The Asian Mystique

April 4, 2005
Prasso, a former Business Week Asia editor, asks if Westerners can look objectively at the Eastern region, blinded as they are by "issues of race and sex, fantasy and power." It's this worldview-one the author admits succumbing to and feeling a "sense of loss" in giving up-that clouds cross-cultural relations. Prasso's ambitious agenda focuses on both Asian women and our perceptions of them, exploring the historical and pop cultural roots of the "Asian Mystique" and ending with a "reality tour of Asia." Her stories about the lives of Asian women from diverse cultures and socio-economic backgrounds are compelling. The Japanese woman who inspired Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha shares her distaste for the novel's "misinterpretation" of her "flower and willow world." A Chinese investment banker struggles with modern demands and traditional expectations. With the author in tow, a Filipina prostitute navigates a seedy red-light district. Prasso has an almost voyeuristic fascination with sexual mores, and the result is a frank, at times graphic, exploration of how some Asian women cope with stereotyping-and with Western males looking for one-night stands. But when the author moves from reportage to social anthropological analysis, the book loses focus. Self-conscious ruminations, such as the incongruity of dancing with Filipina prostitutes to Madonna's "Like a Virgin," sometimes intrude and distract. In addition, Prasso never really gets a grip on the Asian Mystique's effects on foreign policy, concluding, not surprisingly, that it is "much harder to measure and more difficult to prove." Nevertheless, Prasso's work and travels have opened her eyes, and this book might do the same for others.

May 1, 2005
Prasso, a prize-winning journalist and member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, here addresses a non-Asian audience. She asserts that "we" view Asians living in both the West and Asia as exotic, relying on mostly unflattering stereotypes. We perceive Asian women as "Dragon Ladies," docile wives, vixens, or prostitutes and Asian men as either devious or undersexed and weak. These stereotypes, she explains, arise from longtime imperial adventures in Asia and are maintained and fostered by the representation of Asians in the media. In an attempt to correct these misconceptions, Prasso surveys a variety of topics that seem somewhat idiosyncratically organized: social and marital relationships between Westerners and Asians and among Asians, the truth of the geisha, the experience of a Vietnamese woman who had a child with a U.S. soldier, flight attendants on Cathy Pacific Airlines, Asian sex workers, and Asian women in politics. Prasso bases this engaging if wordy volume on interviews, media, secondary sources, and reportage. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.--Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2005
Prasso, who has lived in Phnom Penh and Hong Kong and written for " Business Week," nearly turns the fascination of Western men with Asian sexuality into a subject of numbing correctness. Fortunately, though, her determination to explore "our relationships and interactions, our misconceptions and stereotypes" doesn't suck the life from her compelling topic--perhaps because she is not above taking readers into the girlie bars of Bangkok and Manila, the personals ("Red Hot Asians") of the " Village Voice," the cinemas and TV screens of West and East, even the home of Mineko Iwasaki, who inspired Arthur Golden's best-selling " Memoirs of a Geisha" . Using this frame of reference effectively, Prasso explains the symbiotic nature of Western fantasy and Asian fulfillment--often to great profit--of that fantasy, the roles that Asian women play and defy in the West, even the dangerous implications of this still-active fantasy upon global politics. Especially interesting are her observations on the emasculated role of Asian men in Western media--picture, for instance, Jackie Chan even kissing a Western woman. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)