Fetishized - Kaila Yu

A deeply personal memoir-in-essays, reckoning with being an object of Asian fetish and how media, pop culture, and colonialism contributed to the oversexualization of Asian women—from Kaila Yu, former pin-up model and lead singer of Nylon Pink.No one fetishized Kaila Yu more than she fetishized herself. As a young girl, she dreamt of beauty. But none of the beautiful women on television looked like her. Growing up as a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s, Asian representation was scarce, and where it existed, the women were often reduced to overtly sexual and submissive caricatures—the geishas of the book turned film Memoirs of a Geisha; the lewd twins, Fook Mi and Fook Yu, in Austin Powers films; Papillon Soo Soo’s sex worker character in the cult Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket; and pin-up goddess Sung-Hi Lee. Meanwhile, the "girls next door" were always white. Within that narrow framework, Kaila internalized a painful conclusion: the only way someone who looked like her could have value or be considered beautiful and desirable was to sexualize herself. Blending vulnerable stories from Yu’s life with incisive cultural critique and history, Fetishized is a memoir-in-essays exploring feminism, beauty, Yellow Fever, and the roles pop culture and colonialism played in shaping pervasive and destructive stereotypes about Asian women and their bodies. Yu revisits the formative moments that shaped her identity. She reflects on
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