Dragon Lady (stereotype)

"For the character see Dragon Lady (character) for the U-2 airplane see Lockheed U-2"

A Dragon Lady is a misogynistic stereotype of East Asian women as wicked, calculating and troublesome.

Etymology

Although sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary [cite encyclopedia
encyclopedia = Oxford English Dictionary, second edition
editor= John Simpson and Edmund Weiner
entry = dragon, dragoness
publisher = Oxford University Press
year= 1989
id = ISBN 0-19-861186-2 ] list uses of “dragon” and even “dragoness” from the 18th and 19th centuries to indicate a fierce and aggressive woman, there does not appear to be any use in English of “Dragon Lady” before its introduction by Milton Caniff in his comic strip "Terry and the Pirates". The character first appeared on Dec. 16, 1934, and the “Dragon Lady” appellation was first used on Jan. 6, 1935. [cite book
last = Harvey
first = Robert C
title = Annotated Index to Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates
date = 1995
publisher =
place =
id = ASIN: B0006PF3SS] The term does not appear in earlier “Yellow Peril” fiction such as the Fu Manchu series by Sax Rohmer or in the works of Matthew Phipps Shiel such as "The Yellow Danger" (1898) or the "The Dragon" (1913). A 1931 film based on Rohmer’s "The Daughter of Fu Manchu" was, however, entitled "Daughter of the Dragon." Barring research that might shed further light on the etymology, it is plausible to assume that the term originated with the comic strip "Terry and the Pirates".

Historical source for the Dragon Lady

"Terry and the Pirates" was an action-adventure comic strip created by cartoonist Milton Caniff. Joseph Patterson, editor for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, hired Caniff to create the new strip, providing Caniff with the idea of setting the strip in the Orient. A profile of Caniff in "Time" magazine [“Escape Artist,” "Time", Monday, Jan. 13, 1947] recounts the episode:

: “…Patterson…asked: ‘Ever do anything on the Orient?’ Caniff hadn't. ‘You know,’ Joe Patterson mused, ‘adventure can still happen out there. There could be a beautiful lady pirate, the kind men fall for. . . .’ In a few days Caniff was back with samples and 50 proposed titles; Patterson circled ‘Terry’ and scribbled beside it ‘and the Pirates’…”

Caniff biographer, R.C. Harvey, suggests [cite book
last = Harvey
first = Robert C
title = Annotated Index to Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates
date = 1995
publisher =
place =
id = ASIN: B0006PF3SS] that Patterson had been reading about women pirates in one of two books (or both) published a short time earlier: "I Sailed with Chinese Pirates" by Aleko Lilius [cite book
last = Lilius
first = Aleko E.
title = I sailed with Chinese Pirates
date = 1991
publisher = Oxford University Press reprint
place = Hong Kong
id = ISBN 0195852974] and "Vampires of the Chinese Coast" by Bok [cite book
last = Bok (pseudonym)
first =
title = Vampires of the China coast
date = 1932
publisher = Herbert Jenkins
place = London
id = ] (pseudonym for unknown). Women pirates in the South China Sea figure in both books, especially the one by Lilius, a portion of which is dedicated to the mysterious and real-life “queen of the pirates” (Lilius’ phrase), named Lai Choi San (zh-cp|c=来财山|p=Lai Cai Shan). “Lai Choi San” is a transliteration from Cantonese, the native language of the woman, herself — thus, the way she pronounced her own name. The Pinyin “Lai Cai Shan” represents the Chinese Mandarin pronunciation.) Caniff appropriated the Chinese name, Lai Choi San, as the “real name” of his Dragon Lady, a fact that led both Lilius and Bok to protest. [cite book
last = Harvey
first = R.C.
title = Meanwhile...: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon
date = 2007
page = 213
publisher = Fantagraphics
place = Seattle
id = ISBN-10: 1560977825 ; ISBN-13: 978-1560977827] Patterson pointed out that both books claimed to be non-fiction and that the name belonged to a real person; thus, neither the fact of a woman pirate nor her name could be copyrighted. (Neither Bok nor Lilius had used the actual term “Dragon Lady.”) Sources are not clear on whether it was Patterson or Caniff who coined that actual term, though it was almost certainly one of the two.

