Please Use Any Other Term

Contributor Janet Lee

I have spent the last few minutes researching two things. One - what kinds of radiation aluminum foil will block (clearly not gamma, but if you have enough of the foil, or if the beta radiation is coming from far enough away, it can stop beta radiation) - and the dreaded term, “China doll.” I do not mean the creepy porcelain dolls in the Halos commercial, but the connotation that I cannot shake in light of today’s Twitter firestorm. This stereotype surrounding Asian women involves a fetishization and sexualization of a helpless person so delicate that she is referred to pejoratively as porcelain-based. While the term “China doll” derides not only the assumed heritage of a woman with a perceived East Asian ethnicity, it also reinforces that “lotus-delicate” fragility ascribed by the invoked metaphor.

I am a woman of Korean ancestry that was adopted as an infant, as I related here. I am the mother of a joyful, ebullient toddler daughter with another baby girl on the way. I despise the terms that reduce people to stereotypes, and this is not even discussing the dehumanizing that occurs. I will not have my girls grow up and face this or anything else that reduces them to stereotypes. Please then, I ask, use any other term to describe females except for “China doll.” To invoke it is to imply misogyny and racism, even in underlying context. Thank you.