A while ago, an advertisement harming the image of Taiwanese products was published in the UK by a British company and caused public outrage in Taiwan. The Legislative Yuan passed a resolution saying that the company involved should be punished with a one-year ban on the sale of its products here, although the company had already admitted that the ad was "both wrong and stupid." However, such insulting advertisements can be found everywhere, in every medium. Aren't the "Vietna-mese bride" ads that can be seen all over Taiwan also "wrong and stupid?" And are all these ads merely "wrong and stupid?"
Let's use an advertisement for a credit card that has been been frequently aired on TV as an example. It shows Pierce Bros-nan, the actor who now plays James Bond, in an undefined Southeast Asian country, sitting in a shabby tuk-tuk alongside a well-dressed Asian woman who resembles a well-known actress. Charging through chaotic streets, they suddenly escape the surrounding traffic and arrive at their destination. At this moment, their driver -- the clown -- looks at his dented vehicle with a pained look on his face. Brosnan then generously throws the driver a credit card.
The impression we get of Southeast Asia from this ad is that it is chaotic, poor and backward, that Southeast Asian women are the toys of American and European men, and that Southeast Asian men are clowns serving Europeans and Americans with their physical labor.
Regardless of whether this image of Southeast Asia is factual, it is at least a kind of exaggerated imagination existing within a certain cultural frame of mind, a kind of smearing "otherness" based on a view of Europe and the US as superior. Even more "wrong and stupid," and in contrast to the British ad that angered Taiwan-ese, the Brosnan ad seems to have been made specifically for the Southeast Asian market, and it is also broadcast around Asia.
The company producing and distributing this ad seems to believe that Asians or Southeast Asians will appreciate and accept the image of Asians portrayed in the ad, and that the commercial will be beneficial to the marketing of its credit card.
Some people may find the ad humorous, and ask why anyone would take it seriously. Surely, no one would try to develop a mar-ket by humiliating its customers. This is actually the crux of the issue. Indeed, I'm quite sure that the company which produced and distributed this ad did not intend to smear Asians. I'm also quite sure that the vast majority of Asians seeing this ad will not feel humiliated.
Cultural attitudes are both powerful and frightening -- in a particular cultural frame of mind, some Europeans and Americans often unconsciously use representational features such as text, language and action to reveal their perceived differences between East and West.
In contemporary society, the "media image" is the most powerful tool of representation for disseminating cultural attitudes. After the strong Western cultures have disseminated their cultural attitudes through different media, Asians also begin to gradually accept the stereotypical differences between Asians and Westerners created by these attitudes. Not only do we not think them strange, but we can even admire and sympathize with the stories and representations pushed by these media.
Even more worthy of our attention is the fact that the "representations" created by these cultural attitudes and "social reality" are interdependent and complementary. For example, the European and American perception of Taiwanese products as inferior becomes one kind of social reality. However, after years of efforts we are no longer a nation specialized in producing inferior products and this perception is no longer "fact."
But some Europeans and Americans still hold this attitude, creating new "representations" smearing Taiwanese products and once again strengthening the "social reality," saying that Tai-wanese products should be looked down on.
From this perspective, the Brosnan ad is not only a "wrong and stupid" media image projected by the US business and entertainment industry. Based on culturally and politically biased attitudes, they strengthen some "social realities" where there are qualitative differences between Asia and the West. They also rationalize doubts, interventions and corrections by the US, the UK and other countries of the chaos, backwardness and irrationality in the non-Western world.
To us, there is only one point about these movies and commercials that is not "wrong and stupid" and that is that they may provide good cases for analysis in university courses in textual analysis and representation and reality.
It is necessary to explain that it is easier to analyze these "errors and stupidities" in the Western media but more difficult -- although more important -- that certain cultural attitudes often cause us to use common lan-guage, behavior and media, as well as historical and nationalistic academic research to create and disseminate all kinds of representations, thus stereotyping the qualitative hierarchy of sex, class and ethnicity in society. The Vietnamese bride phenomenon is one such example. Will we be able to understand their situation and consider our own behavior?
Wang Ming-ke is a research fellow at Academia Sinica.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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