“You look like Lucy Liu.”
I didn’t, but the erratic sophomore in my history class wouldn’t drop it. That exchange didn’t cross my mind when news that Christina Yuna Lee had been followed home and stabbed to death in New York first broke into my Twitter feed. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I learned a week later that Lee’s body was found half-naked in her Chinatown apartment.
Despite the disturbing conditions around her death, authorities arraigned Lee’s killer Assamad Nash with the charge of a sexually motivated felony. Notably missing from the indictment was any mention of a racial hate crime. But the implication that racism and sexism are mutually exclusive evils misunderstands the brand of racism that Asian women face in the U.S.
The official response to Lee’s death wasn’t the first misdiagnosis of its kind. Last year Robert Aaron Long traveled to three spas in the Atlanta area and killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women. Long told the police himself that he had a “sexual addiction” and murdered the women in the parlors to eliminate his “temptation.” When Atlanta police produced their indictment, it lacked any reference to a hate crime.
In the months following the shooting in Atlanta, Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition that gathers data on racially-motivated attacks, found that women reported 63.3% of all recorded hate incidents — that’s over twice as often as Asian men. Just this month, Michelle Alyssa Go was pushed into an oncoming Times Square train. Another man assaulted seven Asian women in two hours.
“I didn’t want it to be true,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in panel commemorating the anniversary of the Atlanta shooting, recalling the moment she heard the news. “Yet, I knew deep down that there was a part of me that wasn’t completely surprised, and that was the worst of all of it.”
For many Asian women like Wu and Angie Liou, the executive director of the Vietnamese American Initiative for Development, racist sexually motivated attacks are truly nightmarish — but not new.
“[Long] proclaimed that he targeted massage parlor workers because they were sources of his sex addiction, reinforcing a longstanding stereotype of Asian women as oversexed and dangerous,” Liou said. “All this white perpetrator saw was massage workers, sexualized Asian women indistinguishable from one another.”
What pushed Long to seek out Asian massage parlor workers and Nash to follow Lee home stems from a volatile history between the U.S. and Asian women. “Let’s put it in context,” Liou said. “Physical violence is a symptom, not a root cause.”
The Page Act of 1875 predates the better-known Chinese Exclusion Act of 1883. Unlike the all-inclusive Chinese Exclusion Act, the Page Act specifically prohibited East Asian women from immigrating to the U.S. for “immoral purposes.”
“They thought of Chinese women as all prostitutes,” sociology professor Nancy Wang Yuen told NPR. “It was a way to exclude the Chinese population, and they were successful in enacting it against women because they perceived that — or they constructed that — they carried venereal diseases and actually that they were temptations for white men.”
Then throughout the following century, western war efforts in East Asia set white sexual imperialism in motion. During the Vietnam War, as many as 500,000 Asian women became involved in the sex industry at American GI camp towns. War and rape from the hands of U.S. military men produced the mail-order bride phenomenon, the disproportionate presence of Asian women in pornography, the Asian fetish and lasting sexual violence against Asian women on the home front.
Meanwhile Hollywood was hard at work adapting warzone relationships for the silver screen. Throughout the 20th century, war films featured heroic American soldiers and their villainess counterparts, East Asian women.
“’Madame Butterfly’ (1904) epitomizes the Lotus Blossom trope — feminine, shy, fragile, subservient and sexually submissive. We see the Lotus Blossom in ‘Miss Saigon’ (1989) and ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ (2005),” communication studies professor Stephanie Young told Teen Vogue. “Another popular trope is the Dragon Lady who is cunning and deceitful. She uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation.”
Young pointed to Lucy Liu’s portrayal of the character O-Ren Ishii in “Kill Bill” (2003) as a contemporary iteration of the Dragon Lady. Both film stereotypes recycle imagery of Asian women as slaves, prostitutes and temptresses and memorialize impressions of imperial dominance over East Asia. “It’s now part of society or culture in general, like life imitating art — and imitating kind of an imagined life,” Yuen said.
For an essay in The Cut, Elaine Hsieh Chou began researching the language white men used to describe Asian women. “On sluthate.com, a white man fantasized about raping his half-Japanese teenage daughter, called ‘little geisha fuck doll’ and ‘little neo-colonialist jewel,’” she reported. On another website, a poster asked if he could still be a white nationalist and “fuck Asian women.”
Chou found a blog that outlined 12 commandments for Asian women who are “destined to be slaves to the White man.” The last commandment read: “If an Asian woman becomes old, ugly, out of shape, disfigured or diseased, then she should be divorced, abandoned, sold to someone else or sent back to China or wherever she came from; and the White master can go back to Asia and pick out a new Asian woman to replace her.”
Whether in “Madame Butterfly” or on sluthate.com, the way the U.S. sees Asian women has always been tied by both racism and sexism. Antagonistic representations of Asian women in American culture have repackaged wartime imperialism for those of us on U.S. soil. We have become interchangeable objects of imperialist desire and victims of racist sexual violence. To U.S. men, our desirability — to be fucked and to be killed — comes built-in in our hooded eyes and black hair, as to-blame for our own suffering as Miss Saigon and Lucy Liu.
KARISSA KORMAN 