Dear White Guys: Your Asian Fetish is Showing
The issue with misrepresented Asian women in the media
A few weeks ago, I was waiting at the bus stop for the 66 on my commute to university when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to be greeted by a blond guy about five years older than me. My first thought? He’s sort of cute. Then, he opened his mouth, and it all went downhill from there.
“Chinese, Japanese, Korean?”
“Oh, you’re Korean! Annyeonghaseyo!”
“I dated an Asian before… I love Asians”
Darnit! I thought. Those familiar phrases I’ve heard before. This was just another boy with yellow fever.
“Yellow fever” is a term used to describe Caucasian or non-Asian males who are attracted to Asian females with more intensity or frequency than shown for other racial groups. Often referred to as “rice chasers” or “rice lovers”, these males are primarily interested in East Asians, such as Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese and Taiwanese. According to Yale professor Robin Zheng, “racial fetishism” refers to men that are only interested in forming exclusive or near-exclusive sexual relations with people belonging in a specific racial outgroup.
As stated by Brooks and Hebert, the media plays a central role in promoting racial fetishism by shaping our increasingly gendered and racialised media culture through images, symbols, and narratives in film, music, television, radio and other media.
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with having a type and knowing what you’re attracted to. But if the main prerequisite for me to become your potential partner is whether I’m Asian? Well, that’s offensive. The issue with racial fetishism is that such preferences are derived from racial stereotypes of Asian women by Western culture. In regards to sexual fetishism, this is a situation where the object of affection is “an inanimate object or a specific part of a person”. For these “Yellow Fever”ed men who speak to me, they’re speaking to the idea and fantasy that they’ve seen in the media.
Asian fetishism is often brushed off as a harmless compliment. Some people have told me in the past that I should be flattered that I’m their “type”. A study conducted for the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, interviewed men who prefer Asian women. These men typically defended yellow fever by arguing that their preferences for Asian women were based purely on physical attraction, rather than any form of racial generalisations or stereotypes. An example of this is a man who oversimplified his preference for Asian women by comparing it to men who favour a particular hair colour. He said, “Why is it okay, for example, for a man to like and be attracted to blonde girls? Why don’t they have a blonde fetish that is looked down upon?”.
Having a “thing” for Asians isn’t a praise. To these men, being “Asian” is our defining characteristic. They’re putting all Asian women into a box and objectifying them to fulfil their desires and expectations for how we should behave.
The construct of the sexualised Asian woman has been centuries in the making. According to Balaji & Worawongs, Western media has long made associations of Asian females as sexy and exotic, and this assumption often extends to modern relationships. Mainstream media outlets in the United States generally portray Asian women into two paradoxical stereotypes to fulfil the males’ desires. These are the devilish, seductive “Dragon Lady” — like Lucy Liu’s fierce dominatrix character in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ or the submissive, docile doll — the “Lotus Blossom”- like the quiet and obedient outsider Asian woman Cio-Cio San in ‘Madame Butterfly’.
Dragon Lady
Lotus Blossom
Both of these stereotypes are incredibly gendered and reflect a history of white America’s encounter with Asian women of the last one hundred and fifty years. According to Cheng, as mass media popularised the stereotypes of Asian women, the cultural memory of Asian women for Americans solidified, consequently impacting the everyday lives of Asians.
I myself have experienced being put into the stereotype of a ‘Lotus Blossom’ in the media when my Instagram photo was reposted on a “fan page” dedicated to only Asian women. My photo was included in a sea of Asian women posted on the account, alongside several racially-related hashtags including #asianbaby #asiangirl and #cuteasians.
Men being sexually explicit towards women on social media is nothing new. However, it’s different for women of colour, including Asian women, who receive messages with an intense fixation with their race. These creepy-crawly experiences on the internet have led to a Tumblr called “Creepy White Guys”; an anonymous blog that collects and features racially insensitive pick-up lines sent from Caucasian males to Asian women on OkCupid, an online dating site These are some additions to the collection:
What astonishes me in these screenshots is the complete lack of understanding from these men as to why these remarks and thoughts are wrong. I cannot comprehend what a man is thinking when he says things like he favours Asian women as they are “docile and submissive and respectful to a man”. Are you really trying to impress me?!
Sure, Asian representation is improving in contemporary popular media. As explained by Helen Yang, Social media has created the affordances needed to initiate social reform and raise cultural awareness by allowing users to share ideas and promote their self-expression amongst various communities. This is exemplified by #BeingAsian, a popular hashtag on Twitter which created a space for Asians to share their own negative experiences with racial fetishism in everyday life.
The past two years has also seen an increase in Asian and Asian-American representation in pop culture, most notably with the release of “Crazy Rich Asians”, “Bao”, “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “Searching”. These are milestones definitely worth celebrating. However, Asian representation needs more than a “moment” in the media, and Asian characters need to be portrayed with more depth and substance instead of falling into the stereotype of the delicate Lotus Blossom or the devious Dragon Lady. After all, new Asian narratives created by Asians grant space to break down these stereotypes that men construct into their preferences.
So please, men with yellow fever, stop fetishisising, exotifying and objectifying us. I’m not your geisha, lotus flower or China doll. And next time you have the urge to tell me about your Asian ex-girlfriends or speak a language you’ve assumed is mine in some pick-up line — don’t.
