Reviewing this book is interesting because it’s published posthumously, with an extensive notes from the author’s daughter about the process of bringing it to the light of the day and her relationship with her mother. At this point it seems boorish to be critical of the book in any way, which is unfortunate because the book is both quite good and quite messy. Not because the author had given up on the manuscript by the time it was ‘completed’ (many years before her terminal diagnosis), but because fundamentally the politics of it is very… let’s say a little troubled.
The Fetishist is about, as the title implies, the racial fetishization of Asian women (largely by but not limited to) white men. The prose is excellent; it is litfic’s litfic, if you would. Structurally it’s great. It’s a fun book, even, between the farcical kidnapping plot, attempted murder, things of that nature; remarkably eventful, for litfic in particular. Where the novel flounders is in its insistence that politics don’t really matter, because it’s personal; the fetishization isn’t that bad, because the guy actually does love you and he’s so genuine. Racial fetishists are bad? Not MY Nigel!
She was a quiet woman, with freckles on her face, and thin, blow-away hair, but there was something about her paleness and her fine, delicate features that made her, in certain lights, and on certain days, lovely in the way small children can be lovely, with a dewiness and a fragility—an artless eroticism that was the more enticing for being unformed.
From the constant obsession with depicting Asian women solely (with no exceptions) as hairless and childlike (or, in this case, as a small, sexy child) to a certain softness with which the titular fetishist is treated (and in general, the ‘rice kings’ of the novel), there’s an odd lack of commitment. Yes, it’s messy; what does it have to say about that discomfort though? In the end, strangely little. The white men are treated as, at worst, pathetic but endearing; at best they are depicted as genuine, helplessly attracted to an orientalist stock type not due to any fault of their own but due to the background radiation of white supremacy. It’s a book that’s oddly forgiving toward the ‘rice kings’. Alma, the primary subject of white men’s fetishization, almost revels in it: being desired by white men makes her feel hot (‘She is terrified, but also excited, to be in the Roman aggressor’s grip. It is akin to exultation, laced with contempt, a feeling all the more seductive for being unkind. For it is thrilling to be aligned with the victor, to be held up like a prize, exalted and desired… The Sabine women bore Romulus a nation, and in her dream, Alma smiles at the notion’), and in fact when a white boy tells her for the first time that she’s hot because she’s Asian, it’s also the first time she feels attractive, in possession of erotic power.
I don’t really expect an Asian-American woman who was reasonably comfortable (and whose relationship with her white husband was presumably reasonably healthy, insofar as the heterosexual pathology can be called healthy) to be cognizant of, I guess, brutal human trafficking, mail-order brides, and sex tourism, and how the consequences of racial fetishization looks like outside the context of her own life. The book and the author are concerned with a specific, female Asian-American experience, which is marinating in white supremacy and feeling hot about it because white supremacy has ‘chosen’ them as worthy of the white man’s sexual attentions. The result is the implication that the novel’s Asian-American women, barring Kyoko, are not merely heterosexual but attracted to white cis men in particular. All of them are shackled to it, helplessly drawn to white men, seemingly aroused by being racially salivated over. Fetishization, the novel seems to suggest, is a two-way street.
Daniel, the novel’s great fetishist, is depicted over the course of in-story years as bumbling but inexplicably attractive to Asian women (who practically line up to fuck him), even as he demonstrates little charisma. As the novel’s Asian-American women become sick and decrepit with age (or, in one case, commits suicide out of a broken heart), Daniel somehow remains the stud, the white man every Asian girl (including those twenty years his junior) dreams of seducing. While he doesn’t exactly have a lot of dignity, the women who are desperate to get in his bed somehow have even less.
(There is only one Asian woman in the book who’s not fucking a white man; she is fucking a Black one. The book goes on, at uncomfortable lengths, about how massive, just totally gigantic, he is compared to his tiny, small, diminutive and childlike Japanese-American girlfriend. She is a singer and composer; in one agonizing and mortifying passage, she belts out the lyrics, ‘Miyazaki, Imamura, Kurosawa, Ozu / Kawabata, Hokusai, Utamaro banzaiiii! / Kobo Abe, Hiroshige, Bashō, banzaiii! / Kamikaze, wabi-sabi, origami, hara-kiri, banzaiiiiii! I’m a samurai / I’m a geisha / I’m a samurai / I’m a geisha! Hey, hey, hey! / I’m Japanese! / I’m Japanese! / I’m Japanese! / I’m Japaneeeeeeeeese!’ Yes, Miyazaki as in the Ghibli guy.)
“Did you ever notice that all the bad things come from Asia?” said Alma.
[…]
“Now, now,” said Rickey. “Let’s not be so self-hating, my dear.”
He was looking at her with love, and, Alma knew, intended the comment merely as amusing repartee. But she recognized the word from her online wanderings; she had seen forums where Asian Americans accused one another of this—self-hatred, internalized racism, complicity.
The novel’s one nod to the possibility that Alma may be compromised is deflected as, essentially, woke-scolding: nothing more is done with it beyond this brief, somewhat glib dismissal. In the end it left me feeling like, well, she really wanted to write women’s fiction or a sort of romance, a book of simple genre conventions that doesn’t need to engage with any of its subject matter, just deliver what appears to be the author’s cope fantasy—that white men are decent human beings, that they are capable of treating the Asian women they fetishize as real people, that redeeming the ‘rice king’ is not only possible but laudable.
A Bee Writes 
You must be logged in to post a comment.