I came across the article below while doing some research on a wholly unrelated subject. It is from the September 05 issue of Audrey magazine (an Asian-American "lifestyle" periodical).
I am neither endorsing the article or saying it is wrong. I am posting it because I think it brings up some interesting contexts that many have noticed and/or expressed.
I think the issues brought up by this article pertain not just to Asians, but to other ethnic minorities in this country as well.
Both Aisha and I have relationship experience both within and outside of our ethnic groups. I have also noticed some of the dynamics that the article points out.
Dating Outside the Color Lines
Is it just innocent color-blind love, or Asian evasion?
What do you mean by ‘dated?’” asks my friend Claire,* a Korean American graduate student who is living with her boyfriend, who is white, when I ask her one night over drinks if she has ever dated an Asian guy.
“You know, something more than a couple of dates,” I explain. “It doesn’t have to have been a boyfriend, but someone you at least went out with for a while.”
Claire pauses and takes a thoughtful sip of her gin and tonic while I look at her expectantly.
“Well, there was this one guy,” she begins, launching into a story about a Korean American guy she had known at one time, who was good-looking, they were friends and hung out all the time.
“So did you ever go out with him?” I cut in.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It would’ve been weird,” she says, looking uncomfortable. When I press her for details, she squirms, looks away, takes another sip of her drink, sighs and finally takes a stab at an explanation.
“I grew up in a really WASP-y environment,” she explains. “My parents [who are Korean] sent me to boarding school in Connecticut, where everybody was white. I thought if I dated a Korean guy, I would have to marry him, that I just couldn’t mess around and have fun.”
“But with white guys, you felt like you could just hook up and have a good time and not let it be anything serious?” I asked. “Exactly,” she said, looking relieved that I seemed to understand.
But I didn’t really understand. There seemed to be something deeper going on, something to do with her having grown up in an all white environment, but I didn’t want to push it. We were getting into issues of race, sexuality, self-image, attraction, and it was touchy territory.
Poll Position
By now, I don’t need to state the obvious: we Asian women marry outside our race at far greater rates than any other racial group, the most frequent being the Asian female/white male combination. Maybe it was the potential of feeling like a mere statistic or walking cliché that prompted me a few years ago to take stock of my dating history. Bracing myself, I realized that I had pretty much dated the rainbow, with the glaring exception of Asian men (only a few dates over the years) and the notable over-representation of white men.
Admitting the above, I know, does not endear me to my Asian brothers. I still remember the expression on my Chinese American friend John’s face when I told him a few years ago that I had begun dating someone. “Is he Asian?” asked John, looking at me hopefully. I had to answer truthfully “no” as I watched John’s face fall.
Exactly how many other women are out there like me is unclear. None of the psychologists and sociologists I spoke with was aware of a study that measured the percentage of AA women, and men, who have never dated another Asian. “Let me know if you do come across any research on that,” each of the experts told me. If there is such a study, it’s probably buried in a graduate school thesis somewhere that has yet to see the light of day.
My own highly unscientific study — namely, empirical observations and talking to friends, acquaintances, colleagues and people at parties — indicates that I am not alone. Far from it. Besides my friend Claire, I know several other AA women who have never dated another Asian, and in the course of writing this article, I met more — including a surprising number of men. Almost everyone I talked to, Asian and non-Asian said, “Oh, I know someone like that” or “I know someone you should talk to” when I told them the subject of my article.
“I’m Just Not Attracted to Asians”
I hear lots of different reasons from AAs for why they haven’t dated other Asians. “I’m just not attracted to Asian guys,” says Reesa, a 32-year-old Filipino American who lives in Northern California. “I don’t know why. I just never have been. I’ve just always dated white or European guys.”
Tina, a 31-year-old Chinese American who grew up in an ethnically mixed community in Texas, dated Asians in high school, but stopped when she got to college. “The Asian guys are either too traditional and expect an Asian girl who is more obedient, subservient and domesticated. Or at the other extreme, they are too Americanized and have lost their cultural values and are superficial and materialistic.”
