Please try again later. Earlier this year, I went on a date with a man who told me he had a thing for Asian women. We were sitting across from each other at a table in a fancy restaurant and he stood up to do a head-to-toe scan of me. I am sick of being fetishised because of racist stereotypes about "small and compliant" Asian women. Credit: Stocksy. I told myself to run. Here was yet another man with what is not-so-jokingly referred to as Yellow Fever: the lazy and discriminatory hyper-sexualisation and fetishisation of Asian women, primarily by white men, solely based on race. When I tried to break it off with him, he texted: "I hate you. Thankfully, there are thousands of gorgeous Japanese, Chinese and Korean girls in Sydney, so I will be okay. This is not unusual. I have spent most of my adult life expending psychological and emotional energy fending off men like him. I have a small body.
https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/04jVBZHko7L36wEttwUGHy8/hero-image.fill.size_1248x702.v1611609642.pngBecause I am small and Asian, I am fetishised by some white men
I have an Asian face. Women like me are handcuffed to a double bind. We have to fight off men who infantilise us because of our small bodies, and who also believe the Asian face carries some special gene that makes us soft-spoken, gentle and non-confrontational. I continue to be astounded by the number of white men who still see me and immediately assume I am "submissive, docile, compliant, accommodating, sweet in the kitchen, tiger in the bedroom". My body is viewed as a literal and symbolic site upon which to construct their fantasies of the perfect Asian lover. The pernicious perception that most young Asian women have petite, child-like bodies is not necessarily untrue. Equally painful is realising the extent to which the very narrow representations of Asian women in the West have created the idea in the minds of these men that because of our perceived submissiveness, they can be afforded a sense of ownership and possession of us. I recently entered my 30s. Sometimes, I have felt I have found a person who loved my body as a carrier of the person within, only to realise that, to him, my body was simply a fetish and a curiosity. I am never sure how to respond. Beneath what is projected onto me, is my relationship to my Asian heritage; I have to fight against the Taiwanese cultural indoctrination that to be self-sacrificing and selfless is the ultimate way of being for a woman. I have found these men unwilling to confront their own bias and prejudices. They operate under a system of racial stratification themselves as superior , leaving Asian women to take on the disproportionate burden of fulfilling, resisting, or negotiating their stereotypes. I wonder whether I will go through my life in this country upending stereotypes.
More from ABC
It is not my job, or the job of other Asian women, to do that. These men should scrutinise their so-called "preferences" and work towards modifying racially unjust and untrue perceptions. I am not here for their education, sexual or otherwise. I blocked the man who sent me the aggressive, race-based text when I rejected him. I hope he examines and confronts his prejudices. Only then will women from Asian backgrounds be respected as much as we should and treated as whole human beings — not accessories that embody derogatory fantasies. Because I am small and Asian, I am fetishised by some white men. The Sydney Morning Herald. By Jessie Tu November 28, — Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size. License this article. Please try again later. Earlier this year, I went on a date with a man who told me he had a thing for Asian women.
Am I a 'race traitor' for dating white people?
We were sitting across from each other at a table in a fancy restaurant and he stood up to do a head-to-toe scan of me. I am sick of being fetishised because of racist stereotypes about "small and compliant" Asian women. Credit: Stocksy. I told myself to run. Here was yet another man with what is not-so-jokingly referred to as Yellow Fever: the lazy and discriminatory hyper-sexualisation and fetishisation of Asian women, primarily by white men, solely based on race. When I tried to break it off with him, he texted: "I hate you. Thankfully, there are thousands of gorgeous Japanese, Chinese and Korean girls in Sydney, so I will be okay. This is not unusual. I have spent most of my adult life expending psychological and emotional energy fending off men like him. I have a small body. I have an Asian face. Women like me are handcuffed to a double bind. We have to fight off men who infantilise us because of our small bodies, and who also believe the Asian face carries some special gene that makes us soft-spoken, gentle and non-confrontational. I continue to be astounded by the number of white men who still see me and immediately assume I am "submissive, docile, compliant, accommodating, sweet in the kitchen, tiger in the bedroom". My body is viewed as a literal and symbolic site upon which to construct their fantasies of the perfect Asian lover. The pernicious perception that most young Asian women have petite, child-like bodies is not necessarily untrue. Equally painful is realising the extent to which the very narrow representations of Asian women in the West have created the idea in the minds of these men that because of our perceived submissiveness, they can be afforded a sense of ownership and possession of us.