Usage

Since the 1930s, when “Dragon Lady” became fixed in the English language, the term has been applied countless times to powerful Asian women, from Soong May-ling, also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, to Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu of Vietnam and to any number of racially Asian film actresses. That stereotype — as is the case with other racial caricatures — has generated a large quantity of sociological literature. (See Further Reading, below)

Today, “Dragon Lady” is often applied anachronistically to refer to persons who lived before the term became part of American slang in the 1930s. For example, one finds the term in recent works about the “Dragon Lady” Empress Dowager Cixi (zh-cpw|c=慈禧太后|p=Cíxī Tàihòu|w=Tz'u-Hsi T'ai-hou), who was alive at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, [cite book
last = Seagrave
first = Sterling
title = Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China
date = 1992
publisher = Vintage Books
place = New York
id = ISBN 0679733698] or references to Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as having started her career in the 1920s and early 1930s in “Dragon Lady” roles. [cite book
last = Hodges
first = G.R.G.
title = Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend
date = 2004
publisher = Palgrave Macmillan
place = New York
id = ISBN-10: 0312293194; ISBN-13: 978-0312293192] In both these cases, however, articles written in the early 1900s about the Empress Dowager or reviews of Wong’s early films such as "The Thief of Bagdad" (1924) or "Daughter of the Dragon" (1931) — reviews written when the films appeared — make no use of the term “Dragon Lady.” [For example, the review of "Daughter of the Dragon” in the New York Times, August 22, 1931.] (One writer, however, did refer to the Empress Dowager as “a little lady Bismarck.”) [ Bigelow, Poultney. “A New View of the Empress Dowager of China; Tsu Hsi, the Little Woman Who Rules the Celestial Empire and its Three Hundred Millions of People.” "New York Times". June 26, 1904. ] Today’s anachronistic use of “Dragon Lady” in such cases may lead the modern reader to assume that the term was in earlier use than appears to be the case.

Is the term originally Chinese?

The term is, thus, almost certainly of Western origin and has less in common than Westerners might think with such terms in Chinese as "long nü" (zh-stp|s=龙女|t=龍女|p=lóng nǚ). That, indeed, translates as “Dragon Woman” or “Woman of the Dragon” and might be used in Chinese for a strong, aggressive woman, but it is generally not even used as an astrological designation of a woman born in the Year of the Dragon. In China, when the subject of zodiac signs comes up, men and women would both say “wo shu long” (zh-s|s=我属龙)—that is, "I belong to (the House of) Dragon."

“Dragon Lady” as a figure of malevolence would be almost impossible as a Chinese coinage, given the fact that the Chinese dragon is an icon of strength, power, and good fortune. The very flag of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) itself was a coiled dragon set against a yellow background. In Chinese mythology, the dragon is benevolent, a strong, magical creature that is associated with the spring season and the life-sustaining qualities of water; indeed (at least as late as the 1930s), “… [dragons were] still openly or secretly worshipped [and] they [were] regarded as deified spirits of nature.” [cite journal
last = Birnbaum
first = Martin
title = Chinese Dragons and the Bay de Halong
journal = Western Folklore
volume = 11
issue = 1
pages = 32–37
date = January 1952
id = ISSN: 0043373X
doi = 10.2307/1497284] The dragon is so iconic of goodness in China that the Chinese still like to call themselves “children of the dragon” and the saying “hoping the child becomes a dragon” is a common parental wish for a child. [cite journal
last = Goodkind
first = Daniel
title = Creating New Traditions in Modern Chinese Populations: Aiming for Birth in the Year of the Dragon
journal = Population and Development Review
volume = 17
issue = 4
pages = 663–686
date = December 1991
id = ISSN: 00987921
doi = 10.2307/1973601 ]

Clearly, then, for a western publisher and cartoonist to come up with the term “Dragon Lady” as a symbol of malevolence, they are investing the “dragon” with meaning that the Chinese phrase, “Dragon lady/woman” could not have; they have incorporated the attributes of the dragon from European mythology, in which the dragon is an evil creature, one that guards treasure, spits fire and devours maidens and that eventually must be slain. To the extent that malevolence may have encroached upon the original meaning of “dragon” in Chinese in such an expression as “long nü” (“Dragon Lady” or “woman”) to describe a strong women, that is a Western influence due at least partially to the fact that the Chinese language has experienced great waves of lexical borrowing since the late 1800s. [cite paper
author = Jinwen Du Steinberg
title = Lexical Borrowing and Modernization in China and Japan
date = 1996
format = PhD dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles ]

