This video starts off like one of the ubiquitous makeup tutorials that populate YouTube... but then it becomes something different. Theanne Liu created this thoughtful spoken word piece to share about her personal experiences within Asian America -- "through learning about our history, understanding how we are racialized subjects, being in the diaspora, to dealing with various forms of racism and ethnosexualization."
Created for her Asian American Studies class on Race, Gender, and Sexuality at Northwestern University, the video is produced in the style of a makeup tutorial as a nod to the hypervisibility of Asian women on YouTube in the realm of beauty and fashion, while remaining underrepresented in other non-beauty-related video content.
Take a look:
Theanne admits that she herself is an avid subscriber to many Asian American beauty vloggers, but she was inspired to create a video that explored a more nuanced representation of typical Asian American femininity.
Here's the text from her piece:
RED LIPS EVENING MAKEUP TUTORIAL: for those who refuse to be silenced
step 1: primer
start off with a primer which provides a base-
history of why these Chinese and Taiwanese features
are only read as “Asian”
faces foreign, facing racism
caricatures of 20th century immigrant bodies
excluded, massacred, detained
until we were considered desirable for our brains
intellect weaponized
to uphold the model minority myth
as the basis
of how Asian America
is supposed to appear
step 2: foundation
when you choose a foundation
so you forget about how your darker predecessors
fought for your place in America
and still how they die because this world sees brownness and blackness
as threat, thug, terrorist, illegal
these communities of color ignored by
upper-middle class east Asian America
because it’s easier to look out for our own
yellow skin
step 3: eyebrows
in class this white boy made a music video
centering himself in a rap about overcoming ignorance
only to set it to some stereotypical-as-fuck Chinese tune
unironically
I could only raise my eyebrows
when he claimed he felt “heart”
in this soundtrack to Hollywood’s mystical orient
step 4: eye makeup
make sure you use waterproof eyeliner
so it doesn’t melt off when you return to the fatherland
of Taiwanese humidity and feelings of humility
when you can’t understand the dialect
slowly erased by the Mandarin of the mainland
your own eroding Mandarin once inherent
now in Chinglish
can’t even express to your family
the longing you feel for their acceptance
because you are two parts too many
Shanghainese and American
step 5: lips
these red lips now speak
to counter the era which silenced you, wàigōng
for political dissent from CPC policy
cultural revolutionary separation of family
96 years you lived
but too many spent in isolation
now resting in peace
but never living in power
these words I say today
are a privilege you never had
step 6: reflection
finally look at the result in your mirror
and wonder
when will your reflection show
that who you are inside
is a girl worth self-love
a girl worth more than the number of hearts you captured
and worth no less because of your power to destroy
the heart of that boy who loved you—
no, who loved the idea of you:
exotic, china doll nymphomania;
submission
reflected back onto
the face of the next Asian girl he’ll conquer
love yourself because
this disease of racist desire
known as yellow fever
will never love you
Very nicely done.
More here: Red Lips Evening Makeup Tutorial: for those who refuse to be silenced