a tipsy girl is a happy girl

By Vee H

 Mid-Autumn Festival (Moon Festival, Lantern Festival, etc. – call it what you like, it goes by different names in different cultures) has always held a special place in my heart. Growing up, I never knew the proper name for it, I just knew it as the time when my mum would start bringing home mooncake. Mooncake in our family kitchen never symbolised the end of a harvest year to me. Rather, it was my signal that a big party would soon follow, with various aunts and uncles (not actually related to me). Not as exciting as Lunar New Year – no âng-pau (red packets) at this party. Instead, this was more like a big feast (admittedly, every sort of party with my mum’s friends was a big feast, this one just happened to have mooncake to differentiate it). This year, it fell on the Monday just passed, September 24, and true to form, I celebrated with too much mooncake for one person to consume.

For those who have no idea what Mid-Autumn Festival even is (and apologies for my shoddy recollection and story telling for those who do know), I’ll try and summarise as best I can (with a little help from my friend SK, who spoke with her grandmother to find out the Chinese folklore). Basically, the story is that a woman named Chang’E was married to this dude, Hou Yi, and he was considered a hero because he shot down nine of the ten suns (which were scorching the Earth). As a reward for his good deed, he was given an elixir so he could live forever. So anyway, one day, when Hou Yi is away, his apprentice Pengmeng breaks into their house and tries to force Chang’E to give him the elixir, and she refuses and drinks it for herself. She then becomes a Goddess and flies upwards towards the heavens, and chooses the moon as a place to live. So she’s up there with a rabbit (I’ve no idea where this rabbit came from) for company, and it’s constantly pounding the elixir of life for her (Chinese folklore) or rice cakes (in the Japanese and Korean versions of the story). Anyway, Hou Yi comes home and discovers what happened, and he’s devastated that his wife is gone. But as he looks to the sky to call out her name, he sees the moon and notices how bright and full it is, and he sees the face of Chang’E. So he then brings out her favourite cakes to pray for blessings from heaven, which is where mooncakes got their origin. Basically, at the end of all of that, it’s like Asian Thanksgiving, but with a pretty story.

Chang’E and her rabbit

The festival generally starts a few days before the actual date with all the preparation. SK’s mother told a story of when she was a young girl and her grandmother would start praying in the middle of the night when the moon wasn’t completely full yet (the festival stems from the harvest, and praying ensures good crops). She would pray to the ancestors and the Gods for a good harvest that year, then the next day, she’d make rice cakes and mooncakes. Because their family had been especially poor, the women would all go into town and buy fabric to make one good outfit for the day, and to get their hair and eyebrows done. Every woman and child from the same stretch of street would end up sitting in someone’s courtyard (usually whoever had the biggest) and roll tang yuan (rice balls cooked in water with peanut sauce, filled with red bean, or peanuts and sugar) and they’d spend the day together cooking and gossiping. That night, they’d eat mooncakes and have a feast with their families (only with family). Then after dinner, they’d take a lantern and climb the mountain to the temple and pray with incense for a good harvest.

Mooncake!

For me, personally, my memories are a little bit more “Westernized” – most likely a result of growing up in a half Malaysian, half Australian household. A few days before our big party, my mum would gather my sister, my dad and I to clean the house, while she went and did the food shopping. After that, the real work began, hand rolling dumplings (we did this three times a year: Christmas, Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival – as a result, I can make 200 dumplings in just over an hour and probably have early onset arthritis), and helping mum prepare the rest of the food. Thankfully, we outsourced the mooncake (a sweet pastry filled with lotus paste/red bean – so named for the salted egg yolk inside, which represented the moon) and it was store bought. Then, we’d decorate our house with paper lanterns (traditionally, lanterns symbolised fertility but these days they’re mostly decorative and more or less symbolise the actual festival), and set up the food offering to the ancestors and deities (in my house we more or less made a fancy fruit platter with whatever was in season, but always included pomelos). Then on the actual day of the festival, we’d have mum’s friends and family over for the big feast (the 200+ dumplings I lovingly rolled by hand).

