S04E01 - Yellow Fever

November 24, 2021 Jay Ooi

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S04E01 - Yellow Fever Shoes Off

Transcript

Jay Ooi

The fetishisation of Asian women is something that’s been spoken about a lot recently, especially with the Atlanta shooting where 6 Asian women who worked at spas or massage parlours were killed.

But what’s our history with Asian women in Australia?

Dr Sophie Loy Wilson

We know that many, many Australians experienced their first interaction with Asian peoples on a large scale in second World War.

Jay Ooi

What are the effects of this fetishisation?

Lizzy Hoo

I think it makes you really a bit self-conscious,

Jay Ooi

And what can we do about it?

Timothy Kazuo Steains

I think that if it's there, even if it's to a small extent, it might be something that's worth talking about.

Jay Ooi

Hello, and welcome to Shoes Off, stories about Asian Australian culture. I’m Jay Ooi.

This whole concept of Yellow Fever is something I think we’re all familiar with. East Asian women are quite sought after and fetishised by a lot of men, but what exactly is a fetish? Well, according to the Cambridge dictionary, it’s a sexual interest in an object or a part of the body other than the sexual organs themselves. So an Asian female fetish is a sexual interest in Asian women because of their Asian female-ness, whatever that is.

That’s what we’re going to look at in today’s episode. Now we’ll mainly be talking about the East Asian fetish, and mainly heterosexual attraction, and I know there are more fetishes, and it plays out differently with different genders, but I want to focus in on this one type of attraction today is it has a particular history and formation. Next week, we’ll be looking at the male counterpart and how they’re perceived here.

So what exactly is being fetishised in Asian women? What are these stereotypes?

Jane Park

I've loved following Lucy Liu's career trajectory. I know I'm getting off track, but because I remember when she came out, like not come out, but when she emerged through Ally McBeal, I really hated her character because I felt it was very one dimensional and she really embodied that kind of hyper sexual sort of dominatrixy, cruel, dragon lady stereotype. Anyway, and she's really gotten more nuanced since then, but my point is the dragon lady actually goes all the way back to a literal sort of dragon lady representation embodied by Anna May Wong back as you know probably back in the era of the silent film.

Jay Ooi

That’s Dr Jane Park, senior lecturer in the department of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney, and a Korean American. Now this idea of the dragon lady is something talked quite a lot about, the sort of domineering, mysterious, and sexually alluring Asian woman can be seen in old Hollywood with the characters played by Anna May Wong. And the other stereotype?

Jane Park

That's the dragon lady and then the Lotus blossom, I feel like I'm lecturing, but a great example of the Lotus blossom is...

Jane Park

Miyoshi Umeki. She plays a really cute wife of an Anglo American soldier in postwar, Japan. There are scenes basically she's always smiling. She massages him, she cooks for him and then I'll just give it away because it's a boring film. Anyway, they commit double suicide in this Romeo and Juliet thing because the world isn't ready for interracial romance, blah blah. What's really interesting is when you look at Umeki's career, she started out as a nightclub singer in Japan and then she migrated to the US and became sort of this embodiment of the Lotus blossom.

Jay Ooi

Okay, so the two main stereotypes that you may have heard of, the dragon lady, and the lotus blossom. And these examples are just some of the depictions in pop culture throughout the years. One thesis on deconstructing the Asian Australian experience writes, “Asian women are constructed as perfect partners because they are ‘submissive, passive and servile yet sexual beings’ (Saroca 2002: 7)”

Okay, so Asian women are a bit domineering and sexually alluring, or passive and submissive. What’s the issue with these stereotypes?

Jane Park

The whole thing was stereotyped since... It's not that it's positive or negative.

