TODAY, NBC NEWS -- “It’s a sexual connotation that cannot be removed from race,” Celine Parreñas Shimizu, director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, told “Today” over the phone, pointing out that Long targeted businesses commonly associated with Asian women. “And it’s attributed to a particularly long history of the hypersexuality of Asian American women in our international consciousness, and in the fantasies that have been offered by the theatre and film.”
Netflix content, such as “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” “Never Have I Ever” and “The Half of It,” was a source of uplift for Shimizu throughout quarantine, she said. In these coming-of-age stories, Asian teenage girls certainly don’t shy away from exploring sex and sexuality. But unlike the lotus blossom trope, those topics aren’t “overdetermined by this strange perversity.”