I Couldn’t Find Any Kink Parties That Centered Asians. So I Threw My Own.

My coming out as a kink enthusiast began with an Instagram post: a video of me, tied shibari style, struggling with my constraints. It was a raw, unfiltered and gently pornographic expression of my BDSM lifestyle.

The reaction was mixed — I got admiration, shock and even suggestions on how to monetize the video. It might have seemed like a reckless unveiling to my peers and family, especially as an Ivy League-trained Chinese American journalist who spent her 20s fighting for a career in a notoriously competitive industry. “W hy would a woman with so much privilege risk her reputation for this?” some of them wondered.

It’s because I was tired. I’d spent my 20s curating and maintaining a facade of the type of “perfection” that kept me in a constant state of anxiety. I was determined to start my 30s with a new type of confidence. If I can’t have fun now, then when?

That video changed my life. It was my “fuck you” to the unspoken rules imposed on Asian American women — to conform and remain palatable, especially to the white gaze. Coming out as a kinkster was also my rebellion against the “model minority” myth that I remain a quiet, harmless and conventional Chinese girl. Tired of keeping my head down, I wanted to exercise my expression of ethnicity, queerness and kink unapologetically.

Riding the high of self-celebration, I launched a media consulting agency for the adult industry and shared more free BDSM content online. I didn’t intend to become an adult performer; I just wanted to celebrate the body I’d worked so hard for with the world because, for the first time in my life, I felt genuinely beautiful, powerful and sexy. And with that newfound perspective, I began organizing kink events centering the Asian American