Nikki: Hey, Noah. Thank you for being willing to chat about this subject with me, despite its general unpleasantness. This cartoon was the first thing I saw in my inbox the other day, along with this note: “One day, your son will look at you totally differently. You left your culture at the door when you married a white guy. I am pretty liberal, but the sheer number of Korean girls going after white guys is embarrassing. Your son will notice that too one day.”
[Here let us pause to grudgingly acknowledge that emailing a silly note and a cartoon to a stranger is really some dedicated, next-level trolling.]
Only after I’d tamped down my anger and absorbed some coffee did the truth sink in: that cartoon is MOST insulting not to me, or even to Asian women generally, but to multiracial people. Like my daughters (as you know, I do not currently have a son). Like you. What are we supposed to conclude based on that cartoon? That it would be better if multiracial Asians didn’t even exist, because they are destined to hate themselves?
Noah: That cartoon is SO fucking foul. This whole topic is something that’s been bugging me for a long time, so I’d love the chance to speak from the perspective of someone who is both multiracial and an East Asian-presenting guy.
Nikki: Before we dive in, I do want to say that I’m definitely not trying to speak to or about an entire group here — just the handful of bored, unfortunate jerks choosing to harass me and other Asian women who have non-Asian partners. It’s common enough that I would like to talk about it. Because even if it doesn’t happen every day, it’s become a trend in my writing life.
As long as I’ve been writing online, I’ve had trolls. Recently I participated in the #whitewashedOUT hashtag, as many of us did, and this was the [incredibly mild!] tweet of mine that got the most traction:
My biracial Asian American kids have never seen a single kids’ movie or show starring girls who look like them. #whitewashedOUT
— Nicole Chung (@nicole_soojung) May 3, 2016
The most common derailing response to this was “WHAT ABOUT MULAN???” [Everyone needs to just stop with Mulan. I enjoyed it, but it was made like 20 years ago, it’s not without its issues, and my kids are neither Chinese nor monoracial.]
Then there were the actual white supremacists — the vast majority of them passionate Trump supporters, according to their Twitter profiles — calling me slurs, referring to my kids in hateful language, saying “that’s what you get for race-mixing,” etc. Lovely, charming, just what you’d expect.
And then there were the replies from fellow Asians. Several have taken the time to email and explain to me exactly why I’m a race traitor and what they think of me. I’ve come to expect these comments every time I talk or write about my family, and honestly, they bother me more than the ones from unapologetic white racists. On the casual racism piece for the Toast, we deleted several comments along the lines of “You married into it” (never mind that the racist remark at that dinner party was not made by one of my in-laws) and lectures about how terrible Asian women are for dating/marrying out. On my Kristi Yamaguchi essay for the Times, one of the first comments approved was about how “the very author of this piece, Kristi Yamaguchi and Michelle Kwan all have white husbands.” (As thrilling as it is to be included in any triumvirate that includes Kristi and Michelle, my marriage has no bearing on my ability to care or write about representation.)
Noah: It’s weird, because I had a tweet that went pretty far, and I only got some mild, half-hearted trolling. The gender thing on Twitter is SO real. I almost never have harassers that actually make it to my Twitter account, though I do know my writing on literature has made it onto some subreddits.
The Mulan thing is silly; like The Joy Luck Club movie, it doesn’t really hold up well over time. Nor does it address the concerns of modern-day Asian Americans, and especially not those of multiracial kids. Mulan is also not an Asian AMERICAN film, you know? It has so little actual relevance to Asian America.
I’m not surprised about the white supremacist response you’ve gotten. I’ve been called a mutt plenty of times by white people, and by Asian people, too. White supremacists have obviously been on the whole “fear of white genocide” thing forever and using interracial marriages as evidence that it’s happening.
The thing about Asian men harassing you really makes my stomach turn. I mean, I kind of understand on a superficial level — I felt ugly as an Asian-presenting man for most of my life. But I’ve never extrapolated that to some type of false ownership over Asian women.
I can’t deny that I do sometimes have reactions to seeing white men with Asian women. I worry that there’s some kind of fetishism at play, and sometimes I also reflexively internalize it as “why do they think Asian men are ugly?” — which is completely irrational and stupid. However, I can acknowledge that this comes from a) my own deep insecurities about everything physical about myself, and b) my anger about actual fetishism, none of which makes me think I have the right to police individual Asian women for their choices.
I think a lot of Asian men believe they’re battling yellow fever, but wind up focusing on their own issues.
I also know that even if yellow fever is one part of the equation, it doesn’t always preclude actual love. In the case of my own parents, there was definitely fetishism on both sides, but I also truly believe they loved each other. That doesn’t excuse the fetishism at all, but it also doesn’t mean that love can’t be real. I think a lot of Asian men believe they’re battling yellow fever, but wind up focusing on their own issues around feeling entitled to women.
I do think some Asian men can be influenced by cultural misogyny, and that really does affect how they view Asian women dating and marrying out. But the flip side is that I can’t imagine an Asian man being totally turned off to the idea of dating outside his race. My father was an example of that — he definitely had a thing for white women, even as he made jokes about white dudes chasing Asian women.
I think a lot of these men, like so many men do, are really reacting to how society perceives their masculinity. The more I’ve talked to Asian men about interracial dating, the more I’ve noticed that for some there seems to be an inferiority complex stemming from very real racism mixed with the kind of virulent misogyny too many men are prone to. Then you throw in ideas about blood and “cultural purity” and it comes out as one steaming pile of shit.
Nikki: Every time I get a horrible comment or tweet or email from a fellow Asian American accusing me of being a slut, a white man’s property, or calling me or my kids names — I just think, man, THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS. I know the racist emasculation of Asian American men is a real thing. It should make us all angry. We should call it out when we see it. (I also just DO NOT GET IT, frankly — I’ve found and find so many Asian men attractive.) But it’s horrible that these men feel entitled to any individual woman or group of women. And I don’t think the ones saying misogynistic things to me or saying gross things about my biracial kids really believe that is how we’re going to undermine racism.
I was talking about dating/marrying out recently with some Asian American friends who also have white partners — it can be tough to talk and write about this issue, because no one wants their relationship choices to be up for public debate, nor do they want to give more fodder to the people who might judge them. For me, if I’m honest, there’s also the very real sense that I did dodge a bullet, in a way. I like to think I’d have steered well clear of guys with Asian fetishes when I was younger, but when I think about my “colorblind” upbringing in a white adoptive family, I shudder to think of the kind of relationships I could have easily fallen into if not for very good luck. It’s not like there were any Asian people in my life to warn me about real fetishists. All I could do was, like, read between the lines of various novels and Broadway musicals.
And there are times when I do feel a twinge of discomfort over the fact that my relationship plays into that white guy/Asian girl trope at all, even though I know that’s not what it really is. Of course I don’t like thinking about my marriage, the central relationship of my life, as a stereotype — but at the same time, I’m not oblivious to how the world works. I think about what my relationship is, and sometimes I also think about how it may look. Will some people assume my husband has a fetish? Will they think I’m trying to attain whiteness and white children? Will they just dismiss me as a banana? As a transracial/transcultural adoptee, I already know I’m kind of a banana, though in my case I never rejected any aspect of my culture — it just flat-out wasn’t available to me until I was older and could go in search of it. So maybe part of the reason my few but loud Asian American harassers really rankle — apart from the fact that they’re just spouting genuinely horrible things, and bringing my children into it — is because of my own insecurity as a Korean, and the extra work I’ve had to do to figure out my identity as an adopted person.
