Historical Context

The dehumanization of Asian women dates back to centuries. The first Chinese immigrants began to arrive in the United States in the 1850’s. This was mainly due to The Opium Wars, in which the British defied China’s efforts in stopping the illegal trade of opium, and forced many members of the lower classes to leave their farms and seek new opportunities abroad. More Chinese immigrants arrived in the U.S. to join the Gold Rush in 1848. Some worked on American farms or in the textile industry, while others were laborers in building the Central Pacific and Transcontinental railroads. Despite their major role in building the infrastructure of the United States, Asian immigrants constantly received racist remarks and discriminations since the moment they arrived. 

European immigrants such as Irish settlers fleeing the Irish Potato Famine and German settlers seeking new life came to the United States at the same time Chinese immigrants did, yet the Chinese were seen as a bigger threat: a sexual one. The sexualized stereotype mainly originated in the mid-19th century sex industry, when Chinese women were singled out from their white peers and accused of spreading sexually transmitted diseases. Historically, they have been commodified as either “Dragon Lady”, described as fierce, feisty, and dominant, or as “Lotus Blossom”, domesticated, docile, and sexually subservient to white men. Orientalism is a concept coined by Edward Said that refers to the European convention of portraying the East as exotic, historically frozen in time, sensual, feminine, weak, dangerous, eccentric, irrational, and undeveloped. He discovered that the bodies of the East are always seen as opposition to the West. “If the West is strong, then the East is weak. If the West is rational, then the East is irrational. If the West is masculine, then the East is feminine.” explains Dr. Rene M. Heinrich, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. This term alludes to how we can see a masculine body from the East as feminine, and a feminine body from the East as hyper feminine. 

Media Portrayal

In 2012, filmmaker Debbie Lum created the documentary Seeking Asian Female. Her projects mainly explore subjects within the Asian and Asian American community, and she decided to make this film because she was “sick of dealing with men (usually non-Asian) who shared Steven’s creepy fascination with Asian women,” and also due to her growing interest in the complexities behind ‘yellow fever’. The term ‘yellow fever’ means to have an uncontrollable desire for Asians that is so powerful that having it is comparable to contracting an illness. Seeking Asian Female captures an American man’s uncomfortable obsession with finding himself a Chinese bride. Lum found Steven, the man this documentary focuses on, through ads he had posted on Craigslist where he was seeking Asian women. He chooses to evaluate women based on their level of “Chineseness”, so when he meets his love interest Sandy, he says to her “You look very Chinese, with the bangs. You know I like that.” The film goes through the struggles Steven and Sandy face throughout their relationship, and how they overcome their language barrier in order to stay together.