The Duchess of Sussex today released her latest podcast episode, the first since the Queen’s death, and spoke candidly about stereotypes surrounding Asian women.
Meghan Markle, 41, launched her podcast Archetypes on Spotify in August of this year, but episodes were suspended following the monarch’s passing in September and resumed today.
The clip took a deep dive into Hollywood’s clichéd relationship with the Asian female in an episode titled The Demystification of Dragon Lady.
The Duchess of Sussex’s podcast, Archetypes, has returned to to Spotify today, following the end of the mourning period for the Queen
Meghan Markle, 41, launched her podcast Archetypes on Spotify in August of this year, but episodes were suspended following the monarch’s passing in September and resumed today
In episode five of the podcast, Meghan took aim at Hollywood for promoting ‘Asian stereotypes’ as she criticised Mike Myers’ Austin Powers and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill for ‘caricaturing’ Asian women ‘as over sexualised or aggressive’.
The royal mother-of-two began today’s podcast by talking about her experience of growing up in Los Angeles which was ‘full of culture that you could see, feel, hear and taste on a daily basis’ and said she had a ‘real love’ of getting to know other cultures.
Elsewhere, comedian and Fire Island star Margaret Cho,53, spoke about ‘Orientalism’.
Meanwhile broadcaster Lisa Ling,49, touched on the racism she experienced at work when a co-worker ‘drew slanty eyes’ on a picture of her from Rolling Stone Magazine.
Here FEMAIL reveals five of the takeaways from the show – from Meghan’s own relationship with Asian culture, to a discussion about the two popular films.
Korean-American comedian and Fire Island star Margaret Cho spoke about the struggles of being a ‘queer, non-college educated’ Asian American trying to make it in a world of stereotypes
1. Meghan recalls trips ‘humbling’ to a Korean spa with her mother where they would eat noodles naked
In the introduction to the podcast the Duchess of Sussex recalled her entryway to Asian culture in Los Angeles, as she spoke of Korean spa trips with her mother Doria Ragland.
Meghan said: ‘I would spend my weekends in Little Tokyo or having iced teas in Thai town – I would sit with my friend Christina Wong in a Chinese restaurant.
‘I remember vividly how they would tell me that chow fun with dry noodles is way better than chow fun with wet noodles.’
The most prominent of her memories were trips to the spa with her mother as a teen, which the Duchess described as a ‘humbling’ experience.
She said: ‘It’s a very humbling experience for a girl going through puberty because you enter a room with women from ages nine to maybe 90, all walking around naked and waiting to get a body scrub on one of these tables that are all lined up in a row.
Meanwhile the Duchess added: ‘All I wanted was a bathing suit, which wasn’t allowed’.
After the ‘adolescent embarrassment’ of going nude, Meghan and her mother would head to a room to eat noodles and watch women of all ages, these ‘beautiful Korean women who embraced the tradition’.
The podcast host described how this was the ‘Asian culture she knew’, and that through the lens of steam and noodles she missed the common stereotypes of Asian culture, and ‘archetypes faced by these women on a daily basis’.
The mother of two claimed it was only ‘much, much later’ that she began to see tropes in pop culture, referencing Austin Powers and Kill Bill as typical examples.
Meghan pictured with her mother Doria Ragland – on her latest podcast the Duchess reminisced about the time where the pair would spend weekends out in LA visiting Korean Spas and eating at Little Tokyo
2. Meghan takes on Hollywood over ‘Asian stereotypes’: Duchess looks at Mike Myers’ Austin Powers and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill for ‘caricatures’ of Asian women ‘as over sexualised or aggressive’ in 20-year-old films
In the new episode exploring the ‘Dragon Lady’ stereotype, the Duchess of Sussex – a former actress in the legal drama Suits – called out the two 20-year-old movies Austin Powers and Kill Bill ‘presenting caricatures of women of Asian descent’.
The podcast show touched on two main ‘types’ of Asian women depicted in American pop culture: The ‘evil exotic force’ known as the dragon lady, coined by comedian Margaret Cho from San Francisco or the submissive ‘love me longtime’ image first seen in 1987 film Full Metal Jacket.
Meghan said that the portrayal of a Vietnamese sex worker in the 80’s film has ‘seeped into pop culture’ and remained there ever since.
Meanwhile she said in Full Metal Jacket the now tired lines ‘me so horny’ and ‘me love you longtime’ have been so overused in regard to Asian females that some people are unaware that the origins of the phrases are in American cinema.
Margaret Cho said: ‘Dragon lady comes from this fantasy of Orientalism – similar to the femme fatale, it’s kind of evil queen adjacent.
‘But it’s also pinned to Asian women being some kind of threat – our mysticism is going to get you, this has really stuck the film industry and to Asian women in general.
‘I grew up raised by movies, I didn’t see Asian people in them – and then I saw this trope of the dragon lady.
‘It’s like a caricature, and I wanted to see other Asian representation. I got into Hong Kong cinema and K-Drama – which now everyone loves.’
The Duchess spoke to sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen who said: ‘Asian women are either lotus flowers or femme fatales, where they are not the lead roles in films it’s very tempting to fall into these stereotypes.’
