What a difference a decade can make. The year 1993 gave rise to a pivotal celluloid event in Asian North American culture when director Wayne Wang adapted Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club into a film showcasing an all-female, all Asian-American leading cast. The weepfest hauled in over $32 million at the box office. In its wake, East Asian females have been popping up everywhere on both small and silver screens with increasing frequency, from CBC’s This Is Wonderland (Siu Ta, Mung-Ling Tsui) and ABC’s Lost (Kim Yoon-jin) to film stars like Korean Canadian Sandra Oh (Under the Tuscan Sun, Sideways, Cake) or Eurasian American Devon Aoki (2 Fast 2 Furious, D.E.B.S., Sin City). Even the latest Harry Potter features Cho Chang (Katie Leung) as Harry’s love interest.

Now, almost 13 years after The Joy Luck Club, another predominantly female, all-Asian lead cast is set to mark a new milestone with Memoirs of a Geisha.

Yet this time, rather than explore the contemporary Asian North American female experience like local independent directors Mina Shum (Double Happiness; Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity) or Julia Kwan (Eve and the Fire Horse) have, Memoirs follows the recent line of big-budget Asian period pieces (The Last Samurai; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). What’s more, critics have charged that Memoirs’ characters embed Asian female stereotypes, such as the cold-hearted, berserk dragon lady and the sexual China doll in Lucy Liu’s Ling Woo on Ally McBeal, or Kelly Hu’s Lady Deathstrike in X-Men 2. Has Hollywood moved forward by increasing its depictions of Asian women on-screen? Or has it regressed by recycling antiquated archetypes?

Jenny Uechi, assistant managing editor of Ricepaper magazine, says it’s a combination. “Be it the Harajuku Girls or the Miho character in Sin City, they [Asian women] are silent, and silence is often equated with submissiveness,” Uechi says over coffee downtown. “But their silence is paired with this aggression or subversion of North American culture. I find they’re no longer the passive, weak characters that were invented back in the ’70s and ’80s. Now they’re strong and kind of threatening.” Similarly, while she acknowledges the criticism of Liu’s roles, she also views Liu’s inclusion in group identities such as Charlie’s Angels as a “big step forward for Asian women in media”. On the other hand, Uechi notes that many of these images are still exoticized: “Some films are meant to show that when two cultures come in contact, they find that they have more in common than their differences. But I find that with Lost in Translation and Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Girls, it’s meant to be the opposite. We find out how much we don’t get you, how much you’re so alien from us.” Uechi adds that these images help delineate “us” and “them”: “I can see it as being a thing that identifies ourselves as well.…By defining other people, other cultures, it helps define yourself. The boundaries are clear, so it builds up your own identity as well.”

How the Western world has nurtured a concept of Asia that differs from reality is the subject of Sheridan Prasso’s book The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient (HarperCollins, $37.95). On the line from New York, Prasso explains why there is a continued demand for works like Memoirs: “Western culture has a set of fantasies about Asia and the desire to fulfill those fantasies is what fuels our interest in the more romantic images of Asia.…In order to keep fulfilling our desire for a more exotic and romantic and antiquated vision of Asia, it means that we have to keep looking into the past to find it. So that’s why images of the geisha and samurai are popular in western culture, because they fuel our exoticized and romanticized images of what Asian culture historically has been to us in the West and all that it represents.”

The geisha is one of the oldest, most misconstrued, and overrepresented archetypes of Asian femininity, extending from Madame Butterfly to Madonna. Prasso interviewed Mineko Iwasaki, the geisha whom author Arthur Golden interviewed as research for his book, Memoirs of a Geisha. Iwasaki was particularly troubled by Golden’s equation of geisha with high-class prostitution. “In reality, the life of a geisha has very little to do with sexuality in general,” Prasso explains. “They’re dancers, musicians, and conversationalists who don’t sell their bodies.”

Adding insult to injury, casting Chinese actors in nuance-laden geisha roles ignores definitive details perceptible by Asian audiences. “Basically the idea of interchangeability of Chinese with Japanese in Hollywood’s view is really only one step above the use of white actors in yellowface to play Asian people, which Hollywood used to do in its early day,” Prasso says. “It’s kind of a perpetuation of that all-looks-same lens that western culture uses to view Asia.” Although American Hollywood stars may play European roles, she points out that “we have enough familiarity with those cultures to understand their differences and understand that if you were to depict a German with a beret and a loaf of bread that would look odd to us. And yet we are unable to do that when it comes to Asia.”

In our current economic and social climate, Prasso observes that we propagate these sweeping generalizations from yesteryear to our own detriment. “At a time when China is a rising power and North America’s relationship with Asia deepens because of our trade relationship and globalization, we have a need for a fuller and clearer understanding of the differences between Asian countries and cultures, not this kind of confusion.”

As to what can help counteract these problems, Uechi and Prasso see two different sources of hope. Uechi finds inspiration in Sandra Oh and Margaret Cho, or “women who break the mould and are very vocal about it, and they’re not just one-time things—they keep doing it for years and years”. Prasso, in her 15 years of journalism, has seen activism as the most effective instigator of change: “One thing I have noticed that keeps a lot of negative representations of African Americans out of the media is the fear that Al Sharpton is going to show up at your doorstep with 500 people with picket signs. The Asian North American community has no equivalent of Al Sharpton. And that’s something that’s needed: a constant and vocal countering of stereotypes whenever they appear, and that’s the one thing that makes it go away.”

Although enduring stereotypes may not disappear easily, the Asian North American community is developing a stronger voice. Whether or not these images perpetuate misunderstanding or bridge divides depends on how that voice is used.