I like pandas. They sleep and eat for most of the day, I relate to that strongly. I have panda stuffed animals, panda mugs, and my own boyfriend calls me panda. I also have a hoodie. I love my panda hoodie, it has a cute little face on the hood and panda paws. I wear it on Halloween, around the house, and sometimes to school.
One of the times I wore it to school was in the late afternoon. I got off class early and went to the Entertainment and Engineering building on campus to wait for my boyfriend to get out of class. For those of you who don’t know, Entertainment and Engineering is for people who primarily want to make video games. If you also don’t know, video games are not very good at representing Asian women. So when I, an Asian American woman walked into the building with my panda hoodie, a few of these lovely fellows decided to stalk me.
The EaE building at that time had tables in the basement that connected to classrooms. I sat down and waited at an empty table in the corner. As soon as I sat down, five men approached my table and cornered me in. They blocked off all my exit points and were physically imposing on my space.
“Why do you look so nervous?” they asked me as they literally formed a barrier between me and anyone who could help me.
“Are you dating anyone?” they asked when they could see the promise ring on my finger.
“What kind of Asian are you? You look Japanese,” they said, even though I do not look at all Japanese.
Eventually I did manage to weasel my way to the bathroom. And when I came out they were blocking the door to the bathroom so once again, I could not leave.
They asked me how big my chest size was. They asked me if I was a virgin. They told me I would make the perfect wife.
This was honestly horrifying, but also not the first time something like this has happened to me. Every time I go to the EaE building I feel the stares go to my chest. It’s like I can hear them imagining me as their perfect submissive Asian wife.
The perception of Asian women in the media is all around poor. For people interested in making video games, most of the Asian women in video games and anime are negative. Most of the time you see large chested Asian women who have no complexity. Therefore it makes us easy targets for fetishization.
There is a difference between Asian women being sex-positive and the unrealistic hypersexualization of Asian women. This hypersexualization feeds into the idea that Asian women are for sale or always sexually available for Caucasian men. Ultimately, this also leads to Asian women being exposed to fetishized violence. We’re like rare exotic pokemon that they can collect and possess.
But let me get this straight with all the white men out there who have a “thing” for Asian women. Asian women are not silent and submissive sex dolls who can cook and clean for you and have sex with you at your beck and call. You can appreciate Asian culture, you can love anime and curry all you want, you can have a consenting relationship with adult Asian women. But you cannot mold us into one category. We can’t “look Japanese” or “look Asian”, Japanese and Asian are not a physical characteristic. You don’t have the right to follow us or any person and trap them while asking invasive questions. We are not property. You cannot buy us. We are human.