Lena Chen

Dealbreaker: He’s Got an Asian Fetish | GOOD

Here’s an essay I wrote for GOOD Magazine about a very political issue that wields its head in my personal life. A snippet below:

By the time I met Pierre, I’d already encountered countless fetishists trying to score submissive mates or a membership in the Joy Fuck Club. What’s more, I thought I knew how to avoid these guys—the kind of men who said they were looking for “Asian princesses” in their dating profiles, who expected me to walk on their backs one night and wield a wok the next.

But I soon learned that while a negative bias against a minority group is fairly easy to identify, a fetish can be much trickier to detect and dissect. Are attempts to speak Mandarin just misguided efforts to impress me, a non-native speaker? Should I be flattered when a guy compares me to Lucy Liu, an Asian actress to whom I bear little resemblance? Is being attracted to a woman for her race really any more offensive than dating her for her looks? Unlike sexually transmitted infections, there’s no test for yellow fever, and a fetishist is rarely inclined to disclose the affliction.

Click over for the full piece.