The fears range from warfare—such as Genghis Khan in the Middle Ages and the Japanese Empire in modern history—to economic competition posed by the cheap labour of Asian immigrants in modern Western societies. Finally, prevailing societal conceptions of yellow have historically been readily reinforced by the media. In early-twentieth-century Western media, East Asian characters were often depicted with a distinctive yellow complexion (Mayer 339). The film industry followed this norm by casting white actors in exaggerated skin makeup for East Asian roles, a practice known as “yellowface” (Marchetti 68). Coupled with these racist physical depictions were a slew of tropes: East Asian women were portrayed as available for the white male lead's conquest even as their seductiveness posed a moral threat to racial purity (2–3), while East Asian men were portrayed as villainous or sexually inept in relation to the masculine white hero (Han 84–5).
The first major instance when POEAD referred to themselves as yellow is attributed to the Asian-American movement of the 1960-70s, notably in relation to the term “Yellow Power” (Schlund-Vials 1–2). In her essay, “The Emergence of Yellow Power” (1969), activist Amy Uyematsu situates the intricacies of a “yellow” identity within the rhetoric of racial triangulation in America, through which Asian immigrants were touted as the obedient, hard-working model minority in contrast to the supposedly delinquent, economically inept black people, yet both groups still faced economic and social discrimination by white people (Uyematsu 11). Uyematsu, calling for critical questioning of this racial rhetoric, expresses the need for “Yellow Power”—a movement not only for better economic and social conditions for Asian-Americans people, but also for a new identity free from stereotypes formulated by white people (11–3).
Propelled by greater acceptance, education, and social standing, the later half of the twentiethcentury and the early-twenty-first-century have witnessed more POEAD in a position to produce media products for global consumption, thus enabling them to tell their own stories rather than being represented by Westerners. Still, given the relatively short duration of Asian self-representation in contrast to the hundreds of years of Western depictions of Asians, remnants of racist media portrayals still persist, such as stereotypes of Asians as nerdy (Qin 20–37) and sexually subservient or deficient (Ono and Pham 66, 71).
3. ‘Yellow’ as Wounded Attachment
In the pages that follow, I analyse “yellow” through the concept of “wounded attachments” coined by Wendy Brown, an American political and critical theorist who writes extensively about contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism. The term refers to the fixation of liberal movements in the US on marginalised groups’ injuries, where such injuries arise from minority groups being excluded from the privileges—such as social acceptance and legal recognition—enjoyed by the white male middle-class ideal (Brown 390–410).
Brown’s critique is that attachment to injuries legitimises normativity as the source of woundedness that defines marginalised identities (398). She argues that within liberal rhetoric, the marginalised subject’s deviations from the ideal norm, solidified and made visible through an allegedly shared woundedness, are then reframed through a positivist, disciplinary language of social categories (such as race and sexual orientation) upon which equalising treatment is sought in the name of inclusivity and tolerance. The problem with this language, Brown observes, is that we lose sight of the discursive operation of institutional power that produces injustice in the first place (339). In effect, the marginalised, too attached to their wounds, are unable to envisage true emancipation in the form of transformed power structures (399–403). Ultimately, although Brown does explore ways to overcome this shortcoming, she finds none satisfactory (406–7).
Given Brown’s theory of ‘wounded attachments,’ I seek to explore the following questions: (1) To what extent is the text still attached to its woundedness, measured with reference to the “white norm”? (2) Is the inherently pluralistic nature of subjectivised identities respected, or is it superseded with a totalising identity claim that bolsters political visibility at the expense of erasing individual idiosyncrasies such as gender, sexuality, or socioeconomic class? (3) Does the text acknowledge and address the mechanisms that produce discriminatory stereotypes of POEAD and related negative associations with yellow? Lastly, (4) could we find in the texts an affirmative identity to displace woundedness that does not simply replicate extant Euro-American-centric discourse?
