That Uncomfortable Feeling of Being Wanted for My “Almond-Shaped” Eyes

My former therapist, a well-meaning white woman, once asked me, “Do you think he treated you badly because you are Asian?”

“Your expiration date is later than that of white women ’cause you’re Asian,” said a white man I once loved, while sitting at the dinner table in our shared apartment. He chuckled, thinking this was a compliment about my youthful looks, as I winced.

In one punchline, I became a desirable and yet discardable trophy. It is a special kind of hell to live between being wanted for your body and being dehumanized, all in the same breath. It’s a seesaw of emotions that can exist even years into a relationship.

There are so many ways in which my specific demographic—Asian women—is wanted, especially in sexual ways. In the red light districts or the online pornography portals, racial identity is often reduced to sexual fetish. You can pick up weekly newspapers where, in the small ads section, offerings of “Asian girls” abound.

But it also exists in banal ways, in how people talk about Asian women. An Asian friend from the Bay Area told me once that he caught two men in the bathroom, comparing their girlfriends while relieving themselves over urinals.

“What kind is yours?”

“Vietnamese”

“Ah! Those are fun! Mine is Chinese!”

At the same time, the hyper-sexualized way in which Asian women are perceived can quickly turn us into targets for rage when we are not willing to perform this role. As Patricia Park wrote in an article about the Asian fetish: “At its core, to fetishize something—or someone—is to objectify it to the point that it becomes divorced from the person herself.”

The ire of men, especially white men, who have felt anger, guilt, and shame when I denied them access to my body, has been the terror of my love life. Sometimes, it’s a man on a dating app, whose profile says his favorite vacation was going to Japan and who changes his tone abruptly in our messages when I don’t respond quickly enough or comply to meeting straight away. Sometimes, it’s a man telling me how cute I look with my cheeks all rosy from having a drink, noticing my “Asian glow,” trying to pull me toward him, and looking angrily at me when I try to pull away.

In March of this year, six Asian women—whose day-to-day entailed massaging people for a living, presumably many men—were killed. They were shot by a white man in Atlanta who, the Cherokee County Sheriff department said, had “a bad day.” The shooter told them the killings weren’t about race, but instead motivated by sex addiction, even blaming spas “for providing an outlet.” They said he regularly “goes to church,” depicting him as a pious man, whose struggles with his sinful desires were so large and so important.

This became the center of this story in the eyes of these officials. Alongside the shooter’s beliefs must have been the idea that these women could serve as a target for his rage. They are not the protagonists in his story. The Asian women who died were reduced to their supporting role in his life as temptresses.

But these women were fully fledged beings. They loved to dance. They enjoyed gardening and Zumba classes. They brought their sons to the aquarium and ended the day eating soondubu. They worked to afford themselves stories of their own.

There’s a raucous Asian chorus that is voicing dismay about how this very factor, race, has been swept under the table in discussions about the Atlanta shooting. Scholars like Jeff Chang pointed towards the long history of anti-Asian hate in the US. Journalist Li Zhou wrote about the fetishization of Asian women, noting: “The central problem with this stereotype is that it dehumanizes Asian American women and reduces them solely to sexual objects. That dehumanization, in turn, perpetuates violence toward these groups, and condones it.”

To be clear: Their story speaks to the ways in which working class women who are in stigmatized professions are particularly vulnerable. But their deaths have also sunken into the consciousness of so many Asian women of varying economic and racial backgrounds, bringing previously quiet conversations into the open. This violence and its many intersections—gender, sex, and whiteness—evokes experiences that Asian women have had throughout our entire adulthood.

As the public court continues to litigate whether these murders were or were not about the Asian ethnicity of these women, I have begun to trace back all the bad breakups and romantic episodes I’ve had, specifically with white men.

In my head, each of these men is now on trial.

*

My former therapist, a well-meaning white woman, once asked me, “Do you think he treated you badly because you are Asian?”

This was close to a decade ago, shortly after I had walked out on my white partner when he slapped me. We’d been together for four years and his visits to the local bars had become more frequent, stretched for longer and longer each time. I became a receptacle for his happy drunk, but more often also his angry drunk. This act of violence was a natural translation of the dissatisfaction he needed to release.

But it still somehow caught me by surprise and shook me awake. I had been sheltering myself from his alcohol-infused outbursts behind locked doors, and was startled by his rage made physical as it connected with my face. A few weeks later, I finally left him.

This violence and its many intersections—gender, sex, and whiteness—evokes experiences that Asian women have had throughout our entire adulthood.

After I found a sense of calm, I saw my therapist. Was this about me being Asian? I stared back at my therapist in disbelief, but with a faint sense of understanding and creeping dread. I just sat there, enveloped in a discomfort that felt like a thick gravity blanket, constricting my body.

Maybe it’s easier to slap a face with ‘almond-shaped’ eyes, I suddenly wondered. Maybe it’s easier to scream at me because my skin is slightly more olive, even a hue of light-brown in the summer. Maybe, just maybe, that time he called me a gook, jokingly and mischieviously, he actually believed it a little. Isn’t there always a kernel of truth in a joke?

