I suppose this is the introduction

Do you ever find yourself just hanging out with people, friends, acquaintances, whatever...and someone makes an Asian joke and then everyone looks at you. And you can't figure out why...until it dawns on you that you are Asian. or if you're like me you're only half but you're representative of the entire continent anyway. The power of assimilation, into any culture that you're in is so great. I can very easily forget what sets me apart from others, but other people seem to find the need to remind me all the time.

I'm not going to ignore the injustices that Asians face from the outside and that occurs within communities anymore. I've been laughing along too long and I realize now that the joke's on me.
It started earlier this year, with the body image project I did for my FemSex workshop at Harvard (check out FemSex at Berkeley). I remembered growing up confused about the way I looked. My father was tall, with blonde hair, and blue eyes. I remember being so upset, and confused, and regretful that I could not be more like him. Then, I thought that I would be beautiful. Although my parents raised me to be knowledgeable of and proud of both of my heritages; there was constantly a struggle with valueing one culture over the other. I didn't understand this to be a concept of race until much later, I was just a girl unhappy with the way she looked.

In FemSex, the womyn in my section got on the topic of Asian fetishes. Before that conversation, I had not taken seriously the existence of such a perversion. I thought that it was a bit ridiculous, but also almost flattering for someone who felt completely undesirable her entire life. This thing that is called yellow fever/Asian fetish is nothing but racism, exoticism, colonialism, sexism, degradation. This is a big fuck you to all of that. How dare you make me ashamed and uncomfortable because of my race? How dare you stereotype and sexualize me against my will?
So that's where I'm coming from, welcome to my angry, hapa, feminist blog.
There are very simple goals for this blog...this will be a personal space to hopefully add to the existing discourse in the feminist online blog community. From a half-asian perspective, but obviously it will be my half-asian perspective, I do not want to speak for anyone else. From my searching, I couldn't find many blogs out there by feminist, half-asian, womyn. (If you have one please comment or email me at stefanielorraine@gmail.com w/the link) I also wanted to start this blog because I'm worried about a lack of feminism, and lack of awareness of gender issues in many young womyn that I see. Also, where there are so many young womyn leaders in women's and gender conscious organizations, there's not enough exposure and public applause for them.