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Yellow fever: cure needed, say Asian victims of sex prejudice

  • The fetishisation of Asians may have its roots in the colonial era but it remains a problem for modern women in everything from finding a date to finding a job

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The fetishisation of Asian people is a problem even in this age of increased social justice awareness. Photo: Felix Wong

Last year, Anh Ngo, an American of Vietnamese descent from Texas, decided to install the popular dating application Tinder. It was summer, so why not have some fun? But, as time passed and her number of matches increased, the app proved to be quite the opposite.

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In fact, many of the 20-year-old college student’s matches were devastatingly blunt – they had no qualms letting her know the main reason they liked her profile was because of her ethnicity.

“A lot of people I matched with mentioned my race in the beginning of a conversation,” Ngo recalls.

“I wasn’t surprised, honestly, because there have been other instances of people saying something racist to me before, [for instance] as a ‘joke’ in school. It did feel a little demeaning, though.”

The final straw came when Ngo matched with a white man in her area, who sent her a message saying he had “always wanted an Asian” – prompting Ngo to delete the app altogether.

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Howard Yeh, a 19-year-old New York student, has a similar story.

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