DOUBLE A: I'm A Person, Not A Stereotype

He told me that he bet I followed all the rules and was “a quiet girl.” One date with him, he said, would change that all.

Class ended early, because of one of those “used-to-be-rare-but-now-rather-common” minimum schooldays, and I was, as per my routine, taking the subway to my father’s office. I had gotten off the Red Line, at the Hollywood and Vine stop in LA, with my earbuds in. It was when I reached the Starbucks at the corner of the street, when “he” approached me.

In his New York baseball cap that haphazardly covered his receding hairline, “he,” a middle aged white man, beelined his way towards me though a thick crowd of tourists. He stopped in front of me, first commenting on how my hair looked so “Asian” (I had a bun with bangs). He then asked me about my “accent” (I was born and raised in Los Angeles). And in what I can only assume as an attempt to get to know me more, he asked me questions about what I thought I wanted to do in the future. When I responded, he questioned whether that was my decision or my parents’.

It was clear to me, even when I was fifteen years old, that I was one big stereotype to him.

My experience was both eye opening and repulsive — but the the harsh reality is that my experience is not uncommon for Asian women. For example, a 2014 a New York Times article by journalist Katrin Bennhold profiled Julien Blanc and his misogynistic and racist presentation on how to “pick up” women in Tokyo.

Originally from California, Blanc works as a “pick-up artist,” teaching others how to pick up women for sexual pleasures. And in his latest “presentation” in Tokyo,when discussing how to pick up women in Tokyo specifically, Blanc suggests forcefully grabbing women, which sometimes includes “casually pulling their heads towards the crotch.”  And it is in this “presentation” that Blanc is recorded saying: “if [one is] a white male, [one] could do anything,” normalizing the sexual assault against Asian women.

Of course, this is not just a random occurrence — East Asian women are often eroticized, objectified, and designated as “exotic” in Western culture and, in turn, arguably has created the phenomenon we know today as “Yellow Fever.”

It is important to qualify that interracial relationships are not to be frowned upon and prominent YouTuber Anna Akana does an excellent job of distinguishing between that and “Yellow Fever” in her video “Why Guys Like Asian Girls.”Akana defines “Yellow Fever” as “when the only prerequisite for [one] to be a potential partner is the color of [one’s] skin.” While Akana describes it in such a way that does not describe a “perpetrator,” it is typically in reference to white males who seek to (inappropriately) pursue romantic and sexual relationships with Asian women.

This reality of white men sexually predating Asian women is one that unfortunately goes by unnoticed. In fact, even in my experiences within the UCSD community, the only people who really understood what I meant by “Yellow Fever” seemed to be Asian women. While one non-Asian student said that she rarely witnessed “Yellow Fever,” another Asian student was able to describe several disturbing experiences with men who have had “Yellow Fever.”

One student articulated that her experiences with “Yellow Fever” have made it seem as though dating and Asian woman was a phase. To her, it was specifically as though Asian women were “social experiments,” and she was even able to cite a personal experience where a good friend of hers said that he wanted to date an Asian, “just to see what it was like.”

With these thoughts in mind, in the coming weeks I’d like to continue discussing intersectionality in terms of both being an Asian American and a woman. As the aforementioned types of experiences grow for Asian American women across the nation, and Asian women globally it becomes more and more pertinent to discuss these thoughts for what they are: problems we need to to stop treating as normal.

Double A is a recurring column on yellow fever, the Asian American experience, and everything in-between.