When I graduated from college, I moved to Taipei to teach ESL. One afternoon on the train, I overheard two white men discussing Asian women with an unfiltered openness achieved only under the guise of total privacy. They’d assumed no one around them could understand English.
By this point, I’d arrived at my stop. I froze, caught between arriving to work on time or telling them off for describing Asian women like sex robots whose operative functions include codes. At the last minute, I jumped through the train doors. I regret it to this day.
I wasn’t a stranger to white male “expats” preying on Asian women. At the English school where I taught, all my white male co-workers exclusively dated or were married to Taiwanese women. In the teacher’s room, as we graded homework and prepped for classes, they never spoke about Asian women. At least, not in front of me. But after hearing the two men on the train, I realized I couldn’t assume anything about what they thought. After all, it’s my absence that makes all the difference. In my absence, they feel free.
Read the entire heartbreaking article HERE.