I have an enormous problem with anyone expressing a false sense of entitlement when it comes to any woman or group of women.
Noah: The sad thing for me is that I know you call out racism against Asian men, Nikki, yet some don’t do you the same courtesy of backing you up. And I think it’s really terrible that you have to feel the need to publicly justify your interracial relationship to anyone, let alone to misogynistic men who are projecting their own insecurities onto you.
The way some East Asian men perform masculinity is something that I’ve struggled with for most of my life. I grew up around a lot of Asian people — East, Southeast, South — and I can say that it was often the East Asian guys who made me feel the most uncomfortable and pushed an intense kind of misogyny on the girls around us. I don’t mean to stereotype a whole group; obviously that’s a really slippery slope. But I do want to think about this in terms of my own experiences, again, because misogyny seemed to be built into the worldview of some of my monoracial Asian friends. All the comments that you might worry about regarding your kids — being a “mutt,” or impure, etc. — most of that came to me from Asian people, not from racist white people. White people misread my racial presentation and primarily ascribed Asian stereotypes to me; Asian people, specifically Asian men, went for the jugular with comments about my multiracial heritage.
I get that it sucks to feel unattractive, and I get that some dudes fear they’re going to be alone. That’s a shitty feeling. But to turn around and condemn individual women for choices they make, choices that may actually stem from real and negative experiences with men of their own race, just reeks of bullshit of the highest order to me. There’s always more going on than other people ever know that leads to how we choose our partners.
I think I’ve told you this before, but as an example, I once had a conversation with an Asian friend about why she never dates Asian men. She said she didn’t want another set of Asian parents, and didn’t want to feel “trapped” in her own culture anymore. Again, I was reflexively upset at first, but the more we talked it through the more I understood where she was coming from — after all, my own parents made a similar decision in many ways. That she had felt so oppressed by the patriarchal nature of her own individual family was really distressing. I also realized that as someone with a white mom, I’d never totally get exactly what my friend was referencing.
I’m still not immune to having a reaction when I see a white person with an Asian partner, even though I am a direct product of a union like that. But I’ve put real thought into why I might have a reaction sometimes, and I know it has nothing to do with Asian women generally or one Asian person in particular — it’s more of a rage at the systemic things in media and culture that have led me to believe my Asianness is unattractive and unwanted.
I don’t think you ever need to justify why you’re attracted to who you’re attracted to.
There’s always more going on than other people ever know that leads to how we choose our partners.
Nikki: Nor do I think anyone should have to explain their romantic/relationship/other huge life choices to anybody else, yet here we are.
Do you think we can do anything to make this better? To be clear, I do know that just saying fetishism isn’t your thing doesn’t mean it’s not your thing. I feel very confident that my husband doesn’t hold any terrible views about me/Asian women/women at large, but I also recognize that our relationship might represent different things to different people who see us together. Is that a bad thing? Even if it is, what can I do about it? People can think critically about race and relationships, even if I don’t want some of them focusing on my relationship, and I can’t stop anyone from drawing conclusions about us that aren’t true.
Feeling certain that I’m not being fetishized by my partner doesn’t make his white male privilege or our disparate experiences as people of different races any less relevant. I have no interest in just sticking my head in the sand and pretending those things don’t exist. And I also have a responsibility, especially as a parent of Korean kids, to acknowledge and discuss them. We will definitely talk with our children about racism and stereotypes and how the fetishization of Asian women is sometimes portrayed and actively pushed by the media, and unlike me they will always have people in their lives who have experienced being Asian in this country and can frankly discuss these issues.
Noah: I think one thing I wish I could go back and tell my friends when I was a teenager was that they should trust that people have the right to fall in love with whoever they want. There is, of course, lots of yellow fever out there, and I think most right-thinking people are disgusted by it. At the same time, that doesn’t give Asian men the right to police Asian women’s dating choices or attack them for it.
I think some of this has to do with the insularity of some communities. Many first-gen East Asian Americans tend to cluster by ethnicity for support and cultural identification — which is understandable. As more generations are born here and develop and change, a lot of the aversion to dating outside ethnicity and race naturally shifts. I mean, I married a Japanese person, which my Korean grandfather would never have accepted in a million years, but most Asian American people of my generation wouldn’t think it’s a big deal. I also have a lot of friends in interracial relationships, as you do, too — and depending on geography and generations and families and friend circles and other factors, it’s not really that big of deal to most of us. Ultimately, I really want people who feel the need to judge individuals within their own communities to ask themselves if their actions are actually helpful at all, or if they’re just further pushing people further away.
This is so interesting and smart. I don’t have anything useful to add, except that I really enjoy all of Nicole’s writing – it’s intelligent and important.
same here, I can’t comment on the substance but 1) I am going to miss this website and its kind, intelligent, pieces on these issues so much and 2) I can’t wait to see & read what Nicole does next.
Seconding to add that I will follow Nikki’s writing to whatever heights she climbs. Her pieces are some of the most resonant writing on race and identity that I have ever read. In my own cant terms – she hits me right in the feels AND in the head.
Thirding all of this!
thank you so much, this means a lot to me!
Yes! So much of this hits really close to home, and it’s so important and so well-written.
Thirding this!
Yes, same! What number are we on? Fourthing? I don’t always comment, but Nikki’s pieces stay with me and I think about them often.
Holy shitballs, Nikki, he DREW YOU A CARTOON.
The conversation is fascinating, but for the moment I’m stuck on that troll. I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this bullshit.
Thank you both so much for sharing this conversation, which always seems to pop up with regularity in any space where Asian Americans have any voice at all.. It can be so goddamn maddening but hopefully this will make a few people pause and reconsider their thoughts on the topic.
P.S. Just remembering the last time I engaged on Twitter with an unlocked account on an Asian American hashtag, and some white guy tried to turn the tables on myself and other Asian American women by going “oh, well, you know they’re just going to run back to their white boyfriends after sending out all of these tweets anyway lololol.”
It’s so infuriating how some people who you’re with invalidates everything you say, or that many Asian American women who talk about this shit all have white partners. Of course, as someone who has a non-Asian POC partner, I started to bother the guy about when I was going to get my white boyfriend, and whether or not I’d get to pick one of the Marvel Chrises.
ALSO: strongly feeling this excerpt:
“To be clear, I do know that just saying fetishism isn’t your thing doesn’t mean it’s not your thing. I feel very confident that my husband doesn’t hold any terrible views about me/Asian women/women at large, but I also recognize that our relationship might represent different things to different people who see us together. Is that a bad thing? Even if it is, what can I do about it? People can think critically about race and relationships, even if I don’t want some of them focusing on my relationship, and I can’t stop anyone from drawing conclusions about us that aren’t true.”
