13 minute read
SEEKING ASIAN FEMALE | DESCENT Issue #2
CONTENT WARNING: PROFANITY, SEXUAL HARASSMENT
BY: JAMIE MA
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One late Saturday night after coming home from a date, I forced my roommate to balance on top of her swivel desk chair and take a photo of me from the angle at which this 6’6” white man looked at me.
Both the angle and my LED desk lamp made me look ghoulish— with buggish eyes, flat lips and dark purple under-eye circles. We doubled over in laughter.
“Wow, this man must be really obsessed with getting an Asian girl if that’s what you look like to him,” my roommate joked. I paused. The photo wasn’t great, but it was me— in all my tapered monolid, nonexistent nasal bridge Asian-ness. Then again, what possessed a white guy that tall and midwestern to want a little Asian girl seventeen inches shorter than him? What I heard was, He only likes you because you’re Asian. Regardless of whether or not this was true, I felt hurt. Was it really so unimaginable that I could be attractive for qualities besides my race?
Then again, what possessed a white guy that tall and midwestern to want a little Asian girl seventeen inches shorter than him? Every time I saw him after that (let’s call him Mark) I felt an ickiness pulsing in my gut. Not to pity the white man, but the very foundation of our relationship had troublesome roots.
The majority of early interracial relationships between Asian women and white men began in the 20th century with the “military war brides” who immigrated to the United States as the spouses of American soldiers.
During the Korean War, over 6,000 Korean women married U.S. military personnel and moved to the States. This statistic does not tread lightly. Through a system developed by the US military and Republic of Korea, over tens of thousands of Korean women (estimates run around 26 and 39 thousand) were forced or manipulated into prostitution specifically for the recreation and “morale-boosting” of U.S. soldiers. Derogatorily termed “양공주” or “western princess,” these women became heavily reliant on prostitution and/or relationships with the American GIs for survival.
I focus specifically here on the Korean experience as a Korean-American woman, but parallels can be drawn all throughout Asia as interracial relations grew alongside American globalization during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. For instance, over 8,000 Vietnamese women immigrated to the U.S. as war brides during the Vietnam War, a number which precluded the growing rate of marriage between refugee women and white American men.
For many of these women, marrying American men offered a new life outside of forced prostitution or violence in war-torn countries. However, the fact that many of these relationships arose from American military control and the sexual “availability” of Asian women suggests an unsettling truth—these relationships were borne out of the occupation of both the Asian homeland and the Asian female body.
I couldn’t help but wonder what my relationship with Mark would have looked like just a few generations ago: a different world with the same characters. When Mark touched me for the first time, I wondered what she must have felt like being touched by a foreign man with a foreign tongue who took up twice the space she did. When Mark and I walked side-by-side, holding hands or brushing arms, I wondered what she must have felt like coming to America, walking side-by-side with no family, no friends, no English—only her new white husband and his distorted perception of her.
When Mark lay on top of me, either not knowing or not caring that he was crushing me, I wondered what she must have felt like in the same position once, twice, ten times a day—smothered, trapped, frightened, comforted, disgusted?
“I honestly can’t tell if he’s fetishizing me or not,” I told my roommate one Wednesday evening on the train ride to our home city. My tone conveyed hopefulness, but tugging at the back of my mind: His traveling hand woke me up. “Hey,” he said. He could wrap his entire arm around me and still have forearm left over. “You’re so cute and dainty. I love it.”
Suddenly, she grabbed my knees and burst into laughter. “Holy shit, I have an amazing idea. Say you want him to roleplay as a soldier who saves you from your wartorn country.” If he was down, he for sure was fetishizing me.
“Oh, and ask him to call you Lotus Blossom or some shit like that.”
The rising influx of these military war bride marriages combined with certain pieces of media, heavily perpetuated the submissive, helpless, yet sexually receptive trope almost all Asian American women grapple with today.
Pop culture, history, and even online discourse hypersexualize Asian women— rarely granting the opportunity for us to exert control over our own bodies, sexuality, perception. Whether the story is of a hyper aggressive temptress or prostitute (Kill Bill, Full Metal Jacket), or the helpless, docile damsel in distress (Miss Saigon), these characters one-dimensionalize and eroticize millions of women, subjecting them to racialized sexual harassment and violence. While some may find this “desirability” a privilege (“Oh, at least men want you”), it ensconces Asian women directly within the virulent intersection of white supremacy and misogyny. This “desirability” stems not from genuine desire of Asian women ourselves, but of the power and control over our bodies.
The Atlanta shooting in March 2021, in which six out of eight deaths were Asian women, exemplifies this disturbing fact. The perpetrator’s defense included overcoming a “sex addiction,” zeroing in on a place of “temptation”— the place being an Asian-owned massage business. The gunman’s sexual desire of Asian women neither protected nor pedestaled them; it painted them as oriental Jezebels to be eradicated.