The world seen through the eyes of a life-long nomad
I recently entered my 30s. Sometimes, I have felt I have found a person who loved my body as a carrier of the person within, only to realise that, to him, my body was simply a fetish and a curiosity. I am never sure how to respond. Beneath what is projected onto me, is my relationship to my Asian heritage; I have to fight against the Taiwanese cultural indoctrination that to be self-sacrificing and selfless is the ultimate way of being for a woman. I have found these men unwilling to confront their own bias and prejudices. They operate under a system of racial stratification themselves as superior , leaving Asian women to take on the disproportionate burden of fulfilling, resisting, or negotiating their stereotypes. I wonder whether I will go through my life in this country upending stereotypes. It is not my job, or the job of other Asian women, to do that. These men should scrutinise their so-called "preferences" and work towards modifying racially unjust and untrue perceptions. I am not here for their education, sexual or otherwise. I blocked the man who sent me the aggressive, race-based text when I rejected him. I hope he examines and confronts his prejudices. Only then will women from Asian backgrounds be respected as much as we should and treated as whole human beings — not accessories that embody derogatory fantasies. Because I am small and Asian, I am fetishised by some white men. The Sydney Morning Herald. By Jessie Tu November 28, — Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.
“You Know What I Say About Men Who F--- Asian Women?”
Got it. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size. License this article. The first white boy I loved was in the fourth grade, soon after I had moved from Taiwan to Australia. Ben was a pale, thin boy with sandy hair and hazel eyes. He often sat at the computer in the corner of the classroom, tapping away. Nonetheless, I liked sitting next to him with a book open in my lap, admiring his air of quiet intelligence. I imagined us kindred spirits, keeping a dignified distance from the ruckus of our fellow comrades. I was eight and already doing the thing that I would catch myself doing, again and again, in my teens and then my twenties: idealizing the objects of my affection, creating characters with whom I proceeded to fall head over heels in love. I have always been cautious to a fault. I am precious with my body, the reason why I avoid sports that involve fast balls or speed in general which is to say most sports. But when it comes to matters of the heart, I throw myself headfirst, not so much falling as diving into love. I am addicted to love: its hot flushes, its cold sweats, the way I am unmade and remade by it. Since Ben, I have yearned after many others. There was the drummer in the middle school jazz band, the high school class clown, the teaching assistant in political theory, the melancholic college debater, the aloof mathematician. And then there was A. I am an Asian woman, and a certain narrative about relationships like the ones I have had with white men has infiltrated recent Asian American literature. A fight ensues. How much easier would it be? What kinds of conversations and pains could we bypass?
You’ve read ` + visit + ` of your 3 free articles.
What kinds of cultural aspects and perspectives of the world could we share? The novel, which lampoons academia and facets of Asian American politics, features a Taiwanese American woman, Ingrid, who is engaged to a mediocre white man, Stephen. As it turns out, Stephen, a textbook weeaboo, is on a lifelong quest to date a Japanese woman. But perhaps we could have gleaned that at the beginning of the novel, when he is introduced as a translator of Japanese literature despite not speaking Japanese, or from the none-too-subtle scene where he asks Ingrid to dress up in a Japanese schoolgirl costume. I could go on. But what results is nonetheless a relationship that strains credulity, determined more by race than anything else that might give texture to a relationship—the clash of personalities, say, or sexual chemistry. The paranoia extends beyond literature. But what if love is perilous for Asian women not because we are Asian women, but because love is a perilous endeavor? I broke up with a white man last year. Readers of contemporary Asian American literature might assume that the break-up was a consequence of ethnic difference, but the narrative rings hollow. It inaccurately renders A as ignorant or uncaring as it absolves me of responsibility in giving up on someone I loved. I never thought I would write about us, but I used to love telling our story. A and I started dating a couple of months after we graduated college, but we met much earlier, during the first week of freshman year. I immediately liked the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled and how he seemed to know something about everything. I felt, even back then, when we stayed up until the wee hours of the morning reading and occasionally writing but mostly chatting, the yearning pangs of a small crush. But another girl beat me to the punch. So, I let him go, and we fell out of touch amidst the rush of campus life. We ran into each other again at a coffee shop in the spring of our senior year. Those final months of college were awash with a preemptive nostalgia that tinted everything with a golden glow. We recited the routine pleasantries.