The Western term also identifies “dragon” with “woman,” which would be unusual in Chinese. Virtually all cultures that share the traditional system of Chinese astrology — including Japan and Korea — regard the dragon as a male figure, functioning as such in various mythological roles as, for example, the powerful Dragon King of all waters (rain, drought, floods, fishery). [cite journal
last = Dodgen
first = Randall
title = Hydraulic Religion: ‘Great King’ Cults in the Ming and Qing
journal = Modern Asian Studies
volume = 33
issue = 4
pages = 815–833
date = October 1999
id = ISSN: 0026749X
doi = 10.1017/S0026749X99003492 ] It is true that the older stereotype of the Asian woman — that she is docile — changed considerably in the wake of the 1911 revolution in China and the later Chinese Civil War. Modern literature dealing with those periods, indeed, often portrays strong, heroic women, especially in the roles of helping to bring about and sustain the revolution. [cite journal
last = Liu
first = Chun-jo
title = The Heroes and Heroines of Modern Chinese Fiction: From Ah Q to Wu Tzu-hsu.
journal = Journal of Asian Studies
volume = 16
issue = 2
pages = 201–211
date = February 1957
id = ISSN: 00219118
doi = 10.2307/2941378 ] Such women, however, also appear in earlier Chinese literature, [cite journal
last = Mann
first = Susan
title = Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood
journal = Journal of Asian Studies
volume = 59
issue = 4
pages = 855–862
date = November 2000
id = ISSN: 00219118 ] especially in roles of resistance to foreign invasion. These women are not, however, referred to as “dragons” or “dragon women/ladies.”

The traditional dragon/male identity, however, has undergone some change in the last century. Recently, uses of “Dragon woman/lady” in modern Chinese include Xiao Long Nü, (Little Dragon Woman) (zh-stp|s=小龙女|t=小龍女|p=xiǎo lóng nǚ) the lead female character in "The Legend of the Condor Hero", by Jin Yong, an example of the Wuxia martial arts fiction genre. In modern Chinese, the appellation Long Nü (“Dragon Woman/Lady”) carries at least some of the same meaning as the “original” Western version, at least that of daring, cunning, and strength (but not a malevolent seductiveness). The Western use of the term “Dragon Lady” has thus managed to create its own niche in Chinese, the language from which many Westerners erroneously assumed it must have come in the first place.

ee also

*Ethnic stereotype
*Ethnic stereotypes in comics
*Stereotypes of East and Southeast Asians
*Stereotypes of South Asians
*Stereotypes of West and Central Asians

Further reading

cite book
last = Lim
first = Shirley Jennifer
title = A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women's Popular Culture, 1930-1960 (series: American History and Culture)
date = 2005
publisher = New York University Press
place = New York
id = ISBN-10: 0814751938; ISBN-13: 978-0814751930

cite journal
last = Ma
first = Sheng-Mei
title = The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian-American Identity
journal = Journal of Asian Studies
volume = 60
issue = 4
pages = 1130–1133
date = November 2001
id = ISSN: 00219118
doi = 10.2307/2700032

cite book
last = Menon
first = Elizabeth K.
title = Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale (Series: Asian American Experience)
date = 2006
publisher = Universityof Illinois Press
place =
id = Dewey: 305.40944/09034

cite book
last = Prasso
first = Sheridan
title = The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient
date = 2005
publisher = Public Affairs
place = New York
id = ISBN-10: 1586482149; ISBN-13: 978-1586482145

cite book
last = Tajima
first = Renee
title = “Lotus Blossoms Don't Bleed,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and About Asian American Women
date = 1989
publisher = Beacon Press
place = Boston
id = Dewey: 305.40944/09034

Additional Milton Caniff bibliography

*cite book
last = Abrams
first = Harry N.
title = Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics'
date = 1978
publisher = Smithsonian Institution
place = Washington
id = ISBN 0810916126, ISBN-13 978-0810916128

*cite book
last = Caniff
first = Milton Arthur
title = Enter the Dragon Lady: From the 1936 classic newspaper adventure strip (The Golden age of the comics)
date = 1975
publisher = Nostalgia Press
place = Escondido, California
id = ASIN: B0006CUOBW

*cite book
last = Caniff
first = Milton Arthur
title = The Complete Terry And The Pirates
date = 2007
publisher = IDW (Idea and Design Works)
place = San Diego, California
id = ISBN-10 1600101003; ISBN-13 978-1600101007

*cite book
last = Harvey
first = Robert C. and Milton Caniff
title = Milton Caniff: Conversations (Conversations With Comic Artists Series)
date = 2002
publisher = University Press of Mississippi
place = Jackson, Miss.
id = ISBN-10: 1578064384; ISBN-13: 978-1578064380

Notes and references