8
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