Asian fetish

Asian fetish is a slang term for an interest, appreciation, or preference for people, culture, or things of Asian origin by those of non-Asian descent. The term Asiaphile is sometimes used to describe the same phenomenon as is yellow fever (not to be confused with the disease yellow fever).

In the afterword to the 1988 play M. Butterfly, the writer David Henry Hwang, using the term "yellow fever", a pun on the disease of the same name, discusses white men with a "fetish" for Asian women. Hwang argues that this phenomenon is caused by stereotyping of Asians in Western society.

The gay slang term used for a man, usually white, who exclusively dates Asian men is "rice queen".

In a collection of writings from Asian American females, YELL-Oh Girls!, Meggy Wang calls a man "Mr. Asiaphile".

In 2007, economist Ray Fisman, in a two-year study he co-authored on dating preferences among Columbia University students, did not find evidence of a general preference among white men for Asian women. Furthermore, the study found that there is a significantly higher pairing of white men with East Asian women because East Asian women discriminate against black and Hispanic/Latino men. As quoted on Slate.com, and also reported in The Washington Post and the Review of Economic Studies (a publication of the London School of Economics):

The study was carried out over two years and was conducted by economists Ray Fisman (lead researcher from Columbia University) and Emir Kamenica (University of Chicago), as well as psychologists Sheena Iyengar (Columbia University) and Itamar Simonson (Stanford University). They took data from "thousands of decisions made by more than 400 daters from Columbia University's various graduate and professional schools".

NPR correspondent Elise Hu offers that this can be a source of insecurity in Asian women's dating lives, "Am I just loved because I'm part of an ethnic group that's assumed to be subservient, or do I have actual value as an individual, or is it both?". In other direction, it has been argued that the notion of an Asian fetish creates the unnecessary perception of multiracial relationships as being characterized by "patriarchal, racist power structures" in relationships that are actually mutual and equal"

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