Jane Park

It's just that it fixes a whole group of people in this case, East Asian women in one group and they can't move. You can think about how that plays out still in the ways that East Asian women and to some extent other South Asian, Southeast Asian women certainly how we get represented and also treated. That's the fetish thing, that's a sexualized thing, but I would also say there's a more general stereotype of Asians as all kind of being sort of, I've written about this kind of being robotic or being the same or being interchangeable and being background. I think that plays really well into kind of white male fantasies in a post... I don't want to say post-feminist, but post-second wave feminist era where white women are seen as becoming increasingly masculine and not docile enough and then Asian women sort of take on that nostalgic uber feminine, somewhat childlike role.

Melissa Ty

I think it's those stereotypes are definitely real in our society. And obviously they've been portrayed in the media so many times. And I think that it's... I think that race as a group, each racial group is also gendered. So Asians as a group are often seen as more feminine, so Asian women are almost double feminine. And that's how I think they are fetishised by men.

Jay Ooi

That’s Melissa Ty, a Chinese-Australian clinical psychologist.

Melissa Ty

I think it's the sense of Asians being maybe more obedient, compliant, and more soft spoken, maybe more shy and reserved as well. So they are often seen as more "feminine" characteristics. While a more masculine characteristic in culture would be ones that are more loud, ones that are more aggressive, controlling, that kind of thing.

Jay Ooi

With these ideas of masculinity and femininity, there’s also this perception of white women becoming more “masculine”, whereas and Asian women are still seen as more “feminine” women. One journal in the Cambridge University Press talks about how “yellow fever may be motivated by an antifeminist backlash in men who wish to return to traditional gender roles supposedly exemplified by the demure, obedient Asian woman”

So these stereotypes are very real, but are they based in any truth?

Jay Ooi

But, there is kind of a different way in the way that some Asian cultures are. Like I know that because of... they are a lot more, I guess family oriented it's more about the collective society and, I guess what I'm asking is, is there actually a bit of truth in this stereotype? I'm not saying stereotype is good, but is there a bit of truth that perhaps Asian women are actually more caring and submissive?

Melissa Ty

I think there is always a bit of truth in stereotypes. The problem is, is when it's generalised too far to a race of people. But those stereotypes come from somewhere. So yes, I think if we are talking about China, for example, and a lot of other Asian cultures, they are patriarchal societies where women were told to be submissive and to put other people before them. So I think that there is definitely truth there.

Jay Ooi

So a lot of Asian cultures are more patriarchal, so there are some cultural factors that lend some truth to this more subservient, feminine Asian woman. And we’ve this stereotype of the more feminine Asian woman in Hollywood, but what about on our own shores? What’s our history with representation of Asian women?

Jay Ooi

Let’s venture back into early Colonial Australia days. So Colonial Australia was obviously under British rule even though the land was never ceded by the Aboriginal people, and during that time, multiculturalism wasn’t really something we as a country celebrated or even aspired to achieve. We had restrictions on Non-white migration, Asians were already seen as the “other”, and there just weren’t that many East Asian women in Australia. So what of the East Asian women who were here at that time?

Dr Sophie Loy Wilson

There were a number of Chinese women that came out both as wives of Chinese men and also as maidservants in either European or Chinese families. Again, that's being well documented. A lot of Australians, European and Anglo European settlers would have interacted with Chinese women that way.

Jay Ooi

That’s Dr Sophie Loy Wilson from the University of Sydney.

Dr Sophie Loy Wilson

I teach and research on Chinese Australian history. I've got a long standing interest in the history of immigration, and a long standing interest in history of race relations in this country.

We have a lot of stories in the newspapers. For example, in Sydney, the illustrated Sydney news talks about Chinese wives being hidden behind curtains in Chinese businesses. These mysterious figures. Now, you got to remember that these women were often for two reasons, staying at home. One was the threat of racial violence, which was very, very real, and two, was having your feet bound. Often less mobile.

