The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [230]
This gave me pause, since frankly—as I told my correspondent—I was totally unaware that there was a stereotype of Asian men as alcoholic sex fiends. Now, I realize I have led a rather sheltered life, but still.…
Now, for all I know, Chinese men are known far and wide as alcoholic sex fiends, but it isn’t a view I’d ever personally been exposed to before hearing from this particular correspondent. I therefore don’t really think I can be deliberately perpetuating a vile canard by having allowed Mr. Willoughby to drink brandy—particularly given that all the Europeans around him are drinking as much or more—or by allowing him to express his admiration for women in general.
I did consider the other half of this accusation, though. I imagined there might be a perception, spread through films and TV, of Asian persons as “English-mangling.” However, as I explained to my correspondent, simply noting the fact that a person from one country might not arrive in another with a totally fluent grasp of the unfamiliar language does not really seem to me to be culturally derogatory.
I then descended to particularities, since we were, after all, dealing with an individual, Mr. Willoughby (aka Yi Tien Cho). Given that Mr. Willoughby had arrived in Edinburgh rather precipitously as a stowaway—i.e., without time to bone up on his English before leaving China—had been in Scotland for no more than a year or two, and had spent his time exclusively in the company of wharf rats, prostitutes, and Scottish smugglers, most of whom regarded him as a worm and wouldn’t be talking to him at all if they could help it—I thought it would be highly unlikely for him to be speaking grammatically correct King’s English.
Now, “short.” I did stop to consider this one. Why did I depict Mr. Willoughby as short? Was it truly the result of negative cultural stereotyping? (It could be; one doesn’t usually recognize one’s own biases, and while I have seen the Chinese Olympic basketball team on television, I might conceivably have been warped by years of watching Deng Xiaoping smiling into the belt buckles of various American diplomats).
Of course, one would first have to stipulate that shortness is in fact a negative characteristic, which I for one (one who is five feet three—well, all right; five feet two-and-seven-eighths) wouldn’t be inclined to do.
However, one prime minister does not a culture make, any more than does a basketball team. Neither does a single fictional character. Yes, Asians come in all sizes; however, a single person, be he fictional or real, can only come in one size.18 If one ranked the eighteenth-century male population of China, in order of size, one would no doubt find individuals of varying heights, said heights occurring in a bell curve distribution (because height is one of those natural characteristics that always does occur in a “normal” distribution).
I have no data comparing height distributions for European and Chinese males in the eighteenth century, so I can’t say whether there was or was not a difference in mean height. However, this scarcely matters. Mr. Willoughby is the only Chinese character in Voyager (or in fact, in the whole series). It isn’t possible for a single character in a book to exhibit multiple heights for the purpose of reflecting cultural heterogeneity, I’m sorry. You have to pick one height for a character—how can it be a “stereotype” to pick one from anywhere in this distribution? There is a difference between a stereotype and a statistical distribution, surely.
So, in the event, the question comes down—as it must, in fictional terms—to the individual. Now, in Voyager, the story is told through the eyes of Claire Randall, a time-traveler from the future, who is described throughout the books as being “unusually tall” for the times. The average European woman of the times was quite small—perhaps less than five feet tall, with tiny