What Does It Mean to Live in an Asian Female Body in America?

How I've lived under covert racism without realizing it

I never imagined that I would write about this subject. As an Asian woman with a body that doesn’t conform to the American standard of sexy, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to escape the common stereotype of the Asian woman as a sex object, no matter how much I tried to deny it.

I refused to associate myself with such stereotypes. After all, I don’t work in a spa or massage parlor — places in the United States that are often associated with tagged-on sex services.

So, when six Asian women were murdered at three spas and a massage parlor in the Atlanta, Georgia area during the height of the pandemic, I read the news with a sense of horror and detachment. I didn’t feel that these women’s tragic fate was connected with mine in any way. I didn’t realize then, that this horrible crime of injustice and cruelty was deeply rooted in an arcane but largely unchallenged fetischism of Asian women — one that I can’t escape.

The Objectification of Asian Women in the U.S.: A Brief History

The very first Chinese woman who landed in America, Afong Moy, was treated as a curioso object on display inside the home of a certain Captain Benjamin Obear in New York, who used her as part of an exhibition of Chinese goods he was trying to sell to the American public. Visitors paid 50 cents to see her, much the same way people pay to enter a zoo to see exotic animals. As such, “Afong was a commodity like the objects arranged around her. Her visitors did not see her as entirely human, and this resulted in a general attitude of disrespect.” ¹

That objectification set the tone for covert racism against Asian women in the nearly 200 years that followed.

The Page Act of 1875, which preceded the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, was the first restrictive federal immigration law in the United States. Although it sought to ban immigrants who arrived on the basis of forced labor, as in coolies (for men) and prostitutes (for women), effective enforcement was heavily focused on only the female East Asian immigrants.

It was sad enough that Chinese women were imported as slaves to “serve the needs” of the Chinese male coolies working at the California gold mines because these men couldn’t afford to send for their wives back home. The reputation of Chinese women was further tarnished as they were seen as a threat to the monogamy culture in America. Immigration officials routinely suspected all Chinese immigrant women of being potential prostitutes up until 1943, when the Chinese Exclusion Act ended. ²

Offshore, U.S. soldiers deployed to Asia in the Second World War and the subsequent wars that took place in Korea and Vietnam resulted in the phenomenon of Asian war brides as well as a whole subculture of women “ready and willing” to serve American G.I.s when they were on R&R leaves in Thailand and Vietnam. For more details, I encourage you to check out this article, “White Sexual Imperialism: ‘Me Love You Long Time” published by AsAmNews.³

As the article aptly points out, popular culture has perpetuated the stereotype that “the Asian woman’s role is to sexually serve the man. She is to be docile, unassuming, exotic and demure — yet wildly sexual and uninhibited.” We can see this in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” (1987). We can also see this in James Bond movies like “You Only Live Twice” (1967), to name just a few (although, the Hong Kong woman in the said James Bond movie turned out to be lethal!).

Fast forward to the early 2000s, a new wave of Chinese migrant workers — mostly in their 30s and 40s with children to support back home — came to the United States and started working in illicit massage parlors.⁴ These are the spas where a not-so-professional massage often leads to a “happy ending.” Some of these women chose to work voluntarily, but a great number of them were forced into it as part of the sex/labor trafficking business. Because of their sheer number, Chinese women have come to be associated with the illicit massage industry and automatically assumed to be sex workers, especially in towns and cities where there are few Asian faces, like mine.

One day, I went into an auto repair shop. The owner asked me, with a sly smile, if I was one of the staffers at the nail salon and spa next doors. Because most of the nail salons and spas are run by the Chinese, I immediately knew what he was thinking about. It made me feel both enraged and embarrassed.

White Sexual Imperialism

The spread of sexist and racist stereotypes of Asian women has created a new form of imperialism, White Sexual Imperialism. A whole class of Western (mostly white) men known as “sex-pats” have sprouted up in the last few decades. Sex-pats are expats from Western countries seeking free or cheap sex while living overseas. They take advantage of women in the poorer parts of Asia, such as Thailand, and play an important role in the rise of sex tourism there.

Most of them are older men in their 60s and beyond, seeking company among women half their age or even younger. In their mind, the women of their age are no longer sexually attractive to them. In reality, they are delusional about their own aging. On top of that, many of the women of their own generation back home no longer want to put up with their BS. These men remembered the sex appeal of Southeast Asian women via the stereotypes they were exposed to throughout their life, and felt entitled to use their white male power to take advantage of the women who offered themselves in exchange for money and security.

The subject of sex-pats in Thailand is a painful one to write about, but I want to add some nuance here based on my personal experience as a victim of this whole power play.

You see, my white, American ex-partner started making trips to Thailand during the pandemic using different excuses. One such excuse was to find his life purpose after he lost his job. After an initial solo trip, he went back again and again to study to become an English teacher and then to teach grade school.