Lanterns

So, what does any of this have to do with women, you may ask? In one regard, simply put (from SK), festivals wouldn’t really happen without the women making them happen, particularly with the cooking and preparation they do. Certainly, from my own experience, Mid-Autumn Festival was always a time of family, of time spent with my mum and hearing her tell stories of how she celebrated with her family in Malaysia. In another, the moon has long been associated with women (to do with menstrual cycles and tides, you know the drill). Moreover, the story of how Mid-Autumn Festival came to be is really the story of Chang’E, her quick thinking and refusal to give in to a thief, and her subsequent transformation into a Goddess of the moon.  

Next year, the festival falls on Friday, September 13, so if you start seeing lanterns and mooncakes appearing in local Asian grocery stores, spare a thought for the women in these cultures, the women who are the lifeblood of all the different festivals like this one – who make sure their family is well fed, who pray to the ancestors and leave offerings for a good harvest. Think of poor kids like me, who were woken up at the crack of dawn to hand roll dumplings or help prepare other dishes. And when you look at the moon, think of Chang’E, and her rabbit companion – and honestly, living alone on the moon with a rabbit sounds so peaceful and heavenly. Anyone know where I can find an elixir of immortality?

Sources:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-mid-autumn-moon-festival-and-the-lady-of-the-moon_292666.html

Image sources:

1.      Chang’E and the moon - http://english.gov.cn/news/2014/10/06/content_281474992818307.htm

2.    The other photos were taken by the author at this year’s Mid-Autumn festival. 

By: Vee H.

Here’s the thing, I have a confusing relationship with Joss Whedon. If we were “Facebook official” (does anyone still call it that, or have I just revealed my true spiritual age of 105?) our relationship status would be “it’s complicated”. It didn’t used to be like that; as a teenager, I probably would have said my favourite tv show was Buffy The Vampire Slayer, with its spin-off, Angel, in second place. I fell in love with a premise that Whedon certainly did not create (one girl in all the world, blah blah) nor was he the best at executing it. Whether it was the characters he’d created, the actors playing them, the witty scripts and storylines – or a mix of all of these things, I was hooked. I staunchly defended the show, and by proxy, Whedon himself, from any harsh criticisms, and overlooked anything that now, as a 32-year-old, stands out as (and I hate using this word) problematic. I followed him from Buffy; to Angel, Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog, Dollhouse (look, I skipped Firefly for some reason, I’ve tried dipping a toe in but space cowboys aren’t for me, it seems), and that’s not to mention the movies he had a hand in (not an exhaustive list) – The Cabin in the Woods, The Avengers and The Avengers Age of Ultron. I was loyal, if Whedon’s name was attached, most likely, I was all in. There was something comforting and familiar about his humour, the way he told his stories – all of them laughably simple but layered to make them more complex. Like Shrek and onions.

So maybe you’re wondering where I took a left turn, jumped off the Joss Whedon Fan Train, as it were. Admittedly, it was a slow process, it wasn’t just a running leap off into the unknown post-Whedon world. A few years after Angel ended, some things circulated in the Buffy and Angel fandoms, rumours of how he treated his favourites, and those who had fallen out of favour with him. One of those people being Charisma Carpenter. In 2009 at a convention, a fan asked her how she felt about Cordelia’s last story line in Angel and how the show changed after her departure. While she didn’t explicitly come out and say the exact reason, she hinted that Whedon had been mad at her for making certain life decisions that would directly impact the vision he had for his show. Rumours have long since abounded that, in short, he punished her for falling pregnant. Obviously, no one but Carpenter and Whedon know the true story and at the time of hearing it, I took it with a grain of salt, but that seedling sat in the back of my mind and began to grow. After all, it explained a lot about the fourth season of Angel, and why the character of Cordelia made a complete 360. It was here that my relationship with Whedon started to sour, I began to question how someone who was so outspoken and publicly proud to be a feminist, could treat a woman that he had worked with for nearly a decade like that.

With that knowledge in mind, it was hard not to view some of the dialogue and plot points in his media a little differently, this is only one small example, but looking back, there is way too much slut shaming going on in Buffy to the point where Faith (my favourite character in the whole series, don’t @ me, I’ll defend her until I die) is seen as a lesser person than everyone else, because other female characters (Willow, Cordelia and Buffy herself) have branded her as a “cleavagey slutbomb”. Sure, ok, she goes and kills a bunch of people but they focus on her being slut much more than a psychopath – and I feel the need to point out that we only actually saw her sleep with one person (Xander) by the time the slut shaming actually started, and not that we should count, but Faith only slept with three people (Xander, Robin, and Riley in Buffy’s body) in the whole course of the show. And she killed four humans. Which means in Joss Whedon’s world, if you’re a woman, having sex is a worse crime than murder. Not exactly a feminist message.