Because I am small and Asian, I am fetishised by some white men
I asked after the girl who had beaten me to the punch, and he confessed that they had recently broke up. As the warming promise of spring gently dislodged the unforgiving cold of the East Coast winter, we began to grab meals and drinks together. I remembered why I liked him so much when we first met: he was razor-sharp but not pretentiously so, more bookish and endearingly disheveled. He walked me back in the morning after the first time I spent the night with him. It was slightly drizzling and he held an umbrella for me. And of course, I fell for him. I detoured to get coffee even when I was already nauseously over-caffeinated just so I could catch sight of him at the pool tables he frequented. But there were barriers I had to surmount. My time in Edinburgh, which should have been a year of self-discovery and respite abroad, was torturous. I spent hours agonizing over my phone, waiting for him to text back. I hung a calendar in my room and crossed out each day that elapsed, counting down to when I would see him again. I made a detour to New York City after doing campus visits for graduate programs I had gotten into. The night before I was due to return to Edinburgh, we lay side by side, listening to the sirens go by. After all, the scripts that pervade our culture are hard to ignore. There are many things we already know about these relationships. Asian women comprise a majority of mail-order brides to the U. While stationed in China, Japan, the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam, white American GIs fraternized with the local women who worked as service or sex workers and brought them back to the U. The paranoia, I suspect, is born out of a growing tendency toward didactic critiques of whiteness in our cultural discourse.Denouncing whiteness, especially during the Trump years, became an easy way to accrue cultural capital in the liberal middle class. A curious consequence of the combination of forces just described is that it has become something of a demonstration of virtue to moralize about miscegenation when the couple in question comprises a white man and an Asian woman. When A and I started dating, I mentioned on the phone to my mother that his ex-girlfriend was also Taiwanese. She paused on the other end of the line. I feel it too. Crouching over my laptop like a gremlin writing this very essay, I saw a white man sporting a tight tee with fake Japanese characters scrawled across the chest walk into the library with a willowy Asian woman. I immediately cringed. When I see an older white man and Asian woman walk together in the streets holding hands, I stare, scrying my future in their faces and interactions. Though, as I said, I never thought I would write about A and me. After our bumpy takeoff, the relationship eased into a perfectly smooth ride that would make for rather poor storytelling. For nearly four years, we never fought. My parents loved him, and his parents loved me. My grandmother even praised his chopsticks skills. I came to know him in a way I had never known anyone else.
To All The White Boys I’ve Dated Before
I knew that he would always order a classic margherita at any pizza joint we went to for a scientific assessment. I could play out our conversations in our head before they happened, ping-ponging back and forth in my mind like two sides of myself. He tempered my melodramatic compulsions with his stability. His puttering around our apartment became the background rhythm, comforting in its familiarity, that held me together as I hacked away at each hurdle of the Ph. We got into a cadence. He looked up property prices on Zillow as I peered into each house, making up stories about the lives of its inhabitants. He cooked pasta carbonara, three-cup chicken, red curry and I cleaned meticulously with sprays and wipes. I wondered if this was what it felt like for a peripatetic heart to find a home. How thrilling, to be granted a character that is explicitly an Asian American woman! But alas, as I discovered, the paranoid script is not a very good one. In this script, the heroine is both a victim and complicit in her own victimhood, and her desire is transparent, overdetermined.
The world seen through the eyes of a life-long nomad
I came to Asian American fiction because I was lured by the promises of representation. It is awfully fun to read about yourself. Their marriage is short-lived, however. Her husband dies suddenly, and she is bereft. Three months later, she meets Vasily Pustovalov, a lumberyard manager, on the way home from mass. He pays her a visit a few days later. When he dies from illness one especially bleak Russian winter, she soon grows attached to the local veterinarian, and the pattern repeats. I followed a graduate teaching assistant I crushed on in freshman year into an introduction to political theory course that he was precepting I ended up majoring in political theory. I took Catholic conversion classes and began writing a senior thesis on St. Augustine when I fell in love with a Catholic man. Heck, I read Chekhov because of my Russian American boyfriend. My thrill upon encountering Olenka is not the pleasure of representation derived from identitarian identification—seeing, for example, a Taiwanese American woman just like me in a story. Instead, it is the pleasure of recognition. Chekhov is unsparing in his depiction of Olenka, but in his unsparingness resides a keen ethical attention. He writes her with honesty, bringing to life a woman with whom I immediately identified. As I recognized Olenka, I am recognized by Chekhov. It feels good to be seen. The pleasure of recognition is easily confused with the pleasure of representation.