I think that’s one thing that may go to any interracial couple. I know it crosses my mind for my own relationship (as a BM/AF pairing, we’ve both been fetishized by white people and explicitly subject to that gaze), but like you, I don’t think there’s a lot I can do about it. At most, I figure that all we can do is just be ourselves, and let other people put the pieces together. If they can’t see past our respective racial identities, that’s on them.
wow, I forgot a word:
It’s so infuriating how some people think who you’re with invalidates everything you say, or that many Asian American women who talk about this shit all have white partners. (Because obviously all of the Asian American women who have Asian partners are too subservient or some shit to give a shit about racial politics? IDK)
Thanks so much for posting this conversation. All of this is something I’ve dealt with as an Asian woman married to a white guy, from the gross assumptions about fetishism to members of my family offering to hook me up with “suitable”, “nice” Asian guys when they found out I was dating a white dude.
Intellectually, I know other people must deal with it, but it’s not something that’s really talked about, and I’m grateful to see it discussed here.
Thank you for writing and sharing this.
That cartoon! I’m so sorry you got that in your damn email! What is the message even? “be a good example to your children, divorce their father and marry someone else” ??
Not her children, just her (non existent) son because man feels are the most important.
Nicole & Noah, this is GREAT. Thank you! There are so many strange, small things that arise when Dating While Asian. When I was dating men, that first moment of someone else taking in my relationship “dynamic” if the dude was white was always A Thing. Was I supposed to defend it? Ignore it? Explain myself? Explain him? I never knew. And honestly, why should I have to do any of that? Interestingly, now that I’m with a (white) woman, no one has ever commented on the race difference in our relationship. I can’t tell if it’s some kind of random queer privilege or if it’s just that we both present non-binary and *that* is the overriding thing that people notice.
There’s so much to unpack! Thank you for starting the conversation.
I was wondering about this too! As an Asian American women dating a white women, I don’t generally get people policing our “dynamic” or making accusations of fetishism but my sister used to get all kinds of gross comments when she was dating a white man. Weird queer privilege?
I think it’s specifically a ladyqueer/nonbinary privilege. Joel Kim Booster wrote an excellent article about (among other things) how fucked-up gay men’s racial dynamics are. It’s called “No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians,” and it’s on this site.
The cynic in me thinks it’s probably because when a relationship doesn’t involve a man, it’s not real or important enough to have an emotional reaction to.
Thank you to both of you for talking about this and publishing it. My mom is Taiwanese and my dad is white – my parents’ strategy for dealing with a multi-racial family was just to act like we were the same as any other family. It wasn’t the worst approach, but it wasn’t the best either I don’t think. I did most of my soul-searching/identity-affirming in college, without my parents. It was always weird to me to think about the Asian woman/white man stereotyped relationship because both of my uncles also happened to marry white women. Ultimately I think a lot of what it comes down to is that being a minority is just that – there are fewer of us. I read something about data polling and the As-Am community recently that basically said we’re so hard to poll because of 1. language barriers and 2. there aren’t enough of us to get a significant sample size. I grew up in IA and now live in MN; I’ve only ever dated white men, and I don’t quite know how I feel about that. I also don’t even know if I even *want* kids but I already have anxieties about how they would identify and how I would cope with that. When it’s already so easy to “blend in” as the “model minority” (uggggh) it sometimes takes consistent choice and speaking out to actively embrace my identity as multi-racial – and that whole process has a lot of baggage too. Anyway, thanks for the #feels.
Thanks for posting this. My relationship is mixed–my partner is southeast Asian– and we have two young children. This has given me a lot to think about as a parent and a partner.
In college I remember feeling like I had some (not overtly stated, but subconsciously present) resentment when a girl I dated for a brief while dated Asian guys both before and after me (I’m white, she’s biracial Asian but looks more on the white side I think) – the societal rejection of Asian men you speak of made me feel unattractive by proxy, especially when it took me a long time to get over her.
What a horrible thought that was for me to have; sure, it should have been obvious to me then, but it wasn’t, and I’m grateful to this article for helping me articulate that and use it to fight my ingrained prejudices. Thank you for writing this, for many reasons.
Why is that man’s ear to elbow length 6 foot 3?TERRIFYING.
(K now not joking this interview is great)
Asian man here, I really appreciated reading this and appreciate the very nuanced way you discussed it.
Selfishly, I also appreciate that you covered the shitty trolly behavior some Asian men partake in, *and* even talked about why they may engage in this behavior. While I don’t recall ever chiding any couple, I’ve definitely felt that frustration occasionally when I see couples, but mostly due to my own insecurity / inferiority complex. I’ve learned that the frustration isn’t at the couple themselves, or any individual person who may or may not have a fetish, but it’s more about my frustration at the perception of Asian men in the United States.
I also appreciated the mention of not wanting to be “trapped” in Asian culture anymore. I think it’s great to acknowledge the patriarchal / sometimes problematic nature of East Asian culture.
It was nice to feel included in this discussion, which normally wouldn’t take the Asian male perspective. Also, I think humanizing trolls can (to some degree) hopefully make things better.
Also how many asian american guys read the toast? Do we have a secret handshake? Does it involve using that hand to count how many of us there are? Maybe a lot of folks just don’t write comments?
I’ve dated plenty of white men as an Asian female born and raised in the Midwest, which is to say that I’ve got a lot of sympathy for some of the questions that Nicole asks here, and I’ve struggled with a lot of what it might signal about me and my relationships. However, as someone who has a set of Asian parents, I find it more than just reflexively upsetting that someone wouldn’t want to date Asian because of culture. To me, this falls into the trap that a lot of the really terrible “I’m an Asian woman who only dates white” articles are prey to–the idea that Asian culture is this monolithic Old World import that isn’t capable of change or nuance. Given that the premise of this idea is usually that the Asian woman is unique enough to reject that culture, the inability to extrapolate outwards and imagine a world where other Asian people might feel the same is baffling. My mom is first-generation and incredibly traditional in some ways, but she and her sisters are where I got my first inkling of what feminism meant.
As a qwoc, I’ve dealt with queer Asian women who have flat out refused to date other Asians, because they would “remind them too much like family” or because they just “weren’t attracted to other Asians.” I’m not saying that I entirely understand the straight Asian dude mindset (I’m really trying not to argue #notallAsianmen), but I also felt really hurt by those statements in a way that I hope wasn’t linked to any unconscious misogyny; instead it’s more a reaction to hearing racism parroted back at me from those who’ve internalized some of it.
I mean, white culture is ridiculously patriarchal and problematic too! Two things I find really interesting (and sometimes telling) about using “traditional Asian culture” as a reason not to date Asian:
(1) Does that mean Asian-Americans, including adoptees and members of multiracial families, are incapable of adopting American culture without a white intermediary?
(2) Dating white is often considered the only other option to dating Asian–the idea of dating a non-white Asian poc is never discussed at all.
Just wanted to co-sign to all of your comments and add some additional thoughts:
-as a fellow 2nd gen Asian American (and monoracial and nonadopted to boot), I think we have our own really weird thoughts about what is “traditional” and “cultural.” So much of it is rooted in “whatever our parents told us” which I’ve realized is an incredibly flawed lens to view our own heritages. There are some common threads and traditions through generations, but we need to realize that just as we wouldn’t assume White middle-class Baby Boomers are the end all/be all Keeper of Their White Heritage and Traditions, we probably shouldn’t assume the same of our parents and our families.