She laments that it’s hard to find an Asian guy who is “truly bicultural” like her, i.e., very Americanized, but still valuing her Chinese heritage. “Asian guys can’t deal with a woman who is independent,” she says. “They want a woman who will take care of them and cook and clean for them. I still see that in Asian couples, where the girl does the domestic chores.”
Lately, Tina has been dating Jewish men, a growing trend, at least in New York City. “I know of a lot of Jewish guy/Asian girl couples,” Tina says. “And it makes sense because our cultures share a lot of the same upbringing and family values.”
“I’ve never been attracted to Asian women,” says Tony, 33, a Japanese American who grew up in an all white environment near Philadelphia. “My type is a blonde-haired girl,” he says. “Blondes have caught my eye for some reason.”
Kelly, a Korean American in her mid-30s who grew up in Los Angeles, prefers dating non-Asian men because she feels less inhibited around them. “With Asian guys, I feel like I have to be super feminine and docile. I feel like I can’t be as sexually free as I can with non-Asian guys.”
“Asian guys don’t ask me out,” says Sara, a Korean American in her late 20s. “When I’m out [at night at a bar], I’ll see Asian guys looking at me, but they won’t come over. They’ll just stare from across the room. I always get hit on by white guys.”
Why Does it Matter?
On paper, Dave is every Asian mother’s dream for their daughter: a physician, educated at the most elite institutions in the country, Korean American, handsome, fit and still single at 34. Except for one thing. Dave doesn’t date Asian women. He has only dated white women. When I ask him about it, he’s genuinely perplexed. “I don’t get it,” he says, about finding it “inherently suspicious” that someone has not dated within his or her own race. “It seems overly critical and not really necessary. There is all this hand wringing that two-culture people have about their identity. They question, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ ‘Are you a traitor to your race?’ Because there would be no question if you only dated Asians.”
True. Asians dating Asians does not draw the scrutiny, or even interest, that Asians exclusively dating whites does. It seems natural and expected that if you’re Asian, you’ll date another Asian. (I realize there are huge differences between the Asian ethnicities — including dating patterns and even stereotypes that we hold about each other — but that’s a whole other article.)
“What does it matter what race the person is that you’re with?” asks my best friend, Gina, an Italian American who subscribes to the “people are people” school of thought. “As long as you care about each other, that’s all that should matter.”
I couldn’t agree with her more. People should feel free to date whomever they want. It’s hard enough finding someone you’re compatible with, so it seems silly to artificially narrow your dating choices to a racial group or ethnicity.
But it still strikes me as odd that Dave has never gone out with an Asian woman, despite having grown up in Los Angeles and professing to being “open to dating whomever.” And what about AA women like Claire and me? Why did we feel a vague sense of embarrassment that we had never really dated an Asian man, as if it somehow communicated something, probably negative, about us? Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but surely the situations merit some analysis.
Analyze This
“Why a relatively high proportion of many Asian Americans intermarry and with whom they intermarry are sociologically important and interesting questions,” Sara S. Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Kent State University, writes to me in a recent email. “However, I do not think it is odd for an Asian American in the United States to have never dated another Asian or to marry a non-Asian (i.e., white) person.”
Lee points to factors such as population size, socioeconomic status and proximity. Given that Asian Americans comprise a mere 4.3 percent of the total U.S. population, it’s not surprising we would intermarry. Studies also show that the higher the level of education and occupation, the more likely for an AA to intermarry. “If Asian Americans live, attend schools and/or work mostly among white Americans, chances are, they will most likely marry white Americans,” writes Lee.
Those are Dave’s reasons for never having dated an Asian woman, despite having lived in Los Angeles and currently living in San Francisco — both cities with large populations of Asians. “Being Asian American and professional, we move among whites and we’re able to navigate through those worlds. It’s socioeconomic. We’re always surrounded by whites.
“My friends have asked why I don’t date Asian women and I joke that maybe they remind me too much of my mom,” Dave continues. He grew up in an upper middle class predominantly white neighborhood in West Los Angeles. He attended an exclusive boys’ school. He never socialized or hung out in Koreatown. In college, he got involved with the Korean Students Association, eventually becoming an officer, and had Asian friends. But he admits he was “not particularly attracted to Asian women.”