A recent Stop AAPI Hate national report revealed that from March 2020 to February 2021, Asian women reported 2.3 times more hate incidents than Asian men— making up 68% of all reports. When the prevailing perception of the Asian woman is that of a meek, vulnerable exoticism, an exoticism which also poses a threat to white American purity, this gender disparity is unsurprising.
From personal experience and anecdotal evidence from family and friends, almost every case of sexual harassment, misogyny, and racism is inseparably intertwined. Catcalls always include “yellow” or “China doll” or “Chinese/Japanese/ insert-ethnicity-here princess.” Just two weeks into COVID, racists had gotten disturbingly creative with their remarks. I remember walking through my neighborhood, enjoying the spring sun. Normally I’d walk phone and keys in hand, but it was Orange County suburbia and I never had reason to keep my guard up. A gray Honda Civic pulled up next to me, and a middle-aged white man who eerily resembled Kevin Spacey stuck his head out the window and yelled:
“Keep that mask on and that pussy tight!”
Kevin rolled away laughing, leaving me feeling totally depersonalized—a sexualized, coronavirus-diseased hole for his consumption, his entertainment.
The harsh white light of my laptop cast a menacing glow, the words “shameless Asian woman loves colonial white dick” throbbing, pulsing, burning my eyes with its fluorescent sting. I sat criss-crossed, my dorm mattress stubbornly stiff below me, frantically scrolling through Reddit threads saturated with degrading and violent comments targeting Asian American women romantically or sexually involved with white men. The screen jeered shameless Asian woman. “Annyeonghaseyo,” Mark began greeting me after learning I was Korean. He drew it out, the ‘s’ harsh like in the word ‘scent,’ the unfamiliarity dribbling off his tongue. I initially found it endearing. Shameless Asian woman loves being colonized.
With general AAPI hate on the rise, an interesting gendered dichotomy arises with it. As Asian American women navigate sexual objectification from white men, we simultaneously grapple with vicious accusations from a very loud few Asian American men. Coined “Men’s Rights Asians” on the internet and emboldened by explicit instances of white supremacy (ie, the aforementioned Atlanta shooting), MRAsians take it upon themselves to “dismantle” white supremacy by attacking Asian women “race traitors.”
One Redditor wrote that if a “Lu,” a derogatory term used towards Asian women who “worship white men” entered his home, he’d “shoot her dead on sight.” Redditors upvoted graphic sentences of Asian women dying of cancer and AIDS from their white partners. Men of our own community wanted to shoot, choke, murder, rape us to death.
I stumbled into this triggering internet spiral as my relationship with— and doubts about Mark grew. (“You can just call me ‘pretty,’” I told him several times. No, no, he insisted. 예 뻐. From his tongue, yeh-POH.) My psychoanalytic self dove into the web, googling “white man asian woman bad”, “am i being fetishized asian girl white guy racist”, “am i racist for liking white men.”
Under the guise of Asian American solidarity, MRAsians vilify Asian women as white supremacist eugenicists who, through sexual relations with non-Asian men, either inadvertently or purposefully eliminate Asian men from the human population.
They tell me that by dating a white man, I reject an Asian man. They say I am a “mentally colonized boba liberal hack,” and if I don’t like that, I can go “pray to [my] white god.”
MRAsians pose as the perfect example of the need for intersectionality. In their fight towards anti-racism, they perpetuate violent, destructive misogyny. Their philosophies— rather, the entitlement they feel towards our bodies— ironically promote the exact behavior they claim to despise. Instead of acknowledging our own agency, they argue for ownership of the Asian female body not by white men, but by Asian men.
The YouTube comedy sketch “Yellow Fever” by the popular and prolific channel Wong Fu Productions provides a lighthearted, yet effective example of these behaviors in an everyday, normalized context. A couple Asian men wonder “why white guys are getting all our girls.” The characters, upset that they apparently attract neither white nor Asian girls, study what their white friends do to “get” Asian girls. Maybe they’ll “even get a white girl!”
All their white friend has to do is point a finger at an Asian girl and beckon her over. Immediately she looks up, runs over to him, and asks for his number. This scene yields problematic implications. The sketch highlights the white man’s “power” to essentially trap Asian women, erasing all consciousness and agency from the Asian girl. As the Asian guys scoff in jealousy over said power, they idealize whiteness as the standard of attraction, that whiteness—white masculinity, rather, is the quality that attracts Asian women above any other.
