Fetishized by Kaila Yu: A Review

Hollywood has an objectification problem with women of color. You know the stereotypes: the sassy Black woman, the spicy Latina, the token supportive friend in every sitcom. Where Asian and Asian American women are concerned, stereotypes like the model minority, the dragon lady, and the submissive wife or girlfriend— to name just a few— are narrative short hands for the sexual availability and subsequent disposability of Asian women in the stories we consume.

Pop culture staples like Kill Bill, Gossip Girl, and The Office might entertain us, but they also hinge on the belittling, if not outright dismemberment, of the Asian woman in order to elicit our laughter, shock, and awe. What’s more, post-COVID 19 statistics of nearly tripled anti-Asian hate incidents demonstrate how our popular fictions refract violent and underreported social realities (Stop AAPI Hate, NAPAWF, Pew Research Center). For being the fastest-growing minority group in the U.S. since the 2000s, Asian Americans still contend against reductive mainstream media representations and must clamor for depictions that humanize, rather than objectify.

Enter Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty (2025) by Kaila Yu. 

Kaila Yu’s Fetishized (2025) is now out in audiobook, ebook, and hardcover.

There’s no one better equipped than Yu to unpack the phenomenon of Asian objectification in our pop culture narratives. A Taiwanese-American actress, import model, singer, journalist, and published author, Yu has been in the public eye since early adulthood. Fetishized is a memoir-in-essays that details Yu’s coming of age as a child of first generation immigrants in Southern California, and follows her subsequent journey as one of the few Asian American women in the entertainment industry in the 2000s. In the process, Fetishized tackles identity, femininity, fetishization, and the impact of harmful stereotypes on Asian girls and women. 

A lifetime of unraveling

More than once, I found myself muttering out loud and nodding along as I read her dissections of pop culture portrayals of Asian women. Did my teenage self really, unquestioningly stan Childish Gambino when he rapped about sexual exploits with a Filipino woman at “your local Jollibee”? And was I really unbothered when friends sent me viral videos that remixed the infamous “me so horny” line, or when elderly male veteran patients told me, unprompted, that they used to have a Filipina girlfriend? 

Yu, warmly but unflinchingly, describes her own reckoning with objectification as a process of

chiseling away at layers... unraveling these unconscious beliefs-- woven by media and culture like a silent, constantly spinning spider-- for a lifetime

It’s a jarring and yet comforting feeling to read similar experiences to yours in someone else’s memoir– a “shock of recognition,” but no one is Melville and the spiritual kinship is the inner work we must do to survive a bleak media landscape that constantly bombards women of Asian descent with the same old behavioral paradigms of submissiveness, studiousness, and sexual fungibility. Through these paradigms, normalized by mainstream media (mis)representations, Asians and non-Asians alike fall susceptible to a dangerous, centuries-long discourse of perpetual foreignness and non-citizenship. I almost don't blame them; media and culture work widely and powerfully, and as the spider simile points out, weave tangled, ideological webs that take a lifetime to unravel.

“Where are you guys from?”

The opening anecdote to Fetishized effectively captures the citizen and non-citizen discourse that animates our most heated political discourses. The act of designating a person as alien or foreign to the U.S. does not always occur as violent, televised spectacles; sometimes, the act takes the form of seemingly-innocuous microaggression. Yu recalls the following exchange with an overly friendly dog-owner while out on a date in Los Angeles:

“Where are you guys from?” he asked, seeming eager to chat. “I’m that rare LA native,” he added, referring to the fact that so many in Hollywood are hopeful transplants, chasing a silvery dream of fame or riches.

“Oh, me too,” I said. I grew up in Southern California, although more accurately, in the muggy Inland Empire.

“No, where are you from from,” he insisted.

I knew what he was asking and yet answered accordingly, not needing to make this a teachable moment. “My parents are from Taiwan.”

I held my breath in anticipation of what would drop out of his  mouth next. My date hadn’t been familiar with the concept of the Asian fetish, and now he was observing it in the wild.

A spoiler: what the man says next about Asian women, Jewish women, and feminist liberation movements at large is absolutely wildlife documentary-worthy.

