Are Asians Perennial Adolescents?

No matter how many articles I read about Asians, the thing that strikes me is the portrayal of Asians as a people who have not fully matured, who have not become fully individualized... still a collective unit of their own society.

I remember reading a Vanity Fair article about a Chinese man who was thinking about buying Barney's in London. The English woman who was describing the man who was, I believe, in his late 30's was very struck by how young he looked. Perhaps it is because Asians tend to have less bodily hair than Caucasians, perhaps it is because our facial features are not as quite well defined as Caucasians, perhaps it is because everyone else is defined in terms of Caucasians that Asians seem so much younger than Caucasians?

I also remember reading Ravelstein by Saul Bellow. He describes the Asian lover of Alan Bloom as a man-boy.

I often think that perhaps this is the reason that Hollywood can't imagine an Asian romantic lead. Asians are not sexually developed enough. Our sexuality is too internal, too private, and in some cases, too strange?

Catcher in the Rye is about a boy named Holden Caulfield who refuses to grow up because he finds that the world of adults is the world of phoniness and hypocrisy. Jews, I think, were also seen as perennial adolescents... always complaining about the way the world was... never accepting the hard facts of life. Are Asian-Americans the new Jews? Are these the stepping stones that Asians must cross to eventually become fully American?

At the same time, Asians often talk about their 5,000 year old civilizations. Westerners see 5,000 years of more or less the same, same, same. They don't really see the kind of cultural and scientific competition that was in Europe and America. They don't see themselves. The only Asian culture that they've been able to see themselves in is Japan. They see individuals in Japan. But how disappointing these individuals must have been to Westerners when they discovered that they did not have a grand vision of the world, but only cared about themselves and their native Japan.