Or not. Let me tell you, dear reader, that Asian Party Girls IV is not much of a film. And I won’t be adding parts I, II or III to my Netflix queue either. I left the party girls in the VCR expecting that Omar would find them and know my humiliation. I have no problem with, as my friend Trey puts it, letting a man have his “me time”. The most troubling aspect was the knowledge that I had been intimately acquainted with Omar’s porn before I had ever seen any of it. It wasn’t until late in adult life, recently, that I realize how good sex can be and how little it resembles Joey Silvera’s big-ass party. Men who use porn to inform their sex lives have an inadequate understanding of women. They’re bad lovers. But at the time, I was less bothered that my partner refracted life through the distorted lens of porn than fact that it was a particular kind of fetish porn, which was an affront to both my gender and my ethnicity.
Although I am not alone in this view, not all Asian American women regard Asian fetishes with the same level of hostility. To some, it is simply an extreme form of appreciation; it’s positive. But the issue, as with anything involving race, is far more complicated than personal preference.
Years ago, I attended a weeklong destination wedding in southern France. After one evening of free-flowing regional wine, I overheard two non-Asian men, friends of the groom, carry on a conversation about how “Asian girls are so hot!” inspired, no doubt, by several strikingly beautiful women in the party including Lea, the bride. I also did notice that Lea had some attractive girlfriends. But, because it would have been perfectly natural for Lea to make friends from similar ethnic and social situations and because I know many common-looking Asian American women, I noted only the particularity of the instance, whereas the two groomsmen used the twenty-or-so sampling of wedding guests as a basis to stereotype all women of Asian descent. They expressed desire for these women, not as individuals, but as hyper-sexualized things.
I don’t know exactly when I first noticed the inversion in the relationship between race and beauty. Growing up in a homogenous suburban community, my Asian features were always perceived defects—so much so that I was deformed, alien, and asexual. On my first week in Grade 2 at Northside Elementary School, I was so conscious of my own difference that I was grateful that anyone should choose to sit by my Arts & Crafts workstation. I smiled at Delia, who sat to my left. She responded in a sing-song chant: “You chineeee, you ugleeeee!” Allison, on my right, only laughed. She swung her legs, two thick white turnips dangling over the side of her work stool, to kick me for good measure. You chineeee, you ugleeeee! Mr. Foster did not intervene—perhaps too busy making “African” masks from Chinette paper plates. You chineeee, you ugleeeee! I was quiet. They wanted me to cry. I didn’t. I just sat very very still and held it in. Because it was true. I am Chinese. I am ugly.
This is not a story of victimization. It is an illustration of the most obvious and simplest kind of racism at the hands of two unthinking seven-year olds. We can easily condemn their actions because racism is most recognizable in the guise of hatred, violence, and slurs. But, racism does not become acceptable in the guise of fetishes and sexual stereotyping. It is just as menacing when grown men leer at me on the street, with their konichi-wa’s and anyang-ha-seo’s. I don’t speak Japanese or Korean, but I would happily learn to say “Your Mother” or its idiomatic equivalent in either language. I have just as much resentment towards the two groomsmen who, even as the least and dorkiest among us, speak from a position of sexual and cultural entitlement—like those American tourists who, realizing the value of the U.S. $ to the RMB, expect to buy everything on the cheap. Omar was the one that I let in, making his betrayal the most damaging. Hatred and fetishes are two stalks growing from the same root; they are aggressive forms of dehumanization.
I am ugly. I am beautiful. It makes no difference. If we say that it does matter, then we have to answer the question: Says who? The arbiters of beauty have the privilege to construct the perceptions and realities of others. This is an extraordinary power. I certainly do not possess it nor do I accord it to Delia or some Asian fetishist. Consider:
The beauty myth tells a story: The quality called ‘beauty’ objectively and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it. This embodiment is an imperative for women and not for men, which situation is necessary and natural because it is biological, sexual and evolutionary…The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power. (Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth)Let’s assume that by men’s institutional power we assume that it is white men’s institutional power. Call me wild and crazy. I do not rejoice that my Asian background, former cultural defects, have become a popular inspiration for sexual perversion. Aspirants to this exoticized notion of beauty are, in Bell Hooks’s words, “siblings fighting for the approval of ‘white parents’ whose attention we now have.” Sexual desire is not love. It is not respect. It is not necessarily a positive trait. It is the urge to control and possess. Fetishes are merely a twisted form of this.
