How to Stop Fetishizing My Chinese Identity
There are a lot of ways to be Chinese. I’ve learned them as I’ve grown. Each one comes with a new lens through which you relate to the world; each offers a new aesthetic to wear like armor. These different ways determine how you present yourself to others, how you move your body through the world, and how you see yourself.
I was born to an open-minded Chinese family in Western Canada, but growing up, I didn’t feel like I had access to different identities. It wasn’t until I became older that those avenues began to present themselves to me. Even now, I feel the pressure not to explore these different Asian identities, but instead to conform to a very specific set of expectations. The idea of this one Asian identity that you “should” present to the world is so entrenched in our society that there are comics about it, and it’s turned East Asian women into a fetishized group. People born into an East Asian body are, like myself, often expected to fit into a narrow mold — of being intensely feminine, thin, studious, and youthful.
This fetishization of how East Asian women should exist in the world stems in the West from a mentality that dates back as early as 1887, when Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème was first published. (I would argue that while similar standards also exist in Asia, I personally feel them as more overtly fetishized and hypersexualized in the Western consciousness.) The plotline of Madame Chrysanthème follows the story of a French naval officer who falls in love with the idea of the perfect Japanese woman. He goes on to meet and marry a woman who matches his “exotic” expectations, but eventually leaves her in favor of an American wife.
As a beauty writer of East Asian descent, this type of racial fetishization is something I encounter frequently. It happens when one racial group objectifies another to such an extent that the latter is “divorced from the person” themselves, referred to by Patricia Park in Bitch Media as when a main character in a book objectifies Japanese culture to such an extent that he describes his ideal "creamy-skinned woman with black hair and cat's eyes" early on in the story and falls in love with a woman based on how well she fits the fantasy that he’s created.
Racial fetishization doesn’t only exist in writing, however. While racism may come out in microagressions (like strangers on the street expecting that I’ll be great at math and terrible at driving), beauty fetishization presents a little differently. It comes out when people hold all members of one race to a single standard for their appearance, or when they imply that someone is beautiful because they have the stereotypical or idealized “look” of their racial group. It can even be seen in the discussion around certain products: I’ve heard a lot of “all Asians have great skin” since Korean skin care become popular in North America. And many of these stereotypes have been generalized from a single ethnic group to all East Asian people.
An anonymous source described Asian fetishization to Stella Harris in a Willamette Week article as: You see it "[when people] keep alluding to a generic Asian culture." This idea seems to come from the legacy of Orientalism, from a belief that there’s a huge gap between the cultures of the East and the West, when in reality the two are more similar than they are different. (The term Orientalism was coined and described by Edward W. Said in his 1978 book of the same name.) On top of that, saying that there is only one “generic Asian culture” implies that all Asians share a single set of values, experiences, and aesthetics, which simply isn't true.
It’s uncomfortable to meet a person who expects you to be a certain way based on your ethnicity, but fetishization doesn’t end there. I’ve also felt discomfort when seeing the way many East Asian beauty products are sold and produced in the West: They're often exoticized and hyperfocused on their differences. What makes East Asian beauty trends in Western cultures problematic is that the products or ideas often become fetishized, or (in other words) reduced to a single “exotic” trait. Rather than celebrating the intricate, distinct cultures in Asia, the fetishization of East Asian beauty reduces all East Asian people to a single image. It also encourages brands to capitalize on stereotyped elements of a culture that have wide appeal with a global consumer base, referencing things like "ancient Japanese recipes" while producing products solely for sale outside of Japan. A similar problem is seen with East Asian brands masquerading as other Asian cultures under a “close enough” mentality to appeal to a global consumer base that either can’t tell, or doesn’t care, about the differences between Asian cultures.
North American retailers have also been guilty when it comes to viewing Asian culture as a homogenous entity and presenting a reductive, exotic version for consumption. I remember getting into a Twitter argument with a beauty retailer in 2016 about the "K-beauty" category in their online store. In the category were brands from Korea, but also longstanding Japanese brands like Shiseido, which was founded in 1872 in Japan, long before the 2011 rise of K-beauty products in North America and Europe. The retailer’s justification for the inclusion of these brands at the time was that they were "inspired by Korean beauty" products, even though they predated them; essentially, they were close enough to be included in a trendy way.
Even if it makes for a profitable business, someone else’s culture isn’t something that should be reduced to a single idea, then packaged and sold for our convenience. There's nothing wrong with celebrating Asian beauty, but it's important to respect the richness of other cultures when you dip into them for your own lifestyle. Every culture and every individual has lived a unique experience in the world and that’s something to be celebrated.
There may be a lot of ways to be Chinese, but there’s only one that’s been fetishized to such an extent that it felt like my only option when I was growing up — and I’m done with sticking to it. There’s more to being Asian than living up to other people’s expectations of how you’ll act and look. I’m excited to keep exploring what being Asian looks like on me.
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