For thousands of years, ever since the West encountered the East, an exotic vision of the Asian woman has inhabited Western literature, symbolizing the allure, danger and mystery of the unknown.

"In the Western mind, the fictional image of the 'Asian woman' is the most imagined, misunderstood and 'fetishized'," says Sheridan Prasso, author of The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient (2006), adding this ultra-feminine exoticism has been juxtaposed onto the Asian male, "effectively wiping out his masculinity in Western culture".

Academic Elaine Kim writes in a similar vein, observing "the inscription in American popular culture of Asian men as sexless automatons is complemented by the popular view of Asian women as only sexual beings, which helps explain … the enormous demand for X-rated films featuring Asian women in bondage, the demand for 'Oriental' bathhouse workers in US cities, and the booming business in mail-order marriages".

Such sexual overtones are evident in the dichotomy of the Asian woman in literature. Whether Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Filipina, Indonesian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Khmer, Laotian, Korean or Burmese, the East and Southeast Asian woman is either Dragon Lady – seductive, dominant – or Geisha Girl – subservient, ornamental. Between these two extremes lie permutations like China Doll, Lotus Flower, Prostitute and Mail-order Bride, all with sexual connotations.

The term Dragon Lady is thought to have originated in American cartoonist Milton Caniff's 1930s comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and since then applied repeatedly to powerful Asian woman such as Soong May-ling, wife of former Taiwanese president Chiang Kai-Shek, and the no-nonsense dominatrix Ling Woo (played by Lucy Liu) in television's Ally McBeal.

The Geisha Girl of Western popular imagination has its roots in the eponymous heroine of Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly, a delicate creature who kills herself when abandoned by her American lover. Puccini's play was likely based on novelist Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème, in which the "hero" fails to understand or master the geisha of the title. Both versions demonstrate the heroine's otherness, but the opera strongly implies Western superiority over a submissive Asia.

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