Dr Sophie Loy Wilson

We know this from a lot of oral histories that even Chinese women that were brought out to regional areas such as Wellington, by the 1920s still had their feet bound, which meant they were much less mobile, so you were typically going to see them less. But there was a real attitude of oriental mystique or orientalist mystique that surrounded these Chinese women. Also, they were so rare. There were so few of them that they became deeply exotic. A focus of Anglo fascination, both in the press and just in everyday life. This was just an aspect of how many Europeans related to Chinese women. This is in sharp contrast to the US. In San Francisco, New York, you had massive Chinatown. It's a lot bigger. You had a lot of wealth, more wealth in those areas, so you had a lot of Chinese men bringing out women as wives, as servants, as workers.

Dr Sophie Loy Wilson

Also, you had a prostitution ring in San Francisco, for example, which brought out a lot of Chinese women. In the same way that you had prostitution rings wings with White women. You just had a much larger population there, and many, many more women. In Australia, the key message to communicate is scarcity, and that created fascination and it triggered Orientalism.

Jay Ooi

I know it’s easy to compare ourselves to the US, and yes we are quite influenced by their media, but our perceptions have been shaped slightly differently. Compared to parts of the US, we had far fewer Chinese women, and so because of their scarcity, they were seen as the mystical, almost unattainable eastern figures. Many Australians simply didn’t have much or any interaction with Asian women, and so there was this sort of fascination created by them, and the image that was painted was the fantasy of Asian women in the minds of the Europeans in Australia. That’s the effect of Orientalism, which we’ll touch more upon in the next episode.

So when did Australian men start to have more interactions with Asian women?

Dr Sophie Loy Wilson

I think that the wars that we have been involved in with Asia played a big role in all of this. We know that many, many Australians experienced their first interaction with Asian peoples on a large scale in second World War. Right? We also know that a lot of us Australians shifted their attitude towards Asian men and Asian women in the second World War.

Jay Ooi

So you have a lot of Australian men having their first interaction with Asian women during the war, and this interaction was often in the form of sex workers. It was said that you could get a girl for the price of a burger. So from this fantasy of Asian women to the first interactions with them, Asian women are seen as sexual objects to satisfy men. Here’s Dr Jane Park again.

Jane Park

It goes back again, to the concept of Orientalism and how that's already gendered. You're in this sort of foreign treacherous, dangerous, but beautiful country and the woman that you're having sex with after paying her kind of embodies that landscape, maybe. Sort of exciting and foreign, but also potentially dangerous, so a kind of contagion, if you will. It's interesting when then you have after both the World War II, the Korean war and the Vietnam conflict war when you have American and I would presume Australian soldiers bringing home these former prostitutes or sex workers and domesticating them literally.

Jay Ooi

But another thing Dr Loy Wilson mentions is about Australia’s proximity to Asia. As a relatively weak and small country by population, Asia poses a real threat to us, purely because it’s on our doorstep, and our white allies are quite far away. And Dr Loy Wilson talks about how we were almost taken over by an Asian power in World War II with Japanese forces on our shores, furthering this fear of Asia. And so we yearn for having some sort of power over Asia, in whatever form that may take.

Dr Sophie Loy Wilson

I think women were not seen as a threat. Their size, that population was small. They weren't visible, they weren't competing with men in any way. They weren't threatening White men in any way. Chinese men was seen to be threatening White men. One of the great ironies of the ways in which Asian men are depicted as a feminine is that does not correlate to the threat they are supposed to opposed. Right? They're constantly posing this threat as these workers that are undercutting White jobs. As these men bringing diseases. What's interesting is that, I think the depiction is much more about White fragility than it is about Chinese men in their experience. Right? I think it's all about the threat that White men felt on a range of levels from Chinese men. I don't think that Chinese women were felt to pose that threat.

Dr Sophie Loy Wilson

We know across history that colonizers not only took land, they took women, and they took men. They took sexual power, and they dramatize their conquest by rape and pillage. I feel there's a way in which sexual desire does mirror shifts in geopolitics and gender relations. I believe that as a settler colony, a lot of our interpersonal relationships are shaped by colonial heritage. I do believe that our sense of vulnerability as a White nation in our generation in an Asian region, shapes our attitudes towards Asian peoples, and that that goes for sex as well.

