Sick of "Yellow Fever"?

(Trailer)

This past weekend, I attended an event for the CAAM festival (Center for Asian America Media). One film that simultaneously intrigued and vexed me even before I viewed it was Seeking Asian Female, a documentary by Debbie Lum that centers on a 50+ white man's obsession with finding a younger Asian (in his case, Chinese) female partner. After daily email exchanges with hundreds of Chinese women, along with an eerily voluminous collection of pictures, letters, and "Sunshine Magazines", he eventually proposes to one of his Chinese pen-pals - the story unfolds as they navigate the harsh realities of marriage given the communication barrier, cultural differences, and financial hardships.

Now, I will not proceed to provide a review of the film - what I am more interested in is joining in the conversation around the cultural phenomenon at the heart of the film: "yellow fever".

"Yellow fever" is a term commonly used when a non-Asian (especially white) heterosexual male pursues Asian female romantic partners at the near or complete exclusion of other ethnicities. I first heard this term in university and quickly realized that this was a debated topic among my fellow Asians peers: some reacted with full (even prideful) approval while others with scornful repulsion.

During the viewing of this film, the constitution of the SF audience was more of the latter camp, as evidenced by the vociferous "auuuughs" and scoffs in the room as we were introduced to the white male protagonist. I myself was one of them. As the film unraveled, though, I found myself thinking about this issue differently. It didn't flip my perspective, but it did help me realize that there was a continuum of different types of "yellow fever" (or any "fever" in which one expresses strong preference for one group over all others).

On one side of the continuum lies natural physical preferences - e.g., one tends to be more attracted to Koreans just as one tends to be more attracted to those with short hair or freckles or Joseph Gordon Levitt. While I understand that the media and surrounding community can greatly influence what is considered "mainstream attractive", I do believe we can be born with attraction preferences, very specific or broad depending on individual. To me, admitting "I tend to be more attracted to X ethnicity" is not harmfully discriminating. Most people choose a select few as intimate partners - in order to selectively commit, by default, they must have filtered out countless other individuals as "not as preferable".

Now, if "yellow fever" were just one example of cross-ethnicity physical attraction, I would laud it. However, the issue I take with it - why, so many of us cringed as white men discussed their preferences for Asian women in the documentary - is that too often, they explicitly or implicitly emphasize, "[Asian women] are so undemanding and submissive...they  make great wives because they'll cook and clean and take care of their husbands". Here, the issue grows beyond the realm of pure aesthetic appreciation - here, the issue enters the realm of gender constructs, Orientalism, and power disparity.

When I hear the above message, whirlwind flashbacks of Gender & Women's Studies class debates, personal encounters with sexism and racism, and the countless narratives of abuse and domestic violence circulate through my mind. Admittedly, they have a habit of culminating into a Krav Maga-friendly impetus "kick 'em in the groin!"

I can't speak for all Asian females, but I venture to assume to at least some share my antagonism towards this particular type of "yellow fever" - the type that reflects and perpetuates insidious social constructs. Here is just the tip of the iceberg:

• a) A woman's desirability correlates positively to her submission to a male partner (note that this assumes she even wants a partner, let alone a male one) and inversely to her independence and agency

• b) Asians as a group are "submissive". Women are seen as eager to please (this puzzles me - have they never seen the ruthlessness of an auntie at the market?). Meanwhile, men are de-masculinized and/or invisible in mainstream culture (many have difficultly naming an Asian male celebrity besides Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and "that guy from Crouching Tiger")

• c) Put a) and b) together, and you construct the "relationship" that so many of these feverish men idealize - one in which they hold the power to choose for both parties, while their "partners" are stripped of their human status

I put "relationship"above in quotes, because a real connection between two adults mandate that each respects the other fully as a fellow Being, with inviolable rights of physical and mental autonomy. Thus, when a man desires Asian women b/c he believes they will be more likely to submit to him, he does not actually love Asian women - in fact, he does not love women, period, because he clearly does not respect them. Women become objects of his objectification, not true affection. Connection cannot exist when it is founded on the condition that one continuously submits to another's will.

I do support one end of the "yellow fever" continuum - I support the cases that purely reflect the broader notion that we can and do prefer certain physical characteristics over others when choosing partners. What I don't support, however, is "submissive yellow fever" (admittedly, not as catchy of a label), which has little to do with Asians as individuals and all to do with the corrupt desire to connect with others on the hope that they will surrender their self-worths to mitigate one's own lack of worth.

That's the type of "yellow fever" that, well, makes me quite sick.


There are multiple layers of issues within this topic that deserve to be deconstructed further, such as older men/younger women, Asians as "model minority", Orientalism, etc. Even the phrase "yellow fever" itself lends to questions of what it easily includes (heterosexual) and excludes (queer) and why.