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Thursday, July 30, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
MICHIGAN IN COLOR

Is it love or Asian fetish?

“Look, I’m a tall guy; I’m just attracted to 
small, cute girls. They happen to be Asian, 
but I don’t have yellow fever.” 
The friend I made in the beginning of the 
school year was trying to explain how he — 
a white male — did not have an Asian fetish, 
but he was doing a poor job at that. 
Later on, I learned he was a dominant and 
masochist when he overshared his sex life 
and announced his BDSM test results to me 
and a few other friends. He liked the power 
dynamic between him and his petite Asian 
girlfriend. He was also an avid fan of Asian 
porn. Small and cute were the adjectives he 
used to describe his type, but in hindsight, I 
think they were synonymous with submis-
sive and docile. To me, he has yellow fever.
The term “yellow fever” originates from 
the afterword to the 1988 play M. Butterfly by 
David Henry Hwang, who uses it to describe 
white men who have a fetish towards east 
Asian women. Similar to “jungle fever,” or 
having a fetish towards Black women, it 
holds a derogatory connotation. The attrac-
tion towards a person of color is not wrong 
or a problem, but a fetish rather insinuates 
the attraction to something that one should 
not like, and are therefore wrong or ill for 
indulging in it. The term has also broadened 
into a label for men with hypersexualized 
fantasies of getting romantically involved 
with stereotypical subservient Asian women 
exclusively or near exclusively. 
This submissive Asian woman trope is 
manifested across pop culture and media. 
Asian women are underrepresented in this 
sector, but when they are featured, their 
roles are often limited to either the innocent 
and dainty Asian or the bold and rebellious 
Asian with a hair streak — a failed attempt 
at subverting the former trope and even 
a reinforcement of that exact stereotype. 
The character Lara Jean Song-Covey in the 
movie “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” is 
one depiction of the shy Asian girl commonly 
found in many other films, shows and novels. 

To students taking Arabic 
tojointheCIA,FBIorthe 
military

VICTORIA MINKA
MiC Staff Writer

Graphic by Hibah Chughtai

Since arriving at the University of Michi-
gan, I have taken Arabic language classes 
every single semester. As a rising junior, I 
have grown to deeply love the language and 
the cultural history that informs it. If the 
pandemic permits, I am planning to study 
abroad this upcoming summer to improve 
my skills and immerse myself in an Arabic-
speaking community. However, there has 
been an omnipresent and increasingly dis-
turbing trend throughout my semesters of 
taking Arabic. In my classes, there has almost 
always been a student (often a cis white man) 
who is taking Arabic because they want 
to join the CIA, the FBI or the military in 
the future. While I understand the draw of 
learning a language to improve potential 
hireability, the fact that these institutions 
have directly harmed Arab communities for 
decades is an alarming truth. Taking Arabic 
to make yourself more valuable to a system 
which intensely surveils Arab communities 
in the United States and continues to back 
states who commit crimes against human-
ity against Arabic-speaking people — read 
Israel and Palestine — demonstrates a fright-
ening level of apathy. Then to learn Arabic 
while also continuing to hold prejudices and 
negative stereotypes about Arabic-speaking 
people shows they will perpetuate the cur-
rent systems of “enhanced interrogation” 
and turning a blind eye. 
Even more concerning is their naivety 
when declaring their pride in such a career 
goal to the students, faculty and staff around 
them. Many of our peers are students who 
identify as being of Arab or Middle East 
North African descent. As a student who 
doesn’t identify as Arab or MENA, I am 
made uncomfortable by their presence, and 
while I don’t speak for those who do, I can’t 

imagine what it is like for my classmates It 
has almost become a joke in our classes, to 
guess who the future FBI or CIA employee 
is. This normalization means this is an issue 
which absolutely needs to be addressed. 
Learning a language to extract information, 
torture and continue decades of harm seems 
like an intense bastardization of the reason 
for learning languages in the first place. 
What makes it even more important to have 
this conversation about Arabic is how these 
communities are treated and stereotyped in 
the United States. 
I will now speak directly to you — you who 
is taking Arabic to join the CIA, the FBI, the 
military or something equally damaging. 
First, it’s not too late to change. To learn. To 
be better. Educate yourself not only about the 
Arabic language, but also about the people 
and the culture that it comes from. Reevalu-
ate how and why your use of this language 
could bring harm. How we outsiders — as 
non-Arab or MENA identifying Americans 
— need to hold ourselves accountable and 
intently reflect to see if we’re really living up 
to the best we can be. We need to question if 
we’re being revolutionary in our learning. If 
we’re learning for the sake of growth rather 
than destruction. I know this is a hard truth 
and giving up what could be a lifelong dream 
is terrifying and disorienting. I raise the 
point that if your dream brings harm to those 
around you, was it the right dream to have 
in the first place? I believe firmly in never 
isolating people in their worst moments or 
in their deepest ignorance. This is a call to 
action, to reevaluate how you show up in our 
classes and where we should or should not 
take up space. We are privileged in how we 
are able to learn Arabic without being direct-
ly impacted by all of the cultural...

Read more at michigandaily.com

One department with a high demand 
for Asian women, however, is the adult 
entertainment industry. The top two most 
searched terms on Pornhub in 2019 were 
Japanese and hentai, which is sexually 
explicit Japanese anime or manga. Not far 
below are Korean and Asian, ranked fifth 
and sixth, respectively. Yet, the representa-
tion of Asian women in pornography still 
lacks diversity and upholds the aforemen-
tioned stereotypes to a highly sexualized 
degree. They are infantilized and dominat-
ed, all while putting up a smile. Somehow, 
the model minority myth follows through in 
pornos, too. Our stereotypically compliant 
and obedient demeanor — which they cre-
ated — is what makes others accept Asians 
more than other races in the real world and 
in adult entertainment. Given the lack of 
diverse Asian characters and the abundance 
of the same and typically sexualized arche-
types in Hollywood and American media, 
it comes to no surprise we are fetishized by 
Westerners. 
As a Chinese-American female, it’s off 
putting to see non-Asian men lewdly com-
ment about our ethnicity or race as a means 
to pursue Asian women. It is not flattering 
to know the selling point of our attractive-
ness is the misperception of how subservient 
and exotic the women of our race are. Being 
categorized as “oriental,” “lotus flower,” 
“delicate” and “China doll” is far from a com-
pliment and more of an oversexualized deg-
radation of our ethnicity or race. Rather than 
approaching Asian women with sentiments 
of exoticism, understand we are not foreign 
creatures without an ounce of self-will who 
are in dire need of a strong non-Asian man 
to colonize our bodies. Many of us were born 
and raised in America and consume Western 
culture; we are capable of holding intersec-
tional feminist beliefs as much as the non-
conformist American women who these men 
are so afraid of.

Read more at michigandaily.com

JENNY CHONG
MiC Staff Writer

Graphic by Hibah Chughtai

