The Duchess of Sussex has spoken out about the “humbling experience” of visiting a Korean spa with her mother as a teenager.
In the latest episode of her podcast, Archetypes, which dropped on Tuesday, Meghan Markle explored the “Dragon Lady” stereotype with comedian Margaret Cho and journalist Lisa Ling.
Meghan spoke of her experience of growing up in Los Angeles which was “full of culture that you could see, feel, hear and taste on a daily basis” adding that she had a “real love” of getting to know other cultures.
As part of this, she and her mother would often visit a Korean spa.
“It’s a very humbling experience for a girl going through puberty because you enter a room with women from ages nine to maybe 90, all walking around naked and waiting to get a body scrub on one of these tables that are all lined up in a row,” she revealed. “All I wanted was a bathing suit.”
“Once I was over that adolescent embarrassment, my mom and I, we would go upstairs [and] we would sit in a room and we would have a steaming bowl of the most delicious noodles,” she said.
Despite her immersion into East Asian culture, she admitted that she was not aware of the stigmas faced by women of Asian descent until many years later.
She said: “The Dragon Lady, the East Asian temptress whose mysterious foreign allure is scripted as both tantalising and deadly.
“This has seeped into a lot of our entertainment. But this toxic stereotyping of women of Asian descent, it doesn’t just end once the credits roll.”
She closed the episode with an invitation for listeners to “be yourself”.
She said: “Be yourself, no matter what any societal framework or archetype or loud voice coming from a small place tells you you should be.
“Self: Full, complete, whole, layered, sometimes weird, sometime awesome, always best and true self - be you. So much greater [than] any archetype.”
The podcast series has resumed on Spotify after a four-week break following the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September.
Archetypes debuted on the streaming platform on 23 August, with special guest Serena Williams discussing ‘The Misconceptions of Ambition’.