The scene from 1987 film Full Metal Jacket where a Vietnamese sex worker says ‘me so horny’ to two US military personnel something Cho says ‘Is now part of a cultural stereotype’
3. Duchess offers comment on the ‘erasure’ of race to broadcaster Lisa Ling – as she reveals that she experienced racism at work when a co-worker drew ‘slanty eyes’ on a picture of her from Rolling Stone magazine
Journalist Lisa Ling reveals that she experienced racism at work when she was named as Rolling Stone’s ‘hot reporter’.
She said: ‘Here I am Rolling Stone has just named me hot reporter, and someone at my place of work has cut out that article, drawn slanty eyes over the eyes and written ‘yeah right’ and put it back in my mailbox.
‘It was so exciting for me, here I am this country bumpkin kid from Sacramento and I’m in Rolling Stone.
‘When I got that from my mailbox every kernel of excitement withered away – it was devastating that someone I saw every day harbored those feelings for me and made it racial.
‘Because I am a woman of colour I feel there have been times where I haven’t been seen the same way, down to salaries, promotions.’
Meghan called this ‘erasure’ of culture and says it ‘happens a lot to Asian American woman’.
Lisa Ling, pictured at Variety’s Power of Women last month, said as a woman of colour she’s experienced times where she ‘hasn’t been seen’
4.Duchess of Sussex says that Asians are ‘dehumanized through fetish’ in pop culture when discussing the Atlanta massage parlor shootings in 2021
During the podcast, the Duchess of Sussex spoke about a mass shooting which occured in Atlanta in 2021.
The attack occurred at three massage parlors by 21-year-old Robert Long, where six people of Asian descent were tragically killed.
He then went on the run and was driving to Florida to target porn-industry locations when he was arrested 150 miles south of Atlanta. Police rammed his Hyundai off the road to take him into custody.
Initially, police said they were probing whether race was a factor in the attacks because six of the eight victims were Asian women.
But on Wednesday morning, they said Long told them that was not why he carried out the attacks. Instead, he said he is addicted to sex and porn, and wanted to remove the ‘temptation’ of the parlors.
He told police that he saw the parlors as an ‘outlet’ for his sex addiction. Detectives have not clarified if he had ever engaged in sex acts with any of the staff there.
‘He claims that it was not racially motivated… he has an issue that he considers a sex addiction and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places… it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,’ Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee Sheriff’s Office said at a press conference.
And during the podcast, Meghan and Ms Cho touch on the subject, and said fetishization could lead to ‘dehumanization’ of a race.
Meghan said: ‘Part of the motivation the shooter had was this fetish of Asian women. I remember where I was, and the calls I had.’
Margaret said: ‘It was infuriating. There is this portrayal of Asian women as a fantasy object and not a real person, it comes from this dragon lady archetype – that these women are out to get you.
‘The framing of it was that these women are dragon ladies – the reality of it that these were women just at work.
‘Even in the news coverage they don’t say dragon lady, but it’s almost like this shorthand of massage parlor or Asian spas.
‘It’s dehumanizing and it’s only a fraction of who we could be, but it’s very much down to society’s only wanting to view us in a certain way and only allowing us to appear in a certain way.
‘They don’t allow the totality of being that they do with white people.’
Pictured left is Suncha Kim one of the victims of the mass shooting in Atlanta, that mainly targeted Asian massage parlor workers
5. Meghan calls Fire Island star Margaret Cho a ‘trailblazer’ for her 1994 sitcom All American Girl as they make the distinction between races
Lisa Ling and Margaret Cho both made the distinction between being Asian-American and Asian, with Ling admitting at points in her life she felt ‘unseen’ or on the ‘edges of society’.
Margaret reminisced about her 1994 sitcom All American Girl which draws on the complexity of fitting in to both American and Asian culture.
The show was a first of it’s kind, showing a Korean-American family on TV.
Cho said: ‘The reception of the show made me feel lonely, people didn’t like it.
‘When my show came out it was hard for the community because they didn’t necessarily approve of me – I’m crass, I’m queer, I wasn’t what Koreans wanted as representation.
‘It was like ‘why her?’ and I thought the Asian-American community was behind it, it inspired a lot of people but also upset a lot of people so the network questioned it.’
Meghan responded by saying: ‘I feel like you were a trailblazer.’
Lisa Ling also touched on the aspects of being identified as both an American woman and an Asian woman.
The journalist said: ‘On many occasions I’m the only Asian woman in the room and now I find I am not shying away from it, I’m now claiming my space here.
‘There’s a saying in Asian culture that a nail sticking out will get hammered down.
‘This is something we should be teaching others that we want to stick out, we don’t want to be hammered down and we can bring this rich history and culture with us.’
Cho said: ‘I became a comedian in the midst of the AIDs activism – my parents owned a gay book store and my dad loved male attention, he’s very handsome.
‘I think my parents got that business because deep down they knew I was gay, and I was raised around heavily tattooed men who took me to gay pride from there to have witnessed the turmoil of AIDs and watch the community rise again.’
Meghan said: ‘You have a duality, two parts of activism which are key.’
The Duchess of Sussex signed off her podcast saying: ‘Just be you, yourself, if you want to be weird, silly, fierce or curious – whatever it is that’s up to you. Just be yourself, your whole layered sometimes weird, whole true self.’
Meghan described Margaret as a ‘trailblazer’ for releasing her 1994 Korean-American show All American Girl even though it was received in the community with mixed reviews at the time
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