-On your second point about dating non-Asian POC: internalized racism (especially when paired with anti-Blackness and colorism) is a bitch. 🙁 And I think that’s what it largely comes down to, with a heavy dash of ethnocentric myopia. There’s been a lot of writing I’ve seen recently about how some Asians (especially East Asians) in the US have tried to positioned themselves as “we don’t want to be White but we’re better than other POC like White folks” which is a very specific wrinkle to the whole thing.
I’ve gotten a lot of comments from other non-Black WOC along the lines of “whoaaaa your partner is Black, my parents would be so mad if I brought home a Black man” and while I understand the impetus behind that there’s definitely a part of me that wants to side-eye them and say “…that’s, uh.. thanks for sharing that? what do you want me to do with that knowledge? feel like a rebel?”
Hieu: so much this: “as a fellow 2nd gen Asian American (and monoracial and nonadopted to boot), I think we have our own really weird thoughts about what is “traditional” and “cultural.” So much of it is rooted in “whatever our parents told us” which I’ve realized is an incredibly flawed lens to view our own heritages.”
My parents left Taiwan in the late 60s and their idea of what constitutes Taiwanese culture is a time capsule. I had nothing to compare it with until university. That was its own kind of culture shock.
I mention this a little in a comment downstream, but even if we limit conversation just to dating other Asians, there’s a lot of complexity to be mined there that gets completely left out–dating across cultures, generations of immigrants, and gender. And ignoring all of that only contributes to the false premise that “Asian” is this monolithic other that stands in stark contrast to whiteness, and nothing else.
yeah, totally– i’m a south asian queer woman, and i confess that i’ve thought it unlikely that i’d ever date another south asian. part of that, i think, is also just tied into south asian queer representation– who have i had the opportunity to fawn over, besides the good wife’s kalinda? i also, of course, very much fear that it’s all just the internalized racism, and that’s a far harder thing to confront.
To your first point, YES! I’ve never heard that expressed in words but it really hit home.
~personal anecdote incoming~
My mother is white and my father is from India and I often felt like my father was the “gatekeeper” of all things Indian and mediated my connection to my Indian heritage. He had some ugly patterns of behavior which he excused as being part of Indian culture, and I accepted that because I wanted to badly to connect with Indian culture. It took growing up, making more Indian friends, and actually going to India to realize that there is no one monolithic Indian culture and that abuse does not have to be an inextricable part of Indian culture.
Co-signed. I think for me what was powerful too was discovering that there was also a whole demographic of people who were mixed or blended like me, so I didn’t have to have the “authentic” experience as determined/mediated by the gatekeeper in my family. I could have a mix-n-match 3rd gen experience that would still be shared by and resonate with a lot of other people.
Thanks for writing this! I have had a similar experience. I always thought that my father’s abusiveness was just part of Indian culture (which of course fits in with the narrative that Indian men are all violent and misogynistic). It has only been recently where I’ve realized that this isn’t true.
Point number two crossed my mind as more of a question reading this article. As a black qwoc, I can relate to the discussion of dating a white person vs. someone of my own race/heritage/etc. However, in my experience, dating another POC outside of my race is rarely discussed even though I find myself attracted (not exclusively) to folks who aren’t Black and I’m sure I can’t be the only one… I am curious as to how other POC communities have reacted to outside dating other POC’s…
I would really like to read more discussions about this! NPR’s Code Switch ran a fascinating Twitter interracial dating chat a couple of years ago that I still think about, and there were many great comments from poc dating other poc, and how underrepresented that is in media, pop culture, and related discussions. For this post we talked about straight Asian/white relationships just because I’m in one and so were Noah’s parents — plus we wanted to discuss the cartoon I was sent and the white fetishization of Asian women — but I know it’s just one tiny part of the conversation.
p.s. the hashtag for the conversation was #xculturelove and there’s a good writeup here.
Yeah, I’d love to read more perspectives about dating as an Asian woman that aren’t limited to just the straight Asian/white dynamic. There’s even a lot to be discussed about how dating cross-culturally within races–there’s been a lot of culture clash between my family and some of my Asian partners (Taiwanese, Cantonese, Korean) and the same is true between generations (my sister dated a Taiwanese guy, which is super different from an Taiwanese-American guy).
Regarding what Noah’s friend said about why she doesn’t want to date Asian guys: This is anecdotal, but whenever I talk to *anyone* about why they don’t want to date guys from their culture (including myself — I would not date a guy from my culture), they say, “Oh, men from that culture are so x.” It makes me think, hey, maybe there’s a worldwide problem with how men treat women?
Your second point is EXACTLY what I was thinking when I read Noah’s friend’s reasons for not dating East Asians. Thank you.
This is such a great illustration of how white supremacy affects dating and marriage markets (sorry, I know that’s kind of a gross term – it’s what we call them in my discipline, though, and I’m having trouble coming up with a better one atm). A white-presenting person dating a white-presenting person never has to deal with other people inserting race as the invisible third party in their romance, but… pretty much everyone else does. (Speaking about the US context, here.)
It’s frustrating that the men who do things like send these sad cartoons and taunt Asian women for dating white men would (probably) (ultimately) agree that structural racism is the problem, but think that the solution is to shame and belittle individuals in highly gendered ways.
Anyway, thank you for being willing to have this difficult conversation in public.
We need to create a net, like for cleaning the Pacific Ocean of garbage, only instead it would clean Twitter of racists, process them, and use the resultant slurry to turn them into something useful, like vacuums.
The scene from the Casa della Pietra living room when Nikki tweeted that horrible cartoon:
Me: *staring openmouthed in horror*
Mr. Pietra: *walks into room* Hey, what’s wrong?
Me: *continues to stare in openmouthed horror*
Mr. Pietra: Honey??
Me: Uh. Someone is horrible on the Internet?
Mr. Pietra: To you?
Me: No, to Nikki from the Toast. *proceeds to give thumbnail description of #WhitewashedOut and cartoon*
Mr. Pietra: Dear God.
Me: Yes. Have some coffee before you see this.
Mr. Pietra: Will do.
*schlorp*
Mr. Pietra: WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE.
This is a really great and thoughtful piece, and I’m glad you’ve published it.
I’m biracial, my mom is Chinese, but I feel like I’ve got a very different story than most half-Asians that I know. My mom is my ‘immigrant ancestor’ in that she is technically the one who immigrated (in her teens, to go to Berkley), but also my great grandfather, who was a famous Chinese author and inventor, fled to the states in the 30’s, and my grandmother and great aunt went to super-prestigious American universities (Columbia and Harvard, I think…). So my family had a history in the US.
But then, and I don’t know if this was a conscious choice or not, but my sister and I were not raised culturally Chinese *at all*. I think I know maybe 3 words of the language? And I’ve never even read any of my great-grandfather’s books (which is totally on my to-do list. For when, I don’t know, but I definitely need to do it). So I’ve never felt a big connection to my Chinese heritage.
At the same time… if my wife (white, of various origins, and Jewish) and I ever have kid(s), I don’t want them to not know anything about their heritage. This is a problem for me because I basically don’t know anything about my heritage. And at this point I don’t even know how to approach doing that, because I’m almost 35 and I kind of am who I am, and it would (to me) feel kind of false to all of a sudden be like “Look at how goddamn Chinese I am!”
