Feeling beautiful has always been a challenging aspect of my childhood and still is. When I was 10, I was transplanted from a world where everywhere I looked, people had my nose, my eyes, my skin to a world where everyone was white. Immediately, I believed I wasn’t beautiful. The sad part was I was only 10 years old when the process began. At my public school in suburban New Jersey, almost everyone was white. I saw beauty as thin, blonde, with blue eyes. I equated beauty with whiteness. Even at age 10, I was worried that my differences made boys not like me in the same way they liked a white girl. There was nothing in the media for me to look up to either. There was no show on Nickelodeon or Disney Channel that featured an Asian girl who I could relate to, who I could find inspiration in. All I saw were girls that resembled the white girls in my classes. I wanted to be one of them. I hated being different.
As I grew older, I slowly began to notice that being an Asian woman had other connotations as well. Before, I just didn’t want to be the nerdy, ugly Asian girl. Now, I realized that Asian women were considered sexy and exotic. But, I also realized that those were the only roles Asian women could take on. Either, her looks were degraded as being less desirable than white features or her looks were hyper-sexualized and exoticized. I can already hear some men lashing out saying “what’s so wrong if I find Asian women to be beautiful? Isn’t that a compliment?” As an Asian woman, I can attest that there is nothing worse than feeling like someone’s attraction stems from their curiosity for being with an “exotic” person. Being fetishized is being degraded to just your sexuality. Asian fetishes are eerily connected to connotations of domination and colonization. That goes for all white folks who fetishize people of color. To desire someone purely based on their skin color is no more admirable than to hate someone purely based on their skin color.
I wanted to be desired but not fetishized. As I grew older, I became more confident in my own beauty. I finally saw my eyes, nose and hair as being beautiful, but the desire I received from boys often times made me uncomfortable. I remember the summer after my senior year of high school, I was at a party with my then boyfriend. One of his friends went up to him drunkenly and said “Is that your girlfriend? Good work man! she’s not only hot but she’s Asian so her pussy must be really tight.” My boyfriend told me about the incident. Initially, my reaction was to laugh it off, but I soon grew uncomfortable. How could someone take one look at me and immediately think “her pussy must be really tight”. I felt so small. It was a a creepy generalization about the sexuality of Asian women that sounded like a compliment. I felt like my pussy was this object to be leered at by the men who fetishized me. This is an experience that all people of color can relate to, especially women of color. It was such a brief moment, but it has not left my mind.
The Asian woman’s body has been colonized in the US media. in Hollywood and in pornography alike, Asian women are represented as docile, dominated and exotic beings. They’re often the lovers, the counterparts, the dominions of white men. It’s not only a fetishization but also an attempt to align being Asian with whiteness, or at least with being better than other minorities. I do not condone my body, my sexuality to be something that’s conquered and objectified. I am not a fetish. I am a person of color, and I do not desire to be aligned with whiteness. We are not undesirable because of our distinct features. We are not sex objects either because of our distinct features. Our bodies are ours and not tools of sexual gratification for others.