Yang Song and the Long History of Targeting Asian American Sex Workers
hyphenmagazine.com
“A woman begins to fall.” This is how the New York Times depicts Yang Song  —  just before her death, a half-naked body frozen in trauma. Yang Song was a 38-year-old sex worker living in Queens, NY.

Thus, California passed the Anti-Prostitution Act of 1870 to prohibit the “kidnapping and importation of Mongolian, Chinese and Japanese females for criminal or demoralizing purposes.” Purported to protect trafficking victims, in practice it gave immigration officials complete authority to deem any Asian woman a prostitute and forbid her entry into the state.

In 1875, the same year the Statue of Liberty was built, Congress passed the Page Act to nominally exclude Asian “forced laborers” and prostitutes from entering the United States. However, because Chinese female immigrants  —  whether wives or sex workers, trafficked or not  —  were essentialized by Congressman Horace F. Page as women who were selling themselves into sexual slavery, the Page Act was duly enforced to exclude and deport all Chinese women.

This article is from two years ago, but it shows the intersectional nature of anti-Asian and Pacific Islander and anti-Chinese oppression in the U.S. Centuries of racism, patriarchy (especially anti-sex work), imperialism, and more converged yesterday and killed 8 people.