White Boy Paradise
on fetishization
The skin feels better in the homeland. Breathes easier, I think. I’m oily and dry and patchy all at once, but the fifteen hours of recycled airplane air are reversed by Southeast Asian humidity. It’s better in Laos than in Thailand, because April carries the last hazy dregs of the burning season. In Thailand, the sky is never completely clear, but the sun shines until my pores leak through the night. Bangkok is all polluted, cyberpunk fantasy for all the Westerners that keep their orientalist lens on as they walk through neon streets. Soi Cowboy is White Boy Paradise. Thai women half-naked, dressed as cowgirls and go-go dancers wearing bikinis and fishnets and high heels. A beautiful ladyboy in pleasers is Ana de Armas, larger than life, a sensual simulation to the White Boy’s Ryan Gosling. The girls allure you (read: me) with soft mouths. It’s hard to ignore the dullness in their eyes. They’re used to every kind of casanova; they know how to get paid.
These Western boys, they all think they’re Ryan Gosling. They all think they are The Driver in his scorpion jacket, but they are never Ken. They think they’re in a Nicolas Winding Refn film. In NWR’s Only God Forgives, Ryan Gosling plays an American expat running an underground Muay Thai club in Bangkok. Throughout the entire movie, you only see Bangkok at night. Neon-lit, crime-ridden. The only women in the movie are Thai prostitutes, one being a casualty of the violence around her. The girls in this movie barely speak. There’s something pseudo-philosophical about all of it while disregarding any real meaning, which means it’s admirable to men convinced they’ve discovered the secret to spirituality and who probably dress up as Patrick Bateman for Halloween (I am guilty of this but we’re ignoring that).
This is all going through my head as I walk down the street and try to sympathize with the girls who look like me and the men who are looking at them. My blood is curdling, but that’s mostly because I am sweating out of orifice in this caricature of a Wonderland and I need a beer desperately. I think I’m too mean for this place. They call it the Land of Smiles for a reason.
Maybe I want to be Ryan Gosling tonight. Around me, all the Ryan Goslings are Australian and wide-eyed. Horned up and double-fisting bottles of Singha and Chang. Why do they all have bad tattoos and awful fades? I can’t be angry at all of them, considering they’re mostly around my age. It’s the older ones that freak me out – sunburnt and sporting t-shirts of beers they don’t have back home. There’s something curiously medieval about them. Back home, they were middle-aged, unhappy salesmen, divorced IT workers, men worn thin by spreadsheets. They are now feudal lords of pleasure, hallucinating through the streets of Bangkok that they’ve reached some kind of hedonistic Nirvana. Their bodies soften, their livers fail, their savings dwindle, and the city metabolizes them effortlessly.
There is something almost poignant in their gaudiness. The tank tops, the gold chains, the desperate flirting, the leathery tans. They are trying to decorate over emptiness. They have traveled thousands of miles to escape the suspicion that their lives back home had become spiritually uninhabitable. Bangkok offers temporary anesthesia for this feeling. So does alcohol. So does being called handsome by someone paid to say it.
Getting fetishized seems to be a rite of passage for anyone with an Asian, female body. From puberty and onward, I was always confused about my lack of appeal when it came to navigating romance. It didn’t help that I grew up in a town where I was probably one of three Asian girls in my high school. Despite this, I saw the exoticization of Asian women in the media around me. It only got worse as I grew up and was met with all the usual microaggressions white men used to express their attraction to me. It’s funny that the women around Soi Cowboy might be treated similarly, but they are contributing to the illusion and furthering their own perceived exoticism as a way to survive.
