The Physical Dangers of Racist Stereotypes

So why is a white guy writing about Asian Fetish if he isn’t into it himself?

Over ten years ago, I lived with Julie (not her real name), a beautiful Korean woman in her early twenties. I wasn’t in love and neither was Julie – we’d just happened to have been going out together when she’d lost her apartment and had been forced to stay at my place for a few months. It was a typical story for Manhattan, where affordable apartments are always hard to find.

Two things about Julie:

One, she was the first Asian woman I’d gone out with for any length of time. Julie had graduated the year before summa cum laude from a prestigious university in Massachusetts where she had been very active in Asian student organizations on campus. She brought me up sharp when I innocently used the word "Oriental" in conversation and introduced me to Said’s seminal work on the subject. As Julie and I discussed Asian stereotypes, from the casting of Charlie Chan films to the libretto of Madama Butterfly, I gained a new perspective into what it means to be Asian in America. I also learned to enjoy Korean food, which Julie cooked incredibly well.

Secondly, horribly, Julie had been viciously raped a few months before she had met me. It had been one of those nightmares where the attacker jumped a woman just as she had put her key in the door and then pushed his way inside after her. The experience had, not surprisingly, totally traumatized Julie and had filled her with an anger that surfaced uncontrollably at unexpected times and places, once memorably over dinner at the Union Square Café.

I never put the two points above together until several years later, when Julie was already long gone from my life. It was then that I read a news article on the web about a particularly nasty rape that had occurred in the Pacific Northwest. The attackers in this incident were apparently a pair low-IQ backwoods types. The pair had somewhere heard the urban legend of crowded Japanese subways where women stand submissively with eyes closed, too ashamed to complain, while perverted salarymen press themselves against the women and grope their breasts and buttocks without fear of retribution. The two rednecks had swallowed the story whole and had deliberately targeted a Japanese woman to abduct and rape. They’d naively assumed there would be no risk in attacking a Japanese woman because, once she’d been released, her sense of shame would prohibit her from approaching the authorities. In the case at hand, of course, the victim went directly to the police once she was freed and immediately identified her attackers and had them arrested.

It was after having read this article that, thinking back, I first began to wonder if Julie had also been deliberately singled out by her own attacker. Had he too bought into the myth of the submissive Asian woman? Did Julie’s Asian ethnicity and petite size make her an unwitting target? Ultimately, these are questions that cannot be answered. To the best of my knowledge, the rapist was never caught. Even if he had been apprehended and questioned, he might not have known himself the extent to which he’d been influenced by the racist stereotypes so pervasive in American culture.

The idea stayed in my mind and eventually became the basis for the novel I’m now writing. I want to demonstrate in my fiction that not only are stereotypes of Asian women completely fallacious and degrading, but that they can also be dangerous, in the most literal sense, to the physical safety of the women themselves.

It bears noting that, of the many Asian women I’ve met in NYC, not a single one has ever conformed to the stereotype of the submissive "Oriental" sex doll. On the contrary, and without exception, these Asian women have all possessed forceful characters as varied and individual as those of any other ethnic background.