The Asian Sex Worker Stereotype and the Military-Industrial Complex By A. Mana Nava @TWITTER: @dis_Mana_ting INSTAGRAM: @books.with.mana A. Mana Nava is a freelance writer and a dog-walking-while-reading hazard. Their fiction has been nominated for the Best American Short Story anthology. The nominated piece can be found in The Hopkins Review (issue 13.4). Currently, Nava is a cohort in the Kundiman’s 2021 Asian American Feminist Workshop, a mentee with Representation Matters Organization, an editorial intern at Overachiever, and a contributor for the Drizzle Review.
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hen I was ten years old, I watched Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan enter a massage parlor in Hong Kong. The hostess opens a door painted with Asian iconography to reveal dozens of scantily clad Asian women. They squeeze their chests, waiting for the men to buy them for an hour or so. Even as a child, I picked up on the overtly sexual undertones.
titute scene that gave us the infamous quote: “Ah, me so horny. Me love you long time.” Look at Mean Girls (2004), where Tina Fey (a white woman) writes her Asian characters as promiscuous underage girls seeking sex with grown men. Look at Madame Butterfly (1904) where a Japanese woman falls in love with a soldier and kills herself when he marries a white woman.
Asian women are fetishized by the West. We are depicted as demure, perfect to control, and hypersexual. These depictions perpetuate the same overall message: Asian women are the perfect subservient counterpart for men.
The objectification Asian women experience in the colonized West is dangerous. It’s humiliating and dehumanizing to see people that look like you reduced to a caricature for someone else’s entertainment.
This is a never-ending trend in Hollywood. American movies love to depict Asian women as hypersexual and obedient when they need to blend into the background. Look at Full Metal Jacket (1987) and the pros-
Celine Parreñas Shimizu (Director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University) believes this depiction is linked to the military-industrial complex. Shimizu speaks about how European co-
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lonial powers perpetuate the obedient hypersexual Asian woman narrative through plays and film. How did this dangerous portrayal even start? Even Shimizu admits that’s hard to pinpoint. There are primary sources from military personnel during the Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860), writing about the prostitutes they slept with. Prior to the war, there was documentation from traders describing the same experiences. Regardless of the reason for their visit, when tourists become the authority of another culture, so much is lost in translation. Their limited understanding, interaction, and exposure to the culture should no longer be regarded as the only truth. Let’s talk about class and wartime dynamics. People
