Being an Asian woman means being figuratively chopped up and reduced to a body part.
I first learned about this in seventh grade when a boy in my class told me, completely out of the blue, that I had “lips that were good at sucking dick.” I was 12 years old at the time and wasn’t used to receiving that kind of attention from anyone, let alone the opposite sex. I was excited by that statement.
Before hormones started taking a toll on my body, I was living a low profile life. As one of only two non-white kids in my grade and the only Chinese-Canadian, I felt free not to be noticed. From an early age, I realized that being too different from others made me too remarkable. It was easier to disappear into the wall and out of sight. After all, being noticed means asking for comments on how different I am.
But in that moment, when someone complimented my lips and the specific things I could do with them, I felt the elation of being noticed and feeling beautiful for the first time. That’s when I realized that my body – my sexuality – could be my superpower.
As the years passed, my breasts grew perkier and my hips began to curve, the comments about my body parts only intensified.
A boy once approached me on the beach and asked me the color and shape of my nipples before asking if I wanted to touch his penis.
Or the time my friend came home for Christmas after her first semester of college and told me that she had slept with her “first Asian” and that the rumors about our tight vaginas were true. “I’m sure you’re the same,” he said, putting a new spin on the racist stereotype that “all Asians look alike.”
Those unsolicited comments about my Asian body weren’t necessarily sexual in nature either. Once, after gym class in elementary school, girls would crowd around me in the locker room and try to touch my hair. “Wow, that’s really thick,” someone said. “It’s like a horse.” I smiled and let them pet me. I flinched only slightly when someone pulled too hard as they ran their fingers through my long hair.
I’ve learned to suppress how embarrassing and trivial these comments make me feel. “Rachel, what’s wrong?” I think to myself. “This is what it feels like to be wanted.” In my mind, I was given the choice to stay hidden and invisible, or to be wanted and desired, and I chose the latter every time. .
After years of fetishization and objectification, at some point I had internalized the belief that this is what it meant to be an Asian woman. It was meant to be a source of desire and ridicule at the same time. While some of you may have stopped believing the lie you heard as a child that “he hurts you because he likes you,” I believe that racial abuse is a way of getting attention and affection, especially from white men. I told myself that this was the price I had to pay.
Eventually, I became filled with self-loathing, my self-worth became catastrophically low, and I began to tell myself that being wanted based on my race and looks was enough. Who I was as a person didn’t really matter. To be honest, I don’t think I even knew who I was at the time. I was a blank slate to become what everyone around me wanted me to be.
I mean, when that boy approached me on the beach to ask about my nipples, I laughed it off. That meant I ended up having a secret affair with a friend who thought all Asian vaginas felt the same way.
And after that, it meant staying in a six-year relationship with a man who made me feel embarrassed about my ethnicity at every turn. This relationship consisted of him refusing to eat Chinese food unless he was “westernized,” his silence whenever his father called Asians “bread-faced,” and his “joking” at me. It was characterized by its insistence that we learn how.
I finally ended the relationship with him after one fight when he told me how uncomfortable he was every time I brought up the subject of race. And because he and his friends found racist jokes funny, I started talking about race a lot.
I know that stories like mine are not particularly new or shocking, especially for my Asian American sisters. of sexual racism And the microaggressions I’ve faced in my life are no different from so many microaggressions. endure every day. In fact, the painful and dehumanizing belief that we as humans are more important than our body parts, which I learned at the age of 12, is something that Asian diaspora women directly or indirectly This is a belief that I am constantly learning.
we learn it from Harmful stereotypes about Asian women in popular culture we are depicted Even if we are shown, we are portrayed as either meek and submissive “China Dolls” or hypersexual and deceitful “Dragon Ladies”. Such depictions are the result of centuries of Western imperialism and violent conquest, all of which contribute to today’s reality in which men feel entitled to possess Asian women’s bodies. I am.
Some, like my ex-boyfriend, may think this is “no big deal” and argue that being fetishized by the white patriarchal gaze is an empowering privilege. . I’m ashamed to say that I once believed this lie too.
But now I know better. These seemingly “harmless” comments and stereotypes are outright acts of violence. The point is to dehumanize Asian women and our bodies in order to make them easier to abuse, exploit, and degrade. Our dehumanization makes us more susceptible to being seen as a “temptation” shoot down with a gun and “eliminate”. It makes us more vulnerable to domestic violence and indiscriminate violence on the streetstoo.
