Yellow fever and Avian flu

"Why," I asked my friend, "do you like Asians so much? Why this yellow fever? Do you like the way they always start an Asian table at every meal? The way their thick glasses bump up against your nose when you make out with them? Their obsessive quest to become ubermenschen and revive the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?"

"Asian girls are pretty," he said.

"But beneath the meek, inch-thick makeup and catty smile lies a terrifying soul of darkness and deceit!" I gasped.

"They are subservient and obliging," he responded. "And because they've been marginalized all their lives, because they were always considered nerdy and gross in high school, they will do anything to receive attention from even the most unattractive, horse-faced, black-and-blue-North-Face-jacket-wearing boy or faculty member who supports grade deflation."

"That's true," I conceded. "Many times have I seen such a spectacle. It is therefore necessary that America contains China and prevents it from becoming the other superpower in an increasingly bipolar world."

That was when we decided that someone had spiked our drinks at Terrace. (It didn't help that we seemed to have lost much of our clothing and were in a strange room with three other people.) We were right, though, about one thing. Asia is a fetish. The concept of Asia in its entirety is a fetish.

No description of Asians is complete without reference to the feminine charms of Asian girls and the diminutive appendages of Asian men. In movies, there's always an Asian girl who doesn't speak or a small, brown Asian man who makes irritating sounds. In the case of the latter, the resemblance to a talking turd isn't accidental or particularly subtle. Asians, alongside blacks, Indians, homosexuals and faculty members who support grade deflation, cannot be anything but fetishes or objects of derision.

In all cases the dilemma is similar. When not part of the majority, do as the Romans do. Oftentimes, it's nothing more than a farcical parody, like the girl who adds regularly to her collection of polo shirts, trying to out-prep the preppiest white girls. Or the boy who spends 10 hours in the gym trying to become as big as his white counterparts, only to end up looking like a mutant turtle. Alternately, one can create a couple of flags and symbols, toss around some acronyms and set up shop on the second floor of Frist. By association, however, one's identity becomes so pronounced that it necessarily becomes a fetish. Nobody refers to someone as their "white friend" or their "straight friend." But it's not uncommon to refer to an "Asian friend" or a "gay friend".

It is impossible for China to play by the rules because it is undergoing Western scrutiny as either a fetish of burgeoning power, economic expansion and mystery or contemptuous object of conservative stupidity and avian flu. When being scrutinized, there's only one thing to do besides shutting the world out: exaggerate the differences between the subject and the object. China will continue to abuse human rights and censor its media because it is being scrutinized. The only solution is to stop looking, but nobody wants to lack foresight.

The beginning of interaction between the West and the East eventually brought about the Cultural Revolution and the Meiji Restoration, but that's just farcical parody, like the girl playing dress-up and the boy trying to flex his muscles. The result was the loathsome slaughter of millions through revolution and starvation in China and Japan's hideous rape of Nanking and most of Southeast Asia. That game was not a success, unless by success you mean "death of many" and "total and utter destruction and degradation," which may be the case for the faculty members who support grade deflation. Tiananmen, the Yasukuni shrine and the Great Firewall of China are eclectic if dissimilarly severe examples of ways in which fetishism plays itself out under scrutiny these days.

There is nothing inexorable about behaving well. Japan, even as a liberal democracy, continues to spit in the faces of millions in Asia who remember the atrocities of WWII. China continues to persecute and torture Falungong members, though the news has spread far and wide. My friend and I continue to wake up in dubious places after having too many drinks at Terrace. Johann Loh is a freshman from Singapore. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.