Cut to just last year, when Whedon’s ex-wife, Kai Cole, came out with a heartbreakingly honest account of just what went down in their marriage. Details of his infidelity, gaslighting and emotional manipulation came spilling out of her, and sure, you could argue she was an embittered ex-wife, wanting to hit him where it would hurt the most, but it’s interesting to note that Whedon himself has never actually outright denied or refuted these claims. And ok, infidelity does not strip you of the right to call yourself a feminist, but as written by Clementine Ford “it’s about how he absolved himself in a letter sent to Cole after his infidelity had finally been exposed, blaming the women he cheated with, calling them “beautiful, needy, aggressive young women” who “surrounded” him.” It’s about how he used his feminist badge as a shield, claiming he was raised feminist so he just liked women better, or how he claimed in a letter to Cole, and I quote, “in many ways I was the HEIGHT of normal, in this culture. We’re taught to be providers and companions and at the same time, to conquer and acquire — specifically sexually — and I was pulling off both!”

With all of these things in mind, I started to see Whedon’s feminism as what it likely is; performative, a way to excuse his behaviour, a safeguard to hide behind as if to say, “oh no, I am not like other men at all, although I may act as other men do and fully accept my privilege as a cis-het white male, I’m different. Because I’m a feminist so when I do these terrible things to women, it’s ok, because I love, respect and support women.” Maybe he truly believes he’s a feminist, publicly, he flies the flag very well, and there’s no denying he’s profited from this label, heralded as a great feminist hero, an ally to women everywhere. It’s only when you start to scratch the surface, peel back the layers of the Shrek-onion, do you start to see him for what he (in my mind) really is. A dudebro playing at being the nice guy, someone who says all the right things but whose actions don’t quite match up, in fact, they crumble under any real scrutiny (for further proof of this, go read the leak of the Wonder Woman script, allegedly by Whedon. If you can make it through the whole thing, I’ll buy you a coffee – hell if you can make it through the first 10 pages).

Where does that leave Joss and I then? I admit that I’m conflicted, in a culture that has moved more and more towards “cancelling” people I’m the proverbial fence sitter. I acknowledge that there are people, media, etc that are problematic (the dreaded word) and I think everyone has the right to decide whether or not to consume said media. And for myself, personally, I endlessly flip between the two schools of thought. I won’t watch anything new with Johnny Depp, nor anything from Woody Allen, for example, but I have gone back (since Amber Heard spoke of her abuse at his hands) and watched some of Depp’s older movies. Some people have told me that they disagree, that even watching his older stuff is wrong, that I should ban all forms of Depp media from my life otherwise I am giving him my tacit approval, and that’s their choice and their right, but I suppose I’m still working out where I want to draw the line. I (maybe naively and incorrectly) believe that I can view a piece of media and know its flaws, or the flaws of the person behind it, but still somewhat enjoy it for what it is, or the story it’s telling.

Maybe that’s where I am with Whedon, somewhere in between, neither in the black or the white, somewhere in the shades of grey, because that’s how life is sometimes. I don’t think he’s a fully bad person, nor do I think he’s a fully good person. I think he’s human, and humans are inherently flawed. And maybe that feels like a cop out, but it’s all I have to offer right now. My view of him will never be as it once was, and thus my viewing of the media he has created and produced will likely reflect that. Re-watching Buffy and Angel has become a different experience; I’m no longer blindly swept up in the twists and turns, the witty repartee between characters, but instead viewing through a different lens, one where I question what message he’s really trying to send, what his true intentions are. Instead of laughing at every single joke, they never quite land right with me anymore, my childish naivety gone, replaced with the simmering anger of a woman who wonders why sexist jokes and judgements are supposed to be funny, why the rape of a female character is an excusable plot device to teach men a lesson. It’s exhausting to second guess someone I don’t even know, but this is the brave new world that a combination of his behaviour and my own feminist journey has left me in. These days, I wouldn’t ever say “I love Joss Whedon”, like I would’ve back in my teenage years, more likely you’ll find me saying “I loved Buffy but God it’s weird to watch as an adult”.

