Thank you for your valuable work on these Letters, Professor. Saddened and angered by this latest terrible violence, I’m grateful that you have included it in your real-time chronicle of our present moment and how it grows from our past. I’m grateful for your entire project. Many thanks for your work.
Thank you for your valuable work on these Letters, Professor. Saddened and angered by this latest terrible violence, I’m grateful that you have included it in your real-time chronicle of our present moment and how it grows from our past. I’m grateful for your entire project. Many thanks for your work.
I’m writing to say that I wish you had not used the second sentence of your post to address the legality of the sites where yesterday’s murders took place. If relevant at all, that detail belonged somewhere far from the front of this narrative. To me, it’s like putting in a story of a rape a second sentence reporting that the victim was apparently dressed modestly.
Whether or not the sites were legal has no bearing on the horror of these crimes. Indeed, more germane is the question of whether immigrant women have other options for gainful employment - that is, the legitimacy of an economy so deeply sexist, anti-immigrant, racist, and stratified that women are still today selling intimate access to their bodies for money. One could look at the history of women in the waves of Asian immigration to this country and, I think, pull out threads that illuminate this. I hope you might touch on this in a future post.
As an RN and licensed professional massage therapist, I admit when I first heard news reports of this happening at "massage parlors", a term we don't like to use anyway, my heart sank. Here we go again, still, blaming the sex worker, nearly always women, but not the purchaser, nearly always men. And the framing of the crime reminds me too much of how all girls are sexualized in this country, far too young, and then humiliated at school when their tank top shows to much shoulder or cleavage, their shorts too much leg, their leggings reveal their curves, etc. Still viewed as an object for boys' pleasure or distraction, girls have to suffer.
One of the (many!) things that need to be stopped is the "Beauty" pageants for girls and women. It's disgusting to see 3 and 4 year old girls being dressed in provocative outfits, plastered with makeup, and their hair done up in adult fashion. That is a clear form of abuse and the damage it does to those girls is horrible.
The adult pageants aren't much better; they are reminiscent of an auction and reinforce the stereotype that the only worth of a woman is that of her body.
Listing the type of location and its lawful existence is important. If it had been a church or a school, or a work place or a meeting hall, such a description would have been unnecessary. Because of the stigma surrounding massage parlors, it was a crucial part of this story.
Abigail I disagree with your criticism of where HCR should put that information in the second sentence. It was just a relevant fact and we’re grown up enough to take it for what it is.
Excellent op-ed in today’s New York Times by May Jeong. She sheds light on some of this history:
Quoting, here’s an excerpt:
The stereotype of the Asian woman as simultaneously hypersexualized and submissive is borne of centuries of Western imperialism. An early documented instance of Asian fetishization can be found in “Madame Chrysantheme,” a thinly fictionalized account of a French naval officer’s time visiting 19th-century Japan. “Madame Chrysantheme” was wildly popular when it was published, and went on to create a subgenre of Orientalizing prose. The women in such accounts were, as Edward Said wrote in “Orientalism,” “creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing.”
Later, an untold number of American servicemen in Korea and Vietnam had their first sexual encounter with Asian women. The U.S. military tacitly endorsed prostitution, considering it good for morale, and at times even explicitly encouraged troops to explore the local sex industry. According to the book “Sex Among Allies” by Katharine Moon, a professor of political science at Wellesley College, an ad in Stars and Stripes, the main military newspaper, read: “Picture having three or four of the loveliest creatures God ever created hovering around you, singing, dancing, feeding you, washing what they feed you down with rice wine or beer, all saying at once, ‘You are the greatest.’ This is the Orient you heard about and came to find.”
Yuri Doolan, an assistant professor of history and of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Brandeis University, has written that the first Korean massage parlor workers most likely came to the United States in the 1950s after the United States reduced its forces in South Korea after the war there. They were unlikely to have been massage parlor workers before they came: The son of one of the victims has said his mother told him she was a teacher before coming to the United States.
These women, the first thousand or so, likely met their servicemen husbands in base towns across South Korea that sprang up during the Korean War, and the American occupation that followed.
In 1986 when the Immigration and Naturalization Service created the Korean Organized Crime Task Force to fight the scourge of its time, Korean prostitution, the authorities estimated that some 90 percent of massage parlor workers in the United States had come to the country as G.I. brides. These women followed their husbands to military bases. Once settled, some opened massage parlors, among the few opportunities for employment and financial autonomy available to immigrant women.
But beyond this specific history, structural violence against Asians in the United States has long been institutionalized. The racist, sexist nature of American society is hardly some aberrant, recent phenomenon that can be fixed through minor reform.
In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act became the first and only major federal law to exclude a specific ethnic group from entering the United States. It codified in federal law the xenophobia that had been building since the economic depression after the Civil War, in which Chinese laborers were blamed for taking jobs away from white people. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw horrific violence against Asian communities, including the 1887 Hells Canyon massacre, in which as many as 34 Chinese miners were killed, and the 1907 Bellingham riots, which drove out the entire South Asian population within three days.
Predating the Chinese Exclusion Act was the lesser-known Page Law of 1875, which was mostly applied to Chinese immigrants and allowed the barring of entry to those deemed to have agreed to services with “lewd and immoral purposes.” Immigration officials asked every female applicant, “Are you a virtuous woman?” They “apparently operated on the premise that every Chinese woman was seeking admission on false pretenses, and that each was a potential prostitute until proven otherwise,” according to “Unbound Feet” by Judy Yung, a historian and emerita professor of American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In this way, the Asian woman became an object of hatred, and lust, a thing to loathe, then desire, the distance between yellow peril and yellow fever measured in flashes.