Prostitution was legal in Thailand from the mid-1300s to the mid-1700s, but the period of White Sexual Imperialism started around the Vietnam War. U.S soldiers used Thailand as a place of recreation (literally “R&R’s” – “Rest and Relaxation”) during the war, and with the rising poverty rates in Southeast Asia, the sex industry boomed. The bodies of Asian women were deemed necessities for U.S. military policy. With war came along rape – Sunny Roan remarks that, “chiefly characteristic of Western armies, group machismo evolves in close-knit combat units where sexual performance is prized just as highly as combat performance.”1
In 2021, three Asian spas in Atlanta, Georgia were targeted by a shooter, and six Asian women were killed. While some thought the racial motivation was attributed to the coronavirus, the suspect told the police that he no longer wanted to indulge his sex addiction, so he decided to “eliminate” the problem. In 2022, creative producer Christina Yuna Lee was killed in her Chinatown apartment in New York City by a man who followed her home and intended to sexually assault her. The myth of Asian women as submissive and innocent yet sexually available is what gets them killed. Or, you end up self-loathing and become a character on one of Worst Boyfriend Ever’s posts. As Said writes, Oriental “women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing.”2
White men display the “Asian fetish” syndrome, a symptom of not only the desire for male dominance, but also the imported stereotype that Asian women want to be dominated. The mail-order bride industry flourishes, capitalizing on the “Asian fetish.” Then, the overrepresentation of Asian women in pornography perpetuate the entire cycle of White sexual imperialism as experienced by Asian women today.
Sunny Woan
When I leave Soi Cowboy, I’m seething. To be honest, it’s because I can’t be Ryan Gosling. My boyfriend is wary and every bar is too crowded. I get extremely cranky when I have to walk around for a long time with no destination in mind, so in a mild fit of rage, I go to the very first bar I see and order a Long Island Iced Tea. Immediately, I see another version of the Asian fetish phenomenon – all the white guys here are decrepit and alone. They have no pack of jackals to party with them, so they’re flirting with the bartenders and playing pool with them. There’s a guy with a lipstick kiss on his cheek that makes my nose wrinkle. He actually looks particularly medieval, on the edge of death, but he’s Make-A-Wish-Kid happy because a beautiful Thai woman half his size is holding his hand.
I want to save her. Which is more embarrassing: my misplaced charity or my dumb fantasy that people like me — an amalgam of pessimism and girlhoods spent putting on gifted whitening skin cream — could save anyone with a glare? I sip my Long Island and watch the girl laugh at the old man’s jokes, the way her hand snakes around his wrist, her smile liquid in the red bar lights. The three bartenders wear matching t-shirts and laugh loudly at anything the men say. It’s a coordination act, a cabaret, and the men are so grateful for the illusion of charm it almost becomes romantic. I hate it for a few minutes but then I want, desperately, to believe the intimacy is real. Maybe they all cheat the system. Maybe they all get what they want.
I think again about blending in, wondering what my life would be like if I was born in Laos and made my way to Thailand rather than stepping foot in America at all. It feels like tiptoeing the line between observer and observed. An Asian girl with a white guy inside me watching an Asian girl – an endless hall of mirrors. Fantasies embedded in centuries of colonization sold to tourists. I don’t know enough about the sex industry in Thailand to affirm how many of these women are getting trafficked or simply content with their jobs. There’s a gap to my disdain for White Sex Imperialism in terms of actual impact – the historical violence against Asian women by Western forces vs. the oddity of obsession with Asian-American female sexuality in the U.S. In my comfortable WMAF partnership, I look onto the passport bros with a frown. Someone could call me a hypocrite, maybe. You’re dating a colonizer!
But there’s a difference between navigating love after constantly being suspicious of getting fetishized versus the immediate dehumanization I know Western men put forth upon an Asian woman they want to fuck on vacation. Even without the passport bros, there are an absurd amount of farangs3 in Luang Prabang and Vientiane, which are more than I had ever seen the last time I visited the homeland almost a decade ago. Edward Said’s Orientalism is still relevant today as white debauchery continues to consume the East. My only comfort is that even Ryan Gosling could not stay in Bangkok forever. When I step back onto the street, the city is overflowing with more tourists. I have to remember that I’m also one, among the American veterans and Chinese spectators and European girls with alizarin lips. I try to conjure another Ryan Gosling, or at least someone who can walk the tightrope between longing and disgust better than me. I get another drink.
Woan, Sunny. “White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence.” Washington and Lee University School of Law Scholarly Commons, 2008, scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol14/iss2/5/.
Erward, Said. “Orientalism.” Monoskop, 1979, monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Said_Edward_Orientalism_1979.pdf.
Farang (ฝรั่ง) is the most widely used Thai word for white Westerners or Caucasians. It is the same word in Lao.