Op-Ed: How Asian women are relentlessly objectified in American culture

The police knocked on my door as I stood in my underwear, before my closet, trying to pick out a well-coordinated outfit for the day. The men in my department often dressed casually, some even came to work in shorts, but as a woman of color in a predominantly white university, I knew I’d be judged by different standards.

The knocking continued, loud and insistent.

I threw on my pants and a shirt and rushed to the door. I saw two uniformed officers through the peephole: a white woman and a Black man.

I cautiously opened the door.

“Good morning, Ma’am,� the woman said. “We received a call that there was shouting coming from inside your apartment. Are you all right?�

“Yes, I’m fine. Hmm, that’s weird,� I said. “I’m the only person here and I haven’t heard any shouting.�

“May I come in and look around?� the woman asked.

“What for?�

“I want to make sure that you are not being held against your will. The caller said they heard voices shouting and they thought a woman was in danger. I want to make sure you’re not being trafficked.�

Startled, I had no idea how to respond. Part of my brain said: Don’t ever let cops in your home unless they have a warrant. They could plant drugs, something, charge you with a crime. On the other hand, I didn’t want any trouble with the police. If I put up a fuss now, would they brand me a troublemaker and harass me in the future?

I let the officers inside. The woman looked through my apartment quickly — it was small and mostly empty. I had recently moved to North Carolina for a tenure-track teaching position and I was still unpacking. There was a foot-high stack of flattened cardboard boxes on the floor.

The woman returned and said, “There’s no one.� She turned to me, “Thank you.�

And the cops left.

I wondered if they went around to the other apartments, asking if the inhabitants were trafficked or in distress. All the people I saw in the complex were white, and I was the sole Asian American. A few weeks after I’d arrived, a white woman had followed me across the grounds. She managed to catch up to me at the “clubhouse� where the apartment management company had their offices.

“Konichiwa! I did my missionary work in Japan,� she said. “I’d love to practice Japanese with you sometime.�

“I’m Chinese, not Japanese,� I said, which I knew was really more information than she deserved but it just came out of my mouth.

Had some of my neighbors seen me walking on the grounds and assumed I was a “trafficked� woman, a sex worker, because I am Asian?

The fact that Asian women are punished for the ways white supremacy hypersexualizes our bodies is not unfamiliar to me. I was 13 or 14 years old when white veterans first started coming up to me to tell me stories of the sex workers in Asia. When I complained to my mother, who was white, she would get angry at me, for complaining. “Oh, they like you!� she said. When I shared this story with other white women in college, they reacted with envy, “It’s not fair! They think you’re exotic.�

The most recent example of this objectification of Asian women’s bodies came after six Asian women were shot and killed Tuesday in Georgia. A captain in the sheriff’s department in Cherokee County said of the white gunman at a news conference Wednesday: “Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.� Press reports have said that the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, claimed he had a “sex addiction,� as if that would excuse murdering Asian women.

After the police came to my apartment that morning, I went to work as scheduled. Although I knew Asian American history and I knew that racism against me is not my fault, I could not escape the lingering psychological effects of having been racially profiled.

Between my classes and student meetings, I kept running to the women’s restroom to check my attire. My buttons were buttoned, my fly zipped, my blouse tucked into my pants. Still, for the entire day I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d never finished dressing, that something embarrassing was exposed and visible to everyone but me.

May-lee Chai, an associate professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, is the author most recently of “Useful Phrases for Immigrants.