Suzie Wong

      In The World of Suzie Wong, Suzie is an Asian prostitute who meets an male artist, eventually falling in love with him. At first, her job as a prostitute makes it a priority to gain the largest reputation, which she already had. As she persists on making herself the artist's "exclusive" woman, she tries desperately to tell her fellow prostitutes that she and the artist get along well, saying things like, he makes paintings of me, he lets me have or do whatever she wants with his belongings, etc. Suzie, however, has a back story, which is revealed as her having a child, and taking up the prostitute job to suffice for both their lives' expenses. Eventually, her child dies and a scene brings us to Suzie in the act of a Chinese traditional funeral for her son, while the artist stand beside her. In brief, the two end up together after Suzie comes clean about her true feelings and it becomes another one of those Asian woman American men films.

      In the film, Suzie Wong mentions to her fellow prostitutes, at the time the artist begins to get frustrated with her, that she had been beaten by him. Oddly enough, she does this with pride. She fakes the beating by biting her lip and using the blood to paint her lip and parts of her face and wilds up her hair to make her words promising. To a male, this would be something he would want to hide from publicity, but for Chinese prostitutes apparently, it was a big deal, in a good way, to be beaten by the person she slept with. In the beginning of the film, the male artist runs into what seemed to be an inn. In actuality, it was a prostitute house. The owner, however, did well to hide the truth from the artist, passing it off as an inn. As to being cheap, he does whatever he can do to keep the artist living in the prostitute house for a month. The dialogue in the movie also shows some stereotypical claims, such as Asian accents unable to pronounce L's and R's correctly, and comments like "all Chinese (Asians) look the same" are said. At the end of the film, Suzie burns paper for the afterlife of her deceased child.  This is a Chinese tradition for funerals.

      If this film were to truly make stereotypes for Asian women as clear as can possibly be, it does a great job at it. Although stereotypes do not pertain to all of the community it is aimed towards, in which case many people forget this, Nancy Kwan's character Suzie Wong portrays many of these labels. Culturally, however, seems to be a different case. The funeral tradition shown in the movie isn't particularly something of a label or stereotype. The portrayal of this shows more of a respect to Chinese culture (rather than just telling the audience that the child died, they show how the Chinese deal with the tragedy). In a sense, this movie is educational (to some degree), but somewhat demeaning to the Chinese female community.