If you have allowed yourself to wade within the grimy, shallow depths of short-form content that comprise the digital ocean we have found ourselves hopelessly stranded in, there’s a chance you’ve come across a certain genre in your futile attempts to scroll your way to land via TikTok or Instagram Reel lifeboat. Maybe you’ve happened upon someone who’s suddenly found themselves in “a very Chinese time in their life.” Or potentially you’ve seen the harbinger of an upcoming “Filipino Fall.” Perhaps this aforementioned weather report shows signs of a subsequent “Wasian Winter.” In any case, you have probably noticed a recent surge in posts venerating East Asian identity and culture, typically by the caucasian creed. This, to me, a person of Korean descent, reflects a greater societal shift in our perception of these cultures and emerges as the digital reification of Orientalism.
Edward Said, renowned academic and critical theorist, developed the notion of Orientalism in his seminal text of the same name back in 1978. Whilst admittedly dated, the maxims of Said’s original theory remain presciently relevant from a modern lens. Principles of misrepresentation, alienation and most proactive for the sake of this argument, fetishization, continue to dominate our Western understanding of the East and non-Western world in general. Whilst much of Said’s critique on our shared comprehension of the Orient lies within the realms of academic study and the way it perpetuates the predominant institutional power of Western hegemony which reinforces it, I claim that the sinophobia Said presented some 40 years ago has grossly concealed itself in the illusion of intense fetishization.
Such a fetishization primarily emerges from the aforementioned hegemony of the Western hubris; the distinct categorization and recognition of Asian people as “other” or antonymic, paired with a simultaneously perverse fascination with said outlander as desirable and conquerable. The “asian fetish,” as we understand it colloquially, tends to exist in the form of mail-order brides, white men with self-proclaimed “yellow fever,” and happy ending massage parlors. However, within the digital age, this infatuation has only permeated itself within popular culture, with Japanese anime and pornography alike becoming increasingly popular in the Western World. The lusted exoticism of Asian women stems from a broader characterization as submissive, docile objects and serves largely as a reinforcement of hegemonic notions of Western supremacy.
I acknowledge that my reiteration of Orientalism in this sense applies most visibly to Eastern Asian culture, largely ignoring the original scope of Said’s theory as applicable to both Southern and Western Asia. This being said, the extent to which digital Orientalism exists for such ethnicities extends far beyond the comparatively trivial detriment of fetishization into a far more insidious, hateful form of xenophobia. South Asians are perpetually stereotyped as unhygienic, neurotic creeps who eat mud off the street. Western Asians have been seen as terroristic, womanizing, murderers since most of us were born. The stain of Orientalism continues to cover us all well into the digital age; I only choose to write about the East as it pertains to me.
Digital Orientalism recognizes Asian people as disparate cultural objects diametrically opposed to Western life, whilst concurrently attempting to assimilate through the guise of cultural appreciation or fetishization. It is not my belief that the average, white K-Pop fan is committing some kind of digital sex crime by finding Jungkook or whoever attractive, but behind the obsession with the boyish, more feminine features that are so antonymic to Western beauty standards lies a fascination with “the other.” As these shitty wasian text memes on Instagram keep popping up on my feed, paired with white dudes in traditional Chinese robes eating hot pot, I fear the East and the people of it residing in this country will begin to feel more like a commodity than a member of a community.
