In other beloved films and TV shows written, directed, and/or produced by white women, the figure of the Asian woman might be hypervisible or erased, but she is always a whore. But like a stubborn rash, this phenomenon refuses to die out. I wish Bridget Jones’s Diary were an outlier indicative of a former era. Simultaneously erased and hypervisible, she exists solely to be a two-timing whore. Yet she is both nameless and faceless: The only shot we glimpse of her is of her naked back arched over Daniel on the floor. Though I’d seen the film years before, I noticed this time that the plot turns on an Asian woman: Mark’s Japanese ex-wife, the thorny source of his and Daniel’s decades-long conflict. In a fit of nostalgia, I recently watched Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001).