So I don’t know. It’s a tricky problem, that I probably need to spend more time thinking about for my own life and experience. Anyway, thanks for sharing this. It’s given me a lot to think about that I probably already should have been.
Feel free not to say unless you want to, but is your great-grandfather Lin Yutang? He was one of my favorite authors growing up. Also, incidentally, I’m of an obscure Slavic heritage that is hard to connect with and of a mixed but ultimately nonwhite and obscure Jewish heritage that is also hard to connect with, AND my husband is a first-generation immigrant from Central Asia and very connected to his culture, so I’m still trying to figure out how to represent my side(s) to our almost-three-year-old inasmuch as he gets it at this point, so I can relate.
Nicole, I am always astounded by your ability to take the shitty racism life delivers and turn it into…lemonade.
By which I mean fantastically insightful and thought-provoking essays that will last and accomplish so much far-reaching good to so many people.
p.s. I am saying you are like Beyonce, just want that to be clear
and I will never forget it.
I’m a first-gen Chinese-Canadian woman who is getting married soon to a white man, so this is super relevant to my interests! Thank you for a super thoughtful conversation and for providing this space.
The notion that others assume that we DON’T already spend so much time thinking about these issues is, I think, one of the most infuriating things to me, even as I recognize that I fall into similar traps when faced with others in my situation. (Something something fundamental attribution error.) My partner and I participate in a sport that, for whatever reason, seems to have a disproportionate amount of Asian women/white men pairs, and I confess to feeling incredibly self-conscious when there are a lot us in the space, like we’re intentionally performing a stereotype. And while I know a roughly equal proportion of East-Asian women dating white men as the inverse, and have dated my fair share of either, when I notice East-Asian men with white girlfriends I give a tiny internal cheer and then mentally kick myself for upholding white supremacy even when I’m trying to be an ally.
We’re lucky that our friends are generally enlightened and non-shitty, though we’ve certainly gotten some ignorant comments from family (not to mention dirty looks when we’re holding hands in public). And while I enjoy the idea of joining our families together via a hyphenated name in theory, my external identity as A Chinese Woman is too important for me to “dilute” (despite the delicious SEO boost I would no doubt receive from our ridiculous combination). It was an odd realization for me to come to, because I would by no means describe myself as being in tune with my cultural heritage. But having already swapped my first name for a super generic common English name, I also really don’t want to give up any more of my born(e) identity.
This shit is hard, yo.
As an East Asian British woman, this was difficult but very rewarding reading — thank you.
I’ve had discussions before about how hard it can be for many Asian-looking men in predominantly white cultures in terms of the dating scene and negotiating standards of beauty/attractiveness. It’s very depressing how much misogyny springs up from a toxic combination of inferiority complex and sense of male entitlement to female attention. (That’s obviously something you can see in many misogynistic men actually, regardless of race.)
This article naturally makes me think about my own dating history. I’ve only been out with a few people in my life (due to one relationship lasting ages) so I don’t think it’s particularly statistically significant but I’ve never been out with an East Asian man. I’ve asked myself why that is and I think the main reason is just circumstance — I grew up in very white area and actually I don’t meet that many Asian men or women.
But I wonder if it might also partly be to do with growing up feeling frustrated at how often I was treated like I’m Japanese, rather than British, despite speaking and acting in ways no different from my (mostly white) peers. Not that I don’t think I am Japanese — I feel Japanese too, though that identity is less strong since I grew up in Britain. But many people act like if you’re East Asian, you can’t be British. I wonder if being constantly asked where I’m from, constantly treated like an outsider might have made me sub-consciously reject my ethnicity. It’s very sad to feel that could be the case, since I’m not at all ashamed of being an immigrant and I enjoy talking about Japanese culture and language with people. My ethnic identity is definitely not something I consciously wish to reject.
Thank you for talking about this. I’m a white person who used to have a longterm Asian man as a lover, and that whole relationship caused some really strong reactions in other people regarding stereotypes about Asian men.
He was my boyfriend briefly, but he moved away to college and we became friends who talked every six weeks or so on the phone and flew out to hook up with one another maybe twice a year. And I think the inherently sexual nature of the relationship had a lot to do with how people reacted.
When we were dating, no one seemed to have a problem. But when the relationship wasn’t about commitment, and was instead about sex (and friendship, but people tended to focus on the sex), I got frequent reactions of confusion. Wait: so this hot guy you’re hooking up with because the sex is so hot is … Asian?
I had a lot of relationships with men that were not dissimilar to the one I had with him, and I never got these confused reactions about why I was sexually attracted to my white partners – or actually, to any race of partner except for him.
The message was very strongly there, that Asian men aren’t sexually attractive, and if I was sexually attracted to an Asian man, that was weird. And I don’t know how to feel about that, except that I hated those conversations and I hated people’s reactions, and I never wanted him to know about them. I couldn’t think of any way of having this conversation that didn’t necessarily involve him hearing hurtful things about how people perceive him, so I never brought it up.
This by long way of saying that conversations like Nikki and Noah’s are really important for interracial couples crossing the line in both directions. I really could have used more information like this ten years ago, because I absolutely was not going to bring these questions to this man I cared about. It helps to see a bigger picture. Thank you.
Yes, agreed. Conversations like the one here are crucial in every possible way. As the (white, female) partner to a biracial (Pacific Islander/white) dude, I absolutely want to listen and learn and speak out (when it’s useful/productive/not-erasing to do so) (and I hope that I would want to do those things even if I weren’t in a relationship with a mixed guy).
Even though we don’t have kids and probably won’t for a while, I have begun really thinking about how I can best support my biracial future kid and I appreciate how Nikki’s pieces really thoughtfully probe these complex issues.
As a Pacific Islander/white person in a relationship with a very anglo-saxon white dude, thank you. My partner’s been wonderful about learning when he can speak up and help and when it’s something I’ve got (his help is so welcome with his family, especially in instances where I’m new to the dynamic). It’s the best feeling to have that support and dialogue with someone other than my sisters.
I’m on the other side of the country from my family, and am generally the only Pacific Islander (even mixed) most people where I live have met. It’s so nice not to be alone in it when it comes up. It can be really isolating otherwise.
I wonder if some has to do with where you grow up. I grew up in the Bay Area, and dated several Asian guys (I am white) over the years, and until VERY recently had never heard the trope that Asian guys were not good looking or ever received any blowback from it.
Grew up in Oakland. No dice. And as I said, no one seemed to have a problem with us dating. It was when we were explicitly hooking up for sex, because of how hot the sex was, that people started to have their “really?” reactions. It was totally explicable to them that I could like an Asian guy and want to be his girlfriend; it was considered weird that I would have a sex-oriented relationship with one.
Chances that Cartoon Email Troll Guy is also a Possum Truther Deleted Commenter? I say 98%.
After publishing my piece (From America, with Love: Dating as a New Immigrant) on this website, I received a pretty scathing email telling me that I was nothing but property and ‘option z’ for my white boyfriend who either could not ‘get’ a white woman, or would leave me for one as soon as the opportunity arose. Not only that, he accused my boyfriend of being an ‘old, balding man’ with yellow fever.