4. Celebrating Yellowness in Crazy Rich Asians and YELLOW
The most straightforward approach to resisting racist Euro-American stereotypes about POEAD is by negating them, as exemplified by the 2018 romcom Crazy Rich Asians and the ongoing photography project YELLOW by the Berlin-based photographer Zoen Lam, which began in 2020.
Adapted from a novel by the Singaporean writer Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians tells the story of second generation Chinese-American economics professor Rachel Chu visiting the homeland of her Singaporean boyfriend Nick Young for the first time, only to become entangled in the drama of the outrageously wealthy Young family. The movie inverts East-West power relations by portraying Asians in the position of autonomy and excessive monetary power, evident in the opening scene when the Young family buys off a hotel in London after its reception staff denies them entry based on the assumption that they would not be able to afford such a luxurious stay. The idea of yellow is celebrated and elevated throughout the film, from shiny gold jewelry, furniture, and home decorations that allude to a profusion of material wealth (see Fig. 1) to the full-yellow costumes donned by Peik Lin’s mother and Princess Intan that pay homage to the Dragon Robes worn by East Asian emperors in the past. Yellow also makes its way to living bodies, with multiple shots of shirtless men exposing healthy-yellow skin, such as Michael’s bronzed upper body glowing in the bedroom scene (see Fig. 2) and Nick and Colin’s sun-kissed bodies glistening under the tropical sun on the morning of the bachelor party. These visuals affirm the good build of men of East Asian descent, directly countering early depictions of East Asian men as pale and sickly yellow (Seshagiri 162–3). Finally, the movie closes with the Mandarin cover of Coldplay’s song Yellow, which is meant to celebrate the colour as a proud mark of Asian identity, thus negating the negative connotations ascribed to it by the West (Ho, "How Crazy Rich Asians...").
Figure 1. Crazy Rich Asians, directed by Jon M. Chu (2018; Los Angeles, CA:Warner Bros.), Netflix, 0:27:51, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80239019.
Figure 2. Crazy Rich Asians, directed by Jon M. Chu (2018; Los Angeles, CA: Warner Bros.), Netflix, 00:24:32, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80239019.
In the same spirit, the photography project YELLOW seeks to undo the emasculation of Asian men through a “sexy” re-imagination of its subjects. Lam photographs muscular men of East Asian descent in tiny white briefs against a saturated yellow background that adorns their complexion with a golden tint (see Fig. 3). Their poses exude confidence and seductiveness, aided by chiaroscuro lighting that emphasises muscle volume and creates a sense of enchanting mystery. The project ultimately aims to portray the subjects as role models for other Asians: yellow men of confidence, resilience, and sexual desirability (Lam "Project Yellow").
Figure 3. Banner image for YELLOW’s Kickstarter campaign. Zoen Lam, “YELLOW,” Kickstarter, accessed August 7, 2021, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/projectyellow/yellow-0.
The emancipatory capacity of these two texts arises from their dismantling of the binary opposition between the inferior, dubious, and emasculated yellow man and the superior, heroic, and masculine Westerner. An exclusionary logic is no longer operative: Crazy Rich Asians demonstrates that POEAD can indulge in extravagant affairs like the white social elites of The Great Gatsby, while YELLOW testifies that sex appeal, once portrayed as the exclusive characteristic of white men, is also possessed by men of East Asian descent.
It is true that Crazy Rich Asians goes partway towards disrupting “yellow” as a totalising construct. Throughout the movie, yellow does not appear uniform, with the nouveau riche Goh family’s ostentatious display of wealth expressed in garish shades of gold and the Young mansion depicted in more subdued, refined tones, thus suggesting that POEAD correlate with a range of yellows rather than a single shade. This agenda is further advanced by the central character arc. In the first visit to the Young family, Rachel puts on a classy golden dress with the intention of impressing Eleanor. While her dress fits well with the elite family, Rachel seems uncomfortable in it, in the same manner that she feels incongruous at the party not knowing the appropriate etiquette to observe. However, after she disregards Eleanor’s disapproval and acknowledges her own self-worth, she chooses a pale blue dress to attend the wedding ceremony instead of a chic one featuring golden patterns that she had tried on earlier. The change in colour choice signifies Rachel managing to find her own identity independently from the supposed gold-yellow ideal of a rich East Asian woman.
However, the movie has been criticized for its allegiance to normative Euro-American-centric racial discourse. For one, as intended by the director, it restages an age-old Hollywood story with yellow faces (Marotta, "Crazy Rich Asians"). While the movie is imbued with social, historical, cultural specificities of POEAD, such as the family's traditions of wrapping dumplings and playing mahjong, they are frequently ornamental rather than significant components of the story. Effectively, Crazy Rich Asians still sees the “white” story or “whiteness” as the object of desire instead of embracing the unique socio-cultural positions and lived experiences of POEAD as the starting point for storytelling (Tseng-Putterman, "One Way"). Secondly, the film reproduces a racial hierarchy amongst Asians. Singapore, a city-state with multiculturalism as a tenet of her national identity (Moore 339–40), is reduced to its Chinese majority. When racial minorities make appearances, they are characters associated somewhat exclusively with a lower socioeconomic class, such as the Sikh security guards whose role in the story is to intimidate the protagonist. This rehashes the racist stereotype of violent, threatening blacks in Western consciousness (Ferber 14–5). Under the guise of representation and empowerment, the movie inadvertently realigns itself with colonialist logic, imbuing POEAD with white attributes in Singapore’s racial hierarchy (Wong 6).
YELLOW, on the other hand, reproduces the Western erasure of the diversity of Asian identities in portraying its models as uniformly yellow. All photos are shot against the same shade of yellow and lighting setup, creating a strong visual similarity between all models. This uniformity is furthered by the strikingly similar builds and physical appearances of the models, all of whom are short-black-haired and moderately muscled with rounded deltoids, defined abs, and voluminous pectorals. A brief comparison with Thomas Knight’s Red Hot, the inspiration for Lam’s YELLOW, proves instructive here. Red Hot seeks to debunk myths about weak, clownish ginger men by featuring sexy redheads (Williams, "Red Hot"). But the commonalities of these redheads stop at their hair colour, for viewers see a range of physical builds, skin textures, and hair styles. The models are shot against a contrasting cyan background, enabling their red hair to stand out more prominently while providing a common ground for minute differences among the subjects to surface. On closer inspection, viewers notice different tints, tones, and textures across the redheaded subjects. In contrast, the images that YELLOW comprises foreground homogeneity, reinforced by the yellow background that intensifies the sameness of the photographic subjects’ skin tone. While claiming to construct an idealised archetype of Asian yellowness, the project remains blind to the varied identities and colours subsumed by the term “Asian”, insidiously erasing Asians of other skin colours such as brown. Moreover, the uniform muscularity of YELLOW’s models, which implicitly upholds white ideals of masculinity (Morrison et al. 112–3), ends up advocating for the dominant Western logic that it seeks to counter when failing to consider other cultural variants like “soft masculinity” in mainland East Asia (Kam 933–6).
Neither Crazy Rich Asians nor YELLOW escapes a central pitfall of identity politics highlighted through Brown’s concept of “wounded attachments”: to perceive the yellow identity from a white frame of reference inescapably renders yellow as deficient. Ultimately, both texts potentially further subjugate POEAD to Western standards rather than free them from oppressive power relations. POEAD, even if they attain attributes of worth and desirability conceived in Western consciousness, are still relativised as subordinates trying to catch up with superior whites.