My friend Tom, 33, a Korean American adoptee who was raised in Indiana and now only dates Asian women since moving to San Francisco in 1999, is skeptical. “If they’re living in a big city, I think it’s strange if they’ve never dated another Asian,” he says. “I think something’s up, but not sure exactly what.”
“I think it’s really bizarre,” Darrell Hamamoto, Ph.D., professor of Asian American studies at the University of California at Davis, says about Dave. “I think he grew up idolizing and worshiping whiteness.”
Manufactured Desire
“Your physical and sexual attraction is socially constructed,” says Elaine Kim, Ph.D., professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, “and it’s hard to escape from that.” If you’re Asian, the way you see yourself and the way you think about beauty, according to Kim, is very different if you went to high school in Monterey Park (a community in Los Angeles County with a large Asian population), where the kids voted most popular, the most beautiful were Asian, versus going to a high school where everyone is blonde-haired and blue-eyed.
Karen, a 32-year-old Korean American who has dated mostly white men, readily admits she’s been affected by her environment. Growing up in a predominantly white town in Southern California, the only Asian males in her life were either related to her (father, brothers, cousins) or were the men at church. “I didn’t see Asian guys in a sexual way when I was growing up,” she says. It didn’t help that the only images she saw of Asian males in the media were of cringe-inducing geeks like Long Duck Dong in the teen flick, Sixteen Candles, or the strangely asexual and decidedly unattractive David Carradine character in the television series, Kung Fu.
“I just don’t find Asian guys attractive,” Karen says. “They’re usually short and slight and don’t seem confident.”
Negative stereotypes and images of Asian males in the media have had a real impact on the dating choices of AAs, according to Lee. In a study she conducted among Korean Americans in New York, the men reported that they had little choice but to date Asian women because non-Asian women were not attracted to them. Many of the Korean American women in the study believed the negative images of AA men as nerdy and sexually undesirable. This was especially true if, like Karen, the women had little contact with Asians growing up and their views were largely shaped by movies and television shows.
“Television and other media act as ‘cultural propaganda,’ powerful social institutions shaping racialized views in both overt and covert ways,” says Lee. “These ‘controlling images’ also influence some Asian Americans to have negative racial views of themselves.”
Tony, the Japanese American who has never been attracted to Asian women, admits he’s been affected by the shows he watched as a youngster. “I had the biggest crush on Cheryl Ladd when I was growing up. I thought she was the prettiest of the Charlie’s Angels.” (For those too young to know, Ladd is a blonde, blue-eyed actress from the original TV series Charlie’s Angels in the ’70s.) “Growing up, the beauty standard around you is the white girl. As you grow older, you’re exposed to other cultures and you learn that standard doesn’t apply. But I’ve been conditioned white,” he shrugs.
Racist Love
According to Hamamoto, the process starts as soon as you’re born. Asians already come from countries that have been dominated by white people, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, he says. Against this backdrop, “you’re exposed to media garbage and Hollywood productions like the Last Samurai where the white guy, Tom Cruise, is the hero. That’s ridiculous, but that’s how you grow up. You’re given signals that white people are better physically, intellectually, spiritually.”
When it comes to Asian men who exclusively date white women, Hamamoto says “they are so desperate to be accepted [by whites] that being with a white woman is their entrée.”
He is even more scathing when it comes to Asian women who only date white men, asserting that they are unaware of the history of what he calls “racist love.” Asian women in America started to get fetishized, he asserts, as a result of relaxed immigration barriers in 1965 that created a large-scale influx of Asians to the States. At the same time, you had a generation of white American men who had been in Vietnam and experienced Asian prostitutes, and who now had a larger pool of AA women.
“When you have Asian American women [who are] ignorant of that history and that the desire from these people goes back to the colonization of Asian countries, the media portrayal of Asian women, and Asian American women being socialized into the white supremacist world of media, it makes perfect sense,” Hamamoto says. “Underlying it all is a form of racist love, not an equality.”
