My wife, through her job, occasionally has the opportunity to go on press trips and write about them. Sometimes she does these trips solo, and other times she does them with other journalists and influencers. On a recent group trip, during a rain storm that interrupted their time at a cacao plantation, she spoke with Kaila Yu, another journalist on the trip, about her recent memoir, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty. After the trip, Yu sent my wife a copy of the book. When the book arrived, I knew I wanted to read it, especially after teaching R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefengki’s The Good Asian this semester. Fetishized, as Yu herself puts it, details the ways that she navigated “a world that often viewed [her] through a narrow, exotified lens.” She deals with Orientalism, fetishism, misogyny, the male gaze, internalized racism, and so much through a blend of her own personal stories mixed with cultural criticism and history.

Yu notes that the murders of Daoyou Feng, Xiaojie Tan, Soo Chung Park, Delaina Ashley Yuan Gonzalez, Paul Andre Michels, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yu on March 16, 2021 in Atlanta led her to write Fetishized. Robert Aaron Long’s murder of these eight individuals caused Yu to think about her “earlier compliance with yellow fever tropes.” As she thought about her “earlier compliance” during her time as an import model and as the singer of Nylon Pink, she saw the “confluence of the Asian fetish, the model minority myth, [her] purported adjacency to whiteness, and [the COVID] pandemic with Asians of all ethnicities blamed and targeted by attacks both verbal and physical” as the culmination of years, decades, and centuries of yellow feaver and yellow peril tropes. For all of those who stood shocked at a young white man killing eight people in Atlanta spas, Yu “saw it coming with your Asian fetish.”

The media that surrounds us has a huge impact on the ways that we view the world, and Yu notes this continuously throughout Fetishized. We know the ways that representation in movies impact how we view others and the world, and Yu discusses these, from Anna May Wong and the butterfly trope in 1922’s The Toll of the Sea to Fook Mi and Fook Yu in 2002’s Austin Powers in Goldmember to Lucy Liu and the dragon lady trope in 2003’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1. The depictions of Asian women in these films and more presents them as objects for the Western gaze, either as the submissive, domestic in juxtaposition to the domineering white woman awoken from her bondage by the scourge of feminism in the butterfly trope to the “sexually voracious, conniving, powerful, and reptilian Asian female villain” epitomized in the dragon lady.

Along with film, Yu also details various ways that musicians have played into these tropes, and for me, these discussions proved extremely useful, notably because she writes about two artists I regularly listen to and who I have, specifically with their lyrics about Asian women, had issues with over the years. Initially, I didn’t like Donald Glover’s rap persona Childish Gambino’s debut album Camp because when I listened to it, all I heard was misogyny and the exploitation of women. Yu points out that Gambino mentions Asian women over thirty times over the course of Camp’s thirteen songs. On “Kids (Keep Up),” Gambino raps, “But they say I got a fetish, nah, I’m skippin’ all of it” before he goes on to state that “Black and white girls always come wit’ a set of politics.” Yu notes that these lines, coupled with others, carry within them an undercurrent that views Asian women as submissive and less vocal, that “Asian women are docile and easy to mold to male desires.”

Yu continues by noting lines in “You See Me” where Gambino raps, “Asian girls everywhere, UCLA” and “Forget these white girls/ I need some variation/ Especially if she very Asian,” that one could view them as compliments. However, at the end of that verse, he raps, “She’s an overachiever ’cause all she do is succed.” The last word, “succeed” serves as a double entendre. On the one hand, it plays into the model minority myth. On the other hand, when we couple it with his lyrics about “cumming on her face” earlier in the verse, we hear it as “suck seed,” a reference to a blow job. Along with these lyrics, I always think about his lines in “Backpackers” when he raps, “I got a girl on my, dude, show respect/Something crazy and Asian, Virginia Tech.” These lines stand out to me because they continue the thread from “You See Me,” but they also through in an allusion to Seung-Hui Cho and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre where Cho murdered 32 individuals and injured 23 others. These lines, again, play into tropes surrounding Asian women, but they also present Asian men in relation to the yellow peril myth.

Along with Gambino, Yu also addresses some of the problematic aspects of Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo’s lyrics, specifically on their sophomore album Pinkerton, which many people consider to be their best album. The title of the album comes from the main character in Madama Butterfly, the 1904 opera based on Pierre Loti’s 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème. In the opera Pinkerton, a U.S. Naval officer, takes a 15-year-old Japanese girl as his wife until he can find a proper American wife. In the novel, which is loosely based on Loti’s life, the naval officer describes his child bride as not having an interior life of her own. He asks, “What thoughts are running through that little brain? . . . [I]t is a hundred to one that she has no thoughts whatever. And even if she had, what do I care?” Chrysanthème, his child-wife, exists as nothing more than a receptacle for his pleasure until he can find a “proper” wife. She does not matter. He collects her and disposes of her.

This idea of collecting Asian women comes up in “Butterfly,” the last song on Pinkerton. Cuomo sings about catching a butterfly on his “mama’s mason jar” and never intending to hurt it. He collects it, pinning it inside a jar, not allowing it to escape, then pinning it down for display as a lepidopterist would. He continually laments and apologizes throughout the song, saying that whenever he hopes to pin something down it slips away and that he promised to come back but that he doesn’t plan to ever return. This song, coupled with his opening lines in “El Scorcho” where he sings, “Goddamn you half-Japanese girls do it to me every time,” present Asian women as nothing more than submissive sex objects, thus, as Yu point out, “normaliz[ing] the colonialist association between Asian women and butterflies.”

Fetishized talks about so much more than this, but I wanted to pull out the threads that Yu’s uses with music to highlight the myriad of ways that her memoir confronts the fetishization of Asian women. Her memoir deals with the ways that all of this silences Asian women, making them nothing more than interchangeable pieces that can be taken apart and put back together again for the whims of Asiaphiles. In doing this, Yu writes, “We’re not celebrated for our strength, humanity, and intelligence. We’re reduced to a fantasy fitting the male-dominance narrative.” With this memoir, she calls, as Jun Kit Man points outs in resonate, “for structural change in the media.” Yu does this through detailed discussions of the lack of representation of Asian women in media during her formative years and how that, compounded with other factors, impacted the ways that she viewed herself. Yu moves far beyond music, and her discussions of representation highlight the need “for structural change.”

There is so much in Yu’s memoir that resonates, and as I read it, I kept thinking about ways to use it in future courses, specifically alongside texts such as Kathleen Hannah’s Rebel Girl: My Life As A Feminist Punk and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass and The Waiting. What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.