When Asian Women Are Harassed for Marrying Non-Asian Men
But conflating the pleasure of recognition with the pleasure of representation constrains what art can do. Are my desires shaped by a world that values whiteness? After my first breakup in high school with a Taiwanese boy my mother never liked, she found me staring out the window, sobbing. We like hot people, and our standards for hotness are invariably sculpted by the forces that shape the world we live in. We can play that game of whiteness-studies Scooby-Doo: lift up the mask, and the culprit is white supremacy. But a singular focus on white supremacy can also obscure. It fails to account for the opacity of desire, its unruliness and mystery. I would posit that few of us can capture exactly in words why we love those whom we love. We might be able to make lists of adjectives like kind, intelligent, witty, hot, or even more specific things, like the curve of a smile, a predisposition toward putting others first. The lists, however, are always pale approximations of something far more ineffable. He—or often she—tells the Asian woman, I know what your desires are: they are illegitimate. There is a duty to work, to the best of our abilities, toward the transformation of the political, economic and cultural forces that shape our desires. But to discipline desire itself? I think not. For one, talk of disciplining desire has a violent history. The notion that there exists a moral duty to liberate those who are enslaved to their misguided passions is a well-worn justification for colonialism. And, as I found out the hard way, we would be hubristic to presume that desire is something that can even be disciplined. There is something to the fact that the body-positivity movement that saturated my feeds in the s has only ever made me more obsessed about what I looked like and what I was putting in my body. I could do it. I could write a story about my relationship that traces each fracture along racial lines.I could spin a tale, Days of Distraction -style, about how I felt adrift as I followed my microaggressive white boyfriend around. Woe is me! Pity me as I fade into the background pursuing a Ph. It would be easier for me to peg the dissolution of our relationship to racial difference. I certainly come out looking better. But then I would be in the business of writing scripted desire, that is, porn. Viewers come for a certain performance of sex in porn, and they come when they get it. Porn is fine—I watch porn, you probably do too. But porn, with its potted narratives and singular purpose, leaves little to the imagination. I had recently passed my general exams—a sordid, tearful affair—and felt adrift in my lack of a dissertation topic. But I had A, and A had me, and we were moving into a sun-filled one-bedroom with polished walnut floors. The fractures of our relationship, at the time, were far harder to trace than any iteration of microaggressions. They were mostly imperceptible, our domestic bliss smooth and perfect like a snow globe. But sometimes, I caught sight of them: in the vague awareness that we were having less sex once a week, and then once a month, and then once every three months ; one evening, when I called my girlfriends to catch up and found myself all of a sudden in tears. I brushed away their concern, but I grew increasingly aware then of something in the recesses of my mind that I had tried to ignore for months: a sense of being trapped by the monotony of our routine, suffocating in that snow globe of domestic bliss. As Bollywood music blasted from Bluetooth speakers and White Claws sweated in our hands, my eyes scanned the throng of party attendees and landed on him. He had an angular face and an easygoing smile, well-fitted t-shirt draped over a hint of a muscular torso just so. He caught my gaze, and walked over to introduce himself.
Don’t stop now!
