Yellow Fever, OG SoCal Asian and Breaking Stereotypes – Kaila Tells All | Kaila Yu | EP 111

From MySpace fame to memoir, Kaila Yu has done it all, model, musician, journalist, and now author of Fetishized. She joins us to talk about growing up Taiwanese American in Southern California, the 2000s Asian scene, K-pop, and confronting the Asian fetish. 

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More about the book:

Like most young women, Kaila grew up with big dreams set in a big world experienced through movies, television, and glossy magazine pages. As a teenager and through her most impressionable years, she turned to these sources for women to look up to—for beautiful, strong, smart, and talented women worthy of the world’s attention that looked like her. But the only Asian representation Kaila had to choose from in the late 90s and early 2000s were women that were reduced to overtly sexual and submissive caricatures; women with background roles that spoke in broken English, or in barely-there outfits. Kaila learned that to show her body was to be seen.

Thus, she plunged into a career of import modeling where her value was reflected through the male gaze. For her band Nylon Pink, Kaila wrote songs that dripped in sex despite her discomfort with constantly being made to feel like a different species during her own sexual experiences and feeling inauthentic and performative on film and TV sets. Impossible beauty standards led Kaila to cut and mold her body through various surgeries and undergo years of a blurry drug induced haze that felt like a way to cope. And all the while, she would encounter hypercompetitive women of the same background and experiences, fighting for status in this toxic, cyclical pursuit of validation that they couldn’t escape.

In FETISHIZED, Kaila grapples with her pain and melds it into something powerful to strike against mainstream media’s lingering acceptance of idolized classics, like Memoirs of a Geisha, The Joy Luck Club, Mean Girls and Fast and Furious. Kaila applies an educational lens with infamous U.S. history like the 1945 War Bride Act and its Japanese Bride schools, the series of laws in 1854 against Chinese “prostitutes” that the American Medical Association backed with nonfactual claims in a smear campaign, sexual tourism to provide relief to troops, and the origin of several terms and ideas that have made their way into our zeitgeist, like ABGs. She beautifully sharpens the imagery with personal anecdotes as she revisits formative moments in her life, such as being conned by a pornographer who coerced and assaulted her in an adult video that was widely distributed after the fact.

With FETISHIZED, Kaila fights against the stereotypes that are long overdue to be dismantled. She invites everyone who looks like her to the spotlight, to own their individual selves for all that they are. Kaila knows now that to be seen is to be heard. Through heartbreaking and poignant prose, Kaila begins to learn to love herself and attempt to rectify the world’s objectification of Asian Americans, providing a space for ev