Thank you for your valuable work on these Letters, Professor. Saddened and angered by this latest terrible violence, I’m grateful that you have included it in your real-time chronicle of our present moment and how it grows from our past. I’m grateful for your entire project. Many thanks for your work.
I’m writing to say that I wish you had not used the second sentence of your post to address the legality of the sites where yesterday’s murders took place. If relevant at all, that detail belonged somewhere far from the front of this narrative. To me, it’s like putting in a story of a rape a second sentence reporting that the victim was apparently dressed modestly.
Whether or not the sites were legal has no bearing on the horror of these crimes. Indeed, more germane is the question of whether immigrant women have other options for gainful employment - that is, the legitimacy of an economy so deeply sexist, anti-immigrant, racist, and stratified that women are still today selling intimate access to their bodies for money. One could look at the history of women in the waves of Asian immigration to this country and, I think, pull out threads that illuminate this. I hope you might touch on this in a future post.
As an RN and licensed professional massage therapist, I admit when I first heard news reports of this happening at "massage parlors", a term we don't like to use anyway, my heart sank. Here we go again, still, blaming the sex worker, nearly always women, but not the purchaser, nearly always men. And the framing of the crime reminds me too much of how all girls are sexualized in this country, far too young, and then humiliated at school when their tank top shows to much shoulder or cleavage, their shorts too much leg, their leggings reveal their curves, etc. Still viewed as an object for boys' pleasure or distraction, girls have to suffer.
And, it brings up sex trafficking-- something our country and the world needs to deal with.
The good thing of the second sentence — we will talk about it!!
One of the (many!) things that need to be stopped is the "Beauty" pageants for girls and women. It's disgusting to see 3 and 4 year old girls being dressed in provocative outfits, plastered with makeup, and their hair done up in adult fashion. That is a clear form of abuse and the damage it does to those girls is horrible.
The adult pageants aren't much better; they are reminiscent of an auction and reinforce the stereotype that the only worth of a woman is that of her body.
Listing the type of location and its lawful existence is important. If it had been a church or a school, or a work place or a meeting hall, such a description would have been unnecessary. Because of the stigma surrounding massage parlors, it was a crucial part of this story.
Abigail I disagree with your criticism of where HCR should put that information in the second sentence. It was just a relevant fact and we’re grown up enough to take it for what it is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/opinion/atlanta-shooting-massage-sex-work.amp.html
Excellent op-ed in today’s New York Times by May Jeong. She sheds light on some of this history:
Quoting, here’s an excerpt:
The stereotype of the Asian woman as simultaneously hypersexualized and submissive is borne of centuries of Western imperialism. An early documented instance of Asian fetishization can be found in “Madame Chrysantheme,” a thinly fictionalized account of a French naval officer’s time visiting 19th-century Japan. “Madame Chrysantheme” was wildly popular when it was published, and went on to create a subgenre of Orientalizing prose. The women in such accounts were, as Edward Said wrote in “Orientalism,” “creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing.”
Later, an untold number of American servicemen in Korea and Vietnam had their first sexual encounter with Asian women. The U.S. military tacitly endorsed prostitution, considering it good for morale, and at times even explicitly encouraged troops to explore the local sex industry. According to the book “Sex Among Allies” by Katharine Moon, a professor of political science at Wellesley College, an ad in Stars and Stripes, the main military newspaper, read: “Picture having three or four of the loveliest creatures God ever created hovering around you, singing, dancing, feeding you, washing what they feed you down with rice wine or beer, all saying at once, ‘You are the greatest.’ This is the Orient you heard about and came to find.”
Yuri Doolan, an assistant professor of history and of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Brandeis University, has written that the first Korean massage parlor workers most likely came to the United States in the 1950s after the United States reduced its forces in South Korea after the war there. They were unlikely to have been massage parlor workers before they came: The son of one of the victims has said his mother told him she was a teacher before coming to the United States.
These women, the first thousand or so, likely met their servicemen husbands in base towns across South Korea that sprang up during the Korean War, and the American occupation that followed.
In 1986 when the Immigration and Naturalization Service created the Korean Organized Crime Task Force to fight the scourge of its time, Korean prostitution, the authorities estimated that some 90 percent of massage parlor workers in the United States had come to the country as G.I. brides. These women followed their husbands to military bases. Once settled, some opened massage parlors, among the few opportunities for employment and financial autonomy available to immigrant women.
But beyond this specific history, structural violence against Asians in the United States has long been institutionalized. The racist, sexist nature of American society is hardly some aberrant, recent phenomenon that can be fixed through minor reform.
In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act became the first and only major federal law to exclude a specific ethnic group from entering the United States. It codified in federal law the xenophobia that had been building since the economic depression after the Civil War, in which Chinese laborers were blamed for taking jobs away from white people. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw horrific violence against Asian communities, including the 1887 Hells Canyon massacre, in which as many as 34 Chinese miners were killed, and the 1907 Bellingham riots, which drove out the entire South Asian population within three days.
Predating the Chinese Exclusion Act was the lesser-known Page Law of 1875, which was mostly applied to Chinese immigrants and allowed the barring of entry to those deemed to have agreed to services with “lewd and immoral purposes.” Immigration officials asked every female applicant, “Are you a virtuous woman?” They “apparently operated on the premise that every Chinese woman was seeking admission on false pretenses, and that each was a potential prostitute until proven otherwise,” according to “Unbound Feet” by Judy Yung, a historian and emerita professor of American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In this way, the Asian woman became an object of hatred, and lust, a thing to loathe, then desire, the distance between yellow peril and yellow fever measured in flashes.