Tigresses

The usually staid British newspaper The Guardian called it a “Charlie’s Angel moment” when Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng, shielded her husband from a protester trying to hurl a pie filled with shaving cream at him. Not only that, she was able to slap back the attacker.

All this happened last Tuesday during a hearing of the British parliament, convened to investigate allegations that Murdoch’s newspaper The News of the World (now closed) had engaged in phone hacking

The incident was picked up by millions of viewers throughout the world watching the live coverage and replays of the hearing often focused on the Charlie’s Angel moment.

Print media caught on too, with our own Inquirer featuring the story in the World section with the headline “Wife shields Murdoch, wins fans.”

I thought I’d pick up on the story to talk about perceptions and representations of Asian women in media.

Clearly, if Murdoch’s wife had been a Caucasian, the media would have picked it up too but the story would have died down quickly. But in this case, the incident has crashed into blogs, with many commentaries, as well as increasing use of the label “tiger” to refer to Deng.

The “tiger wife” here, Wendi Deng, is 42 years old and a towering 6 feet. She is the third wife of Murdoch, who divorced his second wife after 32 years of marriage.

For years now, Wendi Deng’s life has been the subject of gossip magazines and tabloids, with detailed stories about how she was able to make her way out of a relatively hard life in China to become the wife of a media mogul.

There are even rumors that she is now the power behind Murdoch and will eventually take over his empire.

The tabloids have not been kind to her, depicting her as an aggressive and ruthless woman (read: Chinese woman) clawing her way up.

With the incident in Parliament, we get a more favorable representation of Deng.

The incident, incidentally, also deflected public hostility against Murdoch, showing him as a vulnerable old man protected by a loyal and courageous wife.

Again, that might as well read “Chinese wife” with bloggers, both in Asia and the United States, now commenting that such Chinese “tigresses” make good wives.

Tiger mom

I’m going to detour a bit here and talk about another “tigress” who made it into international news with her book, “Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother.” This tigress is Amy Chua, born and raised in the United States, although her parents were originally Chinese from the Philippines. Chua made it through Harvard Law School and is now a professor at Yale.

But Amy Chua didn’t acquire the tiger label from her professional achievements. Instead, she chose to describe herself as a tiger mom in a book about how she raised her children.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, she starts out by asking readers, American readers, to imagine parents imposing these rules on children: not to join school plays, not to complain about not being in a school play, no grades less than A, play the piano or violin. There were many more prohibitions and prescriptions, clearly intended to shock readers, especially American parents and indeed there was a flurry of protests, which only generated more publicity, and probably sales, for the book.

I don’t want to go into a discussion of Chua’s parenting techniques, or the way Wendi Deng Murdoch made it to where she is today. What’s important is to see how the tigress image of the two attracts publicity because it contradicts the stereotype of the docile and passive Chinese woman. It’s a stereotype often used as well for other East and Southeast Asian women, including Filipinas.

On the surface, the prescribed desirable behavior for Chinese women does emphasize docility, so much so that some Chinese parents still do not look kindly on having their sons marry a woman born in a tiger year (the last one was 2010, preceded by 1998 and every 12 years before).

Women born in those years are “tigresses” who might, folklore goes, devour their husbands because they are so aggressive. (I did check and found out that Wendi Deng wasn’t born in the year of the tiger, but Amy Chua was.)

The Chinese “fears” of a tigress aren’t limited though to birth years. I’ve heard local Chinese-Filipino mothers expressing disapproval of their sons’ girlfriends because they’re “kiang po”. “Kiang” (neng li in Mandarin) is actually a positive adjective which means “skilled” or “capable” but when used to refer to a woman, it often takes on negative meanings, as in someone skilled in scheming.

The stereotypes around Chinese and Asian women spill over globally, blending with a kind of sexual Orientalism.

What happens is that some American, Australian and European men want to get Asian wives because they believe such wives are going to be obedient, loyal — and, curiously, sexually adept, embodying the exoticism of the Orient.

In many cases though, these men will discover they’ve married tigresses, and not necessarily in the sexual sense.

There are many more Wendis out there, who know what they want and, facing social limitations in their own society, will find they can move ahead by getting out of the country and marrying a Westerner.

Cultural revolutions

Gender norms are changing all over Asia. It’s not surprising that mainland Chinese women are defying stereotypes of the oppressed female. Under the communists, women have had more opportunities in terms of access to education and jobs.

Culture has been slower to change though, as exemplified by a continuing preference for sons, and women still face a glass ceiling in many occupations and in politics.

Deng’s own life reflects some of these contradictions. Her parents were staunch Communist Party members who named her Wen Ge, meaning Cultural Revolution, but had six children as they kept aiming for a son.

With their connections, the parents were not penalized for having so many children and Wendi was able to get through the educational system and, later, found a way to get to the States. She changed her name to Wen Di (meaning cultural enlightenment), conveniently Westernized to Wendi.

Cultural revolutions produce tiger wives and tiger moms. The latter have been around for a long time, ironically tied to the way women are assigned domestic chores, including supervising children’s schooling.

I remember when my sister and I misbehaved as children, usually by watching TV instead of doing our homework, being warned, “Ho bu lay lo (Here comes your tiger mom).”

More tiger moms will emerge, in America and here, among the Chinese and non-Chinese, as more moms respond to the pressures of getting children through school.

We will see more tigresses emerging in the Philippines and in Asia. Some of our taipans (ethnic Chinese tycoons) already have very powerful daughters at the helm of their businesses. For them, the term “tigress” might even be too mild. These are empresses-in-waiting.

* * *

Email: [email protected]