Yellow was my favourite colour. I splashed my bedroom walls with it, despite my parents’ best protests. I wore it around everywhere, even when I was told it clashed with my skin colour. To me, yellow has always been a representation of the warmth from the sun’s rays, the epitome of compassion and light – the very picture of my brightest days. By the seventh grade, my naive perception of the colour was quickly tainted with the red hot rage of corruption.
I grew up in a place with white cultural norms, white food, and white beauty standards. So I hated myself. I hated the way my eyes slanted, I hated my flat nose and my olive skin. I would have traded my language, my tradition, and culture, for soft blonde hair and blue eyes. So I did. I mimicked the way white girls did their hair and makeup, the way they dressed, the way they talked and acted – and in turn, I forgot how to speak Mandarin and communicate with my grandparents, I lost touch with my culture. When I inevitably realized that even my most convincing of imitations could never live up to the beauty of my white friends, I tried a different route. Victim became perpetrator. Exploiter. Abuser. I was suddenly excruciatingly aware of the power my race could hold – sexually, at least. I consumed media insatiably, and smoothed the malleable ridges of my personality accordingly, moulding myself to whatever they wanted.
I could be a schoolgirl in tights, Miss Saigon, Lotus Flower, China Doll. Submissive or hypersexual, gentle or subservient, anything they wanted, all of the time. It worked. It didn’t matter what sexual fantasy I forced myself to be; as long as I was Asian, and as long as I was a woman, I was interchangeable. My identity disappeared behind a short skirt or pair of “anime tits” – I was never seen for who I was, but there was a certain safety in the opaque nature of my mask. So I put up with the fetishistic comments if it meant they thought I was pretty, and guiltily took pleasure in the “nihao” catcalls because it meant I was wanted. I tested myself, trying to see how far I would let it go before the ones I loved made it impossible for me to associate with them. I tried so hard to become their fantasies. And still – it was never enough, and I was never the one.
I wish I learned sooner that the attention I was getting – as intoxicating as it was – was poison. In the summer of 2021, I wrote an article on the perils of “yellow fever”, coming from a place of healing and salvation. But now, I’m fucking angry. It makes me angry that the response to my essay was so overwhelming, my inboxes filled with stories from countless women who shared the same rape of their cultures. It makes me angry that I went so long thinking that I only had myself to blame for my fear. It makes me angry that history continues to repeat itself; where Asian women were once objects for bored American soldiers, we still resonate with our ancestors’ abuse centuries later. It makes me angry that my yellow light – my warm demeanour, my trusting nature, my pleasure in pleasing the ones that I loved – was desired so ruthlessly, hunted, tamed, and exploited.
How dare you erase my identity and reduce me to my race? How dare you mask this racism as desire, and how dare you transform my culture, which is based on modesty and respect, into sex symbols? How dare you taint my precious yellow with your slurs, your murder, and your fucking yellow fever? I used to be very sure of who I was. You forced me to change that. I could build my personality around the stereotypes assigned to me, taking every enneagram test and personality quiz like an exam just to confirm my every cliche. I knew what I was, and I knew the one thing I was not. Angry. An angry woman is the ugliest, most embarrassing villain. I knew that anger made a woman undesirable, or worse, exiled. So I was yellow. Yellow, like my brightest days and my compassion and my light, and never red with hunger or brilliance or ambition.
But I’m done being yellow. I get to be red now. I get to be angry now.
I get to be angry for all of the Asian women that have been tortured, raped, and murdered in the name of sex addiction. I get to be angry for all of the teenage girls crying in mirrors because they will never look like their white idols. I get to be angry for anyone and everyone who has ever had to question if they were loved or if they were just being fetishized. I’m not looking for apologies anymore.