I’m Sorry, Lucy Liu

by Claire Gallagher

I HAVE A THING FOR WASIAN GIRLS You’re Really Pretty For a Chinese Girl

Our Kids would be so Cute, such a good mix

I can’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “yellow fever,” only that it filled me with a misguided sense of pride in the way that childhood ignorance often does. I felt special and precious, a welcome relief from my typical feeling of otherness in my predominantly white middle school. I had heard the boys in my classes profess their preference for blondes or for brunettes, for big tits or big asses, for princesses or for cool girls, but these conversations followed an unspoken rule: White girls were a common denominator amongst their “types.”

I fell in love with a boy in high school who loved to tell me that I was exactly his type: He had a thing for Wasian girls. I breathed a sigh of relief the first time I heard him proclaim that my race was something that attracted him rather than turned him away, and I pretended not to care when I was reminded of my resemblance to his ex-girlfriend because I knew our similarities began and ended with our ethnic makeup. I swooned when he told me he thought I was the hottest girl in my class because I wasn’t “basic-looking.” I was different. He could replace one ex-“something different” with me, a new “something different.”

He was flighty with his feelings toward me, to say the least, so I learned to intensify the parts of myself that he liked most and to conceal the parts that bored him. He liked that I always wanted to have sex, but with him, specifically; the mention of intimacy with other guys was a turn-off, but how hot was I on my knees for him? He loved that I was a model student, a model dancer, a model daughter: pure and pearly and quiet, good in the kitchen and good with the baby I nannied. Who needs a complex when you can have both Madonna and Whore?

While writing this, I tried to remember when my first thought in response to a man showing sexual or romantic interest in me started being, “I wonder if he has an Asian fetish.” I drew a blank.

OUR KIDS WOULD BE SO CUTE, SUCH A GOOD MIX

*said to me by a boy while in the shower, prompting me to remember that my white father dated a young Chinese girl before marrying my mother. My sophomore year, my hair started falling out from excessive use of the drugstore hair-lightener Sun-In. My hairdresser told me that with the damage I had done, attempting to bleach my hair could quite literally start a fire. So I waited patiently and went back in months later for blonde highlights. I progressed to lighter and lighter hair until I was fully light blonde going into my freshman year at Michigan. My guy friends loved it, telling me I looked best with light hair, a backhanded compliment that told me I looked better when I looked whiter.

My older sister used to complain that I had taken all the good genes. She preferred my double eyelids to her monolids, freckles to her milky skin, my nose bridge to her own. I had always thought my sister was beautiful, and I envied (still envy) that everyone used to remark on her resemblance to our mother, while I was said to look like our father.

I pranced through identity hoops. I grew up distant from my father and my father’s side of the family, but I never lacked familial love. I was raised by my mother and my mother’s mother and my A Yí. I spent my afterschool time in A Yí’s kitchen or A Yí’s sister’s kitchen or in the Asian supermarket with A Yí’s friends. Always someone asking me if I had eaten yet, always someone’s leg to cling onto. I found my love for ballet in my grandmother’s living room. My mother encouraged my writing. I had twenty aunties and ten uncles. I grew up on star anises and ginger chunks and bamboo slivers and handmade dumplings and soup noodles. I learned how to cook huoguō (hot pot) before I learned to ride a bike. I looked forward to Chinese New Year more than I looked forward to Christmas. I remembered how to ask my mother if I could have some xīguā, but could not remember the English translation of watermelon. This is all to say that I was raised Chinese. I felt Chinese—I feel Chinese. So I was jealous that my sister was compared to my mom more than I was, but I was not oblivious to the pointed praise that I received from people, regardless of race, for resembling my white father more than my sister did.

It took us many years to realize that the features my sister and I obsessed over, the differences in how our parents’ DNA played out on my sister’s face versus my own, represented our obsession with Eurocentric beauty standards. I’ve been told I am white-passing, and I’ve also been told I look fully Chinese. I still feel a certain

pang in my chest when I hear the latter, followed by intense shame and guilt for feeling that pang.

I try to reconcile my thoughts: I want to look just like my mother, lovely and perfect and breathtaking—I fear that being Chinese makes me undesirable—I relish in and grow nauseated at the feeling of being fetishized—he wants me because of my two halves—he doesn’t want me because of my two halves—he loves me, he loves me not—he loves me, he loves me not—he loves me, he loves me nothelovesmehelovesmenothelovesmehelovesmenothelovesme helovesmenot.

You give me really-crazy-in-bed Vibes

YOU GIVE ME REALLY-CRAZY-IN-BED VIBES.

*based off of my Instagram profile

ME SO HORNY. ME LOVE YOU LONG TIME.

Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket was nominated for eleven awards, taking home five of those accolades. For context, here is a piece of dialogue from the American war classic for your enjoyment, held between a Vietnamese prostitute and two US soldiers stationed in Vietnam, Joker and Rafterman.

Me so horny. Me Love you Long time.

to say it, just once, because “it would be so funny.” According to him, the Asian woman is desperate for the white man. The Asian woman is there to be mocked. The Asian woman is comedic relief. The Asian woman is eye candy. The Asian woman will give you everything for the price of ten dollars.

