Fetishized: A Reckoning With Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty

[Pdoggg]

 

In 2020 and 2021, Stop Asian Hate galvanized into a movement, a brief burst of national awareness of the hate crimes that had spiked during the Covid-19 lockdown.

The 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, which resulted in the deaths of eight — six of them Asian women — were carried out by a white man, a sex addict purportedly trying to remove “temptation.” But in the years since, mainstream awareness of both the movement and the crimes it worked to address has largely subsided.

Enter Kaila Yu’s candid and intimate “Fetishized.” This voicey memoir-in-essays probes the roiling intersections of race, gender and sexuality, particularly the phenomenon known as “Yellow Fever,” a term used to describe the way in which Asian women are regarded by the white men who call themselves “Asiaphiles.”

Yu’s debut fuses critique, historical examination and feminist contemplation with an unsparing account of her personal journey. By deliberately shattering her mirror of self-perception, Yu reflects — in the manner of Virginia Woolf’s “looking glasses at odd corners”— on the stereotypes that are the root of the West’s fixation on, and violence toward, Asian women.

The opening chapter, “Daddy,” revisits the Taiwan-born Yu’s youth in Southern California. Tracing her need for acceptance to childhood, Yu recounts feeling invisible and unloved by her emotionally distant father, recalling an episode in which he hugged her brother, but refused to touch her.

Interweaving this story with a close reading of “The Little Mermaid,” Yu deftly highlights film and television’s role in instilling certain notions of female desirability and value in women and girls. “If I couldn’t dazzle,” she writes of both her family’s and their adoptive cultures, “I would remain insignificant and continue to slip through life unnoticed.”

 

Throughout her high school and college years, Yu’s sense of emotional isolation leads her to seek out male validation. Her loneliness is compounded by the scant and often pernicious depictions of Asian women in Western media, particularly in the books and film adaptations of “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “The Joy Luck Club.”

Yu writes honestly about her motivations while making it clear that the world in which she grew up was also ultimately responsible: “I felt the straightest path to empowerment was through courting the white male gaze.”

She undergoes plastic surgery to alter her eyelids and body to fit the Western ideal. She becomes a pinup model and poses for Playboy. She joins Nylon Pink, an all-Asian-American girl band that embraced a hypersexualized image. She endures and survives sexual assault, a video of which was posted online to porn sites for the world to see. She changes her name from Elaine Yang to Kaila Yu to hide the true nature of her work from her family, who judge and condemn her choices.

And as she slides into addiction, Yu’s splitting of herself — an all-too-common consequence of sexual trauma — threatens to become permanent.

But she claws her way out. And as she does, she comes to feel that, over the years, she herself has become an embodied continuation of essentially the same colonial mind-set — now primarily cultural — that led to horrors like the violent exploitation of women in Asia at the hands of American troops after World War II and again during the Vietnam War, when soldiers were sent to recuperate with “comfort women” in places like Tokyo, Manila, Singapore and Bangkok.

Yu begins to examine the implications of her past while illuminating the complexity of individual agency, in the process asking difficult questions. How much can someone be blamed for their choices when those choices are predetermined by one’s culture? Does “choice feminism” really give women a choice at all?

In connecting her personal history to the broader toxicity of Asiaphilism, Yu illustrates how private wounds and insecurities can be exacerbated by sexualized racism and its invisibility. And while some progress has been made in the representation of Asian women in film, television and media, Yu emphasizes that it is still not enough: The constant danger and violence persist. Indeed, the book closes with thechapter“Reckoning,” in which she writes that the 2021 Atlanta shooting “forced me to stare into the face” of the forces that shaped her identity.

This is an unstinting and necessary read, a memoir that sits as a natural companion to Cathy Park Hong’s “Minor Feelings.” Throughout, Yu contends with her own complicity in “perpetrating and mainstreaming” stereotypes for her own gain. And by means of this self-examination, she challenges readers to consider their own responsibility — personal and cultural — in fetishizing Asian women. She holds up a mirror not only to herself, but to the West, its past and present. And what a jaundiced reflection it

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/books/review/fetishized-kaila-yu.html

 

chapter “Reckoning,” in which she writes that the 2021 Atlanta shooting “forced me to stare into the face” of the forces that shaped hidentity.

This is an unstinting and necessary read, a memoir that sits as a natural companion to Cathy Park Hong’s “Minor Feelings.” Throughout, Yu contends with her own complicity in “perpetrating and mainstreaming” stereotypes for her own gain. And by means of this self-examination, she challenges readers to consider their own responsibility — personal and cultural — in fetishizing Asian women. She holds up a mirror not only to herself, but to the West, its past and present. And what a jaundiced reflection it is.

[Laawman]

Well I guess she should consider herself fortunate - most of my UK friends wouldn't even look twice at her because they're not interested in Asians. Even my own mother used to call them 'slant eyed bitches' but then I guess she was a product of the war years and naturally opposed to anything south of the English channel.

If Yu wants to know the meaning of the word fetishization , then she should try growing a dick and becoming a ladyboy.