The man’s ethnicity and self-proclaimed nativeness to Los Angeles (Tongva land, by the way) is not the point. Neither does Yu speculate or mention these things. The major takeaway of the interaction, Fetishized seems to argue, is that popular narratives of ideal citizenship exist, and those narratives embolden a particular brand of patriarchal authority to claim belonging and nativeness to land while questioning the belonging of others. In this instance, the classic “where are you really from?” line of questioning that many of us have heard before redoubles in xenophobic force with the foreignness of the Asian woman compared to the nativeness of the American man.

Am I an Asian Fetishist?

Having a partner of Asian descent and/or enjoying anime, k-pop, wuxia films, and other facets of Asian popular culture does not mean someone has an Asian fetish. Recognition and appreciation of cultural and ethnic distinctions can occur without forgetting that all individuals have complex personhood, or that Asian Americans are not a monolith. As Yu argues throughout the memoir, fetishization is a willful blindness to the person’s humanity:

More than mere preference and admiration of physical features… it’s a myopic, generalized belief that Asian women inherently embody traits of submissiveness and obedience… like we’re another species of women or kinky, forbidden aliens without unique sexual superpowers

Yu grapples with own her participation in mainstream media representations of Asian fetish. You may have already encountered her cultural footprints: serving 2000s cowboy chic in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, seamless k-pop song covers with metal/rock band Nylon Pink,  sexy photos featured in import car magazine Import Tuner. Yu has deftly made a career of drawing the Western male gaze. However this mode of self- empowerment and validation is ultimately twisted, even potentially deadly for Asian women. Some of the most vulnerable moments in Fetishized recall Yu’s and her Nylon Pink bandmates’ struggles to course correct their life trajectories after years of being in the entertainment industry spotlight, during which they were fetishized in spite of attempts to curate their image as an all-girl band.

The memoir is as well researched as it is relatable. It surveys the cultural and material afterlives of Western colonialism, evident in the legal precedents, military operations, and mass media histories that help normalize and sustain the fetishization of Asian women in the U.S. today. The resulting essays read like vignette-style prose and sociohistorical commentary both at once, with standout chapters like “Geisha” and “A Reckoning” leaving ample food for thought and a trail of research rabbit holes to explore.

Colonial mentality, as Yu reminds us, undergirds and sustains Asian fetishization by Western men. Colonialism is even alive and operational in our everyday language use.

The term “yellow fever” applies well enough to Asian women in a sexual context. Originally a viral, mosquito-born disease but now also a derogatory term for sexual obsession to “females of Asian descent” (thanks, Urban Dictionary), “yellow fever” etymologically evidences the dual linkage of military and sexual conquest in the Pacific by Western forces. The terms “racially motivated” and “hate crime,” on the other hand, do not apply (thanks, then-FBI director Christopher Wray) when Asian communities and allies call for systemic justice against horrific, targeted incidents like the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. 

This is the impact of Asian fetish, at home and abroad. 

A post-colonial, post-fetishized future 

Yu’s prose flows as much for our reading pleasure as it does for easing us into the long histories and present realities of violence against Asian women. But it also delivers a valuable framework for unpacking traumas, unlearning harmful ideologies, and embracing one’s vulnerabilities after years of detachment and self-preservation. Fetishized brims over with disarming humor and honesty.

Hopefully, perhaps even over-eagerly, I believe Yu’s reparenting models a radical acceptance of the traumatized self, the kind that openly grapples with colonial injury while also moving beyond it towards a post-fetishized future.

Arguably, Yu even contributes to an early, fifth-wave feminism in which self-love after self-injury is the precondition to our being able to understand each other across the intersections of sex, race, gender, class, and culture.

Fetishized is a crucial addition to Asian American women’s literature. It’s key to better understanding how pop culture normalizes the objectification of Asian women in the stories that permeate our streaming platforms and movie theaters. It’s also just a bitingly witty, enjoyable read from start to finish. For anyone invested in BIPOC representation, the mechanisms of the Hollywood industrial complex, intersections of postcolonial solidarity, or pop culture in general, this memoir is worth your time. 

To learn more about Kaila Yu and her many accomplishments and ongoing projects, head over to https://kailayu.com/. Photo credit to Marin Independent Journal.