Over time, the phrase has entered various areas of pop culture, school yards and the music and apparel industries, often called out by people who know that it's racist and sexist. It's used to reduce Asian and Asian-American women to sex objects. It's our turn to make sure its use of turning Asian and Asian-American women into jokes stops with us. Etta Devine, a writer in LA, puts it well, “Me love you long time was viral before there was viral”.

In Season One of Hulu’s hit Emmy nominated show PEN15, “me love you long time” is said by a white boy who bullies the half-Japanese lead created and portrayed by Maya Erskine. Maya says boys would hurl “me love you long time” at her in middle school, in Los Angeles. The show which has deftly tackled racism has been renewed for a new season.

As for the accuracy of Kubrick’s screenwriting, I spoke with Pulitzer winning author Robert Olen Butler, who was in his twenties when he served in the American War in Vietnam as a translator. Bob tells me, “My sense of the phrase is its inextricable relationship to a comparable phrase: The “short-timer.” A short-timer was a young woman who was willing to sell temporary time and access to her body. I had a strong sense that very few, if any, of the “short-timers” were hardened prostitutes”. He says that “long time” means the women's availability over the duration of the soldier's tour or beyond. In the context of Kubrick’s scene it seemed to imply the duration of a sexual encounter.

Through the years, “Me love you long time” isn’t just something related to a Vietnamese prostitute. It’s become, for some, a way to label or put down any Asian looking woman-- “casual racism”. A story from Chicago went viral in July 2019 where Connie Cheung, a twenty-seven year old Chinese-American job applicant, got an email that she was accidentally copied on. The email was about her from one male interviewer to another male recruiter referencing Cheung merely with the line “me love you long time”, mocking her application by calling her this. The man who did this said he wrote that because an Asian woman said it in a movie and he presumed Cheung is Asian too, again reducing “Asians” to a monolith and seeing no difference between Vietnamese and Chinese. The man also didn't seem to see Cheung as a whole human, likening her to a prostitute because of her race.

“Me love you long time” has made it into mainstream entertainment after the 1980s. I've been told it's in the cartoons South Park and Family Guy, and in the movies 40 Year Old Virgin and Tommy Boy, with instances characters coyly offering sex for payment of goods or services.

Non-Asian women have appropriated the phrase in the music world. Fergie’s used it in a track, as well as singers like Nelly Furtado and Mariah Carey. Non-Asian female vocalists in a 2008 MTV article by Jennifer Vineyard liken it to reclaiming the word “bitch”. I beg to differ. It's not the same and Asian diaspora women should be the ones reclaiming it.