I usually deflect in conversation, preferring to ask questions over divulging things about myself. But he parried each of my questions with questions of his own. I soon found myself telling him about growing up in Australia, and my inability to speak to my parents in Chinese. What language do you speak to your parents in? As the party drew to a close, I wondered if I would run into this man again. As it happens, we did. It was a peculiar summer when people were slowly shedding their antisocial quarantine lifestyles but no one was traveling yet. We milled around, hosting and attending parties, high on the exhilaration of being in proximity to other bodies again. Cambridge, in any case, is a small, incestuous town. The third time we ran into each other at a party, I found myself asking for his number. I told myself I was just trying to make new friends. The infatuated woman becomes a master interpreter of signs. Each text is meticulously close-read, the date and time sent analyzed for deeper meaning. I calculated the time between our texts, trying to calibrate my responses to match his. I tried a number of things to salvage the relationship. I planned date nights. I tried to explain my waning feelings to my friends. Maybe, I thought, if I could capture my feelings in words, then I could control the story. I even tried talking to A, first in abstract, theoretical terms, and then more concrete ones. I cried a lot, and I drank even more.I apologized over and over again. But if I were being honest with myself, there were also moments when I did not try. I kept texting this man in spite of myself. We got coffee, and then lunch. My determination to save the relationship was tempered with a sense of inevitability. The fetish, I think, troubles us because it relocates what feels so particular to the realm of the abstract and general. What is more, I worry that the scripts that we reproduce end up scripting us. Following these narratives, we—Asian American women—become characters defined primarily by assumptions about how our race and gender dictate our lives, rather than fully fleshed people entangled in all sorts of complicated relationships. To move away from abstraction for a moment: good Asian woman that I am, I like to play a sub. But I am also many other things: obsessive and dogged in my pursuit of my objects of affection, for example. The problem with contemporary morality tales about race has often been pegged to the pitfalls of writing for an imagined reader who is white. Instead, they delivered new tropes: for example, the lone Black character lost in a sea of whiteness who serves as a tool for white enlightenment about racial injustice. But I suspect something else is at play, too. The problem with contemporary morality tales about race is not only that they are written for an imagined reader who is white. It is also that they are written for an imagined reader who is stupid. In this way, they ensure there can be no confusion: they are on the right side of history. But every act of communication is open to misinterpretation, and oftentimes we will be misinterpreted. By taking risks, we open ourselves to misinterpretation, but also at least the possibility—however minuscule—of recognition.
“You Know What I Say About Men Who F--- Asian Women?”
Toward the end, A and I were having another one of those conversations we often had those days, in which we swooped around the problems in our relationship asymptotically without ever touching them. I wondered vaguely if we needed more mystery in our relationship, in which everything felt known. He was frustrated with the way I romanticized everything. He resisted love stories, the soaring highs and crushing lows of desire. In his world, everything made sense, and nothing was enchanted. But his disenchantment was a narrative of its own. But it is itself a narrative—even a myth—that consoles our impotence in the face of contingency with the fantasy that we have the capacity to live rationally with full agency. The choice is not whether we should live in a narrative, but which narrative we should live in. This is why the stakes of storytelling are so high. At the end of November, I attended a major conference in my field. Under the glittering lights of an afterparty, drifting in the hum of conversations pulsing around me, I felt, for the first time in a long time, alive in my aloneness. I moved my flight back to Boston a day early. Unable to look A in the eye, I wrestled my luggage into the apartment and unpacked it quietly. He accused me of casting him as the boring cuckold as I gallivanted about, chasing the thrills of new romance.
Most Viewed Stories
I suppose I ended up in a script after all. To be sure, the paranoid script will feel true to others. There is a more diplomatic thesis here: I could clarify that the point is not to litigate between scripts but to demand a wider range of narrative options—a liberalism of narrative options, if you will, where everyone can pick their favorite narrative for themselves and go home happy. But indulge me as I offer a riskier position: I think there are better narratives and worse narratives. The worst narratives feature caricatures whose decisions are wholly explainable by shallow facts about their identity. The best narratives—in our literature, in our lives—refuse transparency about how desire works and abide, however unbearably, in its mysteries. November slipped into December. Snow fell, rendering Cambridge muted and solemn. I sold pieces of our furniture: the couch, a gray behemoth we lugged painstakingly from New Haven because our friends loved napping on it; a kitchen cart we bought secondhand and wheeled, clacking loudly, a mile to get home. I began packing. Our mug, our pouf, our Instant Pot became my mug, his pouf, my Instant Pot. I live for these moments, when I am unmade and remade by words, unmade and remade by love. So, our stories diverged, and the world spins madly on. Gouache on watercolor paper, mounted on woodboard. Courtesy of the artist. Subscribe Today. Toward the end of my teens, it began to dawn on me that my face was probably fully formed. That no radical change was forthcoming.
Votre commentaire: