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Asians have history. Many of us can trace our families back to China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Sanrio.
—Eddie Huang, "Based FOB," August 29, 2014
In 2015 two convicts tunneled out of a prison in upstate New York, leaving a note that thumbed their noses at authorities: "Have a nice day!" Accompanying this message was the image of a buck-toothed, slanty-eyed Asian face (fig. 1). The racist caricature saturated US media outlets as attempts to locate the fugitives dragged on. Against the ubiquitous display of the Asian caricature left by the fugitives, only NBC News blurred the image as if in belated awareness of the injury underlying racially reductive imagery.
The much-broadcast Asian caricature uncannily reflects an almost identical, also uncensored image: a juicer, manufactured by Alessi, Italian purveyor of upscale household goods (fig. 2). Ludic but functional, the design of the Mandarin Citrus-squeezer is too clever by half: the conical hat comes off to reveal a juicer; the head is a drinking cup. I found it in San Francisco in 2006 at the intersection between the financial district and Chinatown, around the corner from a Sanrio flagship store, purveyor of Hello Kitty tchotchkes. At one level, the anthropomorphic object is appalling, marketed with no awareness of the hoary tradition of segregation-era racist kitsch, mammy cookie jars and the like. Given that dissonance, the object seemed to embody a teachable moment. I bought it. But I wanted it for a less rational reason: I also thought it was adorable.
Mundane household goods personifying largely, but not exclusively, East Asian iconography seem to circulate freely in the United States—Asianized coin banks, rice bowls, kitchen timers, or handbags (fig. 3). These items share an economy of design that is a hallmark of both modernism and cartooning, yet their minimalist aesthetic relies on both the reduction of stereotyping and the exaggeration of caricature. Engaging a visual rhetoric that confers "on
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[ Image omitted: See PDF ]
[ Image omitted: See PDF ]
things some properties of persons" in keeping with the mysticism of commodity fetishism,1 they reflect the seeming inverse of capitalist reification, the fantasy of anthropomorphism, of things come to life.
Asianized objects resurrect a specific racial form...