Girls in Translation: The Role of Women Artists in Subverting Cliché ‘Asian’ Aesthetics
Words: Gabrielle Sicam
Make it stand out
Maybe Wittgenstein meant to write ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my girl’. That’s what I think, anyway, after a week of listening to Gnarly by Katseye on repeat. The song is equal parts fuck-you-pop and semiotic experiment, beginning with member Yoonchae exclaiming, “They could describe everything with one single word!”
Written in part by Alice Longyu Gao, Gnarly is yet another product of the singer-songwriter and DJ’s ‘culture theory’: her emphatic, ‘iconic-by-mistake’ process of translation. Having written the song first in Chinese and then translating it into English, Gao describes her process as ‘so direct and literal and not perfect’ that it creates its own idiosyncratic ‘refreshing literature academia vibe’. Her 2024 album Assembling Symbols Into My Own Poetry, full of multilingual wordplay, is another aptly-titled example of this process.
Gao utilises (mis)translation as the ideological base of her ‘refreshing literature’, exploding the possibilities of a thought-system informed by playful usage of accents, junctures, and images otherwise associated with the ever-caricaturised Asian Girl. In this way, it reminds me a lot of the writing of Olivia Kan-Sperling, whose Hommegirls essay NewJeans Listening Instructions reads as a fresh, postmodern reappraisal of the desire economy of K-pop. She writes: “NewJeans is a closed set of perfectly distinct, symmetrically individualized components, and that is their appeal. Their lovely complementarity and multi-colored coherence is pleasing because it assures us that good things are possible.”
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Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book, which comes out this August, might be the newest addition to this series of ‘refreshing literature’. Described as a ‘bilingual mixed-media melodrama’, it concerns the life and love of Limei, a sensitive, artistic barista living in Shanghai. Limei is less a person than a site for encounters with the desirous Occidental narrative – she is the perfect barista with ‘small and nimble fingers’; she is the virginal, teetotal singer in a seedy nightclub; she is yet another modern simulation of the tragic Madame Butterfly. Kan-Sperling acknowledges the multifarious potential of Limei’s story, writing that ‘it could be understood as either fanfiction or a particularly oblique form of art criticism’. The text is laid out with Chinese on one page (translated by Chen S.) and English on the other.
Between readings of Gao and Kan-Sperling’s work, I compiled a list of images they use, a shared lexicon of references. For one, they both reference Confucius. But there’s also Mikimoto pearls; King Kong; K-BBQ; baby powder; Caroline Polachek; Hysteric Glamour; the Motorola Razor flip-phone. Gnarly opens with the amalgamation of bubble tea, Tesla, fried chicken, partying in the Hollywood Hills and the song itself under the gnarly umbrella. In an interview with Paper Magazine, the members of Katseye add lip gloss, pink hair, eyebrow slits, unicorns, unibrows, a skirt over pants, wedges and wet socks (qualified as bad-gnarly) to the list.
“The constant references might initially be associated with representations of wealth and materialism. But they also denote a kind of wrestling with selfhood: the Girl, obsessed with the things she collects, considers them extensions of her, might be considered a collectible herself.”
The constant references might initially be associated with representations of wealth and materialism. But they also denote a kind of wrestling with selfhood: the Girl, obsessed with the things she collects, considers them extensions of her, might be considered a collectible herself. In Little Pink Book, Limei seems to encounter a new, trapping stereotype at every turn. In Western literature, where East Asian women have been traditionally associated with inaccessible interiority, this insistence on playing with one’s exteriority is a way of acknowledging and subverting that history of fetishistic entrapment.
(mis)translation is another method of playing within, and bending, those assumptions. Gao refers to her lyrics as ‘iconic-by-mistake’, as their force emerges through accidents in the translation process. The caricatured Asian Girl offers linearity, predictability, cohesion in a narrative of desire. In tragedies like Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon, even satiric ones like David Bowie’s China Girl, the Asian Girl is undone by her Western lover, who is attracted to her because of her mystery, her innate difference. But (mis)translation removes the possibility of relying on the Girl’s predictability. Opening up Little Pink Book, one will see two alternating bodies of text: Chinese on one page, English on the other. Depending on the reader, either could read as a completely inaccessible wall of symbols. Next to each other, we understand that they are telling the same story. But Kan-Sperling offers variations of understanding, dependent on how the reader approaches the text; on their reliance and trust of the translation; on their faith in Limei and her agency.
“The caricatured Asian Girl offers linearity, predictability, cohesion in a narrative of desire.”
Translation makes the inaccessible Girl accessible. But (mis)translation is a playful response to that inaccessibility. It doesn’t set out to solve her, or the fact of her simulatedness, but does the work of subverting the distance and exclusivity that such a stereotype assumes for itself. In NewJeans Listening Instructions, Kan-Sperling writes about the deliberate ‘air of mystery, conspiracy, and even darkness’ in the girl group’s music videos, noting that ‘there are many fan theories dedicated to decoding’ those narratives.
Assuming her inaccessibility, her mystery, her darkness, the desiring reader is always interested in decoding the Asian Girl. But what happens when she leans into her simulatedness? The saturated image economy of pop culture today means that anyone existing from it, including girl groups like NewJeans and Katseye must operate knowing the formula. Any fiction, any ‘lore’, is created privy to the understanding that there will be fans who want to unravel it. There is always a desire to make the Girl accessible.
Alice Longyu Gao’s I <3 Harajuku begins with a cutesy, high-pitched invitation from the speaker to join her on a trip to Harajuku. Though the song will retain those hyperpop inflections as it progresses, the lyrics take an almost instant volta: you motherfuckers jealous cause I’m giving you something you’ve never seen. It becomes clear – this won’t end how we thought it would. Like Kan-Sperling, Gao punctures the facade of easy control. There is always something to (mis)translate.
Little Pink Book comes out on the 5th of August, 2025.