True Left

When I graduated from college, I moved to Taipei to teach ESL. One afternoon on the train, I overheard two white men discussing Asian women with an unfiltered openness achieved only under the guise of total privacy. They’d assumed no one around them could understand English.

The first man expressed his frustration about a recent date with a Taiwanese woman that didn’t result in sex. His friend gave him advice. “They use a code,” he said. “When I was living in Japan, I went out with this Japanese girl. The conversation sucked but at least she was nice to look at.” Though it wasn’t late, the girl kept saying how sleepy she was, he told his friend. “So I finally took her back to her place and well, she wasn’t sleepy, if you know what I mean.” The two men laughed. “See? They won’t actually tell you what they want.” The first man nodded seriously, his expression one of a child trying to memorize an important fact.

I wasn’t a stranger to white male “expats” preying on Asian women. At the English school where I taught, all my white male co-workers exclusively dated or were married to Taiwanese women.
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On sluthate.com, a white man fantasized about raping his half-Japanese teenage daughter, called “little geisha **** doll” and “little neo-colonialist jewel.” On another forum, a white man asked in all earnestness if he could still be a white nationalist and **** East Asian women. In the replies, men advertised us like an infomercial, touting our supposed pros over cons: “their pussies are really tight”; “their skin feels so nice”; “they open their legs easy.” Our supposed demeanor was touted as much as, if not more than, our supposed physical attributes: “you get sex when YOU want, not when SHE wants. They’re also happy to do all the housework, cooking, and other chores around the house. It’s so **** easy, man.”

A lengthy manifesto on a related blog declared that Asian women are destined “to be slaves to the White man.” It outlined 12 commandments Asian women must follow, including swearing to never let an Asian or Black man touch her. The final commandment reads: “If an asian woman becomes old, ugly, out of shape, disfigured, or diseased, then she should be divorced, abandoned, sold to someone else, or sent back to China or wherever she came from; and the White master can go back to Asia and pick out a new asian woman to replace her.”
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Beyond the unnerving content of all these websites was the unnerving realization that they were written by someone I could know. The person behind them was likely someone functioning in society. They likely came across Asian women in their day-to-day lives. And when they did, be it at work or on a dating app, I doubt they opened with, “Do you agree your evolutionary purpose is to be my slave?”

I wanted these men identified. I wanted their thoughts broadcasted above their heads. Because how can I move through the world knowing that the men who think these thoughts are real? They’re subway riders, salesmen, police officers, teachers, bosses, friends. They’re someone’s father. They’re someone’s husband. They’re someone’s lover.
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The post that disturbed me the most and threw me into a bad state for weeks was “List of WMAF Violent Crimes that Made the International News.”

The most gruesome images haunted me: women dismembered and melted in sixty liters of acid, women stabbed 76 times in the chest, women sliced up and boiled in a pot, women choked and tortured to death, women sawed into eight pieces and stored in a locker, women molested and photographed in disturbing positions after they’d been killed. One hundred and three pornographic DVDs were found at one murderer’s home; 51 featured Asian women.

I felt nauseous combing through each article, but I was possessed — even when I was physically trembling, I couldn’t stop. I felt I owed it to these women, that my discomfort was the least I could offer up to their suffering.

In 2017, Quyen Ngoc Nguyen, a 28-year-old Vietnamese mother of two, was murdered in Blackpool, England, by William McFall and Stephen Unwin. “Are we raping the chink?” McFall texted Unwin. How much was said in that line — about hate and desire and a racism so banal it’s inaccurate.

After luring her into Unwin’s home, they **** and tortured Nguyen for five hours. The two then wrapped her in a sheet, threw her body in her car, doused the car in gasoline and burned her alive. Leaving the scene, they took a smiling selfie together.
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Here was proof that believing “yellow **** is always ripe for being ****,” as one online user declared, leads to dissolving an Asian women in acid. I needed to document it, not because I needed proof, but because this truth — a truth many Asian women and femmes know to be true from a young age — had been so obliviated in society, I was constantly made to doubt my own reality.

In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong questions why Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s brutal 1982 murder was severed from her ****, as though the two had no connection: “no one admits that Cha was also ****, an omission so stubborn I had to consult court records to confirm that she was also sexually assaulted.”

The erasure of the circumstances around Cha’s murder speaks to another kind of relentless, daily erasure. “The Asian American woman,” Anne A. Cheng writes, “has absorbed centuries of the most blatant racist and sexist projections, yet she hardly registers in the public consciousness as a minority, much less a figure who has suffered discrimination.”

All of this would be simpler if these murders were committed by masked strangers who chose their victims by happenstance. But here is a tricky truth: Most of the men who murdered these women were their romantic or sexual partners, among them several long-term marriages. A relationship, however flawed, existed before it ended, which raises the thorny question: Did hate live within love? Or did love live within hate? That the boundary separating them is so thin as to be transparent is what unsettles me. The oppressor’s desire for the oppressed is by no means new; it’s built into our country’s very existence. What we don’t talk about as often is how it works in the other direction.

At first my rage was uncomplicated because I assumed none of these women had the slightest inclination about their partners’ true feelings until it was simply too late. But that’s an easy way out of a hard truth. New questions obsessed me: What if I knew and chose to stay? What if I’d sensed clues but tried to ignore them or reason them away? Would a “preference” for Asian women seem not only unproblematic, but harmless, even desirable?

These questions obsessed me because they spoke to my own latent fears. When I was 17, a 22-year-old white man took me to his bedroom and produced a box of photos of his ex-girlfriends. He flipped through them while reciting their respective ethnicities: “Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese …”

I wish I could say I ran. I wish, like Chris in Get Out, I understood I was in a horror movie. When Chris sees Rose’s box full of exes, his face contorts in fear. If my expression were captured on film, it would have been dreamy, even wistful. I wanted my photo in that box. I wanted him to choose me.

As Jenny Zhang has written, “My only choices, I thought, were to be invisible and ugly or to be exoticized into worthiness.” Rather than turning away from someone’s fixation on my race, I grasped it the way a drowning person grasps a lifeline. This man told me in no unclear terms who he was, without me having to look up his online history or overhear him talking about me. But I didn’t run. Eyes wide open, I stayed.