Former model Kaila Yu exposes the violent roots of Asian fetishization in debut memoir

Kaila Yu’s debut memoir “Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty” hit shelves Aug. 19, confronting what the former pinup model calls the most insidious stereotype plaguing Asian women today.

In an exclusive interview with The Rebel Yellow, Yu, 46, identifies what she sees as the root of the problem. “One of the most pervasive and insidious stereotypes is the idea that Asian women are interchangeable, submissive and disposable,” she says, characterizing it as “a fantasy rooted in both colonial history and modern media.” In “Fetishized,” she traces how such tropes are “repackaged through everything, from movies to anime and K-pop.”

Yu believes the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings crystallized the deadly consequences of this objectification. A gunman, she notes, “projected his so-called sex addiction onto Asian women’s bodies and murdered them.” What followed exposed the gaslighting Asian women routinely face. “The fact that media outlets hesitated to name the violence as racially and sexually motivated shows just how often Asian women are gaslit when we speak about our objectification,” she recalls. “With ‘Fetishized,’ I wanted to challenge not just the existence of these stereotypes, but the silence around them.”

To Yu, the hardest part was not researching the cultural forces behind fetishization, but excavating her own buried experiences. “The most challenging part was sharing experiences I’ve never spoken about publicly, like my sexual assault and cosmetic surgeries I underwent to fit beauty ideals,” she admits.

Editor Amy Li, another Asian American woman, became essential to the process. Li helped Yu “shape the book with care and intention” and guided her in ensuring that her personal story “always related back to the larger cultural forces at play.” Though writing “Fetishized” proved cathartic, Yu says the vulnerability feels “terrifying” now that it is about to go out into the world.

Writing her essays chronologically revealed patterns Yu had not recognized before. Her experiences in modeling, music and film auditions, she says, were not isolated incidents but part of a larger cultural landscape. This structure brought unexpected self-compassion. “It gave me so much more compassion for the teenage girl who entered the entertainment industry with so much hope and kept going, even through all the disappointments and fetishization,” she shares.

Yu’s journey took her from pinup and import modeling to auditioning for dehumanizing TV and film roles, then touring globally with her band Nylon Pink — from Tokyo’s Hard Rock to venues in Australia, China and Malaysia. Through it all, she found herself altering her body to conform to Western beauty standards and allowing men to treat her like a sex object, choices that exacted an enormous emotional toll.

Yu’s historical research uncovered disturbing truths about fetishization’s origins. “So much of the historical research was shocking, how deeply and blatantly the Asian fetish is rooted in violence. It’s war, colonization and systemic rape,” she notes. “From military brothels to comfort women to sex tourism, the fetish is rooted in clear domination.”

These patterns persist in modern media. During the late 90s and early 2000s, which Yu’s memoir examines, Asian women appeared on screen almost exclusively as sexual objects: the geishas in “Memoirs of a Geisha,” twins Fook Mi and Fook Yu in “Austin Powers in Goldmember” and Papillon Soo Soo’s character in “Full Metal Jacket,” known to the internet as the Da Nang hooker, to name a few. Meanwhile, “the ‘girls next door’ were always white,” Yu observes. As a young girl who dreamt of beauty but found that none of the beautiful women on television looked like her — except when they were being fetishized — she absorbed a toxic lesson: “The only way someone who looked like her could have value or be considered beautiful and desirable was to sexualize herself.”

Yu hopes her book would validate Asian women who have been dismissed when speaking about their experiences. “I want Asian women to feel seen, especially those who’ve been gaslit into thinking the Asian fetish is no big deal,” she emphasizes. She borrows Cathy Park Hong’s term to describe what she calls “minor feelings,” or those “quiet, wounds, like papercuts, so often dismissed by others.”

Her ultimate message transcends gender lines: “If there’s one takeaway, it’s that fetishization and objectification are not harmless. While ‘Fetishized’ centers the experiences of Asian women, I hope men read it too so they can feel what it’s like to be reduced to a sexualized image.” The memoir, described by the New York Times as “raw and lyrical,” blends vulnerable personal stories with incisive cultural critique, serving as 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.”

Since the early 2000s period her memoir covers, Yu acknowledges significant changes. “There’s been exponential growth with Asian American representation in the media, huge amounts of progress. There still are more strides that need to be made,” she tells The Rebel Yellow. Her vision for the future remains straightforward. “What I want moving forward is simple,” she says, “for Asian women, and all women, to be seen as full, complex human beings. As people who are worthy of safety, respect and equality.”

Yu acknowledged one early reader, Brice Montgomery, who captured the book’s nuanced approach on Goodreads and praised how Yu “refuses to frame herself as a passive victim.” Instead, she “recognizes that the truly insidious part of fetishization is how it encouraged her to perpetuate it,” Montgomery writes, recognizing it as “the kind of self-critique possible only through deep self-love.”

Yu, currently a luxury travel, food and culture writer based in Los Angeles, will see debut memoir challenge readers to confront uncomfortable truths about desire, power and the cost of being seen.