On the surface, he was doing something meaningful that could help the poor kids out there. His real purpose, as it turned out, was to engage in sexual escapism and eventually, to retire in the land of milk and honey, where there would be an endless supply of local women ready and willing to fulfill his romantic and sexual fantasies and to boost his dwindling self-esteem as he aged — even as he was supposed to be in a monogamous relationship with me.

As I’m writing this with relative calm, it might be hard for you to imagine the level of rage, anger and pain that tore my soul apart when I found out about his “exotic affairs,” followed by excruciating details of the depth of his deception in planning and engaging in his sexual escapés.

During the past three years when these secrets unfolded, I’ve come to learn a great deal about what lies behind the sex-pat phenomenon. It’s a huge topic on which I may devote another essay in the future. Suffice it to say that I draw a clear line between myself and the Asian women who wreck marriages, partnerships and families — knowingly and unknowingly.

Yet, the reality of who I am in the eyes of Western men — including the one whom I loved with all my heart and dedication — came crashing down last week during a walk in my local park. The event, which I will recount below, showed me that in the gaze of some Western men, I am actually no different from the women I vehemently disassociate myself from.

A Racist Cat Call in the Park

On a beautiful summer afternoon, I was enjoying the breeze under the shade of a big oak tree in my local park. I looked around carefully. The stalker who had been stalking me for over a year was nowhere in sight. I let out a sigh of relief, silently thanking the police officer who responded to my complaint and disseminated the picture of the stalker to his team and deployed a patrol in the area. Still, I remained hypervigilant.

As I emerged from the shade of the tree, a black man passed by and said, “Hello! Can I walk with you?” I was taken by surprise, and shook my head. As I turned away from him, he continued, “Can you cook Chinese food?”

WTF? It felt really icky to me, and the rest of my day was ruined.

Why would a stranger ask if you could cook the type of meal that they assume belongs to your ethnic culture? Tell me in the comment below!

My mind went 100 miles an hour in search of an answer. It quickly came to the conclusion that the man saw the “domestic value” of me — assuming an Asian/Chinese woman to be submissive and excellent in performing the role of a housewife.

Having served as a “wife appliance”⁵ to my ex who cheated on me, I am, with good reason, extremely sensitive about any connotation and assumption that I could be another wife appliance to another man. No way, José!

Then, my mind bridged the gap of understanding in a lightning instant. My ex, who, after reaching a certain age, became exclusively interested in only dating Asian women who are “slim and athletic,” saw me as a festishized sexual object who pleases — no different from how many other Western men see me.

That was the crushing realization. I thought he appreciated me as a whole person, with brains and soul and my own agency and accomplishments. Yet, after just four months of separation, he’s already moved on and started a dating profile in search of his next Asian sex objects. His requirements are the same as what he looked for when I found him on a dating app. “Slim, athletic, kind.” I don’t need to explain the first two. As for the last one, well, it is simply an euphemism of how covert narcissists groom their next romantic interest into someone who would prove her loyalty by being kind and forgiving of his secretive cheating behavior, just as what he had done to me.

So that cat call triggered a whole cascade of emotions in me, making me feel not only extremely unsafe, but also diminished and humiliated.

“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. Are you interested in me because of who I am, or because of the shade of my skin and the Asian face I’m wearing?”⁶

~Jessie Tu

Racism occurs in myriad ways, not just in overt hate speech or violent acts. Covert dehumanization can do as much harm as those overt acts. It fucks with your mind and makes it shameful for you to even speak up against it. Yet if turned a blind eye and accepted by society long enough, it will foment into cruel and horrendous acts, like the murder of the six Asian women in Georgia, and the Asian hate crimes that peaked during the pandemic. Equally hurtful is the “use-and-discard” mentality, filled with the same disrespect that drives patriarchy, that these covertly racist men use against “small and compliant” Asian women.

“It’s a painful effrontery, not a compliment. These guys expect something of us and from us, based on their myth about what Asian women are, and, when we don’t meet those expectations, they have the power to so easily hurt us.”

~ Jessie Tu

And hurt I have been, in the form of mental and emotional abuse, betrayal and discard. It’s time for us Asian women to redefine our identity and paint a full spectrum of nuanced colors — in between the fetischized sex object and the quiet, model minority.

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1. “Life Story: Afong Moy: First-Recorded Chinese Woman in America”: https://wams.nyhistory.org/expansions-and-inequalities/industry-and-immigration/afong-moy/

2. Page Act of 1875: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Act_of_1875

3. “White Sexual Imperialism: ‘Me Love You Long Time’” https://asamnews.com/2013/08/07/white-sexual-imperialism-me-love-you-long-time/

4. “Chinese moms in America’s illicit massage parlors”: https://thechinaproject.com/2020/01/30/chinese-moms-in-americas-illicit-massage-parlors/

5. The term “wife appliance” was coined by Tracy Schorn, a.k.a. the Chump Lady, who wrote “Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life”: https://www.chumplady.com

6. “Because I am small and Asian, I am fetishised by some white men”: https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/because-i-am-small-and-asian-i-am-fetishised-by-some-white-men-20181126-p50ifk.html