Harmful, erroneous stereotypes attached to Asian women played into Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abuse of Rowena Chiu, she said.
Rowena Chiu was interviewed on the “Today” show on Sept. 9, 2019.Nathan Congleton / NBC
Rowena Chiu’s Weinstein allegation highlights the issue of race in sexual assault
Decades after Rowena Chiu alleges she was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, she wrote an op-ed article for The New York Times, opening with words that may have felt pointed or shocking to some, but gut-wrenching and all too familiar to many Asian women.
“Harvey Weinstein told me he liked Chinese girls,” wrote Chiu, who is British Chinese. “He liked them because they were discreet, he said — because they knew how to keep a secret. Hours later, he attempted to rape me.”
Race sits at the core of Chiu’s story. Harmful, erroneous stereotypes attached to Asian women played into Weinstein’s alleged abuse of her, according to Chiu. Race also comes into play through specific Chinese cultural values and taboos that made it notably difficult for Chiu, a former Miramax employee, to process and eventually speak out about what had happened to her, she told NBC News.
“I really strongly believe that it took me much longer than the other victims to think, ‘Am I prepared to live with the repercussions of speaking out?’” Chiu said. “It took me a full two years. People are like, ‘Why did it take you that long?’ and I always feel like my answer should be, ‘How did I come to that position so quickly?’ Because to think of myself as an Asian person and a really terrified individual in October 2017, it’s really a big journey to come in just two years.”
According to her account, however, Chiu was pressured into signing a nondisclosure agreement after she attempted to report the alleged attack. Miramax declined NBC News’ request for comment, and Weinstein did not return NBC News’ request for comment.
Chiu, who was raised in a conservative Christian and Chinese household in a predominantly white area outside London, was uncomfortable with speaking about her experience when a New York Times reporter, Jodi Kantor, initially approached her in 2017 — but not solely because she had signed the agreement.
Silenced by the ‘model minority myth’
Shame and saving face are concepts deeply woven into several Asian cultures, in particular when it comes to how women are socialized to avoid acts that may be perceived as bringing shame to themselves or their families. As Asian American psychology researcher Stanley Sue points out, there’s even specific language for the notions.
“‘Haji’ among Japanese, ‘hiya’ among Filipinos, ‘mianzi’ among Chinese, and ‘chaemyun’ among Koreans are terms that reveal concerns over the process of shame or the loss of face,” he said.
Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, explained that given the culture of shame in the Asian diaspora, Chiu’s act of speaking out is tremendously significant.
“On the outside, Asian American women might look like we’re successful, but the level of shame and isolation that comes with experiencing stigma is so deep, like mental health issues and dealing with violence,” she said. “More Asian American women deal with violence than will let on, whether it’s sexual violence or physical violence or emotional violence, because we are told not to talk about it, we are told not to disrupt, or we don’t know where to go for resources.”
There’s an additional layer of scrutiny when it comes to Asian immigrant families. Choimorrow explained that those from immigrant families are often told “from a very young age to assimilate, don’t bring attention to ourselves” as a means of survival in the new country.
Chiu understands this. “They talk a lot about the legal constraints of speaking out but I think it hasn’t centered around a lot of the personal constraints. I would say for me, personally, those were a lot stronger,” Chiu said. “I hadn’t talked to my family, I hadn’t talked to my husband, I hadn’t talked to my sister, I hadn’t talked to my network of friends. No one from that time in my life in ‘98 knew what really happened to me.”
By contrast, many of her former Miramax colleagues were ready to speak about their experiences with Weinstein when Kantor and Twohey approached them two years ago. Chiu underscored that she was raised to be someone who didn’t speak up, avoided calling attention to herself and never talked back. That presented an especially difficult dilemma when dealing with the trauma and confiding in loved ones about it.
“These are things that are perpetuated when we internalize the model-minority stereotype,” Choimorrow said. “This is what happens when our community internalizes the model minority myth and says, ‘Yes, we have to be those people to get ahead and be successful.’
“It’s not bringing shame to the family, it’s, ‘You are embarrassing us and bringing us shame in front of white people, in front of mainstream America.’”
To this day, Chiu’s parents have not spoken to her about the assault. She has noted, though, that she’s received a great deal of support from the Asian community.
“[White men] expect obedience and submission but if you’re from ‘model minority’ parents who don’t want to make a fuss, you’re in double danger,” Chiu said. “Because you don’t feel like you can stick your neck out or be an unpleasant person.”
