Exploring Yellow Fever and Feminism in Kaila Yu's New Memoir 'Fetishized'

Kaila Yu’s Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty sounds like one of those books that will make you laugh, cringe, nod along, and sometimes stop mid-page just to sit with what you’ve read. It’s presented as part memoir, part cultural takedown and looks to be messy in all the best ways. The mess is likely the point.

As profiled in a recent Forbes article, Yu’s lived through a lot of different worlds. Pinup model, lead singer of the all-Asian American rock band Nylon Pink, social media personality. And she pulls no punches talking about how those worlds shaped her. She digs into the way Asian women have been stereotyped for decades in Western pop culture, from tragic, submissive geishas to hyper-sexualized fantasy girls, and she’s just as willing to talk about how she bought into those ideas herself. The book moves between her personal stories and pop-culture deep dives, calling out films like Full Metal Jacket, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Austin Powers for the roles they play in feeding “yellow fever.”

She comes across as brutally self-aware, too. At one point she writes, “I’m still chiseling away at the layers between the pleasurable applause of the chauvinistic gaze and my feminist ideals,” admitting that this kind of unlearning might take her whole life, as quoted in Publishers Weekly, which calls it  “searing” and “ruthless,” . It’s not the kind of line you forget after you read it.

Ms. Magazine named it one of August’s best feminist reads, praising how Yu doesn’t just talk about being objectified. She also gets into the pressure to self-sexualize just to fit the mold.

What makes Fetishized seem so gripping is that it feels like it's not trying to give you a neat “lesson learned” at the end. It’s more like Yu’s inviting you into the middle of her own reckoning, showing you the contradictions, the slip-ups, the growth, and the stuff she’s still figuring out. And by the time you finish, you’ll probably be looking at your own media diet and beauty ideals in a whole new way.

Photos from kailayu.com