By Jessica • 19 years ago

Priscilla kicks off Voices of API Women week!

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Priscilla Huang is the Policy and Programs Director at the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum.
It’s Asian-Pacific American History Month, so I’m going to this as an opportunity to celebrate the history of Asian and Pacific Islander (API) women. API women started making history a long time ago. In fact, the United States’ first immigration law targeted Asian women—particularly Chinese women—with the enactment of the Page Law of 1875. (Note: The Page Law pre-dated the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the law that most immigration scholars consider the “first� U.S. immigration law.) Facially, the law prohibited the entry of Chinese prostitutes. In practice, the law acted to prevent most “Oriental� women from immigrating to the U.S. The law presumed that all Asian women seeking entry to the U.S. were prostitutes unless the woman could “prove� to immigration officials that she was not. You can imagine how many Asian women were actually certified and allowed into the U.S. (Answer: About 60 women per year.)
Unfortunately, the struggles of API women are still being minimized 133 years later. At NAPAWF, I constantly run into the problem of trying to advocate for a group of women that is often left out of the larger feminist picture. API women (and men) are plagued by the “model minority� myth. From an advocate’s perspective, this is problematic because it creates the impression that all Asian Americans are wealthy, educated, and healthy. The myth dismisses the reproductive health disparities that Asian and Pacific Islander women suffer, and masks the many barriers that we encounter when accessing reproductive and sexual health care. It also allows mainstream health providers and researchers to ignore the needs of API women and devote less resources and services to our community.


Yet, API women constitute the ONLY racial group that is underrepresented in reproductive health research. Less than 2% of published reproductive and sexual health articles include data on API women. Even so, these limited research findings have revealed some alarming facts:
– Between 1994-2000, abortion rates decreased for all racial groups except API women
– API women have the second highest rate of pregnancies that end in abortion, at 35%
– Less than 40% of API women use regular contraceptive methods, way lower than the national average of 88%
– 36% of API women under the age of 65 lack health insurance
– 54% of Korean American women have never received a Pap smear
– A study of Chinese American women in California revealed that 69% had no understanding of mammograms
– Vietnamese-American women have cervical cancer rates 5 times higher than non-Hispanic white women (the highest in the country)
(All of these stats are available in NAPAWF’s fact sheets and issue briefs.)
API women also face a number of sexualized racist stereotypes that reflect negatively on our health and sexualities and compound the problem of the model minority myth. API women are seen as docile and compliant, which makes us seem like ideal victims for sexual domination. We are also seen as hypersexual and exotic, a myth that fuels “oriental massage parlor� jokes and the frequent commodification of API women’s bodies in the mainstream media, the lucrative mail order bride industry, and in pornographic representations. These are the same misconceptions that gave rise to the Page Law and today’s dating trend—the Asian fetish. P.S.—If you’re never heard of Asian fetishism (also known as “yellow fever�) or doubt its prevalence, check this out. It’s so widespread, there are even “how to� books. Gross.
Clearly, we’ve got issues. It’s time to debunk stereotypes, and make API women’s history.

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