Jay Ooi

So Asian women in Australia were mystical, oriental, and not a threat to us, yet Dr Loy Wilson says they’re also a way for us as a country to puff our chests by “dominating” them. One journal talks about “White sexual imperialism, through rape and war, created the hyper-sexualized stereotype of the Asian woman. This stereotype in turn fostered the overprevalence of Asian women in pornography, the mail-order bride phenomenon, the Asian fetish syndrome, and worst of all, sexual violence against Asian women.”

So that’s our history with Asian women in Australia, and it’s certainly impacted our views of Asian women. There are of course other factors that have influenced our perception of Asian women, including how they’re portrayed in pornography, and other forms of media like Pierre Loti’s 1887 book Madame Chrysanthème about his temporary marriage to a Japanese woman, which then inspired Puccini’s 1904 opera Madame Butterfly. But you might be wondering, why is it bad for Asian women to be fetishised? Isn’t it a good thing to be desired and sought after?

Lizzy Hoo

I've had friends argue this with me. They're like, "It's to your advantage! Hell, why are you upset about this?" And I was like, "Yes, it's great for your numbers, but are they interested in me or just the look of me?" Yeah, so I don't think it's a good thing necessarily.

Jay Ooi

That’s stand up comedian Lizzy Hoo, a mixed race Malaysian-Chinese and Irish Australian.

Lizzy Hoo

I think it makes you really a bit self-conscious, and it's hard because it's only ever been my experience, but I can imagine if you were a white girl, you'd never have to think about that unless maybe you were in an Asian country and dating Asian men. You'd never have to think, "Oh, when I go to this guy's house, are they going to report back to the family, 'Oh, she's Asian.'" I've definitely been self-conscious of that, meeting people's friends and meeting their family and being like, "Oh, is that something they're going to talk about later, or?"

Jay Ooi

So for Lizzy, it creates this sort of second guessing, or questioning about how she’s perceived if she’s dating a white guy.

Lizzy Hoo

I don't know. It's just this idea I think they've grown up with, or that they've learnt from somewhere, and they think, "Oh, that sounds good. I want someone to do my washing. I want someone to cook for me, and just wait on me." And I think, "Oh, yuck." That... Yeah, I'd hate to be in a relationship where they thought that of me.

Jay Ooi

Here’s Psychologist Melissa Ty again.

Melissa Ty

I think being seen as beautiful for who we are as individuals is a good thing. When we feel like we're being valued for our appearance or for stereotypical characteristics, it tends to feel quite demeaning. People don't like to be valued for things that aren't within their control. So I think they don't feel seen as a whole person.

Melissa Ty

I think firstly, there's this sense of maybe distrust and doubt when a white man shows interest in them. I think a lot of Asian women automatically have this internal calculation, "Is this a white fetish... no. Is this an Asian fetish?" So I think there is an emotional burden there around, "Does this person like me for me or does this person like me because I'm Asian?" And I think as well, this idea of Asian fetish also creates this feeling of being othered. “So my differences are further reinforced because I'm liked for them”. So we already feel different in society in Australian culture. We are a minority so we are therefore different. So if that’s reinforced I think there is that sense of, "I am different in some way."

Jay Ooi

So I think a racialised desire specifically for a minority race like Asian women is different to a racialised desire for white women. Because we are already a minority and seen as different from the norm, being desired because of our race can further alienate us. One Cambridge University Press journal says “By contrast, blondes and brunettes as such have not suffered histories of exploitation, colonization, slavery, persecution, and exclusion on the basis of phenotype. Nor does hair or eye color track categorical differences across all social, economic, and political dimensions of life, including opportunities for health, education, jobs, relationships, legal protections, and more. But race does.”

