Mika Tan Fights for America, Whores, and the Right to Film Sex with Asian Men

A version of this story first appeared in The Naughty American.

In a business where, for women, a career often lasts less than 18 months, Mika Tan in December will begin her 13th year as a porn star. But the Hawaii native, who now lives in this west San Fernando Valley town, partially attributes her porn longevity to a simple clarification.

“I’m a whore,” she says, “not a slut.”

As in her business, Tan’s sexual activities are goal-oriented. While she may be, in both her public and private personae, a delightful, nerdy, accessible person who hosts karaoke parties at her house, she only gets physically intimate for two reasons.

“For me, sex is for love or film, nothing else,” Tan said. “I do not believe in casual sex. I perform for the guy or girl at home who cannot get the amount of or the kind of sex he or she wants. Sluts will have sex with you for free; whores require compensation like money, deeds, cars, fame, or jewelry.”

At the recent birthday party for fetish performer Satine Phoenix, Tan was dancing with a man who wasn’t in the adult business.

“He leaned in and said, ‘My friend just told me you were a big porn star,'” she recalled.

“I said, ‘Not really.’

“Without another word, he quickly untied the back of the bustier I was wearing,” she said. “I slowly backed up and left. I will not speak for all porn performers, but people believe that we’ll fuck anyone, any time.”

Tan is a performer’s performer. She arrives to the set on time, rolling a suitcase with several clothing choices behind her. If it’s an anal scene, she has hydrated and fasted for the previous twelve hours.

“As someone that has penetrated, licked, electrified, spanked and spat on Mika’s ass,” said the bondage performer/rigger Chanta Rose, “I have to say Mika has one of the cleanest assholes of all.”

“Mika is one of the unsung greats,” said AVN Hall of Fame director Roy Karch, who has directed Tan in several movies. “She’s a delight to work with.”

“Unsung” was so often a word used to describe Tan, who at press time has appeared in more than 900 porn scenes, from fetish to anal to interracial to the inevitable “Asian,” that Adult Video News presented her with its first-ever Unsung Starlet award in 2007.

And it is not because porn so often casts even vaguely-Asiatic performers as mysterious “geishas” that Tan often flies below Jenna Jameson and Belladonna-level fame radar despite all those scenes, partners, and movies.

“If you knew me in high school,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe I would be in this business at all.”

Despite being very accessible to fans, appearing at most of the consumer conventions the porn world hosts, Tan is a private person who is involved with her work to the point she rarely goes clubbing or engages in the Little Hollywood trappings of the modern porn star’s life.

“I rarely take breaks and like to keep my time occupied with being productive,” she said. “I enjoy taking courses and learning new things. My pastimes are spending time with my relatives, who are spread pretty far apart, and having my extended porn family over for dinner.”

Tan’s need for privacy is relative, of course. She might appear at a porn convention in sexy ninja gear and pasties, or graphically demonstrate dildo techniques on her show on Internet TV station RudeTV, but she doesn’t host parties at the Palms in Vegas like Tera Patrick does or pop up at Hollywood hipster hangouts like Jenny Hendrix.

So it was during a recent hiatus that a series of rumors about the comparatively reclusive Tan quickly picked up credibility.

“My aunt and I were taking care of my grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia,” she said. “I was away from the business for several months. When I came back, the life people invented for me sounded so much more exciting.”

Growing up in Hawaii and on Guam, Tan says she comes from a very patriotic family, many of whom served in the U.S. military. Speculation about Tan’s own connection with the military spread during her hiatus.

“After September 11, 2001, I did try to sign up for the Army with my sister, but I couldn’t serve because of porn. My recruiter feared for my personal safety because women make up a smaller percentage of the military. Because some pornfolk knew I was training heavily to try and sign up for Army, rumors circulated that I was in Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan when I actually was just spending time with my family,” she said.

“My life is not as exciting as some people would like to believe,” she said.

And now the outside world looks different to Tan, too.

“I used to do mainstream projects since I was in middle school, so when I hit 18 and started doing porn, there was such a drastic change in the way mainstream casting agents and directors treated me,” she said. “I was looked at differently. I have yet to be sexually harassed and propositioned by a director or crewman on a porn set. I think it is because they deal with it so much on a regular basis. But it’s a different story on a mainstream set.”

Tan booked non-porn modeling gigs and was a TV announcer on Guam prior to her move to L.A. where, in December, 1998, she responded to an L.A. Weekly ad seeking a non-nude 18-or-over Asian for adult video work.

“It was a bukkake and I wore a Japanese schoolgirl uniform throughout,” she said.

Tan (and other Asian porn performers) are often typecast in submissive roles, such as geishas or … geishas (porn can’t handle too many stereotypes at once). But Tan’s energy, zest, and sheer dirtiness have made her as popular a “gonzo girl” — a performer who will not shrink from extreme sex – as she is for fetish work and scripted porn.

In fact, it is in scripted porn that a more playful side of Tan emerges. She can regularly be seen on late night cable in movies like “Bare Naked Desires” (where she plays the owner of a bordello catering to men who like Asian women) or in quirkier XXX fare, like the movie “Atomic Vixens – Escape from the Valley of the Sluts.”

In the latter movie Tan improvised dialogue in a scene with Jade Starr. “I taste like dog!” Tan yelled in Japanese.

“I nearly spat out my beer,” said “Vixens” director Ron Royster. “Mika Tan should be President.”

After all this time in porn, Tan doesn’t want to be President so much as she wants to direct. And in her directing gig she gets back to her roots. She is producing and directing a series with Asians as the male talent.

“I want to make porn for Asian-American men,” she said, noting the absence of Asian-American males from the performing end of the adult business. “It is frustrating because none of the porn companies believe there is a large enough market to bankroll it for me.”

Yet adult stores are as common in Asian-American neighborhoods as anywhere else.

“All of my boyfriends before porn were Asian,” Tan said. “There are millions of Asians in this world and not seeing them in porn isn’t because they don’t know how to fuck. I speak from experience.”

If Tan is a whore but not a slut, are there, for research purposes, Asians who are sluts? If so, what might one say to them to draw out their sluttiness?

Tan wouldn’t take the bait.

“Most Asians I know think very highly of themselves,” she said. “They rarely have acceptance issues or negative self-esteem. There is nothing you can say to a typical Asian girl to make her more slutty. They either like you or they don’t.”

What about cars or deeds or jewelry?

“A lot come from money so trying to impress them with how much you make just makes you look like an idiot,” she said.

Previously: RudeTV sprouts from grave of KSEX; The World is your Royster
See also: Mika Tan