I've tried to stay out of this, but, what the heck, here's my 2 cp.
OA is problematic, for me, because it does such a poor job of being what it claims to be - a sourcebook for "Oriental" adventures. If it claimed to be "Adventures in Fantasy Japan" or something like that, I'd have no problems. But, it doesn't. It claims to cover a much broader area.
I don't disagree, but I do think it's worth remembering that this work was published in the 1980s. In the 80s, China was only marginally more open to the outside world than North Korea is today. Further, the world was much larger then, without the easy access to expertise and resources that the Internet brings with it.
Oriental Adventures' China stuff includes stuff from the Shaw Brothers movies, the Kung Fu TV series, Big Trouble in Little China, James Clavell novels, etc. While I'm not opposed to people being offended by it and I'm in favor of content warnings, I find it really difficult to condemn the American authors who were writing an American book so that other Americans could play an American game that used the elements of American pop/nerd culture that were popular in America because that's the part of Chinese culture that reached them from China (or, well, from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taiwan). The culture presented in Oriental Adventures is the culture that China was exporting at the time as well as how Asian Americans capitalized on their own culture in the US. Everything from romanticized ideas about martial artists and Shaolin, mysticizing Chinese culture with
magical Asian tropes, opening fortune cookies after a meal, etc. OA is not a special case for the treatment of Chinese culture in the US. It's
a product of the Chinese culture actually exported to the US.
Imagine if the baseline PHB was written so that all the classes were given French names, the equipment list was in French, 90% of the monsters and playable races were from French mythology, then devoted about 10% of the material to the rest of Europe, completely ignoring, say, Vikings and English mythology, and then claimed to be "European Medieval Fantasy Adventures". People would lose their collective minds. The book would be absolutely pilloried.
I mean, D&D includes Paladins with only a very cursory similarity to palatial Roman guards or the knights of the Holy Roman Empire. Instead, it cribs more from Three Hearts Three Lions (along with Law vs Chaos alignment and Swanmays) than it does from Song of Roland. Because the authors were more interested in mimicking pop culture from contemporary fantasy novels than it ever was of mimicking history. Rangers were a thing in historic England, but the ones present in the PHB have more in common with Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett than a Sheriff of the King's Forests, to say nothing of the influence of Aragorn and Lord of the Rings. Barbarians don't come from historically representing less developed cultures; they come from Robert E Howard. Wizards come to us by way of Jack Vance. Clerics refusing to use edged weapons is not historical. Druids are at least as ahistoric as Monks are. Studded leather armor and banded mail are not historical. The orcs, elves, dwarves, goblins, dragons, etc., in D&D don't come from European historic folklore. They come from
Tolkien and other contemporary fantasy novels.
In the 1970s and 1980s, D&D was the equivalent of Ready Player One: The RPG. It comes from a time when you could play Ultima I which had a sequence where you, a medieval warrior,
flew a starship into space and fought actual TIE fighters. Pretty sure that ain't historic. D&D was a total mix of everything in American nerd pop culture. Yes, that was part of the white, male culture dominant in the US at the time... but that's who the authors were and that's who they imagined their audience to be. Right or wrong, it was designed and written in a [perceived] monoculture to be for members of that monoculture.
D&D was
never intended to represent historic
anything! It's
always been about taking from nerd culture or pop culture or pop fantasy and mimicking that. Oriental Adventures isn't what Asian cultures are. It's a book about
how to inject 1980s Asian-themed American nerd culture into your American nerd culture game. That was it's design and intent, and that design and intent was not unique to OA as a game supplement.
And, moving into the present day, that's, for me anyway, the biggest issue with OA. That it's "Oriental Adventures" as seen through the lens of American writers funneled through Japanese history and culture. It's very culturally chauvinistic.
All culture is chauvinistic. Every single one of them in all of recorded history. Every culture in the future will be, too. If a culture ever doesn't think that it's the best, it will adopt the ideas it thinks it's lacking until it thinks it's the best again. That's what culture does. Our modern culture is chauvinistic, too; that's why we think our opinion about Oriental Adventures is better!