And one more effect of this fetishisation is arguably what resulted in the Atlanta shooting in America. Here’s Historian Dr Loy Wilson again.

Dr Sophie Loy Wilson

I feel one thing I haven't talked about is the fact that I think the ways in which the orientalizing of Asian women in Western society, I think does leave some Asian women here to feel quite unsafe. I think we need to acknowledge the flip side of this, which is that in Australian society, there are Asian women, including friends of mine close friends and colleagues who feel genuinely quite unsafe here. Both because of issues around Asian hate and issues around the orientalizing and sexualizing of Asian women. That presumption that Asian women are somehow open to sex with White men. That worries me. I think it's an issue with e-safety, and I think it's a new space for the proliferation of racism and racial violence.

Jay Ooi

I’ve heard from so many people about how men just expect Asian women to want to date them or sleep with them, and are surprised when they turn these men down. Asian women are seen as easily attainable, and sadly, this is another effect of this fetishation, especially when combined with Asians having that minority status in Australian society.

And there is another effect of this fetish. It can often lead to Asian women using this racialised desire to their advantage to get something else they’re after. It’s that other trope of a younger Asian woman, perhaps from a poorer country or family, with an older white man.

Melissa Ty

I mean I think in those situations, where women are quite powerless, perhaps, then finding a White male partner would be seen as marrying up and increasing their chances of survival and success. I would hope that in Australian culture if an Australian-Asian woman was to be with a White partner that power imbalance would be hopefully less.

Jay Ooi

But even the older white male younger asian female trope has its effects. Here’s comedian Lizzy Hoo again.

Lizzy Hoo

So I do have a joke about this. A couple of my friends' dads, who are older, now have Asian brides, right?

Jay Ooi

Yes.

Lizzy Hoo

Which is like ugh to me. But I hate that, I feel like that I've been at weddings when they've been there and I'm the only other Asian person there, I'm like, "I'm not... No!"

Jay Ooi

Yeah. Exactly.

Lizzy Hoo

"I grew up in Brisbane!" Yeah, I kind of feel that you have to explain, not explain, but it does run through your mind, yeah.

Jay Ooi

So for Lizzy, seeing younger Asian women with older white men makes her feel a bit awkward, because she doesn’t want to be lumped into that same category of women. But it’s a reality that there are more men interested in Asian women than most other races, and Asian women do marry outside of their race more than Asian men. Here’s me talking to Dr Jane Park again.

Jay Ooi

I guess as a economic or class sort of imbalance there, that the Asian woman is trading her sexuality for economic safety.

Jane Park

Yeah. Security, for material comfort, for the American dream or the Australian dream. You also see resonances of that in terms of stereotypes of the mail order bride now. There's a fantastic film. It's a documentary. Again, I'm sorry I'm having so many weird pre senile moments or senior moments. It's Debbie Lum, right? Who's Chinese American, has a fantastic documentary called Seeking single Asian Female and I screened it for my race class. It's really interesting because she deliberately chooses this guy, Steve, who is a total loser and embodies... When we talk about Asian fetish, we're usually talking about in a very straight way, the Asian woman, but you can also talk about the rice King and we can go there as well.

Jane Park

In the sort of mainstream imaginary, all those insight programs, it's like, Oh, here's the white guy. They always talk about stereotypes of women, but it's like, what are the stereotypes of the white men again? Why is it always white men? There are Latinos, there are indigenous men, there are all kinds of men who also fetishize Asian women. Anyway, going back to the white Asian thing, what is that stereotype? It's almost always a stereotype of kind of like the loser, right? A total geek, which is what the Steve guy is in Debbie Lum's documentary. Who brings a Chinese woman, Sandy to live with him and it's a really funny and interesting and insightful documentary because it's just awkward all around. Have you seen it?

Jay Ooi

No, I couldn't get access to it.

