Funny story, when I was a kid, in 7th grade English we read Joy Luck Club and the teacher (white/hispanic) asked if there were any problems we felt with the racial politics of the book. This was a school you had to test into and it was also fairly heavily Asian, so it was extra pertinent. Anyways, one girl, Chinese, mentioned the "white knighting" of the book and I vehemently pushed back that I didn't see anything wrong, and I'm a guy. I was just so happy to see Chinese people represented in a book at all that I refused to see anything wrong (Chinese women! Immigrants like my mom!). In hindsight it was really naive. The girl also really hated me after that lol.

I also read an interesting comment in a different thread about the kind of limited "access" Amy Tan had to China at the time, and the way Asian males of that period must have appeared to her -- patriarchal, old school, musty, etc. It's unfortunate that she basically recreated those images. She wrote literally about magic and shit, but couldn't see or imagine an authentically contemporary Asian guy?

Anyways idk. As someone involved in this stuff now, I have a lot of thoughts about this. I've probably imbibed enough whiteness in our cultural production to blanch my soul into the eternal afterlife but I still actually think the mustiness in "Asian culture," when attached to Asian-Americans specifically, is in for a huge overhaul and it's going to be exciting. Like a second-coming-of-Bruce-Lee exciting. It's personally why I don't feel bothered AT ALL by Michael Derrick Hudson things, or Tilda Swinton, because the fact we're getting saturated by knock-off Asian culture is a hint at the latent demand for something there that we haven't seen yet, and the real thing is going to blow people away. It's not a cure-all, everything is still terrible but I think there's a lot of room for crazy untapped shit.