Professor, Doctor and Empress

Okay. So I've been absent, I've been lazy and I've been trying to get my future on track. It is, after all, the last half year in which I'd be a student out of necessity--and not out of choice (or a lack of better things to do).

Building up my academic credence has definitely been a large part of my last 4 months. This means, above all, churning out pages upon pages of academic writing, both based on original research and just plain regurgitation.

I've also been trying to get my name out there as someone who can potentially write with plenty of style, so that I can be proud of calling myself a 'columnist' and not cringe with embarrassment when a particularly arrogant peer asks me what I generally write about and I'd have to reply "once I wrote about how students should mop up their own mustard puddles".

Let's cue for a shameless self-promotion plug here: this is the link for my recent column on Amy Chua and her new parenting book http://www.browndailyherald.com/yu-11-tiger-mother-dragon-lady-1.2459388

In this column, I alluded Chua's commercial success to Dowager Empress Cixi, who remains tied in first place as the most hated woman in Chinese history (her contender is, of course, Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao).

I had a lot of trouble deciding whether or not to include this comparison. There's no doubt a lot of sensitivity involved in bringing up an infamous figure from one of modern China's more difficult times, and evoking the term "Dragon Lady" is sure to set a few f-word-ists into a loud frenzy. By nature, I'm a pretty iffy columnist--I always have this nagging tendency to be paranoid about potential hate mail. However, when the chance came up to associate current affairs with Chinese history, of course I was going to take it.

What bothers me most about the Chua phenomenon is the astounding commercial success possible from presupposing a clash of civilisations. It just doesn't seem to me that we've progressed very far from the mistakenly bygone days of this guy:

I also chose to embed this Fu Manchu video so as not to seem sexist by just picking on the female villains. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Dr Fu Manchu was the earliest archetype of the evil villian... with an 'Asian' face. A series of movies and books were made in the early 20th century about this very infamous character who is, at best, evilly ingenious, and at worst, overtly racist.

What do Amy Chua, Fu Manchu and Cixi all have in common? They are all characterised as anti-Western, all in positions of considerable power, and all provide means for the perceived and manufactured gap and conflict between East and West to remain grounded in society and culture.

Amy Chua could do better than to follow in the footsteps of a woman who had no defined cheekbones and a fictional character with an impossibly inconvenient moustache.