But it was only when I had read down to the very end that I realized that it was written by an Asian man, and NOT a racist white-supremacist type. The man said that he had lived in the U.K. and was bullied all his life and that if I had a biracial son, he would be disrespected by everyone in America. This last part I think made me realize that much of what he had accused me and my boyfriend of had come from his own insecurities and fear of being discriminated against. I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he took the time to write a whole email insulting me and my relationship.
also, I’m sorry you had to deal with that. Ugh.
My god I’m so sorry. I really admire people like you and Nikki who publish things about such personal (and often painful) experiences, because while people are perfectly capable of being horrible in real life, there really does seem to be something about the disconnection of the internet that makes some people feel like they can use people as repositories for their anger and insecurities. So thank you for sharing such experiences despite that.
Ah, Nicole, you’re so eloquent when it comes to these terrible issues. (And everything, but these in particular!)
I am a white woman married to a South Asian man. I never ever want to step over his experiences and defer to him always, but the constant assumptions to me are maddening and exhausting. Sex and family and our future children are all apparently up for debate with virtual strangers: no, random stranger at the grocery store, his parents don’t wish he had married in his own race! But thanks for making our Saturday DISGUSTING! And as we have kids this will come up more and more. I wish I had an answer for them. I wish I had a real plan. Can anyone have a real plan besides “talk about it and hope for the best?”
This was beautiful & thought-provoking as always. My niece and nephew are biracial and I’m so grateful for the chance to read articles & comments like this as a way of understanding better the cultural context that they face & will face. (Not to mention what my brother & sister-in-law experience.)
It also made me think about what sort of relationships have to deal with the corrosive effects of the “fetishization” label. I have experienced a different version of that in regards to gender, being in a femme-butch relationship. I’m not sure how to articulate this but it just seems so unfair that any relationship “type” is singled out for extra scrutiny — any relationship can have elements of fetish, or essentialism, or what have you, but only certain relationships get invalidated out of the gate this way.
Two things:
1) There’s a very good new American/k-drama web series out there called Dramaworld, available only on Viki in most of the world, and now I finally understand representation feels since I’m pretty sure it’s the only white girl/Asian man relationship I’ve seen in any show, let alone a white girl who’s kind of into Asian dudes, and
2) This is my “because the Toast is closing I better say this now” bit, since I’ve noticed that a lot of my Asian friends who came to the US as adults know very little about the Asian-American experience, and since it is so misrepresented in the Asian media I consume, my dream is when I go to Korea to teach English to have kids who are old enough that I can have them read one or two of Nicole’s essays.
Re: 1) Thank you, this is very useful information that I will put to use posthaste.
May I recommend Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, where Phryne beds a very attractive Asian man in a mutual no-strings-attached way? The whole show is quite delightful. She happily and shamelessly sleeps with a different attractive man in almost every episode, so the fact that he shows up in a few episodes is a treat.
(Caveat: It’s set in 1920’s Austraila, so the Orientalism is definitely there.)
I love Miss Fisher, though I’m honestly pretty weirded out by the Lin Chung story line, and…all the stuff related to his Chinese wife and her opium-smuggling family?
It’s just a fact that the multiracial actor who plays him (Philippe Day) is VERY FINE.
Yeah it’s definitely not perfect… That arc didn’t sit entirely well with me, though at least they attempted to break down the racist assumption that all Asians in 1920’s Melbourne were selling opium. But mostly I enjoy how very friendly it is to the people-attracted-to-men gaze. And how Lin Chung isn’t played for laughs but as Phryne’s equal and they touch on the pressure of dating out. (Brief aside about the fly Asian men in Marco Polo too…)
The distinct lack of Aboriginal characters really stands out to me and I kinda dread the day the introduce one, because as much as I enjoy the show, it’ll probably still be a negatively stereotypical view.
(Apologies if this posts like ten times. IntenseDebate and my phone are not very friendly.)
Season 2, episode 4 (“Deadweight”) has Aboriginal characters, and from what I can remember, the show did not portray them negatively.
Now, I’m not trying to claim that one instance of representation in a three-season series is amazing. Just wanted to point out that there has been one episode.
Related, Daniel Dae Kim’s character on Hawaii Five-O is dating a very white woman this season, which I love. Very different show from Miss Fisher’s, I have room in my heart for both.
As a white-presenting multiracial woman married to a white dude, I just want to thank you for talking about these things. Before you started writing about these issues, I had never come across such a successful and full articulation of this sort of experience. Reading your writing has made me better understand my own position in the world, and also my marriage, and I hope it will help me better deal with these issues in my children. (My parents are wonderful people who truly love each other and their kids, but they were completly unprepared for this shit)
Thank you thank you thank you.
Thanks a whole lot for saying this!
What you’ve said about your parents is true for my white parents as well re: transracial adoption. They were and are amazing parents, but they weren’t given the tools we all needed when it came to discussions around race and privilege and prejudice.
Word. In my parents’ case, it’s all complicated by the fact that their class backgrounds don’t line up stereotypically (my white mom grew up working class, my Latin father is the child of two professionals),* and the oh-so-very-Latin “well, we’re all mixed anyway, so don’t worry about it” ideology. That might work in Havana or Mexico city, but didn’t work at all in California and Arizona in the 80s and 90s.
Anyway, thanks for writing so honestly about this stuff, and for giving space to others to do the same. Every time I read one of your posts on this subject, I find myself nodding in agreement, and comparing your experience to mine.
*incidentally, it took me into my 30s to realize that the fact that people were always so shocked by my parents’ respective backgrounds was straight-up racism.
This conversation is amazing and I have so many thoughts!!
I was particularly struck by what Noah said about his friend not wanting another pair of Asian parents. I don’t have that exact problem, but I’m pretty close to my family and I’ve often wondered about the logistics, if I date or marry someone with an immigrant background, of visiting family in both countries. There’s a couple in my family that come from two different states in India and I know the logistics can sometimes be tricky even then.
The way that Nicole talks about the misogyny she got from East Asian guys also reminds me of how I’ve sometimes heard certain Indian and Indian American women talk about Indian men dating white women. I’ve heard it in a disparaging way from an Indian American female acquaintance — taking it personally in a way that I find confusing and troubling — but also, alarmingly, one of my mother’s friends brags about how her son has only been dating white girls.
I always think of this weird stuff as that classic joke, “the call is coming from INSIDE YOUR BRAIN!!!” I see it sometimes in fandom as well. I usually call out my friends on it, which can lead to awkward conversations, but it truly weirds me out. I don’t know.
ha, I had a line in this that I deleted about the hate coming from inside the house! great minds, etc., Sulagna. 😉
Man, I have a lot of feelings about this.
I am Japanese/Chinese mixed and have a white stepfather which all adds up into a childhood spent feeling like I was being drawn and quartered. People would frequently assume Mother’s white husband was my father since he was her first marriage and she refused to correct people about it, which was constantly frustrating and alienating.
Between the fraught inter-community stuff between Japanese and Chinese and the constant “you will never be white enough” and othering from Americans, in all honesty, being mixed-race is a large part of why I got my tubes tied. I refuse to raise children to go through my misery.
I would never police other people’s dating choices, but at the same time, I have quit dating white people. I am sick of fetishists who wanted Asian girlfriends, people complimenting my exotic face or my exotic accent, etc. For the past few years I’ve only dated other Asians because I need to be with someone who can understand and respect my experiences–and more importantly my profound exhaustion with the way race politics are constantly imposed on me as an Asian living in America.
yeah…I can totally see having a blanket no-dating-white-people policy, tbh.
It’s funny how dating other Asians makes me invisible and it makes me angry that I have to be grateful for that! Even if I don’t mean to make a statement when I date outside my race, other people project their own idea of a statement onto it for me, and the weight of their projections just rapidly becomes too heavy for me to bear.
Great article, and a great discussion. Being on the opposite side of this same coin (white guy married to a Korean woman), I too have strong feelings about race and perception (huh….odd). This has increased since the birth of our daughter.
I know there have been times when I first introduce my wife that I wonder if there will be a reaction, or if they will say anything. Luckily, I have not had any negative experiences. But u wonder if it is because I am a white man.
Race, sex, and relationships have improved, but are not even close to perfect. I know that there are still placea in this country that my wife and I would not be welcome. And this is sad.
As I look at pictures of my daughter, I see me and my wife, but I struggle to see the Asian or Caucasian features, even when I know others can. What is she going to have to deal with? How can I prepare her?
What is she going to have to deal with?
well for one thing
she’s going to have to a pretty ridiculous aunt
(IT’S ME)
edited to add: and seriously, I will fight anyone if I have to
I appreciate this insider’s view. As a white man who grew up in an incredibly homogeneous part of the country, who married a first-generation ABC, I have no idea how I am going to broach this topic with my (now very young) kids. Nor do I know whether I should wait until something ugly happens to them in the outside world to raise the topic, or whether I need to broach it first and prepare them for how horrible and judgmental people can be. I am trying to gather as many perspectives as I can so I can at least try to make sense of it when my kids have to deal with it.
ha, I had a line in this that I deleted about the hate coming from inside the house! great minds, etc., Sulagna. 😉
I love Miss Fisher, though I'm honestly pretty weirded out by the Lin Chung story line, and…all the stuff related to his Chinese wife and her opium-smuggling family?
It's just a fact that the multiracial actor who plays him (Philippe Day) is VERY FINE.
Thanks a whole lot for saying this!
What you've said about your parents is true for my white parents as well re: transracial adoption. They were and are amazing parents, but they weren't given the tools we all needed when it came to discussions around race and privilege and prejudice.
'I realized at some point that feeling guilty for being with a white person is tangled up in internalized racism'
Whoa.
(that sound you heard was a fellow Latina/white girl's mind being blown)
I need to digest it a little bit now, but thank you for wording that; you've given me a ton to think about.
And so has Nikki; her pieces make me very thoughtful about the way I approach my own mixed heritage, my decision to marry the whitest white guy who ever whited, and my sister's decision to marry an Asian man and have children with him. The level of crap my delightful small niece will have to face makes my heart hurt. But I'd rather know, so I can be there for her when it hurts her and have something useful to say.
Props for the openness and courage of the authors.
Also just wanted to say, I enjoyed watching Big Hero 6 for many reasons, as I’m an engineer of Japanese descent currently living the Bay Area and having spent a couple of years in Japan. My husband (who is hapa) and I saw it in the theater, and I gave the movie extra points in my book when I read that this was the first Disney movie to star a biracial main character, and they even cast hapa voice actors for those roles.
My girls LOVE BH6 (and I especially love Daniel Henney, who voices Tadashi). My 5yo has a Baymax doll she carries EVERYWHERE. I wish my kids had multiracial Asian girl characters to watch, too.
Yes, these are very tough to find! But I’ve been searching for decades and am excited to have recommendations!! For elementary school age kids, Netflix is currently streaming Disney Channel movies:
1. “Lemonade Mouth”: one of the main characters, Stella, is half Japanese-American and half white, and she’s played by an actress of that mix.
2. “Invisible Sister”: the two sisters’ characters are half-white and half-Asian. (Not a high-quality movie, but harmless.)
3. “High School Musical”: the actress who plays Gabriella, Vanessa Ann Hudgens, is half-white and half-Filipina. Her character reads as Hispanic, but please don’t make that a reason to overlook it. When I was in college and discovered that the actress breaking hearts on Smallville (Kristin Kreuk) was half-white and half-Chinese, it helped reinforce my sense that being mixed is beautiful and normal. (In fact, watching Hudgens’ character be so adored by everyone in this movie still boosted my multiracial confidence as an adult, on a subtle level.)
On the last point, I would also recommend the book “Part Asian, 100% hapa” by Kip Fulbeck as a resource if/when your daughters hit their racial identity questioning time. It’s a book of photos of multiracial people (along with their essays answering the “what are you?” question). I recently had another acquaintance tell me I didn’t look like the mix I am, and a quick flip through the book helped reaffirm that I truly do—that person was just ignorant. I wish I’d had it when I first got a rude question and questioned my features through a racial lens. (I wish I’d had the book, and Kristin Kreuk and Vanessa Hudgens!)
Nikki, I’m sorry you’re getting trolled in this way! Thank you so much for all that you do. I hope one of these ideas is helpful!
Mainly for Nikki and other readers. The cartoon depicted in the article was written by a half asian man that grew up with a white father and asian mother. Who was precisely the kind of couple that was born out of white worship, fetishisation and self hate.
It doesn’t make it any less aggressive or any more acceptable to send it to individual Asian women in order to attack them, their family, or their choices.
People can draw what they want to get their feelings out, but it doesn’t change how gross it is to send it to someone as a message.
If he feels that his parents fucked him up, he should be sending nasty cartoons to them, not random people he knows nothing about.
Season 2, episode 4 ("Deadweight") has Aboriginal characters, and from what I can remember, the show did not portray them negatively.
Now, I'm not trying to claim that one instance of representation in a three-season series is amazing. Just wanted to point out that there has been one episode.
Exactly what I was going to say. I am going to miss these incredibly thoughtful and civilised discussions about difficult topics.
I am going to miss the Toast SO MUCH. This place is one of the few safe spaces for Asian wo/men of all cultures and experiences to truly feel understood and acknowledged. I send you all so much love, do not ever doubt yourself EVEREVEREVER for standing up for yourself in real life or on social media, even if your progressive white friends still don’t get it or your fellow Asians keep quiet or align with the majority voice for whatever reason. Put your foot down, do not be afraid because we have a right to the same respect that all others have. Thank you so much Nicole for all these articles. Please archive them somewhere!!!!
I stumbled upon this whole war through Celeste Ng’s Tweets, which I read with a heavy heart.
I used to blog about Asian interracial relationships, which meant more than two years of my life drowning in this special kind of misogyny directed towards Asian women who out-marry, especially if their husbands are white-presenting. Like Nicole says, the comments that troubled me the most came from Asian men in America and other Western countries. The comments were always the same, always included the phrases white worship, self-hate, internalized racism. Most were full of the foulest language.
Imagine wading through these comments and emails almost every day for years.
I know Asian men have real grievances in those countries. Their issues – systemic racism, emasculation, lousy media portrayals – exist and should be discussed. But to email rape and death threats to individual women?