She added: “You’re raised as someone who can be nice.”
‘He’d never had a Chinese girl’
In addition to that context, Chiu also found herself surrounded by executives, filmmakers, producers and others in the entertainment industry. She said she was often the only Asian person in the room in the early portion of her career. Looking back, she remembers that racially charged quips and jokes were common. Oftentimes the remarks were well intentioned but the incidents only served to highlight the industry’s lack of cultural and racial sensitivity.
Harvey Weinstein and attorney Benjamin Brafman exit State Supreme Court, on June 5, 2018 in New York.Drew Angerer / Getty Images file
The night Weinstein allegedly attempted to rape her was the first time the then-assistant encountered overt racism while on the job, she said.
In her written account in The New York Times, Chiu described the way Weinstein weaponized her race, diminishing her to a two-dimensional, exotic trope.
“My ethnicity initially marked me as different and inferior: He assured [then-colleague Zelda Perkins] that he wouldn’t harass me because he didn’t, as I remember it, ‘do Chinese or Jewish girls,’” Chiu wrote. “Then later, he turned around and defined me in terms of sexual exoticism, telling me, just before he tried to rape me, that he’d never had a Chinese girl.”
It wasn’t the first time Chiu had heard the “I’ve never had a Chinese woman” line, she said. Like many Asian women living in the West, Chiu said it wasn’t an uncommon comment directed at her in London bars when she was younger. Regardless of who spoke that line or the version they used, she believed the underlying purpose was the same: dehumanization.
“Guys would come up to me and say, ‘I’ve always fancied an Asian woman,’ which is very similar to what Harvey Weinstein said to me,” Chiu said. “What you’re actually saying, but you may not be conscious of, is: ‘Hey, I know you’re an inferior race and I’m doing you a favor by fancying you. There’s a blonde woman I could be talking to but I’m talking to you instead.’”
‘Geishas and prostitutes with hearts of gold’
Experts said the fetishization of Asian women that permeates both barside catcalls and Weinstein’s alleged comments to Chiu is rooted in a toxic mix of imperialism, discriminatory immigration legislation and problematic representations onscreen.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans imagined the East or the “Orient” as exotic and immoral, Catherine Ceniza Choy, professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, told NBC News. As European and American colonizers expanded into Asia, they perpetuated ideas of Asian women as attractive, available and submissive, cementing this characterization through postcards and photographs.
Legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act, which put a 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration, further exacerbated the prevalence of stereotypes by “codifying the foreignness of Asians in America,” Choy said.
And Hollywood didn’t help much with dismantling stereotypes, either, she added.
“Twentieth-century popular culture, especially the stereotyping of Asian women in Hollywood films as dragon ladies, lotus blossoms, geishas and prostitutes with hearts of gold, furthered the reach of these one-dimensional fantasies in more contemporary times,” Choy said.
Chiu noted that not only were Asian women portrayed as sex workers, they were “highly submissive sex workers.”
“The way that they were sexually submissive to a dominant white male, that was an enormous sexual stereotype,” Chiu said of the film industry, where Weinstein was a leader for years. “Whether or not one believes it directly translates into real life, I think dominant white men, who come from that sort of cultural hegemony, absorb those stereotypes consciously or unconsciously.”
Choimorrow agreed. The stigmas attached to Asian women have come at a cost to their safety and equity in sexual situations and beyond, she said.
“The stereotypes play into the culture and assumption about what men feel like they can do with women; objectify and use women at their disposal and at their pleasure,” she said.
According to the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender Based Violence, from 21 to 55 percent of Asian women in the U.S. report experiencing intimate physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetime. The range is based on a compilation of studies of disaggregated samples of Asian ethnicities in local communities. In comparison, 33 percent of women in the U.S. experience sexual violence.
‘Not just a rapist… also racist’
That’s why Weinstein’s alleged invocation of Chiu’s race is not negligible, Choimorrow said, describing the disgraced film executive as “not just a rapist, he is also a racist.” Based on Chiu’s account, Weinstein allegedly targeted Chiu specifically because she is an Asian woman, she added.
“By not talking about the racialized experience of her story, you are erasing the racism that played into her situation.”
Sung Yeon Choimorrow
“By not talking about the racialized experience of her story, you are erasing the racism that played into her situation. This is often what women of color deal with,” Choimorrow said. “We are often forced to choose or not think about one aspect of our lives.”
