In a previous issue of the Nassau Weekly, we published a verbatim that was offensive to members of the Asian American community, particularly Asian American women. While the intent had been to call out racist and fetishistic language, we acknowledge that printing the verbatim was a lapse in judgment, and wound up perpetuating the very language we had intended to critique. In order to continue the discourse, we opened a call for members of the Asian American community, the Nass community, and members of both to share their responses.

Your Humor, My Pussy Part 1

In high school, someone in the grade below me equated “Asian pussy” to “moldy sushi egg roll” in an effort to explain why Asian women were unattractive. Opening issue 15 of the Nass and seeing “Eating Asian pussy, all we need is sweet and sour sauce” printed in the Verbatim page was not so much a revelatory experience, but a tired re-encounter of the gross racial fetishization I already knew too well.

“Eating Asian pussy, all we need is sweet and sour sauce” does many things at once; it blatantly fetishizes not the entire Asian woman, but specifically her “pussy” (her sexual organ), and expresses a necessity for “sweet and sour sauce,” referencing stereotypical Asian foodstuff to imply the priming of the “Asian pussy” for literal consumption in addition to oral sex. It’s easy to continue this process of critical analysis and question the fraternity that used the line as an email sign off, criticize Kanye West for conceiving it as a song lyric, and disparage the Nass for providing this disgusting rhetoric with a platform, but I’m more interested in what I found myself doing in the hours, days, weeks after I saw “eating Asian pussy, all we need is sweet and sour sauce”: the work of making my anger make sense.

I feel an obligation to be on the defensive, to conjure all possible counterarguments from all angles (What if the Verbatim was meant to call out the condemnable behaviors of frat culture at Princeton? Maybe it’s just a joke, maybe I just lack a sense of humor, etc) and refute them. I’ve discovered that in order to be acceptably angry, my arguments must be airtight, my frustrations must be logically justified because no one will listen or empathize if I am upset at virtually “nothing.”

Do these few lines of text matter at all in the context of “greater” issues at hand? This is a question many people like to ask the angered, a slick mechanism that invalidates and dismisses. And my answer is no, a few lines printed in one student publication does not mean that much, especially in comparison to other pertinent issues. But I can be angry about large-scale injustices, and still think that publishing “eating Asian pussy, all we need is sweet and sour sauce” is fucked up because my anger and my compassion are not restricted to finite amounts. I live in a body that is Asian with an Asian pussy; this is my body at stake.

Annabelle Tseng ’19

Your Humor, My Pussy Part 2

I am not interested in detailing my, our, pain. I’m not interested in deconstructing why, when I was confronted by the words, “Eating Asian pussy, all you need is sweet and sour sauce,” I lost possession of my body, momentarily. Momentarily, because I then snapped back into reality, which is, of course, that those words don’t describe me. How absurd! My body, reduced into a sexual object to be consumed and thrown away like Chinese takeout? The verbatim, which I learned retroactively was a Kanye lyric, touches upon an all-too-familiar dehumanizing exotification of the Asian body, but it says nothing about me, nor any Asian girl I know. But it does say something damning about the culture from which it came.

A series of decisions and silences occurred that led to me reading this verbatim. Multiple people acted, or failed to act, in a way that perpetuated the insult, from the song lyric to email to the verbatim publication. It’s a little bewildering to think of how many people OK’ed this lyric before it got to my hands. I doubt anyone intended to be racist or misogynistic; the insult simply didn’t land on them because it didn’t feel real. The verbatim functioned as garish and humorous provocation, but nothing more, for how could it when the words didn’t apply to any of their bodies?

I like the Nass and its people; I’ve read their pieces, attended their meetings, and am interested in writing stuff for them. So it is bewildering to witness one of my editor-in-chiefs publicly apologize to my club for insulting a community to which I belong. I realized that despite whatever connection I imagined that I had to the Nass, it clearly wasn’t writing for me at that moment. It was using my body as a tool to laugh at and distance itself from those frat bros, not realizing that such distance does not exist for some of us.

This numbness betrays an insularity of the culture from which it came. It reveals a forgetfulness that those who read their words are different from themselves, and thus interpret them through different lens and experiences. Although their masthead is blindingly white, their readers are not.

The sad part is that nothing would have happened if someone outside the system, Annabelle, who identifies as an Asian woman, had not talked to one of the co-editors, Rachel, about the offensive lyric. She was very receptive and publicly apologized to AASA. But why did she, who opposed its publication from the very beginning, publicly shoulder the publication’s responsibility for the verbatim? She did the work because she cared enough. Because she, as a woman (but not only because she is a woman), understood the importance of respecting women’s bodies, not as an idea, but as continuous, active, and sometimes painful process.

I write this not at all to condemn, but to ask us to try and do better. Because, maybe, hopefully, the next time something like this comes around, those in power will be aware enough to consider the reverberations of their decisions, instead of requiring those who are most hurt to gather their energies and do the work of clapping back.

Rebecca Ngu ’20

Correction: The Nassau Weekly has posted these responses in a separate article to better reflect the writers’ perspective.