By Jill Damatac

In 2020 and 2021, Stop Asian Hate galvanized into a movement, a brief burst of national awareness of the hate crimes that had spiked during the Covid-19 lockdown.

The 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, which resulted in the deaths of eight — six of them Asian women — were carried out by a white man, a sex addict purportedly trying to remove “temptation.” But in the years since, mainstream awareness of both the movement and the crimes it worked to address has largely subsided.

Enter Kaila Yu’s candid and intimate “Fetishized.” This voicey memoir-in-essays probes the roiling intersections of race, gender and sexuality, particularly the phenomenon known as “Yellow Fever,” a term used to describe the way in which Asian women are regarded by the white men who call themselves “Asiaphiles.”

Yu’s debut fuses critique, historical examination and feminist contemplation with an unsparing account of her personal journey. By deliberately shattering her mirror of self-perception, Yu reflects — in the manner of Virginia Woolf’s “looking glasses at odd corners”— on the stereotypes that are the root of the West’s fixation on, and violence toward, Asian women.

The opening chapter, “Daddy,” revisits the Taiwan-born Yu’s youth in Southern California. Tracing her need for acceptance to childhood, Yu recounts feeling invisible and unloved by her emotionally distant father, recalling an episode in which he hugged her brother, but refused to touch her.

Interweaving this story with a close reading of “The Little Mermaid,” Yu deftly highlights film and television’s role in instilling certain notions of female desirability and value in women and girls. “If I couldn’t dazzle,” she writes of both her family’s and their adoptive cultures, “I would remain insignificant and continue to slip through life unnoticed.”

To read the entire article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/books/review/fetishized-kaila-yu.html