As a young Taiwanese girl living in the Inland Empire, former singer and import model-turned-writer Kaila Yu said she often felt “uncomfortable” in her skin, growing up around Eurocentric beauty standards.

“I felt like my features weren’t desirable,” Yu said of her childhood. “I felt very insecure about all of that.”

The now 46-year-old L.A.-based author explores themes of sexuality and race in her debut memoir, “ Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, ” — out everywhere books are sold.

The candid memoir-in-essays format explores Yu’s upbringing in the 1990s and early 2000s, blending “vulnerable stories from her life with incisive cultural critique and history,” according to the synopsis . “Fetishized” explores Yu’s complex, intimate feelings around repres

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