Jane Park

I'll try to give you access. It's really interesting. I was cringing the entire time, but my students, including the Asian female students just found it fascinating and a lot of them started to feel sympathy for this Asiaphile, which they were like, what! It humanizes both of them and it shows the different kinds of desires and dreams each has, and also the ways that they come together, but also don't fit together and particularly going back to what you were saying before the class and economic disparity.

Jane Park

It's really complicated. I'm the last person who's going to judge people for their preferences. Desire is very messy, and just because somebody likes a certain kind of body type or race or whatever, that's really their thing. I think it's a combination of your individual preference and the context in which you've been exposed to people who look like that or who come from there or whatever.

Jay Ooi

I think it’s important to note here that we’re often very quick to judge others based on appearances. We see a younger Asian woman with an older white man and we might go, ew, why would she want to be with him, or, what a gold digger. But I think that’s often us projecting what we’re after in a relationship onto them, and wondering why they’re together, whereas in reality, people get into relationships for all sorts of reasons. I think being with someone to give yourself and perhaps your kids a more stable economic life isn’t bad or wrong, it’s just different from a lot of our western views of relationships being purely because of love. It’s not like the younger Asian woman is getting nothing out of the relationship.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And we don't know the full details of their relationship either. [crosstalk 01:19:14] There could be more complexity to it. There has to be more complexity than just what it looks like on the surface.

Jay Ooi

That’s Dr Timothy Kazuo Steains, also from the University of Sydney’s Gender and Culture Studies.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And if we assume that it's just a white man thirsting over Asian women, we are also totally discounting the agency of that woman and her story actually. There's more to her story than would look like on the surface.

Jay Ooi

So let’s be slower to judge and let people kind of do what they want, as long as it’s consensual.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

There's a lot of discussion about how gross this is. It's yellow fever, et cetera, et cetera. I had this maybe kind of controversial opinion that racialised desire is sort of like an inevitability. I think that it's naive to assume that in this current time that people can be completely devoid of racialised desire, because it's all around us.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And you can be vigilant about it. But also sometimes in gender studies, we talk about this concept called sex positivity. And it has to do oftentimes with kinky people who enjoy doing things sexually that can involve, for example, really significant power dynamics. Power dynamics between for example, a man who has a lot of power over a woman in a particular sex act or whatever.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And in gender studies, or when people talk about this and kink culture, it's like, if they're doing it consensually, then there's nothing wrong with that. Yes, it's part of a sexist culture. It's part of inherited gender dynamics that can be misogynistic in nature. But if people are doing it consensually, knowing what they are doing and wanting that, then there's nothing wrong with that.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And I think the same rule has to apply for race as well. If people know what desires they are working with and they consent to it, then I don't think there's anything wrong with it. But nobody ever talks about it, because no one's having a conversation about, "Okay, how much do you like me because I'm Asian? How much do you like me because I'm white?" It's a very awkward conversation because you will be accused of being racist and people don't want to be in that position.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

Especially white men don't want to be told that they have yellow fever and they can get really offended by that.

Jay Ooi

I know you might not agree with this opinion, but I want you to sit with the idea for a bit. We know our desires are so influenced by our surroundings, and yet often at the first inkling of a racial preference, we get turned off and run for the hills. But as Dr Steains mentions, racialised desires are kind of an inevitability. Think about your own desires, for example. Are there particular races you find more or less attractive? Are you perhaps one of those Asian women who don’t date Asian men because “they look like my brother” - more on that in the next episode. If so, that’s a racialised desire, similar to ones people have of Asian women - and I think we all have them.

So maybe we should ask ourselves and each other, what is actually required for the ‘essential functions’ for a dating, sexual, romantic, or marriage partner, and, whether something like race is really one of those requirements.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

But because it's such a difficult topic to talk about, it's difficult to understand what it means to have, let's say 20% of my desire for this person has a kind of racial tinge to it and I don't know how to feel about that.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

But I also feel all of these other things for that person. That doesn't mean that I disrespect them or whatever. I don't know if that's a reality, but there could be something like that where having a conversation about that might mean that people can just say, "Okay, how do you feel about this? Do you think that this is fair or not? How can we work on it?" I think it's a difficult thing to talk about. But I'd like to see if that kind of thing could happen.

