This is Not Your Happy Ending: How The Fetishization of Asian Women Leads to Violence on Our Bodies
Last month, a contestant on the ABC show, “The Bachelor”, used racists jokes to describe her fellow cast member, Sarah Hamrick, who is half Vietnamese. In her now-deleted TikTok post (but thanks to reddit, I was able to find it), she jokes “Sarah, my little Asian persuasion, OK? One thing’s for certain and two things for damn sure, if Clayton ends up with Sarah, at least we know he’s gonna get a happy ending,”.
With the on-going rise of anti-Asian hate rise since the beginning of the pandemic (and possibly even before, just unrecorded/reported), Asian women that have been specifically targeted and preyed upon. Just last month, Christina Yuna Lee a 35-yr old Korean American woman, was followed to her apartment and stabbed 40 times. In January 2022, Michelle Go, a 40-yr old Chinese American woman which pushed in front of a subway train. And last month in Albuquerque, two Asian spa shootings caused the death of two Asian women—a flashback to the Atlanta shooting a year ago in March 2021 where 6 Asian women were killed due to a White man having a “bad day”. Why does this keep happening??
The dehumanizing narratives around Asian women as docile sex servants has led to violence to our bodies in the form of assault, sexual assault, domestic violence, and murder. These narratives are perpetuated by the model minority myth trope that states that all Asians are successful, hard-working, never-complaining, model citizens who have achieved the “American Dream”.
While this stereotype seemed to be a “good stereotype”, and has allowed Asians to navigate spaces that Black and Brown folx may not be able to navigate, it leaves Asians unseen and unheard. Asians were only permitted to navigate White spaces because they were seen as more tolerable and less likely to cause trouble, and able to be instrumentalized. Asians have never been welcomed to the table.
In fact, the “model minority” term was used to rank and pit minorities against each other in order to deny the existence of structural racism. The implication was, “if this group of minorities and immigrants are able to be successful in this country, racism must not exist”.
When the group’s identity is hijacked and weaponized, individuals become invisible and irrelevant to the sociopolitical discourse, marginalized and exposed to harm. This is seen through continual anti-Asian violence that does not get large news media coverage, mental illness being undetected, lack of equitable resources for Asian populations.
And because Asians are seen as never fighting back unless they are Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, individuals who perpetuate these harmful narratives are not held accountable. And when these jokes are questioned or challenged, they are often met with gaslighting comments such as, “it was just a joke” or “you’re being too sensitive”.
Unfortunately, the targeting of and violence towards Asian woman, is not something new to this country. There is a history of racial misogyny since Asian women immigrated to the country. Before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, The Page Act of 1875 restricted Chinese women from immigrating to the U.S. on the basis that these women were sexually immoral and "imported for the purposes of prostitution."
However, if we examine the history of oppression in the United States, the US has a way of criminalizing and scapegoating people of color (converting Native Americans because they were “savages”, slavery because Blacks were inherently subhuman, war on drugs and labeling Black and other minorities as “super predators”, “yellow peril”, and more recently, “kung flu”). Was it that Asian women were actually “sexually immoral”? Or, was that a trope used to not just disguise racism, but to also position the US as the moral saviour of the world? Perhaps the real reason was, that if Chinese women were barred from immigrating, it would not only deter more Chinese men from coming to the states, but that it would ultimately prevent reunification of families and thus, procreation. More Asian bodies meant more “cheap” labor due to Asians being exploited, leading to more job competition with the “hard-working White folks”. Seeing that the Page Act did not succeed in deterring immigration, 7 years later came the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Also, even if there were Asian women who did sex work to survive, why is the blame put on Asian women and not the system of White supremacy and patriarchy? These women came to the US to flee economic chaos in China. They came with nothing. On top of that had to deal with language barriers, xenophobia, as well as patriarchy and misogyny within their own culture. Perhaps they were left with no other choice but to sell their bodies to survive. And maybe some even found it to be a lucrative business as because women were barred from immigrating, men outnumbered women. Whatever it was, it put food on the table.
The violence towards Asian women is multi-fold. It stems from the historical racist beliefs that Asians were “cheap labor”, expendable, exploitable, replaceable. This commodification of Asians dehumanizes us. On top of that, being the “model minority” creates the narrative that Asians are quiet and won’t fight back, which is completely false if you look into Asian American history of resistance (as well as Asians resisting colonization in their own countries). Lastly, being seen as subservient sex objects further compounds the commodification and dehumanization, causing Asian women to be targets to sexual violence and murder.
Thus, we must understand the history of racial misogyny against Asian women in order to dismantle harmful narratives that perpetuate violence towards our bodies. We must hold individuals accountable when they make Asian women the butt of their jokes. We must empower our women to reclaim their voice and take up space, in order to combat systems that continue to subjugate them.
And lastly, no, I am not your “Asian persuasion” barf