Perhaps, dear reader, that all this seems like an overreaction. After all, your garden-variety Asian fetishist doesn’t mean any harm1. They’re not exactly the face of repressive white institutional power. In fact, they’re often pathetic and socially awkward. You know the type. Those guys who, as undergrads, would be the same faces auditing Intro to Modern Chinese, Asian American History, Asian American Literature, Japanese Anthropology, Ancient Chinese Philosophy, etc. They show up at AASA meetings or mixers where there would be high concentrations of Asian Americans. They try to impress females on their skills in Tae Kwon Do, their love of Dim Sum, or their fascination with The Pillow Book. They do all this and brag about how many APIA (Asian Pacific Islander American) friends they have in an effort to convince you, a Taiwanese American girl, that they belong there. The problem is: they have no clue where ‘there’ is. The Asian fetishist construes diverse national groups as a single monolithic ‘Asian’ culture—a fallacy since ‘Asian American’ is a balkanized political classification so broad that includes three different subcontinents. (Of course, the pathology is different for the cruder less-educated fetishists: “Hey, there sexy China doll; Ho Chi Minh City, here I come!” Ask Waldorf how she feels about that one.)
I was recently in online communication with a young man who exhibited the textbook symptoms of Asian fetish. Although I felt my suspicions grow with each East Asian reference—to Heian, Tae Kwon Do, vacations to Seoul, Murakami, Wu Xia, edamame, and Buddhist vegetarianism—I held my tongue. But then he referred to himself as an “Egg”. That’s right: Egg. As in the inverse of “Twinkie” (the Asian equivalent to the hateful racial term “Oreo”). An Egg is white on the outside and yellow on the inside. So I asked him, “Excuse me, but I have to ask. Do you have an Asian fetish?”
It was a simple question wrapped around an accusation. Egbert’s response read like a Asian American Studies textbook. Frank Chin this. Fred Korematsu that. Apparently, all the classes he took at Berkeley really paid off. Blah-ba-tee blah. He then informed me that racism and discrimination against Asian Americans still exist. Oh, indeed? Do tell. Imagine my astonishment at his presumption, explaining to me the hardships of the Asian American experience. It is kind of like having some guy tell me what it is like being a woman. Then, Egbert defended his Egg status: (1) How dare I question him, (2) His thousands of APIA brothers and sisters call him an Egg, and (3) Everyone has a right to choose his own ethnic identity as he please. And that’s where he showed himself as the entitled white man that he is. He could hardly expect to make a racially-charged comment without inviting response. What his APIA friends call him is irrelevant to my views on the hateful term. And, ask anyone of color whether he or she can choose to be anything other than they are.
Sure, fetish is a rude term. But, I’d think that if someone asked me “Are you an asshole?”, my first inclination would be to find out what assholey qualities inspired this question and not list a bazillion reasons why I’m not an asshole—that is, unless I knew I was an asshole. But, the Egbert situation poses a complicated question: When does distaste of Asian fetishes become an insular racist response? Egbert levied an implicit charge that by my standards all white males are suspected fetishists. This caused me to reexamine some of my more strongly held ideas on fetishes. Extreme reactions of the targeted fetish groups often devolve to primitive notions of race and intolerance of interracial relationships. This is as odious as the fetish that inspires it. But I worry that Egbert may be unwittingly correct—that I am allowing my negative experiences with Omar to tar all future relationships with the brush of race.
These past two months, I’ve been seeing someone who I like very much. He is white. I know he doesn’t have a fetish. But I am afraid of this attachment, how vulnerable I feel. So, I do pause for a split second, uncomfortable, every time he makes a Japanese reference. My heart stops until I recognize that he’s drawing upon his own experience, having lived in Japan for six years, and not because he thinks I should identify with anything Asian. I cringe when his close friend pays me compliment over my good English, to which I thank his friend with subtle irony and explain that “I have been speaking it since 1980.” But, I can’t punish him for his friend’s gaffe, especially when he immediately informs his friend that I am a talented writer. I love him for that. On the street, I do notice the sidelong looks from Asian American passers-by—glares that communicate “traitor!” Am I just imagining it? I just cling to him tighter, comforted by his scent.
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Note: 1This is based on my own experience. From an April 2005 YDN article, apparently, incidents on college campuses illustrate how fetishes are much more pernicious.
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