Lucy Liu and the stereotypical Asian concept of the "Lady dragon"

Lucy Liu is undoubtedly one of the Asian actresses of the Hollywood industry best known in Western culture. Her participation in Charlie’s Angels and her villain O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill: Volume I made her jump to world fame, especially for being one of the few Asian female faces in Western-dominated productions. Something that is already changing with the recognition of films such as Parasites in 2019 and Minari in this latest Oscar gala. Hollywood has lived for many years to raise stereotypical characters, among them the Middle Asian who, for example, always mastered Kung-fu or who had no idea of speaking the American homeland language. Femme fatale transferred to Asian ethnicity. The term comes from a 1934 comic strip titled Terry and the Pirates, where this character first appeared. Later the word has been used to explain the stereotype of the representation of strong, dominant Asian women with certain airs such as mystery and deception, having its origin with the approval in 1875 of the Page Law that radically reduced the entry of Chinese women into the continent. This expression has been used in Teen Vogue in which India Roby has used as an example the character of Liu, O-Ren Ishii in her article entitled Hollywood played a role in the hypersexualization of Asian women.In this essay Roby defines the Lady Dragon “cunning and deceptive” and as a character who “uses her sexuality as a powerful manipulative tool, but is often emotionally and sexually cold.”After citing the character of Lucy Liu as a contemporary example of this stereotype, Liu wanted to clarify that this categorization of her character does not make sense, since Tarantino created a story with murderers of similar mentality. Liu in his Washington Post article has thrown a rhetorical question to prove how wrong Roby is: “Why not also call Uma Thurman, Vivica A. Fox or Daryl Hannah a Lady Dragon? I can only conclude that it is because those characters are not Asian. ” The actress ended her message in the newspaper with a critical phrase with the concept: “Exit the dragon” (Salt of the dragon).