5.Rupturing ‘Yellow’ in Yellow Fever and Palimpsest
An alternative approach to yellow is found in Yellow Fever, a 1998 short film directed by Ray Yeung, and Palimpsest, an autobiographical graphic novel by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom published in 2016. The POEAD in both texts share a sense of misalignment with an Asian identity imposed by the wider community that they inhabit, which ruptures the yellowness meant to index them. Yellow Fever follows Monty, a Chinese gay Anglophile living in 1990s London, falling in love with his new mainland Taiwanese neighbour Jai Ming. The idea of romantic interest toward another POEAD appears repulsive to Monty at first, a view stemming from internalised colonialism that renders the worth of POEAD salvageable only through the whiteness of their partner. The film concludes with Monty confronting his ingrained prejudices and externalising his feelings for Jai Ming. The short film thus demonstrates how Monty resists his allegiance to the group identity of “potato queens”—Asian homosexuals who preferentially date Caucasians (Jackson, "Rice Queens")—to attend to his own romantic inclinations. Turning to Palimpsest, the novel narrates the author’s journey as a Korean adoptee in Sweden finding her origins. The story chronicles Sjöblom’s struggles: growing up looking different and being treated differently from her white friends, yearning for a biological mother figure upon her own motherhood, her hardships upon learning about her illegal adoption while trying to find her biological parents, and her failure to profoundly connect to her Korean heritage. The protagonists in these two texts both question and resist their perceived group identity ascribed by yellow. Monty’s “potato queen” Asian homosexuality and Sjöblom’s East Asianness are Western-centric categories that lock them into an epistemology centered around white supremacy. By expressing their deviations from these labels, they displace the hegemony of Euro-American epistemology, thereby rupturing the yellow that such epistemology articulates.
Yellow Fever attends to the woundedness that POEAD living in Western societies inflict upon themselves using both visual cues and the plot as leverage. The film opens with white cream plastered on Monty’s moderately tanned face, an indication of his loathing for yellow and his desire to become white. The short film also features a “potato queen”-type character, Monty’s gym friend who is also of East Asian descent. He works out assiduously to compensate for his yellowness and hence boost his appeal to white men when patronising clubs. Meanwhile, Monty finds the pursuit of fitness burdensome. In Brown’s terms, two layers of woundedness are inflicted upon Monty: he feels inadequate and unattractive not only as a yellow man aspiring to be white, but also as one who cannot live up to the archetype of well-built “potato queens.” Colours are key to the film’s discourse of how these wounded attachments can be healed. Whenever Monty passes by Jin Ming’s apartment, viewers always see warm, welcoming yellow light emitting from the latter’s entrance, contrasting with the cold icy blue light illuminating the staircase leading to Monty’s place (see Fig 4). Monty’s acceptance of Jin Ming’s invitations to enter his apartment, whether to nurse the former’s hangover, to watch a tennis match together, or to share a meal, signifies Monty seeing yellow in a more positive light and starting to embrace it. Moreover, the film ruptures the simplistic dichotomy of white and yellow by introducing other hues as supplementary to one’s identity, thus circumventing the Euro-American logic of colour as a racial index. For instance, the living space of Monty’s effeminate friend, Ernest is painted with shades of magenta—a hue that is often associated with queer identity (Koller 409) and codified into contemporary queer symbolism (Barrios 344–50)—thus visually expanding Ernest’s identity beyond his race. The scene depicting intimacy between Monty and Jai Ming douses their bodies in deep blue light (see Fig 5). Blue drains the yellow tones out of the lovers’ skin in Yellow Fever, relieving them of any preconceptions of East Asians and encouraging a gaze that looks past their common skin colour that comes with so much baggage of woundedness.
Figure 4. Yellow Fever, directed by Raymond Yeung (1998; San Francisco, CA: Frameline), YouTube, July 23, 2011, 00:16:35, https://youtu.be/ICOG-6rllTw.
Figure 5. Yellow Fever, directed by Raymond Yeung (1998; San Francisco, CA: Frameline), YouTube, July 23, 2011, 00:19:44, https://youtu.be/ICOG-6rllTw.
