A CHINESE WOMAN who preferred to date Western men once told me that she required the men she dated to have at least one Western ex-girlfriend. "So I can be the real fetishist," she joked.

On the ground in China , as in anywhere else, the power dynamics of interracial relationships are the stuff of daily conversation. Stereotypes about both Western and Asian lovers abound, and they run the gamut. I've heard that Western women are viewed by Chinese as objects of desire -- or as hideously freckled. I heard that once a Western man has slept with an Asian woman, he will "never go back," and also that Western men prefer to marry Westerners, their economic equals. I've met Chinese women who dated exclusively Western men and Western women who loved only Asian men.

  Sheridan Prasso's new book, "The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient," (Public Affairs Press, 437 pages, $27.95) tackles these very issues. Ms. Prasso, who worked as a journalist in Asia and has written about the region for over 15 years, offers up an entertaining account of the West's fetishization of Asian women as well as its feminization of Asian men. At its core is the author's attempt to unravel an "Asian mystique" she argues that the West created, a primarily sexual one centered on simplifications and misconceptions about Asian women, men, and nations.

"The Asian Mystique," part historical chronicle and part collage of interviews with modern Asian women, serves up a scandalous, detailed portrayal of the West's creation of a mystical Asia . Ms. Prasso peppers the pages with amazing and often offensive images of Asians from articles, advertisements and cartoons. She does not explore the other edge of this sword, the stereotype in Asia of Western women as excessively liberated symbols of capitalism and decadence.

Instead, Ms. Prasso focuses on what she sees as the West's inaccurate vision of Asia . At the root of the problem, she argues, is an age-old and pervasive Orientalist image of Asia as an exotic, conquerable mistress. Victorians, too deeply repressed to imagine their own women as sexual beings, turned to Asia for sexual fantasies. Explorers, missionaries, and writers traveled East and wrote fanciful and unfounded exposes, which were later codified by Hollywood .

Ms. Prasso points out that Asians themselves are complicit in furthering these images, as they have various motivations (mostly financial) for keeping the mystique alive as well. She launches a feisty assault on everything from sex shows to Web sites that sell Asian mail-order-brides, to ads offering "Red Hot Asians," "Asian Foxes," and "Jade Escorts" in New York publications like the Village Voice.

She hits her stride when letting Asian women, from prostitutes to housewives to powerful politicians, speak for themselves. And what they say, while not exactly surprising, is pleasingly stark in its presentation. Mineko Iwasaki, the geisha who inspired the bestseller "Memoirs of a Geisha" (and later sued its author for misrepresenting her), wears what the author describes as "the Japanese equivalent of a Tommy Hilfiger sweat suit," and speculates on who will win Wimbledon and whether Hillary Clinton will ever run for president of the United States .

The 48-year-old Reiko Nakajima, who is both mayor of Haki , Japan as well as a mushroom farmer, tells the author: "Walking three steps behind your husband, so to speak, is still prevalent. That's why I ran for mayor." She founded the Ms. Association, a study group dedicated to changing the landscape of women's lives, and became the fifth woman elected mayor in all of Japan 's 3,200 municipalities.

Ms. Nakajima's victory story is hardly a revelation; women speak eloquently and take power in lots of places. It's just that we don't always hear them tell their stories. Ms. Prasso records carefully wrought and sensitive conversations that remind us of the women all over the world who defy stereotypes. Women are women everywhere, Ms. Prasso observes, and "a young professional living in a high-rise apartment in Beijing has more in common with a young professional living in a high-rise in New York than with a Chinese farm worker on the outskirts of her own city."

The author is less kind to her male subjects. Some of the men in the book are blamed for perpetuating and funding the "Asian mystique." She describes "enormous white men, many with bulging bellies, hand-in-hand with seemingly tiny Thai girls who otherwise find it culturally uncomfortable to hold hands like that," as well as men who "enjoy the Alpha-Male power" of paying small change to watch prostitutes perform degrading shows.

Ironically, some of Ms. Prasso's own descriptions could be mistaken for Asian stereotypes for Western men: barbarian invaders and savages, interested only in conquering women and territory. The author is also careful to include some more self-aware male subjects, who have unique perspectives on their Eastern connections. But even books that set out to dismantle stereotypes occasionally fall prey to some of their own.

On the whole, she is more sympathetic to Asian men, whom she often depicts as victims. While the West sexualizes and demonizes Asian women, it emasculates Asian men into asexual clowns, unmacho even as martial artists. Jackie Chan never gets a real love scene in American movies, while he's a first-rate heartthrob in Asia . Asian world leaders, Ms. Prasso says, are also mischaracterized by the West as frail and effeminate "little brown brothers."

Perhaps some of the stereotypes that Ms. Prasso identifies are so prevalent that even the author, who is more acutely aware of them than most, occasionally falls into the trap of relying on them to make her points. But Ms. Prasso's work remains powerful because she wisely asks questions rather than trying to answer them, using her subjects' stories to paint a messy, honest portrait of both Asia and women.

Ms. DeWoskin, a New York-based writer, is the author of "Foreign Babes in Beijing ," (Norton, 2005).