America Loves to Watch Asian Women—But Never Lets Them Belong

From Sideshow to Scapegoat

From being looked at to taking flight—Afong Moy and Hazel Ying Lee mark a century-long shift in how Asian American women moved through history.  Image created with Kling AI.

As we mark Women’s History Month, these stories remind us how much work remains—not only to honor well-known figures, but to recognize those whose experiences challenge and expand our understanding of what it means to be seen in America.

History reveals its favorites by making them sit still, and, all too often, by making them Asian.

Take Afong Moy.

1834, New York City. She arrives at fourteen, not as an immigrant, not as a traveler, not even as a human being. She arrives as entertainment.

"Fear and fascination mixed, shaping American views of Asians for generations."

Merchants billed her as “The Chinese Lady,” and Americans paid fifty cents to stare. At her bound feet, her tea ceremony, her clothing, basically, a live museum exhibit. And while the country gawked, they weren’t just fascinated. They were anxious. Exotic. Foreign. Other. Fear mixed with fascination: a cocktail that would represent anti-Asian sentiment for centuries.

Fast forward about a century: enter Hazel Ying Lee.

Born in Portland in 1912, Hazel grew up under the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law that essentially said, “We like your food, just not you.” Flying planes was a male domain; doing it as an Asian woman was asking for trouble.

Trouble found her. After a forced landing in Kansas, a farmer chased her with a pitchfork, mistaking her for a Japanese pilot. She flew for a country that didn’t want her, only to be attacked on its soil. When she died in a runway collision in 1944, her family couldn’t bury her in certain cemeteries because Asians were “not allowed.”

What connects these stories isn’t just history, it’s psychology. Americans have long cast Asians as perpetual foreigners, admired and distrusted at once. Stereotypes and anxiety make competence seem threatening and difference seem strange. Fascination and hate are two sides of the same coin.

Place these stories side by side:

Afong Moy: a living exhibit, displayed so people could stare at her exoticness.

Hazel Ying Lee: a fighter pilot, navigating prejudice, pitchforks, and racism while literally flying over the country that doubted her.

One was forced to sit still. The other refused the ground. Both illuminate the strange American paradox: we want Asian women visible… but only on our terms.

The story of Afong Moy and Hazel Ying Lee isn’t just about spectacle or skill; it’s about a country that has long struggled to see Asian women as fully human. Fear, anxiety, and the mental shortcuts that cast them as perpetual outsiders have provoked both fascination and hate for centuries. Yet time and again, women like Hazel refuse the box, fly anyway, and force us to face our own prejudices, whether we’re ready or not.