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Mika Tan: 'Back Door Open for Business!' Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan (January 2005 in Las Vegas) Mika Tan Anh (Wanted List), Mika Tan Mika Tan Mika Tan (May 24, 2005 at Sardos) From Mike Tan's online autobiography:
I call Mika Sunday morning, July 3, 2005. Duke: "When you were a little girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?" Mika: "There's a recording of me at five. I said I wanted to be a professor by day and a stripper at night." Duke: "How did you ever get the idea of becoming a stripper?" Mika: "Maybe I thought they made a lot of money." Duke: "What were you expected to become (by your family)?" Mika: "I grew up in a zero-expectation household. If I didn't want to go to school, they would write me a note saying I was sick. I didn't get pushed hard. "My dad wanted me to go to college but he didn't push me. I got $20 for every A I got. That was my motivation to do well in school. "It's an Asian household where they didn't expect the women to do much. 'You're going to get married and you're going to have kids and you're going to be very happy.'" Mika was a good student in highschool and college. She graduated with a degree in Bio-Chemistry from San Diego State. "It took me five years but I did it. I loved school. I liked science. I wanted to be a teacher." Duke: "What kind of crowd did you hang out with in highschool?" Mika: "I was with the nerd crowd. I was in student council and the national Honors society. "In my last year in college, I was trying to make some money. I did figure modeling. Nude modeling. Have you heard of Glamor Photography International? This small association of amateur photographers. They rent out a small park. For $75, photographers can come in and take pictures of all these models (who get paid between $150-$200 a day. You did just pretty Playboy-style modeling." I hear tap going on in the background and the flow of water. I think she's washing her hands. Then it sounds like she's drying them as she says, "I didn't have a problem with nudity." So what was she doing two minutes before washing her hands while talking to me? Mika: "My grandmother owned massage parlors in Guam and Hawaii. I grew up [in Guam]. I know that sounds really bad. I don't know if you want to print that." Duke: "Oh no. That's fascinating." Mika: "I don't have any issues or hangups when it comes to sex or nudity. I did some house-dancing at a couple of strip clubs in San Diego." Duke: "You went to UCSD?" Mika: "No. It's so hard for an Asian to get into a UC school. They tend to hit their Asian quotas. Affirmative action crap. "It's depressing when you get your degree from a place that's known for its football team. "I did my first porn movie in 1997. Who was that for? He got in trouble recently for getting a minor pregnant. He was a little guy. [Jack Pearl]. Out of San Diego. "Ed Powers was my first anal scene. "My ex didn't want me to do any boy-girl scenes, so I scaled back. I just did girl-girl and fetish. Then I came across an internet company (JET, who ran Hollywoodasians.com) that was looking for a model. I applied. They didn't have an admin assistant, so I started working in the office and doing cam on the side. Cam girls are flakey. "I opened up Geishahouse.com in 1999. It was an all-Asian voyeur house. I did solo work and with my ex-husband [Ray Shannon]. He was so jealous. It was so weird." Duke: "You're on your second husband now?" Mika: "Yes. And he's [Alec Knight] a lot nicer. "Then my ex-husband decided he wanted to be a porn star. We started doing boy-girl scenes." Both of Mika's husbands have been white while her boyfriends were Asian. "Both marriages were after I was already doing porn. Asian men I dated while in the business would not let me meet their parents, some of their friends, and no self-respecting Asian man certainly would not marry a woman in the business. The Asian boys interested in dating a porn chick have something to prove to their guy friends, but seemed ashamed to introduce me to their sisters or parents...I don't need that s---. The guys that last long enough for marriage are ones that can deal with what I do. I have made compromises in the past, but my new guy understands this is what I was when he met me." Mika (who's Chinese, Okinawan and Samoan) says she's done 631 scenes (many of them just for the internet). Duke: "What do you love and hate about working in porn?" Mika: "I love sex. I love the freedom it gives me to spend time with my family. The pay days are not bad. I like building my own schedule. I could never do 9-5 again. It's nice to be able to say, 'I'm tired. I won't book anything for a couple of days.' The freedom is paramount to everything else I like. "The things I don't like about the industry are scandalous people. Not everybody is in the business because they enjoy sex and like making money doing it. Some people have