LISTEN · EPISODE 5
The Dragon Lady, The Lotus Blossom, and the Asian Woman
This episode discusses racism, the sexualization of Asian women, suicide in fiction, and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.
In the late nineties, Lucy Liu played Ling Woo on Ally McBeal, a character written to be cold and a little terrifying. Liu said she started to worry that people would run from her on the street. The character stayed on the show. The label followed her home.
That label, the Dragon Lady, has a partner: the Lotus Blossom, sweet and devoted and usually dead by the final scene. This System Episode of Witches, Bitches, and Sluts follows both of them.
Two women who never existed
The Lotus Blossom was fully built before movies had sound. A French naval officer's 1887 novel about a "temporary wife" in Nagasaki became a short story, then a play, then Puccini's Madama Butterfly in 1904. Every version ends the same way: he goes home to a new life, and she dies. In 1989, Renee Tajima gave the pattern a name: "Lotus Blossoms Don't Bleed."
The Dragon Lady came from pulp fiction. Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels turned the "Yellow Peril" into a villain, and the villain had a seductive daughter. Hollywood cast her again and again, sometimes with Asian actresses and sometimes with white actresses in yellowface. The name itself came from a 1934 comic strip, Terry and the Pirates.
Before either of them, there was Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman recorded coming to the U.S., put on display in 1834 in a room full of things for sale. And there was the Page Act of 1875, which treated almost every Chinese woman as a suspected prostitute.
The label follows the soldiers
The labels were never loyal to one country. They moved from China to Japan, Korea and Vietnam, following American troops and the sex industries that grew around their bases. Japan went from wartime enemy to "perfect wife" in a few years. The American press called Madame Nhu, the unofficial First Lady of an American ally, the "Dragon Lady." And Miss Saigon moved Madame Butterfly to the Vietnam War, with the same ending.
Why there are two
In 1972, Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan wrote that every racial stereotype comes in a pair: "There is racist hate and racist love." The Dragon Lady is the hate. The Lotus Blossom is the love, and she gets rewarded only because she's controllable. It's the same shape as the Ambivalent Sexism covered in Episode 1, and the same shape as the model minority myth.
What the labels do
Out of 1,300 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2019, only six were led by an Asian or Pacific Islander woman. A 2018 study of 564 Asian American women found that gendered racism, such as being assumed to be submissive or being fetishized, was linked to more depressive symptoms, beyond what racism or sexism alone explained. A 2024 study linked internalized racism to Asian American women's dating preferences. And Sandra Oh read the script for Killing Eve and asked her agent which part was hers. She was the lead.
In 2021, Lucy Liu pushed back on the critics, too. Kill Bill has four female assassins, she wrote, so why was only hers called a Dragon Lady? "I can only conclude it's because they are not Asian."
Who holds the pen
The labels don't fade with time. They pull back when Asian American creators get to tell the story, as in The Joy Luck Club and Crazy Rich Asians, and they come back when they don't, as in Ally McBeal and the 2017 Ghost in the Shell. In 1958, Miyoshi Umeki became the first Asian woman to win an acting Oscar, for a role that ended in tragedy. Sixty-five years later, Michelle Yeoh won Best Actress for playing a woman doing her taxes and saving her family.
Sources behind the episode
Read or download the Episode 5 source list (PDF).