“Chrysalis” by Kaila Yu
“I think I’m in love with her,” Sam sighed after introducing me to his latest crush, Sung Hi Lee.
It was 1995, I was 15 years old, and she was the most striking woman I had ever seen. This woman was a goddess, desired by men all over the world, and we were just a pair of skinny teenagers stuck in Upland, CA.
Seeing Sung Hi Lee gaze at me in her golden bikini that day assured me that I, too, could be beautiful. She was the first Asian model I’d ever seen. Until then, I’d idolized supermodels like Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, and Christy Turlington, wishing I could look like them, even though I knew it was impossible. They were white, blonde, and curvy. Flipping through the pages of the Victoria’s Secret catalog, I admired the models in their barely-there lingerie; I imagined myself in their shoes. Of course, I hardly registered how absurd these photos were for a publication geared toward women. The models were occasionally topless, though the catalog tried to sell bras.
I clamored to our family desktop computer when I got home from school that day. It was 1995, and I had to wait an entire two minutes and thirty seconds for the dial-up internet. A litany of melodious punches on a telephone keypad followed the sound of the dial tone and, finally, the loud cacophonous belch of beeps and static. The desperate hope was always that no one would call, knocking me off the internet and requiring me to start the process all over again.
I typed “Sung-Hi Lee” into Yahoo! Search. She was known as the Korean butterfly to her legion of online fans—primarily white men—and to them she was the most beautiful woman in the world. That year, Lee was at the height of her internet fame, with a total of twelve appearances in Playboy. She was the first Asian model ever to grace its cover. Hundreds of GeoCities fan sites praised her beauty. Her photo for Playboy’s Special Editions, inspired by the famous Got Milk? ads of the 1990s, was one of her most iconic. I stared at it for a long time, for so many years.
In Lee’s portrait, she’s holding a glass of milk delicately in her right hand and wearing that infamous milk mustache over her top lip—but that’s where similarities end. Instead, Lee’s back is arched, and she’s entirely nude, save for her thigh-high white stockings. She’s artfully dribbled with rivulets of milk crisscrossing down her tanned body, running from her chest to below her famously inviting butterfly tattoo, right above her pubic area. That these drips of milk traversed down her body and emphasized her little tattoo made it seem as though the photographer and the viewer were working together to mark her, to claim her.
When I first saw Lee’s Playboy photos, I was immediately drawn to that butterfly tattoo. Upon seeing her eyes staring at me from the computer screen, my new dream was to become an internet goddess and grace the cover of Playboy, just like her. I started to collect her calendars and Playboys, and I even subscribed as a member of her website. I studied her poses in weekly photosets, imagining men admiring my future photosets. Although her makeup, hair, and lingerie look often changed dramatically, the photosets all ended up the same way—with her completely nude. I decided that I would have no qualms about shedding my clothing. If she could do it, so could I.
Staring into Sung-Hi’s eyes on my computer screen, the puzzle pieces of desirability fused together. I began to incorporate Lee’s smoky eye shadow and overlined plump lips paired with form-fitting tank tops and tight jeans. I even changed my name, though that would come later. Beginning that day and escalating over a period of years, I systematically eradicated anything authentically me.
Kaila Yu is an author in Los Angeles who has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, and more. Her debut memoir, Fetishized, will be published in the summer of 2025 with Crown/Penguin Random House. Fetishized is a memoir-in-essays that blends personal narrative and cultural criticism to explore how the portrayal of Asian women in pop culture and media of the 1990s and 2000s contributed to the objectification of Asian women and the deep roots of Asian fetish, as well as the societal and cultural repercussions that still linger today.