The Invisible Experience of Asian American Women

Let’s have a frank discussion about the things you won't experience unless you're an Asian woman.

Let’s have a frank discussion about the invisible experience of Asian woman. How much could racism affect someone like her? “She’s sort of White,” (I’m biracial Asian-American), you may think. Let me tell you.

bisexual kaiju @LyanaRodriguez1

@C_Stroop Now let's also consider that: 1) Asian people as a whole are blamed for the Pandemic and for America's waning supremacy in the world. 2) Asian women are fetishized to an extreme.

🌊 Lily Akiko Bergeron @Lily_Warrior

@LyanaRodriguez1 @C_Stroop So fetishized that I've had men ask for a look at my private parts to see if they like look white women's private parts. As if I would say yes to that shit. They have also commented that I was part of the "good minority," to which I reply that we aren't the minority globally.

I was 8-years-old when I learned about the tweeted stereotypes, from male classmates.

I struggled to focus in class for fear of them acting on the things they would say to me. Often, for no reason whatsoever, boys would shout things like “ching-chong” if I was talking. As I approached 9, 10, and 11 years, increasingly older males said things like “me so horny,” which I did not understand at the time.

Male peers often felt comfortable saying incredibly vulgar sexual things to me at school. They clarified that while they found me attractive, I was lesser than the completely White girls and women around me. The distinct impression I had was always that I should not be offended. Instead, it seemed that I was meant to see attention from White men as a gift.

This is not an experience uncommon to Asian women. A real phenomenon exists where White males don’t even particularly seem to identify that we’re human or that it is at all unfaithful to their partners or indecent to behave this way. This may partially explain why nearly 70% of hate crimes against Asians in the US in 2021 were against women.

Source: “Republicans’ Anti-Asian COVID Rhetoric Was A Deliberate Strategy.”

I don’t fault people for not knowing.

Racism is an experience that is doubly painful because of the way you experience it — alone.

No one else sees the different instances, the comments, the attacks, that pile up over a lifetime. It’s like society hitching weight to your back at birth, that grows over your lifetime, which much of society denies exists.

When six Asian women are shot to “remove temptation” you can say you think that because he said it was a sex addiction that this had nothing to do with race. You’d be as dead wrong as the murders themselves, but I understand why you might not know.

You know now.

Do better so that my daughters never have to hear the things that I did. Do better because Asian women (and men) are struggling to hold it together, just like Jewish Americans are tired, like Hispanic Americans are tired, and Black Americans are tired.

We already know the truth.

I blame no one for not knowing. It’s the denials of our reality because it differs from yours— when there is no reasonable expectation that you would have the same experience—that is more difficult to understand.

Doing this, is what ensures that little girls today, experience what I experienced. It is to participate in perpetuating a cultural climate that precipitates acts of violence. You don’t have to be a bad person or even be a “racist” person. You just have to deny a reality you can’t see.