While Chiu’s account of her experience was covered by numerous outlets, the majority highlighted the chronological events of the traumatic night Weinstein allegedly tried to attack her during the Venice Film Festival in 1998. Very few directly address Chiu’s race at any angle. For the most part, her Asianness is glossed over, or mentioned as an aside.
Perhaps outlets wanted to portray her as an “every-girl,” an “ordinary person who just graduated university with student debt who went up against the most powerful man in Hollywood,” Chiu said. In doing so, the intersectionality of her experience is neglected, according to Choimorrow.
Since coming out with her story, Chiu has spoken about it in front of audiences and with television hosts, exposing more of the issues she grappled with around her alleged assault. But given the dynamics at play surrounding her race and gender, she still worries.
“We don’t know how many silent Asian voices are out there,” she said.
Chiu stressed that sexual assault survivors should only come out if they are comfortable with doing so. In her own experience, “the dread and fear of coming out was worse than the actual coming out,” she said.
“I feared a lot of judgment from my community, from my family, from my culture that didn’t play true,” she said of her journey. “Because in the end, the monsters in your imagination are bigger.”
CORRECTION (Nov. 11, 2019, 10:18 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated where Catherine Ceniza Choy is a professor. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, not the University of California, Los Angeles.
World events often move fast, but it is hard to match the pace and power of change in 1989.
It culminated in one of the most famous scenes in recent history – the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The wall came down partly because of a bureaucratic accident but it fell amid a wave of revolutions that left the Soviet-led communist bloc teetering on the brink of collapse and helped define a new world order.
How did the Wall come down?
It was on 9 November 1989, five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest, that the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany crumbled.
East German leaders had tried to calm mounting protests by loosening the borders, making travel easier for East Germans. They had not intended to open the border up completely.
The changes were meant to be fairly minor – but the way they were delivered had major consequences.
Notes about the new rules were handed to a spokesman, Günter Schabowski – who had no time to read them before his regular press conference. When he read the note aloud for the first time, reporters were stunned.
“Private travel outside the country can now be applied for without prerequisites,” he said. Surprised journalists clamoured for more details.
Shuffling through his notes, Mr Schabowski said that as far as he was aware, it was effective immediately.
In fact it had been planned to start the next day, with details on applying for a visa.
But the news was all over television – and East Germans flocked to the border in huge numbers.
Harald Jäger, a border guard in charge that evening, told Der Spiegel in 2009 that he had watched the press conference in confusion – and then watched the crowd arrive.
There were emotional scenes as East Berliners entered the West
Mr Jäger frantically called his superiors, but they gave no orders either to open the gate – or to open fire to stop the crowd. With only a handful of guards facing hundreds of angry citizens, force would have been of little use.
“People could have been injured or killed even without shots being fired, in scuffles, or if there had been panic among the thousands gathered at the border crossing,” he told Der Spiegel.
“That’s why I gave my people the order: Open the barrier!”
Thousands flowed through, celebrating and crying, in scenes beamed around the world. Many climbed the wall at Berlin’s Brandenburg gate, chipping away at the wall itself with hammers and pickaxes.
A turbulent year had reached a climax.
Why did the Wall come down?
After World War Two, Europe was carved up by the Soviet Union and its former Western allies, and the Soviets gradually erected an “Iron Curtain” splitting the East from the West.
Defeated Germany was divided up by the occupying powers – the US, UK, France and the USSR – with the eastern part occupied by the Soviets. East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic, became the Soviet Union’s foothold in Western Europe.
But Berlin was split four ways, with British, French and American zones in the west of the city and a Soviet zone in the east. West Berlin became an island surrounded by communist East Germany.
The wall was eventually built in 1961 because East Berlin was haemorrhaging people to the West.
By the 1980s, the Soviet Union faced acute economic problems and major food shortages, and when a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station in Ukraine exploded in April 1986, it was a symbolic moment in the impending collapse of the communist bloc.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the comparatively young Soviet leader who took power in 1985, introduced a reform policy of “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring).
But events moved far faster than he could have foreseen.
Revolutionary wave
Reform movements were already stirring in the communist bloc. Years of activism and strikes in Poland culminated in its ruling communist party voting to legalise the banned Solidarity trade union.
