'I am but a blank exotic canvas'
Navigating gender and racialization in the world of hospitality
The last piece of our BODY issue is a short reflection on the sexualization of racialized bodies, including in the world of hospitality, and how this gaze can distort one’s sense of self.
By Anna Sulan Masing1
I became acutely aware about my racialized place in the world at the same time as I was beginning to understand desire, sexuality and my body. My gender, and how it intersected with race, was my crucial and brutal introduction to realizing exactly how my difference played out in public. My identity was not my own but seemed to belong to the world at large. It was for others to decide who I was.
Those awkward teenage years were where I experimented with makeup (too much of it, poorly applied), or wearing boys’ T-shirts, loose-fitting to cover any curves, outfits bought at the army surplus store. I ricocheted between wanting to explore my personal identity and gender, and wanting to hide from the world and the predatory looks I was receiving. At eighteen, I didn’t just feel the looks, but I heard the words that put my body on a stage for others. Everyone is beautiful at eighteen. Then, like now, my hair was long. I’d discovered hair straightening products, and I was desperate to tame my hair, make it obedient. I had just stopped dancing and playing sports so everything about my body was slowly softening. I weighed 50 kilograms, had a C-cup bra size, and strange men in the street would tell me I had ‘big tits for an Asian’. A renowned amateur theatre director told me if I wanted to study theatre in London, I should audition for the ‘proper schools’ because: ‘I was just the right type of exotic they’d want.’ What she meant was I was different enough to be interesting, but familiar enough to be desirable, non-threatening, not dangerous. The ‘right’ things were my whiteness, my thinness, my youth, my long hair. I felt like she was describing a product for sale. It was 2000 and for a moment in time, I was perfect — for a very specific lens. To be told that your flavour of difference is OK in other people’s mouths is bitter. I was navigating racialized gender and sexuality at a time when celebrity magazines were ripping apart women like it was war or sport.
I have a joke about how white men flirt with me, trying to guess where I am from, without me uttering a word. Then I speak with the broadest New Zealand accent I can muster, and their disappointment is palpable. They want something far flung, ‘exotic’. The most common guess in a dimmed bar is South America — Chile or Peru, usually — from white men who have been to South America for three to six months (any shorter they know it’s a holiday, any longer they know they don’t know anything). These men have insisted that I must know Spanish even after I’ve said ‘No, I said I’m half Malaysian!’ I am but a blank exotic canvas for fantasies to be projected on.
I remember being a child at ballet, and the mothers discussing making sure outfits were adjustable so that when we grew they didn’t have to make or buy a new character skirt and the like. One of the mothers nodded to me, and said to my mother: ‘Well, yes, your girls mature faster than ours, don’t they?’ with a slight hand gesture demonstrating curves. I remember thinking, what was my body going to do that my white friends’ bodies wouldn’t? The sexualization of my body was seen at the age of eight.
When you are othered, you are hyper-aware of how much space your body takes up. The racism in school was contained to microaggressions that I could brush off, but entering into the adult world, for me, felt dangerous. I had internalized so much about the ways I could be acceptable, palatable, that I was constantly aware of when my body was misbehaving. My hair was frizzy, my skin marked by freckles, spots, moles. My body was rounded and my thighs were built for running through jungles, whereas Asian women were (I thought! Media told me!) supposed to be small and delicate.
I have spent so long trying to tame myself, trying to choose an acceptable racial identity or an ambiguity or to lean into my whiteness. Every day, I still think about how I can move through space, how I will meet with people and I ask myself: How will they see me? What do I want them to see?
***
So much of my adult working life has revolved around hospitality — restaurants, bars and events, primarily as a worker, and then in the last decade as a writer and researcher. I am now back working front of house at one of my favourite restaurants in London: Sambal Shiok, a laksa bar owned by my friend Mandy Yin. I love the buzz of a restaurant or bar, the camaraderie of the team — restaurants are always a place to gather the best and most interesting people a city has to offer. There can be a fun dynamic when I get to talk about food I love, to guests. I’ve worked in fantastic places, and Sambal Shiok in particular has been one of the safest work environments I have ever worked in. But restaurants are also where I have experienced the most racism. The combination of performance and providing a service makes the space ripe for racialised sexualisation. It always starts with ‘where are you from?’ before I’ve barely said a word. A real-life conversation I experienced:
‘Where are you from?’ ‘London.’
‘No, that’s not what I mean.’
‘New Zealand.’
‘Oh, are you one of those Māori?’
‘No’ – I took the bottle of champagne and topped up another wedding guest, looking over the rolling hills of the estate in the Midlands and sighing at how a beautiful landscape could feel so ugly.
Another time, I served a table of three middle-aged white couples, where one man moved from ‘where are you from?’ (accompanied by scanning my full body, as he leant back in his chair), to comments about my appearance, the heat in Malaysia and a continuous stream of innuendoes directed at me for the whole table to hear. Finally, when he was paying, I explained the card machine needed to be closer to the front to get the Wi-Fi connection and asked if he could follow me. He smiled, wiggled his eyebrows and his wife said, ‘He’s been waiting for you to say that all night.’ This isn’t a funny joke. An entire table were making me their plaything, their joke, an object to look at. I felt so worthless. A decade later, I can still see his face and the look he gave me.
Once, a very drunk white man asked me, while I tried to make him a drink: ‘So, what are you? You don’t look yellow, or brown, you look sort of….’ and put his hand three inches from my face and made a circular movement and said ‘orange’.
***
In a world now of video calls, my face becomes a site of uncomfortableness and is fraught with (self) hatred. I spent a week on Zoom calls with white people. During one interview, with a really lovely and interesting white woman, I became aware of our physical differences.
The width of my nose, the slant of my eyes, the pallor of my skin mid-winter when it really needs to see the sun — everything felt in contrast to her, and my internal systems interpreted that as negative. The actor Vera Chok and I were on a podcast once, and we spoke about these moments where you stop and realize ‘shit, I’m not white!’ These moments are jolting. In a very visceral way, you realize you are not ‘the norm’ in a white world, and that is understood as A Bad Thing. It is often gendered as well as racialized. That Zoom call was yet another moment of self-realization – of being ugly, of being unacceptable, of ‘shit, I’m not white!’
I don’t want to hide my ethnicity and heritage and I don’t want to play up to it. I still chemically straighten my hair and curse my thighs, but I am finding my way into being the wrong kind of exotic — dangerous and uncomfortable, speaking out. My friend Frankie and I talk about identity a lot (she is mixed race too, white British and Dominican heritage). She said to me once: ‘We are doing the work so that our great-great grandchildren will be OK, safe and do not have to do this work.’ I think about this all the time, the unlearning in ourselves, so that each generation passes on less embodied emotions of otherness. It is a lifetime’s work, navigating our own identity and intersections.
Dr Anna Sulan Masing is an academic, poet, and journalist. She co-founded SOURCED, a public research platform that explores our global food and drink systems, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Cheese magazine.
Looking for another short read? This time last year, we published a fascinating interview with pastor, activist, and organizer Aline Silva on the intersections between religion and plant-based eating.
Says Aline: “In my experience, Christian leadership and ministry have taken many forms. But perhaps the most significant has taken place on my plate and in my work centering non-human animals.”
This piece uses excerpts from Anna’s new book, ‘Chinese and Any Other Asian: Exploring East and South East Asian Identity in Britain’. It’s great and we encourage you to buy or borrow it!