At the end of the sketch, a friend explains that Asian men can’t attract women because they are “too pansy” and “don’t have the confidence or assertiveness” to initiate relationships or conversations. WongFu Productions, in an albeit self-deprecating way, raises another issue within the Asian American community. While members of almost all minority groups regardless of sexuality experience rejection from white America, Asian men face it in unprecedented and disproportionate numbers. While I do not agree with MRAsians in the slightest, I can sympathize with their attempts at overcoming that feeling of constant and continual rejection. When highly racialized and gendered standards strictly establish the concept of masculinity and ultimately, personhood, anything perceived as further “rejection” (even if it’s based in deep seated misogyny) stings.
We can trace this back to 1875 with the U.S. Page Act that barred all “Oriental” women from entering the United States, drastically skewing gender proportions amongst the Chinese American population— at 48 women per every 1000 men (the reasoning for this ban: Asian women were viewed as unclean prostitutes who’d ruin young America). Working “feminine” jobs such as cleaning or cooking and cultural expressions such as wearing long hair further ostracized this population of unmarried, working-class men. The effeminization of Asian men, similarly to that of Asian women, still permeates our culture now.
OKTrends, dating app OKCupid’s research blog, reported in 2009 that Asian men received the lowest rates of response of any gender or racial group on the app. This rejection transcends heterosexuality, as the Journal of Sex Research found in September 2021 that on Grindr, Asian men also received disproportionate rates of rejection compared to any other racial group. This suggests that the white standard of masculinity continues to be a significant factor in dating choices. We come full circle with the realization that white men, out of all men, are most desirable on all dating apps (heterosexual or not), and Asian women are most desirable out of all women.
A 2017 Pew Research study on interracial marriage reveals that Asian/white couples make up 15% of all newlywed interracial couples; yet over 70% of these marriages were of white men and Asian women.
Interestingly, Hispanic/white couples made up 42% of interracial marriages but were evenly split among gender lines. The skewing of interracial coupling along gendered lines is specifically unique to Asian Americans (this skew also existed, to a lesser extent, between Black men and women). These statistics beg the question— do we Asian women play a part in this? Do Asian women have “white fever?”
A short PBS special “Seeking Asian Female: Do Asian Women Have ‘White Fever’?” examined this question. Many of the interviewed women cited “personality” and “looks” as the reason they preferred (or exclusively dated) white men.
There is a certain attractiveness in whiteness. We’re force-fed whiteness as the ideal of beauty, success, knowledge, and power until the ramifications choke us, until we can’t breathe a single, uncomplicated sigh of relief free from the highly racialized world we live in. It’s not white fever or a fetish; it’s a reverse power dynamic stemming from our own objectification.
No matter how much or how little sexual/ romantic experience we’ve had, we still are in the developmental stages of our sexual identities. I’m not suggesting we, as young Asian Americans, need to strictly police our dating habits or over analyze our relationships. However, it’s worth taking a second look at our choices, how we desire others and how we frame that desire. Is there a feeling of pride at “getting” a white partner, like in the WongFu sketch? Perhaps that sense of safety or comfort with a white partner is actually an attachment to the podium of whiteness? I don’t know. This is a conversation that’s been had hundreds of times before, and yet the subject matter remains complicated, the right path elusive. I really don’t know.
If I find myself attracted to a person of a different race, am I betraying my own? Am I perpetuating the emasculating idea that Asian men are unattractive and effeminate? Am I being “mentally colonized?” Am I being unfair to Mark, for almost eagerly labeling him racist, for hyperfocusing on the colonial implications of the relationship?
I wonder if these questions are another response to socialization— that I’m responsible for the emotional security of other people over my own, yet another internalization Asian American women must unlearn. But looking inwardly, things don’t get less complicated. Am I hurting myself, defaulting myself to victimhood and unreasonably blaming someone else? Am I degrading myself, succumbing to the fear that outside of my race I am inherently unlikeable or unlovable?
I never asked Mark about the roleplaying scenario. I ended things with him instead. I don’t know if this was the right decision, and I wonder if there even was one. The tricky thing about a relationship with colonial implications is just that— they’re implications. Dating as an Asian woman today follows decades of exploitation, but nothing’s clear-cut: there is no one villain or victim, and labeling him and myself as such is highly problematic.
Nonetheless, this decision produced a small sense of power, a privilege withheld from almost an entire history of Asian women. I imagine that the women who came before me would want the privilege of choice, the privilege of happiness, to revel not necessarily in the ability to break up with someone but in the pursuit of freedom, happiness, joy.
With each and every assertion of my own agency I commemorate my sisters, mothers and their mothers; I yearn for their happiness, I ache for their agency, I hunger for their joy. Transcending MRAsians, colonization, injustice, the Asian female body is a sacred vessel— to our value, our worth, our humanity.
