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.
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.