By Pauline Chow, Guest Writer.
These vampires don’t serve the bloodline. They drink it.
Hypersexual. Exotic. Depraved. The Asian female vampire has been mishandled in fiction. But in the hands of diaspora authors, she is no longer punished for wanting. Because her transformation now comes by satiating her hunger.
Wanting is the emotional core I explored in my debut novel, Chasing Moonflowers (forthcoming, July 2025). The protagonist, Ling, is a young herbalist in 1925 colonial Hong Kong, desperate to clear her uncle’s name from a crime he didn’t commit. While her roles as sister and daughter weigh heavily on Ling, at her core, she longs for a relationship with her lost Captain father. She is fully expected to do what is best for her family, even if that means giving up on her dreams. In the end, she must choose to maintain her power or release it back to the wild.
Ling’s struggle to choose herself mirrors Lydia’s, whose hunger in Woman, Eating (2022) by Claire Kohda reveals how deeply shame can shape the female appetite. Lydia is a Japanese-British vampire scrolling binge-eating videos in a bare studio, examining influencers slurp noodles and devour rich gold foiled chocolate cake. However, her hunger remains unfulfilled, because she cannot taste or derive nourishment from human foods. Even securing pig’s blood, her only food source, is fraught with guilt and revulsion. Her vampirism is not a glamorous metaphor for power. Her urge to feed is something closer to inherited shame.
This feeling of unworthiness is an easy metaphor for classism, racism, and moral expectations held for women.
Shame is cultural as much as it is personal. Lydia has spent her life under the thumb of her mother’s belief that their condition is something to be hidden and suffered. This feeling of unworthiness is an easy metaphor for classism, racism, and moral expectations held for women. Their lives must be lived in hunger and sacrifice. But once the protagonist places her mother in a care facility for dementia, Lydia begins to indulge.
In upgraded versions of vampire stories, hunger is reframed as a gateway to power. Lydia goes for what feels like months without nourishment until her first feed, when the shady benefactor of the museum she interns at backs her into a corner. Comparably, in The Vampire (2018), a short story by Intan Pramaditha, Saras navigates the oppressive dynamics of the workplace and her boss acting inappropriately towards her. At the end of both stories, the act of feeding becomes a form of resistance against the structures that suppresses and victimizes them.
In upgraded versions of vampire stories, hunger is reframed as a gateway to power.
For character arcs, the tension of withholding one selves in these narratives becomes a tension laden longing. Absence defines these characters. In a state of lack they find their strength. The temporary deprivation is a pivotal act in transformation, stoking their will to survive.
What we choose to sacrifice shapes who we become. In Lianyu Tan’s The Wicked and the Willing (2022), set in 1927 colonial Singapore, Verity Edevane, a British vampiress, exerts control over Gean Choo, a Chinese maidservant. Their sapphic relationship unfolds through obsession, power imbalance, and emotional coercion. Tan offers the reader two different endings. In one version, Gean submits to Verity’s dominance. In another, Gean chooses independence. Similarly, in Chasing Moonflowers, Ling has to choose: to remain human and invisible, or to become free but feared. Who will suffer in each of the protagonist’s choices?
Female Asian vampires are haunted not just by their conditions, but by the inheritance of centuries of silence, suppression, and sacrifice.
Even omnipotent creatures cannot escape their contexts. Female Asian vampires are haunted not just by their conditions, but by the inheritance of centuries of silence, suppression, and sacrifice. They aren’t made monstrous by their appetites, but by a world that punishes those natural urges. Their hunger becomes a challenge to social order, not a character flaw.
At the heart of Shloka’s Desi gothic love story is the murderous and destructive feud between Tamil Brahmin vampire factions in A Very Bloody Kalayanam. Even given their supernatural ability, love is only second to familial duty. Jenny, a vampire in Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers (Nightmare Magazine, 2015) by Alyssa Wong, feeds off negative thoughts and dark emotions of vile people. Her hunger isn’t for blood, but for corruption. When she befriends Aiko, a neighbor whose mind is unspoiled and good, Jenny feels both drawn to her and unable to consume her. That restraint becomes an act of love. Jenny meets Seo-yun, another monster with no boundaries for bloodlust. All seems well until Seo-yun threatens Aiko, forcing Jenny to choose: indulgence or protection, kinship or conscience.
Vampirism, in the hands of Asian female diaspora writers, becomes a tool to invert inter-generational expectations.
Being a vampire is a conundrum with contradictions. Why can’t heroes choose the darker side? In Chasing Moonflowers, Ling is given the option to embrace a forbidden power. She can wield a force that had once harmed her and her family, but now might be the only thing that can save her family. In the end, Ling faces her own humanity and life’s purpose through a different perspective.
Vampirism, in the hands of Asian female diaspora writers, becomes a tool to invert inter-generational expectations, like the Confucian ideals of filial piety and feminine restraint. Where such teachings demand that women sacrifice personal desires for family and social harmony, the vampire claims indulgence, self-definition, and rebellion. These vampires don’t serve the bloodline. They drink it.
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Pauline Chow
Pauline Chow is a writer, coach, and ancestral magic practitioner, crafting alternative histories and optimistic futures. She is a Pushcart Prize nominated author with works in Cosmic Monthly Horror, Space and Time Magazine, Apocalypse Confidential, and more. Not your average data scientist, she once sued slumlords and advocated for affordable housing in Southern California. Now, she lives in the woods and is planning her next trip to a historical (hopefully haunted) hotel. Her gothic historical fantasy, Chasing Moonflowers, is coming out July 1, 2025!