Jay Ooi

So perhaps instead of fleeing at the first sign of racialised desires, or avoiding the topic completely, maybe it’s something we need to be more open to talking about. I’m not saying the person who completely sees you as an object to fulfill his desire is someone you should give a chance to if that’s not what you want, and I’m not trying to gloss over all the impacts of this fetish, but I think racialised attraction can co-exist with a genuine interest in the person. They aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

I think that if it's there, even if it's to a small extent, it might be something that's worth talking about. And then again, if both parties are fully honest, then it might lead to something constructive. Otherwise you just hide it from each other and maybe you implicitly engage in that desire without being explicit about it or whatever.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And you could do that too. But for me, that seems less constructive and it's limiting because there might be more understanding between a couple if they can talk about these kinds of things.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And if you can't talk to your partner about that, then it lies dormant. I just see it as a kind of inevitable thing that it's better talked about in order to better understand, than not talked about.

Jay Ooi

Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground, and perhaps some contentious territory, but let’s recap. This fetish of Asian women as uber feminine lotus blossoms or alluring dragon ladies has its roots in colonialism, Australian history, wars, media and more. Its effects are very real - Asian women can feel even more othered, they can become hyper vigilant in dating, and they might even use it to their advantage to get power or stability, and on the other hand, men can feel like Asian women should be attracted to them.

Every relationship is different and not everyone wants the same thing out of theirs as you or I would. Us as outside viewers don’t really know the details, so I don’t think it’s our place to judge. And, racialised desires are pretty much inevitable, so we need to find ways to talk about it.

I think what I want to leave you with is the idea that we’re not powerless. Talking about our racialised attractions can maybe help tear them down, or just help us understand what we’re comfortable with with our partner. And considering our own desires might help us realise how we’ve been affected by our surroundings. Change can happen, but change starts with you.

Melissa Ty

I think that we just need to be really wary about bias and assumptions. I think a lot of people probably look at mixed race couples, bi-racial couples, and make assumptions in the same sense that we make assumptions when we see someone of a certain race. So I think the more aware we are of the more likely and the more able we are to challenge them.

Credits

This episode of Shoes Off was written, produced and edited by me, Jay Ooi.

Special thanks to all the guests in today’s episode: Dr Jane Park, Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson, Dr Timothy Kazuo Steains, Melissa Ty, and Lizzy Hoo, and to Kayleigh Yap for a whole bunch of research on this topic and helping craft this piece.

In the show notes for this episode at shoesoff.net you can find all the references, and there are a lot.

Some music is by Avik Chari and the episode artwork is by Yelly Chuan.

What are your thoughts on how Asian women have been fetishised? Let me know @shoesoffau on facebook and instagram.

If you liked Shoes Off please subscribe, we’re on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to it right now, or head to shoesoff.net

And if you have a Asian female friends who might relate to what you’ve heard today, please share this episode with them.

Thanks, and catch you next episode.

Jay Ooi

Do you think it's still seen as marrying up, marrying a white person?

Jane Park

Look, I think that this is a discussion that comes up a lot within certainly Korean communities, Japanese. Japanese American, I can't remember the statistics, but it's like almost all of them have married out. I'm not a sociologist, I'm sure that there's a lot of research on this that you can look up. I remember when I was a kid, my dad said to me, yeah you're American, so you should marry white. He actually said that to me, which is very strange for a Korean dad, but then he also really worshiped John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. Anyway, he was very blunt about it. He said, look, that's where the power is and you want to be accepted, so if you're going to marry out, then you should marry white. Being blunt. Sagittarius.