I continued to stare at my therapist. After registering my silence, she discarded her thought about race as quickly and casually as she had offered it up.

“Oh, he probably would have treated any woman like garbage from what you told me,” she said. “It’s just… sometimes white men do this to women who aren’t white, you know?”

I did not know.

Love exists in an extreme myopia. We seldom see how our partners behave outside of the specific confines of a relationship. I had never seen how he loved another woman, like the white woman he’d loved just before me. Did he treat her better than me? I searched for clues in my memory of his sparse words about her, but came up empty-handed.

How much of his abuse was rooted in misogyny or racism or in any other factor? This is a secret recipe only he will know. But the reality I’ve lived always makes me question whether my race has had anything to do with some of the hurt that still lives in my heart. There are so many incidents that, strung together in one long list, speak to a theme. Why did any given person choose to pursue me, to sleep with me, to cheat on me, or to hurt me? Like a faint cry in the distance, I’d always hear a voice in my head talk about race.

There was the man who jumped up and down upon seeing me come to a gathering, shouting “Hapa! Hapa!”—meaning biracial, white and Asian, which I am not—clapping his hands, akin to an excited seal in a man’s body. It feels odd to be celebrated like the arrival of pizza at a drunken party.

There was the white man who, a couple of months into our relationship, told me I was his seventh Asian girlfriend. He simply had a “visual preference,” he said, and replaced me with another Asian woman, a month after the end of our relationship.

And so, the partner who slapped me, the boyfriend who replaced me, the guy who wanted to fuck me, the boys on the streets just hollering at me, the strangers on the internet ALL-CAPS abusing me—there’s something they all seemed to have in common, even if that something is a bit harder to pinpoint.

Perhaps they were looking for a docile and submissive woman, one that is both kinky and giving, has satin-black hair and soft porcelain skin. A woman whom they want so much that they stomp their feet and load their guns when they don’t get her.

An Asian woman whose sole purpose is to serve the sexual needs of a white man—it’s an image deeply rooted in how Asian women were first introduced to white American society. It came to our consciousness through a handful of fictional female characters who acted as the sole cultural ambassadors for the entire continent of Asia. Just think of the geisha who falls for an American lieutenant in Madama Butterfly and perishes without his love, or the young prostitute in Full Metal Jacket who promised to “love you long time.” The ghosts of these hypervisible Asian women kept creeping up in my oh-so-invisible Asian life. Each experience of this objectifying force, one after another, robbed me of little bits of my real self.

Perhaps the most toxic thing about these experiences is not just that you have to endure them. In some ways, the drone of a repetitive message works itself into your being, every muscle, every cell of your body. Your instinct comes to believe the story that others tell you of you. In the saddest and most ironic of ways, I may have often submitted to it, and contorted myself into fitting into the role of this character.

Each experience of this objectifying force, one after another, robbed me of little bits of my real self.

But something happened in that moment when this therapist kept talking at me. She had refocused my gaze and broke down a fourth wall. With that barrier eliminated, I got to look at myself through the eyes of a white person for once. And from that stance, I realized how easily something that is to be considered a possession can quickly become subject to destruction.

And all I wanted to do was protect her, me, her.

*

“Từ đó đến giờ, ba chưa bao giờ đánh mẹ của con,” my father told me: From the beginning until now . . . I have never raised my hand against your mother.

It was the first time my father had addressed me as an adult, when I told him about the abuse —the slap, the way my partner cursed me out drunkenly, the way I felt. I had just told my partner to move out. To my father, I was a child until that moment. But no longer.

I was still deciding whether to leave my partner or to forgive him; love is a powerful and confusing force. It was the first time I sought my father’s counsel as an adult. He was but a caretaker until that moment. But no longer.

My father, an Asian man who’s considered weak to some, a yellow peril to others, was acting with so much restraint. “You’re an adult. And this is entirely your choice. I will respect whatever you will do,” he told me.

And then he said it again: “Nhưng ma từ đó đến giờ, ba chưa bao giờ đánh mẹ của con.”

To love a child, I’m told, is to want to throw your body between them and any harm that may come their way. I’m my father’s “cục cưng,” his beloved piece, his darling daughter. But even in this vulnerable state—knowing he could lose a daughter to her love for a man who actively hurts her—he extended to me the kind of respect so few other men had ever given me. I could be a ‘beloved piece,’ a “cục cưng,” but also a person with choices and agency.

“Từ đó đến giờ, ba chưa bao giờ đánh mẹ của con,”

From the beginning until now, I have never raised my hand against your mother.

To be loved and protected and yet to be seen as full. To not be a vessel for someone’s anger. To never even fathom raising a hand against your loved one. Perhaps my father was trying to tell me that I can exist in three dimensions as a person who deserves to be loved fully. He was able to love an Asian woman, my mother, not as an infatuation or as a receptacle of his rage, but as a person. Maybe someone else can do this for me, too. This is a thought that still rings in my head.