“So I finally took her back to her place and well, she wasn’t sleepy, if you know what I mean.” The two men laughed. The conversation sucked but at least she was nice to look at.” Though it wasn’t late, the girl kept saying how sleepy she was, he told his friend. “When I was living in Japan, I went out with this Japanese girl. The first man expressed his frustration about a recent date with a Taiwanese woman that didn’t result in sex.
They’d assumed no one around them could understand English. One afternoon on the train, I overheard two white men discussing Asian women with an unfiltered openness achieved only under the guise of total privacy. When I graduated from college, I moved to Taipei to teach ESL. This essay contains graphic descriptions of murder, sexual violence, and racist language used online.
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