Why the ‘ambiguously Asian’ Olympic Barbie is an epic fail

This vaguely Asian doll is a blatant denial of an entire spectrum of cultural and ethnic diversity
The doll is perhaps a reflection of our times, with anti-Asian hate so prevalent that Barbie designers felt they had to tone down Asian features

Alice Wu

Published: 9:30am, 16 Aug 2021

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I have never been into Barbie dolls. I just couldn’t relate. The blonde bombshell with impossible proportions and an extraordinarily small head didn’t speak to me; the marketing concept of a fashion model with her own career didn’t do it for me, either.

Having said that, Barbie was created once upon a time out of a desire to let little girls play with something other than baby dolls, which tended to limit the role-playing to just carers and mothers.

At that time, more than 60 years ago, an improbably busty fashion doll who could dress the part of different professions was revolutionary; Barbie opened the minds of little girls to possibilities, to the notion that they have choices in who they can be and what they can do when they grow up.

They had possibilities, and a boyfriend, Ken, they were not dependent on, plus glamorous girlfriends to go to beach parties with: this was the stuff of girlie dreams then and perhaps still is even now.

Yet, over the past decades, this doll has caused controversy, too. Most recently, Mattel, the toy company that manufactures Barbies, dedicated a collection to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics that was an epic fail – specifically, it apparently failed to feature an Asian Barbie.

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To state the obvious: how oblivious did Mattel have to be, not to be mindful of Asian representation when it was presenting an inclusive product line celebrating the Games held in an iconic Asian city? It is no wonder that so many called out the company on the lack of representation. This was irony at its most glaring.

Worse yet, it was a collection that the company collaborated on with the International Olympic Committee and Tokyo 2020 organisers.

In other words, the lack of representation escaped the attention of the IOC and Tokyo 2020, never mind that the five interlocking rings of the Olympic symbol are themselves supposed to be an inclusive representation of the five continents and thus the world’s nations.

But, to be fair, it’s not all Barbie’s fault. And the outrage shouldn’t have been solely Barbie’s to bear.

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The new collection was intended to reflect five new sports added to the Olympic programme: baseball, climbing, karate, skateboarding and surfing. In a statement, the company admitted: “Our intention to represent the Asian community with the Skateboarder doll fell short and we fully receive and recognise the feedback.”

So it isn’t true that Mattel set out to render Asians “invisible”, as some, including Japanese-American visual artist Drue Kataoka, asserted.

Mattel said it “fell short” of its intention to represent Asians with the skateboarder doll for Tokyo 2020. Photo: Handout

Besides, there were others who suspected that the skateboarder doll, with almond-shaped eyes and brown hair, could be the token Asian even before the company said so.

Rather, the problem, best put by Taiwanese-American entrepreneur Dave Lu in a Post report, is that “ambiguously Asian isn’t good enough”.

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To lighten the skin palette, blur distinctive Asian features and change the hair colour is to reject the very features Asians were born with, and this is so more sinister than simply forgetting.

This is filtering out Asianness and it is far more damaging than cultural appropriation. This vaguely Asian doll on a skateboard is a denial of a whole spectrum of cultural and ethnic diversity that Asia represents. And this is definitely not OK.

Barbie was originally based on a sexually suggestive German doll made for adults, launched in the 1950s and named Lilli. The appearance of the first Barbie doll, a bombshell in a swimsuit, very much reflected the ideal of womanhood at that time.

Barbie was born into a world with women ready to dream bigger dreams than motherhood and housekeeping. However, although she has evolved over the years, she remains very much the product of her time.

Take a look at recent Barbie collections, and you will realise that the latest misstep is no isolated incident. Check out the line of dolls honouring health care workers, for instance, and see if you can spot the vaguely Asian doll modelled on an Asian-American doctor.

Perhaps the line of dolls celebrating Tokyo 2020 “inclusivity and innovation” are, in the end, a reflection of our times, when anti-Asian hate is so prevalent that Barbie designers might have felt a need to tone down Asianness. The toy market is ultracompetitive and it’s naive to believe this could simply have been an oversight.

Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA