These past weeks, Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University and U.S. Treasury secretary, has seen a stunning fall from grace. Newly released Jeffrey Epstein emails showed that Summers leaned on the disgraced sex trafficker as his “wing man” while crudely strategizing about a younger Chinese “mentee” he and Epstein nicknamed “peril.” In the many emails exchanged over months, Summers calls the mentee — an accomplished economist in her own right — “Smart Assertive and clear Gorgeous,” while Epstein reassures him that she is “doomed to be with you” and best kept in a “forced holding pattern.”

The revelations have prompted Harvard, where Summers is still a professor, to sideline him, and institutions like The New York Times and OpenAI to cut ties. Yet much of the discussion has framed the exchange between the Harvard professor and the sex offender as a story of lapsed moral judgment: a brilliant man with catastrophically poor taste in friends and boundaries. That framing shrinks a systemic pattern into a matter of private vice and conveniently treats the nickname “peril” as an odd detail rather than a clue to something older and uglier.

“Peril” is not neutral, but both racist and sexist. It directly evokes “Yellow Peril,” a phrase that originated more than a hundred years ago to paint Asians as a civilizational threat to justify exclusion, surveillance, and violence. The label has morphed into one that, as Summers and Epstein do, flattens and fetishizes Asian women as so exotic and desirable as to be almost dangerous. In their emails, that history is not incidental background noise; it is part of the plot. Yet the racial content dissolves into the background in most mainstream coverage, if it registers at all. That collective yawn in the public discourse is itself a verdict.

These are stereotypes Asian women have long faced. In 2021, actress Lucy Liu wrote about how Asian women are seen as either a “dragon lady” — as her character from the film “Kill Bill” was labeled — or a “lotus blossom.” These stereotypes run through Western literature, film, and pop culture, and create an image of Asian women as threatening enough to be thrilling and submissive enough to be collectible. “If I can’t play certain roles because mainstream Americans still see me as Other, and I don’t want to be cast only in ‘typically Asian’ roles because they reinforce stereotypes, I start to feel the walls of the metaphorical box we AAPI women stand in,” wrote Liu, using the acronym for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Memoirs like former model and singer Kaila Yu’s “Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty” have also criticized Asian fetish as dehumanizing and as being rooted in a historical context of Orientalist fantasy.

Seen through that script, Summers’ emails are not just distasteful fantasizing. He asked for Epstein’s advice on “getting horizontal w peril,” and complimented him, “U r better at understanding Chinese women than at probability theory.” The mentee’s Chineseness and womanhood are the lens through which her desirability is perceived.

Unsurprisingly, men who see Asian women as trophies in fact have a poor record in advancing gender equality, or changing their views. Nearly 20 years ago, at a closed-door conference on women in science, Summers speculated that the lack of women in senior research positions might be due to innate aptitude differences between men and women. The remark was widely condemned and led to his resignation as president of Harvard University.

Even as more employers and campuses have signaled commitment to gender equality in recent years, Asian women continue to face an agonizing professional or academic environment. A 2023 paper synthesizes research on Asian American women’s experiences of intersectional discrimination, which is when race and gender-based discrimination happen together. Across studies, recurring themes were that of Asian women being cast as passive and the other, erased by lack of representation, tokenized, and scrutinized — which makes them easy to minimize or ignore.

Such findings, as well as the muted criticism of Summers’ and Epstein’s use of “peril,” reveal the limitations of lean-in feminism, which encourages individual women to be assertive and ambitious to expand their representation in professional settings. Rather, they are vivid evidence of intersectionality: how racial and gender hierarchies reinforce one another and devolve into discrimination.

The woman at the center of Summers’ emails had tenure, publications, and global recognition, yet was reduced to a conquest calculation between two powerful figures. If someone with such a level of achievement is treated this way, the implied message to everyone else is clear: the rules are not destined to change any time soon.

Summers has publicly apologized for a “misguided decision to continue communicating” with Epstein. He has not, however, apologized for using the word “peril.” The racism and gendered power dynamic slipped by without being called out. Though Summers will have fewer boards to join and op-eds to write, the boys’ club will live on — for now. And those who seek a traditional career in many industries will likely have to continue playing their game.

Which is precisely why Asian women must keep carving out new paths that defy current rules and norms: building careers, alliances, and platforms that do not depend on playing the game as it is currently designed. The world is vast enough for ambitions and networks that do not run through men who see Asian women as “peril.” When the price of advancement includes accepting reduction to a racial trope, choosing not to play becomes its own form of power.

The real game-changer is not one man’s fall from grace, but every woman who refuses the role of “peril” and insists on calling the shots.

Portrait artist: Zhou Zhen.

(Header image: Visuals from VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)