cw: white (sexual) imperialism

As a software engineer, I’ve come to be surrounded by people similarly privileged to take nice, international trips.

But as a Vietnamese-Filipina operating within the apparatus of an industry known for “yellow fever,” hearing about colleagues’ trips to Asia can be harrowing, to say the least. As Southeast Asia especially has come to the fore as an “affordable destination,” something that irks me time and again is white colleagues bragging about how “cheap” their trips to Manila, Hanoi, etc. are.

To boast of cutting corners by locals who depend on literal dollars, table scraps of your hourly income, to feed their families for entire weeks holds no repute for me. And to begrudge people whose cultures and languages you probably aren’t ever going to take the time to learn, whose lands have been forcibly colonized by Western nations, and whose economies have been rendered codependent ever since, coerced into sectors the West now scoffs as “third-world” — sex tourism and agriculture — does not impress me.

Silicon Valley doesn’t see the entitlement in a white man who makes $100s/day at Facebook bragging about frugality at the expense of a Filipina street vendor; we see the same thing here, in our two-tier workforce. Still, the pride in capitalizing on others’ scarcity is definitively incredible to me.

White imperialism, especially white sexual imperialism, feels reminiscent of a tech industry that has a professional appetite for white men (~88% male, ~70% white to be exact) but a long-known sexual appetite for women of color. So I don’t want to hear about your trip to Southeast Asia. I don’t want to hear about your “dirt-cheap” trips to Mexico, India, or “Africa” either. (P.S. it’s really funny how the same people who will fault you for not knowing prosecco from champagne will homogenize an entire continent, but that’s a story for another day.)