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You Are What You
Wear
Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA) Themed
Tee-Shirts: A Movement
by
Erin Pangilinan
posted 3/29/05
Asian Pacific Islander Americans (APIAs) continue
a movement urging for accurate representation of their people in the
media: tee-shirts. Just when Abercrombie and Fitch (A&F) paid $40 million to plaintiffs
accusing A&F of discrimination in the workplace, another store sparks
further controversy with a line of tee-shirts to infuriate APIAs. Jun
Zuniga has started a petition online urging APIAs to take action in supporting
to help remove offensive Asian-themed t-shirts from their stores. 
1. “Get Lucky By Rubbing Buddha’s Belly” - This tee-shirt depicts the religious figure, Buddha, while making a sexual reference to “getting lucky.”
2. “Madam Wong’s House of Tang Good Eats Guaranteed Fresh” – This tee-shirt contains a repulsive sexual innuendo (the slang word ‘Tang’) while referring to Asian women as prostitutes.
3. “Red Monkey - Who Flung Poo Chinese Food Delivery” – This tee-shirt depicts Chinese food delivery people as monkeys and Chinese food as dirty.
These tee-shirts continue to exoticize, eroticize, objectify, and defile APIAs with old school negative images, chopstick-y fonts and poorly written catch phrases. They spread this sort of inaccurate image of APIAs to the mass public through their apparel and expect us to take it as a joke. The racist tee-shirts remind me of APIA images of the past speaking with thick accents. These images spark my mind from a Charlie Chan, to M. Butterfly, and the “obedient,” “soft spoken” APIA women. These negative images APIA females are reminiscent of the submissive China doll, geisha girl (exotic), dragon lady (hypersexualized), and Miss Saigon.