What he says next is even more startling. “These Asian American women get hit on or propositioned by white men, but they don’t realize what lies beneath; that they’re coming onto you as a prostitute or massage woman, because that’s what they see, first and foremost, regardless of educational level. Conversely, an Asian American woman in white supremacist America will value anything white. I won’t say it’s instinctual, but almost at the preconscious level.”
Kim’s comments are similar. “Whiteness has a centrality; it is the highest point in the hierarchy,” she explains. “Whiteness is taken as the norm against which everyone else is measured and you couldn’t help but buy into it.”
“Growing up around whites,” she remembers, “I was shocked when I walked by a mirror and saw my Asian reflection.” She felt brainwashed by a white society that told her people like her were ugly and inferior. “I had to purge myself of that thought,” she says, explaining why she no longer dates white men, despite having been married to one. “If I went out with a white guy, I’d be going back to that. It’s my problem,” she acknowledges, “but I don’t want to be in that situation again.”
So, are the experts saying never to date white men?
No. Even Hamamoto won’t say that. “I really don’t care. People can live their lives however,” he says. “But both Asian American men and women need to be made aware of where desire comes from, how desire is produced and how we human beings internalize it.”
Love In All Its Forms
“There is this myth that who you date symbolizes where your loyalty lies,” says Carmen Van Kerckhove, who is biracial and a speaker on mixed race identity and interracial relationships. “It’s not fair.”
Kim agrees that it isn’t fair and would never presume to judge what is going on in someone’s head. Her advice to a good friend, a Korean American author who felt conflicted about her love and planned marriage to a white man, as well as to people who might judge her interracial marriage as a reflection of some sort of racial self-hatred: “[T]heir life is not yours, and in the end, they can’t really know what you as a person need and want, let alone why you need and want these things.” In other words, date whomever you want. Marry whomever you please. As long as you know what you like and why you like it — that’s all that matters.
*Names of interviewees have been changed.
Here it is 2006 now. I've been busy travelling most of January and in February also for work. I think of the five plus months we've been in New York, I've been on the road for half that time. And the beat goes on as my department is moving quite a few responsibilities over to my group. As a result, I'll be super-busy until at least the end of March.
This makes me daydream about a big vacation. Vietnam with my folks is out due to the bird flu. I feel like I should be immune by now given that I got sick twice in three weeks due to my travel to SF, LA and Dublin. Aisha and I are scoping out either the Bahamas or Greece. I prefer the latter as I'd rather visit a people and their culture versus a resort environment. I also have a passion for antiquities and architecture. That should be a degree program or seminar series at some liberal arts college.
Aisha is busy with school, work and volunteering at the Fall '06 Fashion Week so I hardly see her. I'm amazed at her energy level. I've tried to spoil Mochi with as much outdoor activity as I can given that when I'm not around he doesn't get much excercise. I've found a few unofficial off-leash areas at the park near our apartment. Fuggedaboutit regarding offleash walks in Central Park. Even if I get there before 9am when it's legal, it's not that much better than the park closer to my home. That's because of all the fences that make probably at least 80% of the green areas in the Park inaccessible. Did I mention how disappointed I am with Central Park? Of course I have.
I'm starting to get comfortable in New York and it's starting to feel like home. I don't miss Berkeley that much anymore (though I do wish to return eventually) and New York is becoming the norm by which I mentally measure my existence against now. The winter has been extremely mild with temps in the 60s on some days. Too easy. I miss the snow, though. It's the only thing that makes Central Park worthwhile. When Aisha and I were scoping out the City early last year, we visited Christo's The Gates exhibit at the Park. It was ok. The next day it snowed and we were exploring the Upper West and East Sides on foot and stopped by the Park again. This time the contrast created by the orange Gates against the white snow was stunning.
This will be the second Valentine's I will spending apart from Aisha in upstate NY. What a crapola (it's like a crayola, but made of crap). She's handling it well. I'm not.
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