Asian American Strippers

Mei, a third generation Chinese-American woman, went into her junior year of college with a mountain of student debt staring her down.

“I was going to graduate owing tens of thousands of dollars,” she says, “and I was making $200 a week with my work-study job.”

So Mei did what many pretty young American girls do when they need money- she started stripping.

“Every stripper has a stripper mom, and this girl named Electra was mine,” Mei says. Electra was a stripper Mei knew through a mutual friend. Mei reached out to her in her time of financial desperation, asking for advice on entering the nerve-racking world of stripping. “Electra really took me under her wing,” Mei says. “She sent me this long google doc she’d written out that was like a stripper bible.”

Mars, a first generation Filipino-American woman, was inspired to start stripping by a girl she met at a party while on acid. “This girl told me she was a stripper,” Mars said, “and I thought, ‘that’s going to be me.’ I just had this feeling about it.”

Whenever anyone asks Mars why she began stripping, though, she likes to reply “Why not? There’s a place ten minutes from my house where people will give me money for being hot. Why would I not go to that place?”

Mei’s great grandparents migrated from China separately and met and married within the U.S. They raised their children with a heavy emphasis on Chinese culture and traditions, and Mei’s grandmother passed these traditions on to her children, as did her daughter, Mei’s aunt. Her other daughter, however- Mei’s mother — did not.

“My fully Chinese mother didn’t raise us Chinese at all,” Mei says. “I’d go to my aunt’s house and she’d do all these things my mom didn’t do. She’d cook sweet rice dishes and stuff while my mom just made pasta.”

Growing up, Mars’ mom cooked traditional Filipino meals, such as lumpia and sinangag — dishes Mars still makes often. This isn’t the only activity of her mother’s she would grow up to adopt.

“Filipinos save everything,” says Mars, laughing. “Ketchup packets and hot sauce packets and fast food napkins. I keep an empty yoghurt container in the shower and rinse my hair with it. I definitely got my hoarding tendencies from my mom.”

But overall, Mars admits she feels somewhat detached from her Asian heritage, saying, “It’s not something I think about a whole lot.”

Mei too grew up feeling a lack of resonance with her roots which often manifested in identity confusion. She says, “I’d go to my aunt’s and everything would be so different from how it was at home. I’d think, ‘Is this a part of me, too?’”

When it comes to their two very different Asian mothers, Mars and Mei have two very different relationships with them.

“My mom doesn’t know I was a stripper,” says Mei, “but that’s because we don’t really speak any more.”

Mars never told her mom when she started dancing, but her mom found out on her own. Her reaction?

“She was mainly upset at me for not telling her,” Mars says. “No one in my family exactly loves what I do, though.”

Mars says it’s a Filipino standard that the women submit to the men. “When I tell men I’m Filipino, the words I tend to hear are ‘loyal,’ ‘obedient,’ ‘good,’” Mars says. She partially credits this cultural norm to why her mother might feel coldly towards her career choice. She thinks she may be uncomfortable with the idea of her daughter being in a position of power over men when it goes against everything she was raised to believe about gender roles.

“I had this boyfriend, for example,” Mars says, “and my mom would get uncomfortable when I asked him for things like a glass of water. The women in my family take care of the men before they take care of themselves. I think that is a role that’s pushed on all women, but it’s really amplified for Asian women.”

While Mars grew up with stereotypes of submission weighing on her shoulders, Mei was strapped with stereotypes of studiousness.

“I was the dorky, socially awkward Asian with glasses,” she says. “My sister was the hot one. She got a lot of attention from men who thought she was Italian or something. They saw her as this sexy form of not-white where she was a little bit not-white but not too not-white. With me though, there was no ambiguity. I was the typical Asian nerd.”

In May of 2017, Mei glowed up like an early 2000’s movie sequence, trading her glasses for contacts and her textbooks for a stripper pole.

“I didn’t have a good relationship with my body before stripping,” Mei says, “and it’s nowhere near perfect now, but it’s improved a lot. I’ve realized I’m too hard on myself.”

She even found a way to profit off of the ‘Asian nerd’ card society had dealt her.

“I can tell when a customer is uncomfortable in the club environment,” Mei explains. “That’s when I jump in like, ‘Hey guess who’s getting their degree in engineering?’ School is a subject they know how to base a conversation around.”

“Stripping is the most empowering thing I’ve done,” says Mars who took her first high-heeled step onto stage in summer, 2018. She even finds power in the hate that inevitably comes any successful woman’s way, saying, “I live for the judgment. I love the looks cashiers give me while they count my ones.”

Despite the position of power Mei and Mars are in as strippers in a strip club, they still lack power, representation, and respect largely as Asian American women in a white, male-dominated world. Though Asian American women make up nearly 10% the U.S. female population, they take up less than 1% of the space in strip clubs.

“There are almost no women of color on day shift,” says Mars about the club she dances at in Eugene, Oregon where she is one of few women of color and the only Asian woman on staff.

Chicago wasn’t any more diverse, Mei says, commenting, “There was only one other Asian girl on staff before they hired me.”

Even between the walls of the club where they are goddesses among men, racism manages to seep in from the outside world.

“I hear the word ‘exotic’ a lot in the club,” says Mei.

Deepening her voice to impersonate a strip club patron, Mars says mockingly, “You look exotic. What’s your nationality?” She laughs. “Men actually use that as an icebreaker.”

“There are a lot of little microaggressions and a lot of the culture-blending kind of racism,” says Mei. She remembers men assigning her stereotypes of races that were not her own, and doing the same to other women of color in the club. “Where there is ambiguity, there is a lot of culture-blending,” she says.

“Men usually think I’m Mexican,” says Mars, “but I’ve heard Middle Eastern, Native American… I’ve heard it all.” She even recalls one time a patron asked her nationality after pointing out she was ‘some kind of brown.’

Mars reminds us that microaggressive speech isn’t just ignorant and disrespectful — it can also be deeply damaging in ways we don’t think about. Our words are what form perceptions on the subjects of which we speak in the minds of those we speak to. With the internet at our fingertips, our words can spread like wildfire and they hold the power to inaccurately villainize entire races, especially today, when hate crimes against Asians have increased 150% in the past year.

“Once,” says Mars, “I remember the president of the Philippines said something bad about Obama and it was on the news all day, and it was the headline. It was so uncomfortable. I was like, ‘Is this even news? What is this going to lead to? Are they going to slander Filipinos and say we are a terrorist country?’”

There have been 3800 racist incidents against Asians in the U.S. since 2019 and 68% of them were directed towards Asian women.

“In this climate,” says Mars, “we have to pay attention to how we talk about people and how we talk about race. People don’t understand how dangerous words can be.”

Mei left the silver pole behind in 2018 upon tackling her student debts and becoming financially stable. She graduated from Northwestern University in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and now bartends and is in the process of starting a crystal jewelry business on her way to deciding her next long-term steps.

“I realized engineering isn’t my path,” she says.

This past year, Mei has been actively channeling her Chinese heritage by practicing Chinese traditions, such as observing Chinese New Year, and cooking recipes taught to her by her aunt.

“In the last few months I got the ingredients to make my aunt’s sweet rice recipe myself,” she says. “It turned out well. I want to dabble in other Chinese recipes, too.”

Mars continues to strip in Eugene and is planning a trip to the Philippines soon, about which she says, “I feel like the land there is calling me and I want to see if going there will make me feel more tied to my Filipino roots. Because whether they resonate with me or not, they are my roots. They are etched into my DNA.”