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Transcription: [00:00:04]
I'm actually going to come out from behind the table for a bit. Thank you all so much for being here, most of you I'm related to. Those of you that I'm not, you get extra points for being here, as well.
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I always say that the book in some respects is a bit of an exercise of narcissism. It's sort of that dinner party joke - enough about you let's talk about - or enough about me let's talk about you, what do you think of me?
[00:00:27]
In some respects, what started me down the road of writing the book was listening to what my students had to say about me and other American women that they were interacting with in Hong Kong.
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And as I started listening more and more it wasn't just my students that were talking to me about American women, it was other people as well.
[00:00:47]
So, I started - I'm in American studies, and in U.S. history, so this became a way for me to enliven my teaching, but then really listen
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and any of you, if you live in Washington D.C., you have cross cultural encounters every day.
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We've all had the experience of living in or being in a place where you are different, and you are changed by that encounter.
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So the book is about several women who had cross cultural encounters in Hong Kong and were changed, by first growing up in the U.S. and coming to Hong Kong and thinking about what it meant to be American in a different context.
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It's also about women, when you get to the later part of the book, it's about women who grow up in Hong Kong and then are educated in the U.S. and come back to Hong Kong, and they are seen by their families, honestly, as damaged goods, a little bit.
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They've been Americanized and although there is a desire for them to be educated and take advantage of certain aspects of the US educational system,
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for women particularly, when they return to Hong Kong, there is a bit of concern that they have been too Americanized.
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And so there are some very positive messages that go with being an American woman in Hong Kong, but there are some negative messages, as well.
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And then there is also the whole question of virtual American women. A lot of my students will say to me, "I'm assuming that American women are a lot like those women that we see in Desperate Housewives or on Friends"
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Those were the pop culture text that were sort of the go-to text during the time that I wrote the book.
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So as I started going back and looking at, where did these stereotypes of American women come from? They start really early.
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They're accentuated in our time by popular culture, by the fact that there's travel and education back and forth, but from a very early period, there was this idea that there is something special and unique, and not always good, about being an American woman, so I look at both sides of that.
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I want to say something about the title, "Troubling American Women." We joke about, there are many types of troubling, and the first type of troubling is actually, bossy.
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So, I am a troubling American woman in the bossy way, I'm not gonna lie. When I first arrived there, I found myself being a bit demanding, or having expectations of the way people should treat me.
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So one example of that is, my husband and I were shopping in a mall in Hong Kong, and I paid for the item, and the gentleman who was the cashier handed my husband the change.
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And he got a lecture on, "why are you giving him the change, that's my money?!" and you know, the poor guy, he looked at me like, "really? I didn't want to hurt anybody, I just wanted to give you your change back and your husband is part of this unit and I gave the money to him."
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But I, for me, the American feminist in me had to preach at him a little bit. Turns out I'm not alone. Other people do that as well and they've been doing it for a while.
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So version number 1 of troubling is preaching, maybe a little bit bossy, well intentioned, but not always tuned in to the cultural dynamics, or not always aware that there might be many ways to read a situation.
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And that's sort of troubling, I think, as Americans right now, we have to be aware. I mean there's this big debate between the GOP candidates and the Democrats about when we go abroad, when we talk about who we are as an American population abroad, how do we tell our story?
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And there's been criticism that perhaps our President has apologized for America abroad.
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I don't agree. I think we have to be careful about how we present ourselves abroad, but that's a debate for another day.
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What is relevant here is this notion of American exceptionalism, bubbles through all of these narratives.
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Women who go to Asia who take with them, this idea that there is something unique, or special, or different about an American ideology, U.S. culture, and then how that plays out in Hong Kong. So that's the first version of troubling.
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And that goes with the dictionary definition of "to annoy, vex or bother." [[laughs]] The second definition is "to disturb the mental calm and contentment of something."
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Now that version of troubling, for me, gets a little bit more interesting. There's a strong ethos of harmony in Hong Kong.
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And you can argue that this plays itself out in other Asian cultures as well, and we can spill into generalizations very easily, and I don't want to do that. But in Hong Kong, there's a strong cultural value placed on harmonizing, on getting along, on not making too much of yourself.
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So an American style, which can be more direct, or more assertive, is not as valued. And ethnically Chinese women who come back to Hong Kong after having some experience in the U.S. have to do their own negotiations in terms of how much they harmonize.
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They feel strongly that they've learned different sorts of stylistic techniques, and they have to live within families and workplaces and communities, but it's not always easy.
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So, to disturb the mental calm of the harmony ethos in Hong Kong, is something that I've seen ethnically Chinese women do and I write about that a little bit in the text
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and that is something also that links to pop culture, in the sense that, in the Cold War period, lots of Hong Kong films were made by local Hong Kong artists, movie starts, who were funded, partially, by the United States government.
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And you had a presentation of American women as being independent, and leading out, and being

Transcription Notes:
Not 100% confident she say always in the fourth sentence.