weird fetishes and strange egos or drug problems." Duke: "Have you gotten taken advantage of?" Mika: "Oh yeah. I got screwed over because I didn't have an agent. I'm getting to the point where I'm shot out. I'm using the agent to fill in my holes. "I'm getting behind the camera. I shot my first production in the beginning of June, before I left. My church group went to Phuket, Thailand to help rebuild houses. I came back in bad shape (mosquitoes, really bad sun burn). "I don't have a distributor yet. I'm going to try to pimp it out. It's the first Asian movie featuring all Asian men." Duke: "There aren't any Asian men in the business." Mika: "There aren't. I had such a hard time. It was such a challenge I almost wanted to cry sometimes. "The genesis of the project is that I started getting hate mail from my fans. 'How come you hate Asian men? You never f--- Asian men. What's your problem? Asian men aren't good enough for you?' "I said, 'Why don't you step up? There ain't no Asians to f---.' "I started doing these casting calls. I had 147 emails applying to my website. There was this website Asianman.com that was bashing me. 'Mika Tan is trying to exploit Asians.' "They want to be porn stars. They want to be respected sexually. But they don't want to be exploited? The whole biz is exploitation, for men and women." She sounds like she's taking a sip of a drink. "Exploitation is how we make our money. "I got the Asian community's panties in a bunch. Some really liked the idea. Some really hated the idea." Duke: "Why do you think there are so few Asian men as talent in porn?" Mika: "Asian families have pressure on their boys to do well and to not shame the family. There's so much stigma to shaming your family. Japanese people jump off buildings because they're failing in school." Duke: "What about Asian men are not hung?" Mika: "Asian men got a bad rap for being tiny. The only exposure people have to Asian men are those Japanese ones [where the genitals] are digitized. They're embarrassingly tiny. The women do scenes like they're constipated. "I wanted to show people that there are not a billian Asian people in the world for nothing. Not because they don't know how to f---. "We did it. All my men are over six inches long. "There were men who were big and good looking but they refused to show their face. They wanted to wear a mask. "I went down from 147 people who were interested to seven guys. I didn't want to have any half-Asians. Guys were showing up saying, 'I'm Jamaican-Chinese.' I said, 'Dude, you look black. Go away.' "I got Katie Morgan and all the biggest names in the business. I had [the fans] write down their fantasy list of who they wanted to see. Most of them wanted white girls. "I bash the mainstream on my website. They treated me bad because of porn. So many people have so many misconceptions about what people in porn do. I get invited to Hollywood mainstream parties but they want me to service directors. For some reason, they don't understand why I get offended. "I'm a performer just like you, only that I go all the way. I show that extra two percent of skin. I don't see any difference between what we do and what somebody on Playboy TV does. It looks the same. It's still adult content. "I know there are a lot of crack whores in the business. I just don't want people to believe that we're all cracked out nymphomaniacs. We are intelligent and this is an intelligent decision that we're making. I did mainstream modeling starting at 12. (Resume). I had the most problems with casting directors and writers hoping for tail even before I did porn. Even more so have come out of the woodwork after I started doing porn. I get e-mailed offers all the time over the last couple years to meet for coffee so that I can "read" for parts. Slimiest pervs I have met in my life, including my porn contacts, are at NBC, MTV, FOX, Paramount Pictures, and Touchstone Films. "I see nothing wrong with sex. That's how we all got here." Duke: "How did your family react to your getting into porn?" Mika: "My dad didn't handle it well. My mom was pretty cool about it. My grandma owned massage parlors, so she grew up around that stuff. 'Oh, I half-expected it.' "They couldn't complain too much about it because I helped out a lot with the mortgage. I helped pay off my grandma's house. They probably would've had a problem if I had kept it all to myself and did drugs. "My dad didn't talk to me for a couple of years. My mom knew years before my dad did. She said, 'Don't tell your dad. He might have a problem with that.' "I didn't tell my dad until I did a Hustler thing and he has a subscription to Hustler. "After I told him, he banged the phone on the table for a while and then said, 'I need some time to register this. Don't call back.' "My grandma was kinda happy. My grandma's philosophy on her massage parlors is that massage parlors take away rapes. They fulfill fantasies. "I used to get a lot of flak from school. People would say, 'Your grandma is a whore.' Everybody knew my grandma. They had a big thing in the paper. She was talking about massage parlors. They were shutting down massage parlors in Guam. My dad was stationed there so I caught a lot of crap. "My grandmother said, 'Everybody needs sex. Not everybody gets it the way they want it or as often as they want it, and that's where massage parlors come in. Guys who like little girls can come in and choose one of our ladies who dresses up like a little girl. It helps to stop rapes.' "She felt like she was doing a public service. "She said to me: 'That's good. At least it's not illegal yet. Just keep on going until they ban it. Americans are going to ban it.' "I don't know when [sex work] became something you needed to be ashamed of. It's weird. A country based on freedoms and you're not allowed to exercise them. "I think of internet porn the same way [as a public service]. I do a lot of fetish work. Because some of the fetishes I do are really taboo, some guys can't ask their wife to dress up like a little girl and talk to me like that... I don't believe porn creates fetishes. I think it caters to them. People who have these fetishes need an outlet. If they didn't have an outlet, they might run around and hang out at school yards. "I was in Germany. I saw a German Shepherd with a woman. It doesn't make me look at dogs in a new way. I can't see how watching a porn video can spark your interest in something you have no interest in. "In Thailand, they have little girls they pimp out. That doesn't excite me. It makes a little bit sick. I have no problem dressing up as a little girl and have them talk to me that way. I can call them daddy if they want me to. I'd rather it be me than somebody else." Duke: "Your church group went to Thailand to build houses." Mika: "I do a lot of work for [a non-profit home-building organization for the disadvantaged]. We built 15 houses in ten days. If anybody needs drywalling, I'm pretty decent. I can do it topless. They'll have to pay me a premium though. I'm not licensed and bonded." Duke: "Does your church group know about your modeling work?" Mika: "Yeah." Duke: "They don't give you a hard time?" Mika: "No. It's not like it's a Christian church. It's a Buddhist church. They're more relaxed about it." Duke: "What are your life ambitions?" Mika: "I want to make porn that is fun to watch. I don't want any of that spit-in-her-face, punching her and weird stuff like that. We've come to the point where directors are competing with themselves and not catering to what customers want to see. Who can think of the most disgusting thing to do. "People come up to me and say, 'Would you be willing to do that?' Three cocks in my ass? No. "It's come to the point where I don't even like to rent porn anymore and I like it." Mika calls her sister a "breeder" because she has three kids. Mika has a phone number on her website where she'll talk to people for $5 a minute. "I haven't checked my messages in a long time. I used to get these weird calls: 'I want to f--- you till you bleed.' Eww. It must be all the bondage and S-M shoots I do. Because I have a high tolerance for pain, I do a lot of them. I do extreme fetish shoots." Duke: "Isn't that freaky when you meet people who are into the extreme fetishes you do?" Mika: "It is. It scared me. Just because I do the fetish and understand it doesn't mean it turns me on. I don't really like to beat people until they bleed, even though I've done it." Duke: "What did you learn from the tough stuff [miscarriage, divorce etc] you went through?" Mika: "It made me paranoid. I went through four webmasters who screwed me over. I had to sue the last one to get my name back. I need to not trust so easy, which is sad, because I'm normally an open love everybody person. But people have to earn my trust now. "My husband and I want to go into partnership with people on our productions but it makes me scared to tell anyone my ideas. I'm so afraid that someone is going to take it, like the Geishahouse.com. I created it. I built it. I drove traffic to it. And my partner sold it and I got nothing. Not even my cut. "It's one thing to have no morals, but to have no ethics, that's something different. Yeah, I'm the first one to tell people that I have no morals but I'm ethical. I would like to see that more in the business. I like working with people with ethics. I wish there were more people like that in the business but that's the cross we have to bear. "I used to think my grandma was a crackpot when I was growing up. Everyone in my family said she was weird. But I guess I've grown up to be just like her. The more I do the business and meet fans, the more understand that it is important to a lot of people. We need to cater to people who don't have sex as often."
Sunday afternoon I got a mass email from Mika:
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