By February 1989, Solidarity was in talks with the government, and partially free elections in the summer saw it capture seats in parliament. Though the Communists retained a quota of seats, Solidarity swept the board wherever it was allowed to stand.
Poland’s Solidarity movement was successful in partially free elections
Hungarians, too, launched mass demonstrations for democracy in March. In May, 150 miles (240km) of barbed wire were dismantled along the border with Austria – the first chink in the Iron Curtain. Hungary’s 1956 revolution was brutally suppressed by the Soviets, but this was succeeding.
By August, the revolutionary wave had truly re-ignited on the fringes. Two million people across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – then part of the Soviet Union – held one of the most memorable demonstrations of the so-called Singing Revolution when they formed a 370-mile (600km) human chain across the Baltic republics calling for independence.
Many East Germans were overcome by emotion as they crossed into Austria
In the heat of August, Hungary opened it borders to Austria in the west, allowing East German refugees an escape.
The Iron Curtain was buckling.
Czechoslovakia, whose push for liberalising reform had been brutally suppressed in 1968, provided another means of escape. East Germans could travel to the neighbouring socialist nation without restriction, and began to flood the West German embassy there by the hundreds, eventually being evacuated to the West by train.
East Germany ended up closing its border with Czechoslovakia in October to stem the tide.
But by then the revolution had spread to East Germany itself.
East Germany rebels
It began with demonstrators rallying for freedom in the centre of the city of Leipzig.
On 9 October, within days of East Germany celebrating its 40th anniversary, 70,000 people took to the streets.
There were calls for free elections from West Germany, and talk of reform from East Germany’s new communist leader Egon Krenz. No-one knew the fall of the Wall was weeks away.
In late October parliament in Hungary, which had been among the first to hold mass demonstrations, adopted legislation providing for direct presidential elections and multi-party parliamentary elections.
And then on 31 October, the numbers demanding democracy in East Germany swelled to half a million. Mr Krenz flew to Moscow for meetings – he recently told the BBC that he had been assured German reunification was not on the agenda.
On 4 November, a month after the East German protests had begun, around half a million people gathered in Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin.
Three days later, the government resigned. But there was no intention to give way to democracy and Egon Krenz remained head of the Communist Party and the country’s de facto leader.
He would not be there long. Five days later, Mr Schabowski gave his world-changing press conference.
Why didn’t the Soviets use force?
Earlier in ’89, Beijing demonstrators in Tiananmen Square who had called for democracy in China were crushed in a major military crackdown.
The USSR had used its military to put down rebellions before. So why not now?
Within the Soviet Union itself, it did, killing 21 pro-independence protesters in the Soviet republic of Georgia. But elsewhere in the communist bloc, they did not.
In a break with Soviet policy, Mikhail Gorbachev decided against using the threat of military might to quell mass demonstrations and political revolution in neighbouring countries.
“We now have the Frank Sinatra doctrine,” foreign ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov told US television. “He has a song, `I (Did) It My Way.’ So every country decides on its own which road to take.”
A new chapter in European history
On 3 December, Mr Gorbachev and US President George HW Bush sat side by side in Malta, and released a statement saying the Cold War between the two powers was coming to a close.
More than half a million people gathered in Prague for this November 1989 demonstration as Czechoslovak communism was overthrown
The 1989 wave of revolutions was not over yet.
Student demonstrators in Prague clashed with police, triggering the Velvet Revolution which overthrew Czechoslovak communism within weeks.
In Romania, demonstrations ended in violence and saw the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. A new government took over as the ousted leader fled his palace and angry crowds stormed it.
The Romanian revolution was the only one in Eastern Europe that year that saw bloodshed
He and his wife Elena were captured and executed on Christmas Day. More than 1,000 people were killed in unrest before and after the revolution, setting Romania apart from the largely bloodless events elsewhere.
Postscript to 1989
And the Soviet Union itself?
In 1990, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia took advantage of their new-found political freedoms to vote out their communist governments and make moves towards independence. The Soviet Union was falling apart, but Mr Gorbachev made one last ill-fated attempt to reform it by calling together the leaders of the 15 Soviet republics.
Hardline communists opposed to his reforms pre-empted him, attempting a coup while he was on holiday in Crimea in August 1991 and putting him under house arrest.
The coup was defeated in three days as pro-democracy forces rallied round Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic.
But it was the death knell for the USSR, and one by one its constituent republics declared independence. By the end of the year the Soviet flag had flown for the last time.