Like Yellow Fever, Palimpsest remains skeptical towards white epistemology in its portrayal of Sjöblom’s frustration towards a Western narrative that sees her adoption as a blessing for the adoptee and casts the search for her roots as ungrateful. This Western-centric standpoint invalidates her experience identifying as neither white nor yellow precisely because of Sweden’s exclusionary white consciousness and the transnational system, operating on the imperialist logic of the East supplying babies as commodities to the West, that uproots her from Korea. Palimpsest reckons with the centredness of Euro-American epistemology through the greyish, coppery yellow of wilted leaves that stains the cover and every frame of the novel in stark contrast to the pristine white margins and gutters (see Fig 6). At no point do viewers see a visual element drawn outside a frame, as if the gutters and margins operate like a white consciousness that orders, constrains, and defines the wounded yellow. Additionally, the muted yellow frames of Palimpsest render the complexion of Westerners indistinguishable from POEAD, such that yellow ceases to index race and takes on a new meaning. Within Sjöblom’s poignant narration, yellow no longer symbolises the joy and cheerfulness so often associated with the colour, but instead functions as a harbour for the author’s woundedness resulting from the discrimination against her by Westerners and her failed attempt to connect with her biological parents. Palimpsest thus challenges the liberal fixation on the white middle-class norm as the univocal source of injury. Identifying with neither yellow nor white, Sjöblom finds her pain oscillating between the two colours, locating her woundedness in her manifold deviations from either an Asian or a Euro-American identity. (sfig
Figure 6. Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2019), 151.
6. Beyond ‘Yellow’?
The four texts discussed above all display characteristics of “wounded attachments” to different extents. While Palimpsest stays attached to its woundedness without any affirmative identity for the author to take refuge in, YELLOW’s efforts to counter the stereotype of weak, emasculated men of East Asian descent inadvertently valorise the ideals of white masculinity. In contrast, Crazy Rich Asians and Yellow Fever offer possible departures from woundedness. Despite indulging in depictions of the dazzling and luxurious life of the super-rich, Crazy Rich Asian, at its heart, celebrates the confidence and self-worth of the protagonist who does not belong to the elite circle, therefore avoiding reducing POEAD to a mirror of white elites or a singular shade of yellow. Yellow Fever, on the other hand, delves into the wounds felt by the protagonist, but in the end enables Monty to resolve his self-hatred and welcome his own identity free from white-centric stereotypes. Significantly, both texts do so by mobilising another hue on top of yellow—the baby blue of the dress worn by Crazy Rich Asians’ Rachel and the deep navy of the lovers’ bodies in Yellow Fever—to reject the reductionist approach of indexing race by colour. That said, the introduction of another hue alone does not amount to resistance against identity constructs produced by Western epistemology, if in doing so one reproduces the same colonialist thinking, as can be seen in Crazy Rich Asians’ problematic representation of Singapore’s racial relations.
All four texts provide valuable insights into how POEAD have resisted the prejudiced meanings of yellow conceived by Western consciousness, enabling readers to develop a critical understanding into the potency and limitations of various strategies of resistance. Celebrating yellow by portraying POEAD with desirable attributes is a straightforward way to undo the negative associations with this colour; however, prudence should be exercised to not realign with colonialist thinking and replicate the Euro-American value system. Laying bare the operations of white logic circumvents this pitfall, but runs the risk of failed emancipation when texts become even more invested in the state of woundedness. The possibility of an affirmative identity is thus paramount to the emancipatory project, which could be achieved by modulating or layering another hue on top of the colour assigned to race. The wounded, racialised body is yellow, but when admired, emboldened, or loved, it is orange, purple, blue—anything but yellow.
A computer science student by day and a writer by night, Dan writes about anything visual, having contributed at SGIFF, SINdie—a local editorial platform for Southeast Asian cinema—and Matca—a Vietnam-based online journal on photography. Sometimes he partakes in the practice of visual arts and has had his works featured in group exhibitions at Objectifs and The Substation.
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