Wanderlust

how sex work helped me come to terms with my cultural identity

June 3, 2007 at 9:10 pm gvblog 8 comments

Guest Entry by Elizabeth Sy 

At the Sistersong Conference I attending a workshop titled "the Oversexualization of Women of Color."  During the workshop I listened to various women talk about their experiences of being exoticized and how it made them feel.  One comment that stuck out to me was about the internalization of racism and how it has affected a woman’s own view of her sexuality and self identity.  As I was sitting in the workshop, I started to think about my own life, my own experiences with being oversexualized and my own sense of identity.

Here’s what I realized:

Growing up in intolerant and racist southern Orange County made me ashamed of my Asian heritage.  When I was 8 years old, I remember serving coffee and donuts with my 60 year old immigrant Cambodian mother at 4 in the morning.  She was and still is the hardest working person I have ever known in my life.  She would work 12-14 hour days and refused to ever close the donut shop.  Christmas, New Year’s, her husband’s funeral were never an excuse to close down our means of survival.

When I think of those days, I remember customers wrinkling their noses and making weird faces when they watched us eat our lunch of dried salted fish and rice.  I remember people talking really loud and slow because talking really loud and slow makes you miraculously and suddenly understand English.  I remember them being mean and even calling her racial slurs and bad names because they felt entitled to.  

I remember an instant when a white man, in his 20s called my mom a stupid gook  because in her haste to brew 10 different types of coffee, pull out 3 trays of croissants before they burned and juggle serving 4 different customers at once all at 5 in the morning, she had accidentally given him a chocolate covered buttermilk donut instead of a maple one.  I remember my face and ears burning with shame.  I remember wanting my mother to yell back at him but that she didn’t.  And I remember that in that instant I hated the fact that she couldn’t speak English, hated that we were different, but most of all I hated her for not sticking up for herself.

At school, I remember being bullied by two white boys, their daily rituals involved them running after me, pushing me down on the playground and kicking me in the stomach, legs and chest.  When I was bold enough one day to ask them why they picked on me, they told me it was because I was a chink.  I remember coming home with black eyes, cuts and bruises and my mother slapping me because she felt so powerless knowing that I was getting bullied at school.

I hated everything that was Asian.  I hated my hair, I hated my eyes, I hated my nose, I hated being pressured to be the smartest kid in our school by my teachers, I hated being told that I was supposed to be quiet but most of all I hated being told that I “spoke good English for an oriental.”  And even though I wanted to hate the kids that beat me up or the rude customers that called my mom racial slurs—I didn’t.  The desperate need to feel connected to people and to be accepted left me feeling that it was our fault that people didn’t like us.

When I thought of Asian girls, I thought of dorky girls who played the violin and were really good at math, and when I was older, I thought of really high platform heels and super short skirts.  But even when I wore platform heels and loved doing math, I always considered myself to be different from other Asians I saw; in fact, I never considered myself Asian. 

Fast forward 10 years.  I was living in Berkeley and working at a strip club to pay for my tuition, astronomic medical bills and other varied expenses.  I remember being hired on the spot because I was considered “eye candy” because I was an Asian woman.  I was told that because of my Asian features, it would be much easier for me to make more money.  I was one of the three Asian women that worked at the club and was given advice early on how to milk my Asian status to make more money.  One woman told me that being an exotic dancer was about providing a fantasy to your client. 

“Every client wants to be your knight in shining armor, every client wants to think that they are saving you.  The best thing that you and any girl in this industry can do is pretend that you need help and that you don’t know what you’re doing with your life.  The best thing that any Asian girl can do is be submissive and pretend that you can’t really speak English.”

I noticed that when I did play into these very stereotypes, I made more money.  In doing so, part of me felt clever because I was exploiting the very stereotypes that I felt oppressed me.  But a bigger part of me felt terrible about pretending to be something I wasn’t and something I had always fought against being and for perpetuating the racist stereotypes that had affected my experience of growing up. 

That dynamic—of hating to be stereotyped but exploiting myself and those stereotypes in order to make more money, was something that I struggled with during the several years I spent working in the sex industry.  Doing sex work forced me to deal with my internalized racism and self-hatred.  There was no running away from the issue, every night I spent working forced me to think about why I felt more comfortable identifying as an Asian woman when I was doing sex work than in any other aspect of my life.

Later on, I understood that playing into Asian stereotypes for the purpose of making more money was never really about accepting my identity as an Asian woman.  And that stereotypes in and of themselves are misconceptions, chock full of unfounded assumptions, that aren’t capable of defining the people that they target because their purpose isn’t to provide a deeper understanding, it’s to a tool to oppress. 

In order to identify as an Asian American woman, I needed to define what that meant for myself and coming to define myself on my own terms meant stripping myself of the patriarchal and white lens I spent my childhood and early adult years seeing myself through.   

So 18 years of self-hatred, 4 years of sex work and a lifetime of self-exploration later, what have I realized?  That being a Cambodian American woman for me is acknowledging that my mother survived through two different wars, ran through jungles laced with landmines while pregnant and with her 9 kids at the time, survived through starvation and disease to miraculously give birth to me months after she arrived in the United States.  That my family and myself have been able to deal with all the shit, racism, punches and oppression that people have thrown at us and been able to rise above it to build amazing lives for ourselves.  That I love fish sauce because there is no other existing condiment or spice that can even compare to it.  And that in my nature, I am a warrior and a survivor. 

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