Like I said, it’s complicated.

Sources:

http://oranges8hands.tumblr.com/post/117924895453/charisma-carpenter-transcript-on-being-fired

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_igTbXKPck

https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/clementine-ford-why-joss-whedons-treatment-of-exwife-kai-cole-matters-20170821-gy16lx.html

https://indiegroundfilms.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/wonder-woman-aug7-07-joss-whedon.pdf

Image sources:

Yahoo.com

tenplay.com.au

The Joy Luck Club was the first movie I remember with an Asian cast. That was 1993 and I was 7 years old, too young to understand how important that was, or even to really know why that was. I’m a child of the mid 80’s, I grew up in the Disney Renaissance, and when my friends and I played “princesses” on the playground, for most of that time, I pretended to be Ariel, despite my childish unease at not having a princess that looked like me. Mulan was released long after I had outgrown playing at make believe, and though overjoyed there was finally an Asian princess (albeit, technically not a princess, and technically not my specific ethnicity), my pre-pubescent brain had learned that it was better to be white.

Looking back on my childhood and teenage years, I can recall only a handful of Asian characters on my screen that made any impact on my life – Trini, the original Yellow Power Ranger (in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the only series worth watching), played by Thuy Trang, a Vietnamese American actress (RIP), Mulan (though does she really count, given she was a cartoon?), Lori Lee on Neighbours, played by Michelle Ang, an actress of Kiwi and Malay-Chinese descent, Sunny Lee on Neighbours (seems like Asians only get the one last name in Australian shows) played by Hany Lee Choi, a Korean-Australian (finally!) actress. Four seems like a pretty piss-weak number in comparison to the thousands of white characters that flooded our screens and pages.

By the time I hit my early twenties, I still hadn’t had many positive experiences with watching or reading about Asian characters, their roles reduced to a cruel stereotype, an easy laugh, a punchline to a joke that I hadn’t realised I was meant to be, lazy writing by people who had never questioned if this was doing more harm than good. The only representation I had taught me several things, and none of it was good:

1.) I was only allowed to be a nerdy sidekick, I could never be a hero myself. I could be the nerdy / funny / quirky best friend, but not the lead. Romance was for white girls, not for Asians.

2.) I was only funny as a punchline – I could be laughed AT, but never laughed WITH. This meant that I must have a “funny” accent and speak in broken English, this was the only acceptable way for me to land a joke (whilst simultaneously being the joke).

3.) Mainstream media deemed Asian faces unattractive, therefore I could be cute, but never beautiful. “Pretty for an Asian” was something I heard a lot. It did wonders for my self-esteem!

4.) If I was to be represented in media, my whole story MUST be about being Asian because that is the only defining fact about me. It could never just be a part of my life, it must be my WHOLE being. You know, the way a story about white characters revolves around the fact that they’re white.

5.) All Asians are interchangeable, so it is perfectly acceptable to cast a Vietnamese actor as a Chinese character. Please note that I do not blame the actor for this, they’re trying to make a living, just as the rest of us are. And roles for Asian actors are few and far between, they do not have the power to turn it down in favour of casting the correct ethnicity. That should fall to the people in charge making the casting decisions.

Part of this is why I’m so excited to see a step in a more positive direction for Asian stories in mainstream media, why I think it’s absolutely so important for non-Asian people to go see ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ while it’s still in theatres, or to check out ‘To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before’ on Netflix (so it does whatever it needs to do with the algorithm to make it trend). Send the message that you care about our stories, even if you “can’t relate” – which I’ve heard being used as an excuse as to why people won’t see it. Funny though, these same people can go watch The Avengers movies, or Star Wars, and last I checked, you weren’t Tony Stark (RDJ, obviously, this does not apply to you). Support Asian stories in Western media – but do not support the white washing of Asian characters (ScarJo, I’m looking your way). Encourage positive and not harmful Asian characters, stories, media, so that kids who were like I was, don’t have to grow up feeling ashamed of their heritage and culture.

By: Vanessa Head

Image sources:

Joy Luck Club, d23.com

Crazy Rich Asians, Wikipedia.org

a shout out to all the people who started saying “same” as a joke once in awhile but now use it for the most random things like a car honking their horn at another car