Those threats mess with you, despite how strong you think you are, and how much faith you have in your relationship (that it is built on respect, that there is no fetishization, that mutual interests brought you together). At one point, after one vile email after another, I started becoming the self-hating woman they said I was – but what I hated myself for was loving my husband. I started internalizing what those men wrote to me. I started cringing whenever I saw other Asian women with white men. I refused to leave the apartment. I saw myself through the harrassers’ eyes – a tall, young Asian woman with a short, older white-looking guy – ugh! When I was called a whore and spat at by real life men, I thought I deserved it.
It’s a bad way to live.
I was still sane enough to realize leaving my husband because of trolls was pretty stupid. So I tried a detox. I ended my blog. I avoided reading Asian interracial relationship blogs. We moved to my hometown in Asia, which is multiracial without the POC vs whiteness struggles of America. No one seemed to glare at us.
And then my so was born, and It hit me that I had a son. And someone sent me a link to the same blog by that hapa son who hates his white father and Asian mother and is making it his mission in life to call for the destruction of couples who look like us. And a woman was killed in Beijing, targeted because she had married a white foreigner. And a couple like us was verbally abused on the subway in Taiwan.
And it all came back.
It’s hard enough being a new mother. Add voices in your head telling you you’re messing your son up just by having him, that he’ll hate you one day, that he won’t respect you, that he’ll want you to die, that you are raising the next UCSB shooter…
I think I was susceptible to a relapse because of postpartum depression. A mild version, at least. Months of crying. Not wanting to go out. Not wanting to be stared at, not even the looks that were nothing but curiosity. Constant guilt over my son.
Things got better after he turned one and I gained more confidence in being a mother. The tension faded. I started going out again, seeing friends. I felt normal. I loved that our son had my surname, that we are raising him in Asia surrounded by his Asian family. I think the dynamics of being mixed are different where we are. At the very least, there isn’t that struggle with over-identifying with his white side or feeling inadequate about looking Asian. Honestly, the thought of moving to the West at some point terrifies me.
I’m so grateful for this piece.
I will add myself to the number of people hoping to find a way to continue reading these essays when the Toast is no more.
And, as a librarian, I wanted to mention that you can discover the source of many images like that disgusting cartoon by right clicking in Chrome and doing a “search by Image” – it appears that this cartoon has a prior history, when you check all sizes and see larger versions elsewhere.
I can’t say I wanted to read anything from someone who would use this as an affirmative illustration, but if you ever do need to track down content for any reason, that’s a good basic method.
I will add myself to the number of people hoping to find a way to continue reading these essays when the Toast is no more.
And, as a librarian, I wanted to mention that you can discover the source of many images like that disgusting cartoon by right clicking in Chrome and doing a "search by Image" – it appears that this cartoon has a prior history, when you check all sizes and see larger versions elsewhere.
I can't say I wanted to read anything from someone who would use this as an affirmative illustration, but if you ever do need to track down content for any reason, that's a good basic method.
Nikki, yeah that cartoon is pretty fucked up, sucks that you have to deal with this sort of shit. Thanks for the discussion on this. Some sporadic thoughts, to a varying degree related to this article, mostly about myself I guess (sorry)–
I have thought to myself before, an asian guy, that a lot of the choices I make in how I present myself, the way I talk, the way I behave, the interests I pursue- are motivated to some extent to make myself be more ‘white’. I guess I feel like I am trying to fit in to a standard of beauty, of respectability, of cultured-ness and intellectual-ness that (I at least) largely associate with whiteness. I suppose some part of me thinks this is more attractive.
Noah, so I would also agree (and also not wanting to stereotype) that I have experienced other east asian guys being openly misogynist and justifying it in a weird way out of the racism they face and the undesirability they experience. I wonder though if discussions of good allyship and intersectionality, unfortunately, seem too ‘white’, or at least maybe like they come from a place of privilege that asian guys are excluded from. Not that I mean to justify them, I just wonder if it’s enough of a thing that it’s worth digging into.
That said, I have definitely caught myself being aware in certain situations of the racial make-up of relationships in a way that maybe smells a bit of entitlement and bitterness, unfortunately. I mean I’d also say for example that time I watched Love Actually with my (white) friends and really struggled to empathize with any of the cast of pretty much all white characters (and therefore the entire movie) made this noticeably worse (though having never been in a romantic relationship may also have affected that viewing).
“every relationship you enter is based on … a highly individualized assessment you make about a person”. I also felt this way- and then I met Tinder (and Bumble, etc.). I haven’t really had success with the app(s) so I might have a bit of a bias here, but I definitely wonder if it’s a place where people choose based on racial preferences (I mean if I’m honest, myself included), and not just by explicitly stating ‘no asians’ in their profile. But that’s a whole other jar of worms I guess.
Also this is pretty weird I know but I will admit that I once thought of myself as like Aragorn, but asian (the whole racial purity thing.. anyways it was a passing thought related to being the only non-mixed race cousins in the family and hey Tolkien came up with that story not me).
I’m a first gen west african immigrant into the US, so I’m very much an outsider in this discussion. However, I empathize with the self-consciousness some of you have expressed with dating white men while being aware of all the cultural baggage surrounding interracial relationships. I’m engaged to a white guy now. We have a lot in common, went to the same college and grad school program, work in the same field, and I have never loved anyone this much, yet whenever we are out in public I know that all anyone sees is whatever icky stereotype they want to project onto us. Jamaica Kincaid said something once about minorities just wanting the right to be ordinary, and I think it’s spot on. I’d just like to be a person walking down the street with another person I love. There’s so much baggage in this culture. There’s so much bullshit about race and what it means. And it’s such a bloody waste of energy to project and stir up so much on the basis of it. That’s the way of the world though.
I’m an Asian man here. I don’t condone Asian men attacking Asian women if they choose to date outside the race. However, when someone says the statement” I won’t date Asian men for x reasons” , it’s like automatically they assume all Asian men are like this but white men is not. Isn’t that a form of prejudice ? How is that different from Asian men assuming that if an Asian women date out she is sell out? It’s like everyone is making assumption here.
As a Asian -American man I grew up with old fashion Asian parents. Yes, traditional Asian family can be patriarchy and this may partial explain why you have higher amounts of Asian women who don’t want to deal with this type of family structure and therefore want to marry or date non-Asian men.
But there is also allot of pressure on the Asian man too. My father expected me to marry and have kids and it had to be same Asian back ground. Forget about dating another Asian nationality . Whites were not even consider . On top of that America has this underlying racism towards Asian men which makes dating hard period.
So growing up I felt I got hit both outside and inside. My family was not understanding..It’s like how come your not married with a kids already?
So in a way I kind of understand when I meet a fair number of Asian women who reject Asian men because of the Asian family dynamics . A part of me understand but it saddens me because I get it but they reject me even though I get it. I hate to say but sometimes the Asian family dynamics makes the Asian son insecure. At least in my family. My father would brow beat saying things I wasn’t good enough ..could be education or success. Its weird in High School and College my parents told focus on education ONLY get a GOOD job a woman come later. That’s how many strict Asian parents raise there kids but I find that there is more pressure on the Asian sons. At the same we live in culture where as a man you have to have the social intelligence in knowing how to talk to a girl and be able to attract them. Asian family oppresses that. Maybe that’s why you don’t see too many Asian men out there stepping up to the plate approaching non-Asian women.
I guess I want to say Asian parents are oppressive to Asian sons.