Hacker Cinema
Seeking Asian Female
2012 · Film · documentary · 82 min
Directed by Debbie Lum
Seeking Asian Female is an eccentric modern love story about Steven and Sandy – an aging white man with “yellow fever” who is obsessed with marrying any Asian woman, and the young Chinese bride he finds online. Debbie, a Chinese American filmmaker, documents and narrates with skepticism and humor, from the early stages of Steven’s search, through the moment Sandy steps foot in California for the first time, to a year into their precarious union. Global migration, Sino-American relations and the perennial battle of the sexes, weigh in on the fate of their marriage in this intimate and quirky personal documentary.
2 positive1 neutralfrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
> I think this tells us something about the current aesthetics of the internet, Asian women are idealized to some degree.
Fetishising Asian women predates the internet[1]. Seeking Asian Female[2] is a documentary on the matter, by an Asian woman.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish
[2]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2320029/
I saw Seeking Asian Female for a class and couldn't get it out of my head. It's a documentary about this older man who has a pretty...egregious Asian fetish. He finds this woman in China who he flies over to the US with the intent of marrying her ASAP. At this point most people have a preconceived notion of where the story is going, but I'll just say it ends up being a lot more complicated. There's a really nice reflexive quality, as filmmaker is an Asian woman herself, albeit Asian-American. Because of this, she ends up playing a role that goes beyond filmmaker, and part of the movie is her reflecting on this transgression.
There's a documentary, Seeking Asian Female, that charts a relationship like this over a longer period of time (although the bride is Chinese). You might be interested.