Fetishized

A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty

De: Kaila Yu

Narrado por: Kaila Yu

A “raw and lyrical” (New York Times) memoir-in-essays from former pinup model and lead singer of Nylon Pink Kaila Yu, reckoning with being an object of Asian fetish and how media, pop culture, and colonialism contributed to the oversexualization of Asian women.

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. In the late '90s and early 2000s Asian 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 in Goldmember; 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 reflects on the women in media who influenced her, the legacy of U.S. occupation in shaping Western perceptions of Asian women, her own experiences in the pinup and import modeling industry, auditioning for TV and film roles that perpetuated dehumanizing stereotypes, and touring the world with her band in revealing outfits. She recounts altering her body to conform to Western beauty standards, allowing men to treat her like a sex object, and the emotional toll and trauma of losing her sense of self in the pursuit of the image she thought the world wanted.

Candid and intimate, Fetishized is a personal journey of self-love and healing. It’s both a searing indictment of the violence of objectification and a tender exploration of the broken relationship so many of us have with beauty, desire, and our own bodies.


*Includes a downloadable PDF of Sources, Additional Reading, and the 'Not an Entirely Comprehensive List of Fetishized Portrayals of Asian Women in Mainstream Media' from the book.

Hard Truths, and Real Courage

This book hits hard and feels real. Kaila Yu doesn’t sugarcoat anything. She talks about what it’s like growing up and living in a world that puts Asian women into boxes and stereotypes. Some parts are raw, some are funny, some are painful, but all of it feels honest. By the end, you can see how much strength it takes to turn all that crap into confidence. It’s not just her story; it makes you think about the bigger picture of how women are judged, and how unfair and messed up it can be. A tough but inspiring read. Hearing Kaila narrate it herself in the audiobook makes it hit even harder; it's like she’s sitting across from you, telling her own story.

Truly unique, unsung (to me) perspective No sugarcoating… And you’ll need to get out of your bubble to follow Kaila’s story

Not preachy - Kaila keeps it real, about many events and raw experiences from beauteous to fugly, and everything in-between (and with my Audible copy I have missed out on all of the cool archive pictures - I need to get my Kindle one) It’s sort of like a diaries collection, a memoir, extremely sincere! Yet I got to say it’s beyond this You’ll definitely have to do your homework, making it through the books fun, hella serious stuff and plenty of new info And don’t get it twisted: it’s a piece of serious intellectual/research work too With good amount of facts on how Asian ladies been/are presented and represented - and misrepresented (and of course, what’s messed up and needs to be reprogrammed in many minds, even if it’s been normalized) I wish it could be translated into Ukrainian - since there’s not much for Asian Ukrainian women and girls out there to elevate and educate
PS: Some altered names/nicknames aren’t easy to figure out, yet it’s the way the author needs it to be And as I speak highly of Fetishized, there’re parts I don’t agree with, ‘eg some parts regarding rap music - yet I’m also not a critic, and I think that my feedback is (already) detailed enough