As I had blogged about when reviewing Seeking Asian Female, Director Debbie Lum had hundreds of hours of footage for her documentary that she did not use. Her original intent prior to focusing on the story of Steven and Sandy was to explore “yellow fever” – or the strong preference of non-Asian men, predominately white men, who have a fetish for Asian or Asian American women. Lum is a guest on This American Life on the weekend of Friday, March 29th to talk about yellow fever and the making of her documentary, in the episode titled, “Tribes.”
On April 1st, Lum launches her six-part web series, They’re All So Beautiful that takes the conversation started in Seeking Asian Female, to the web forums with reactions from Tracy Quan (The Daily Beast), Celine Parrenas Shimizu (UC Santa Barbara), Jeff Yang (The Wall Street Journal), and Ian Lang (AskMen.com). The schedule is as follows:
- What is “yellow fever”? (April 1)
- Do you have to be white to have “yellow fever”? (April 8)
- What do Asian/American men think of “yellow fever”? (April 15)
- What about “white fever”–when Asian women seek out white Western men? (April 22)
- What about interracial marriage? (April 29)
- Seeking Asian Female (May 6) airs on PBS’s Independent Lens