Asian women made their first appearance in American porn after the Korean war as romanticized war brides following their men to America as the perfect American wife: sexually submissive, domestically superior.2 A study in 2013 found that white men and other races deemed Asian women to be the most “desirable” racial group.2

If you haven’t seen Full Metal Jacket, perhaps you’ve seen Lucy Liu in Kill Bill or in Ally McBeal: seductive, cold, mysterious, exotic, fearsome—the epitome of one of American media’s favorite tropes for Asian women, the Dragon Lady. Or maybe you know Miss Saigon and the ever-devoted Kim: helpless, innocent (but somehow still hypersexual), submissive, passive—the antithesis to the Dragon Lady is found in the Lotus Blossom.

Lotus Blossom or Dragon Lady? Sex object either way.

*a subtle and chivalrous slide into my dm’s

On March 16th of this year, Robert Aaron Long shot and killed eight people in the Atlanta area, six of whom were Asian women: Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Yue, Xiaojie Tan, Dayou Feng. Targeting massage parlors, Long was quoted to be motivated by the desire to “eliminate his temptations,”2 a feat he evidently saw as achievable through the murders of Asian women. One Twitter user took this opportunity to display their comedic genius with the tweet, “Not quite the happy ending they were expecting,”3 because even sexualizing and stereotyping victims of murder can be funny if those victims are Asian women.

Less than 24 hours after the shooting, the Atlanta police captain told the public that Long was just “pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him.”4 Because murderous sprees are a typical method to wind down

I’VE never fucked an asian before

Hooker: Hey, baby, you got girlfriend Vietnam? Joker: Not just this minute. Hooker: Well, baby, me so horny, me so horny. Me love you long time. You party? Joker: Yeah, we might party. How much? Hooker: Fifteen dolla. Joker: Fifteen dollars for both of us? Hooker: No. Each you fifteen dolla. Me love you long time. Me so horny. Joker: Fifteen dollar too boo-coo. Five dollars each. Hooker: Me suckee-suckee. Me love you too much. Joker: Five dollars is all my mom allows me to spend. Hooker: Okay! Ten dolla each. Joker: What do we get for ten dollars? Hooker: Everything you want. — Joker: You know, half these gook1 whores are serving officers in the Viet Cong. The other half have got T.B. Make sure you only fuck the ones that cough.

I knew the phrases “me so horny” and “me love you long time” long before I was even aware of Full Metal Jacket. I heard it in TV shows, saw it in puns created to name restaurants, and was asked

Eliminate his temptations // Not quite The Happy Ending They were Expecting

1 A slur against people of Asian descent originating from US marines during the Philippine-American war and gaining popularity during the Vietnam War 2 https://www.vox.com/22338807/asian-fetish-racism-atlanta-shooting 3 https://www.shondaland.com/act/a36052580/we-need-to-defetishize-our-view-of-asian-women/ 4 https://gen.medium.com/the-u-s-militarys-long-history-of-anti-asian-dehumanization-f1a8fe320e7a

What is the Asian woman’s body worth in America?

Predating the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act was the Page Act of 1875, federal legislation passed to prohibit the immigration of laborers from “China, Japan, or any Oriental country.”5 More disturbingly, the act was careful to highlight its ban on “the importation of women for the purposes of prostitution,”5 illustrating America’s efforts to “systematically prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the US.”6 Asian women had to be confined to the East, where they could not taint American values and where their hypersexuality could not be a “temptation.”

World War II, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the Philippine-American War cultivated the idea of Asian women as a sexual otherness, an object of white lust and desire whose sexuality could not be contained. After condemning imperial Japan’s use of “comfort women,” women from Japanese-occupied areas, particularly Korea, forced into sexual slavery for soldiers, America founded their own military brothels for American soldiers during the Korean War. In 1965, a survey revealed a striking 85% of GIs reported having “been with” or “been out with” a prostitute during the Korean war.7 The stereotypes of Asian women as hypersexual and subservient followed American soldiers home, where they nestled comfortably in the collective American understanding.

A culture of violence against Asian women sprang from the hips of US legislation and military activity; this culture prevails today, rearing its ugly head in Atlanta massage parlors, on street corners, in middle schools, and at gas pumps. It weaves itself seamlessly into the fabric of Asian women’s lives until beauty can no longer be separated from exotic, and until appreciation and fetishization can no longer be distinguished.

I can’t yet anchor the flutter of validation I get from hearing that my specific skin moves somebody to crave me. But I have long shed my blissful belief that this desire holds any substance to be proud of. I had accepted that white girls were the standard, so white girls were to be judged and chosen based on their hair length, breast size, nose shape, intelligence level, people skills, ambition, and values. They were judged and chosen based on, no matter how shallow a level to examine, themselves. I had also accepted that not being the standard meant the possibility of being judged and chosen based on an idea, an illusive concept of a lotus or a dragon that I represented and was expected to satisfy. I would like to take back this acceptance. I should not settle for being wanted for the wrong reasons simply for the purposes of being wanted. I should not feel butterflies at attention that is conditional and unspecific. I should not attempt to fit a mold created years ago, but perpetuated today. America’s history of fetishizing Asian women is long and impossible to erase completely from the American consciousness, but checking one’s own implicit biases and stereotypical generalizations shows a proactive effort to combat this consciousness. I accept only being wanted for the standard— being wanted for myself.

5 https://www.history.com/news/chinese-immigration-page-act-women 6 https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/us/asian-women-misogyny-spa-shootings-trnd/index.html 7 https://gen.medium.com/the-u-s-militarys-long-history-of-anti-asian-dehumanization-f1a8fe320e7a