- Meghan Markle opens up about feeling shy as a teen on Archetypes.
- She says it was a “humbling experience” for a teenage girl growing up in the ’90s.
- The actress says the term stems from the “fantasy of Orientalism”.
]Meghan Markle is disclosing a “humbling incident” she had as a child. On the most recent episode of Archetypes, which was broadcast on Tuesday, the Duchess of Sussex, 41, discussed feeling self-conscious as a teenager. Meghan opened the programme by recounting the story of how she felt shy as a youngster at a Korean spa, which are customarily nude. She then called Margaret Cho and Lisa Ling to the discussion to talk about Asian representation and the “Dragon Lady” myth.
The diversity of Asian cultures, Meghan said, “was a significant part of that” as she cherished the various backgrounds that made up Los Angeles.
The Duchess of Sussex stated, “My weekends were spent in Little Tokyo, or drinking iced teas in Thai Town, or dining with my friend Christina Wong and her parents at a neighbourhood Chinese restaurant. They explained to me why chow fun with dry noodles was superior to chow fun with wet noodles, and I remember this so clearly.
“I had a real love of getting to know other cultures. And part of that, my mom and I would often go to the Korean spa together,” Doria Ragland, “Now those of you who haven’t been to one before, it’s a very humbling experience for a girl going through puberty, because you enter a room with women from ages 9 to maybe 90 all walking around naked, and waiting to get a body scrub on one of the tables lined up in a row.”
She said, “All I wanted was a bathing suit, but you’re not allowed, by the way.” “After I got past my teenage humiliation, my mom and I would walk upstairs and eat a hot bowl of the tastiest noodles while taking a peek at all the other women. These lovely Korean women shared the jimjilbang with one another and had embraced the generational custom.”
Meghan acknowledged that it would take her years to fully appreciate the severity of the stigmas that many Asian women must endure.
Cho and Ling were welcomed to her show by the actress, who discussed how the lack of Asian representation they witnessed as young girls inspired them to seek professions in journalism and entertainment today.
The “Dragon Lady” archetype was explained by Cho, 53, who claimed that it comes from the “dream of Orientalism.”
“It’s similar to the femme fatale… a woman who is beautiful and deadly. Because we can’t just be beautiful. We have to have, like it has to come at a cost and it’s kind of like, evil queen adjacent. But it’s also so pinned to this idea that Asianness is an inherent threat. That our foreignness is somehow ‘gonna getcha, “The mystery and the exoticism of it is part of it. And unfortunately, that trope has really stuck to film, but also to Asian-American women or Asian women.”
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