Aha! Well then, how about compiling a list of adjectives that describes your character, to start?
This way you are building a round, believable character and not a flat, uninteresting one.
Consider how your character would react to different situations, including both pleasant and stressful ones.
Have you considered looking up how Asian features compare with white and black features? Like how Asians typically have almond-shaped eyes, while white eyes tend to be oval-shaped?
If your reader’s imagination is good enough, they might get the hint of what race you’re trying to get at.
I would agree with this, but I would also encourage writers to think about personality first, and physical features later.
A writer may find that in not specifying physical features, a reader’s imagination may be that much more free to create their own visual rendering of how that character might look like.
Also, there are other, subtle ways to refer to race without referring to race.
Names can be a weak indicator; language a stronger one.
Perhaps describing “how life was” can begin to reveal a character’s socioeconomic status.
Consider this passage from The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros:
We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that
we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we
lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before
that I can't remember. But what I remember most is mov-
ing a lot. Each time it seemed there'd be one more of us.
By the time we got to Mango Street we were six—Mama,
Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me.
Personally, I’d rather not worry about racial descriptors at all and just go with their names. (Unless the character is African-American, because many African-Americans have European-origin names.) So if I had an Asian character, I’d just describe the stand-out characteristics and then introduce the character as, say, “Zhang Liuming” with further interaction demonstrating that “Zhang” is the surname, not “Liuming”.
“The woman who comes to greet you is exceptionally tall, with vase-like curves and an unfortunate fondness for Christmas sweaters. Her dark hair is pulled back into a tight braid. Her name, she tells you, is Theresa Wong.”
(Actually, I have a great fondness for culturally ambiguous surnames, like Lee or Park…)
That’s actually a really good idea. You can be rather vague about a character’s physical features, but if they have a name like Sakura Chang, people are going to assume they’re Asian
Actually it’s another thing is that people tend to do is treat Asian cultures/languages as if they’re all the same when actually they’re really different. Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese are all tonal languages and come from the same or similar origins (I’ve been told by other people that Cantone’s and Viet sound really similar but since I speak one and not the other, I don’t really hear it). Japanese is syllabalic while Korean has its own system. They usually wouldn’t mix unless the person was mixed race since, linguistically, it just wouldn’t make sense. There can also be many dialects within one language, so that could be another thing you could do?
@anon86661845 is absolutely correct. An analogy would be to examine the differences in language and culture between European nations: England; Ireland; Scotland; France; Germany; Netherlands; etc.
Exactly. That’s the point. People in an alternate reality can be described as “black” or “white” since neither of those words imply that the character is from a certain country or continent. I want to describe that a character is Asian in appearance but not from Asia.
Yeah, make sure you run your Asian names by an actual Asian or two before running with it. Japanese/Chinese combinations might exist in North America, but are unlikely to exist in Asia (or in fantasy Asia analogues, according to the associations in readers’ heads) without a bunch of backstory which could wind up feeling a bit like an unnecessary distraction. In particular, watch out for standard Pinyin and anglicised Cantonese combinations: that’s kind of like writing half your name in the Roman alphabet and using Cyrillic for the other half. It simply Does Not Happen.
We just don’t have a colloquial term for it. “White” more or less means “of European descent,” “black” more or less means “of African descent,” we just don’t have a non-offensive term that means the same for people of East Asian descent.
As well, I assume that quote doesn’t mean “don’t describe people that look like they’re from East Asia” as much as “don’t use incorrect and stereotypical descriptors that might imply that everybody from Asia is East Asian and looks the same,” like don’t just say a character “looks Asian,” which isn’t what this author is trying to do. Their goal is to be inclusive, and not just leave out a whole race of people simply because it might take more thought to figure out how to express it through text. “Asian in appearance” just means “a character that visually resembles people of real world East Asian descent the same way any white character would be read by the audience as visually resembling people if real world European descent.”
But isn’t this somewhat paradoxical?
How can you have “Asian ethnicity” if Asia does not exist in @Avery_Moore’s world?
Also, on a somewhat (un)related note, I would like to point out that as useful as Writing with Color is, it is a Tumblr resource. No offense to Tumblr or the people who use it. The point is that it appears to be a popular source, rather than an academic one.
