When you stop looking for whiteness in yourself, you stop looking for it in your partners, writes Naomii Seah. I decided to stop dating white men long before I broke up with my last partner of that persuasion. It was the mid-autumn festival of October My partner was beside me, his lanky arms draped over my bed frame as he watched me peel the cakes from their festive red packaging. Although they were a bit dented, the ornate mooncakes were still glossy brown in their plastic trays, smelling of spiced flour and rich red beans. I cut little slices of them, putting one onto my tongue, salted yolk first; I loved the salty-sweet contrast of that first bite. I offered a slice to my partner. He nibbled it tentatively. I watched his jaw wrestling with the thick texture of the red bean paste. I felt as if I was offering him slices of my raw heart, still beating.
How America tells me and other Asian American men we’re not attractive
He looked down at my extended arm and considered it for a moment. We broke up in February. In high school, while I studied in my room at night, my mother would bring me carefully sliced apples, persimmons and pears, sometimes coated in a dusting of sour plum powder. Later, when I came home during university breaks, she would make a point of cooking my favourite dishes: laksa with thick noodles and sour-sweet soup; prawns coated in a spicy cereal batter; Thai style chicken with fragrant coconut rice. Being fed and feeding others was ingrained in my conception of love and care from the very beginning of my life. It was in the custom of serving others first at a meal, piling vegetables and sauce onto their plates; pouring tea for elders; and even the inevitable fight over the bill at the end of the night. I had been faced with that excruciating disappointment before.In turn, the rejection of my food felt like a rejection of myself, a core part of who I was. For most of my life, I had tried to shed all the Asian parts of myself like an old skin: my language, my customs, my traditions. But shedding my Asianness was like trying to separate breath from lungs. At these gatherings, I always felt like a fish in the desert. As for my partners, they were usually happily oblivious to my discomfort, or else dismissive.
Because I am small and Asian, I am fetishised by some white men
Dating is a political experience. Dating while Asian, queer and a woman makes it trebly so. And like all good politics, it disguises itself as emotion. For me, politics donned the cloak of a wild, love-at-first-sight sort of chemical attraction. All of my past relationships shared a supersonic-speed attachment based on superficial interests like a shared love of literature, the beach, arguing.
Roots of discrimination
Ultimately, none of those relationships lasted, not even platonically. Like Victor and Eleanor, respectively the stars of the fourth and fifth episode of Dating While Asian, I came to realise that who I was dating was really an exercise in validation. When we first started dating, I knew next to nothing about each of my partners. So what was the attraction, really? For me, it was part and parcel of that dizzying puppy-love; the alluring idea that my most intimate relationship would afford me a ticket into this exclusive world. Long before I had the words to describe it, I could recognise the markers of this world. And while I loved each ex-partner for their unique qualities—gentleness, intelligence, humour—there was also this hope in the background that I could find the acceptance of wider society by an intimate association with white men.
Dating While Asian: Why I’m no longer dating white men
Almost none of those dates were with white men. I wanted something other than this familiar, unpleasant ache that I seemed so attracted to. And it turned out that once I stopped looking for whiteness in myself, I stopped looking for whiteness in my partners. Turns out when you date other people of colour, the question of heritage feels more like an exchange and less like an invasion. And that element of exchange has taught me that I deserve to have my culture, my food and my traditions enthusiastically embraced, not simply tolerated. Additionally, dating other women has opened my conception of romance to something softer, more gentle, less constrained by rules and roles and expectations. After years of rushed relationships with the closest available man, dating slowly and with intention is a somewhat novel experience. Paradoxically, dating has become an exercise in self-knowledge. Figuring out what I really want, and what needs I really have, can be confronting.Dating While Asian is available to view on Re:. The Spinoff. Politics Pop Culture Kai Podcasts. Search for an author Watch Videos. Members Donate Log in. About Contact Advertise About us Jobs. Subscribe Newsletters. Image: Archi Banal. Naomii Seah.
Dating While Asian: Why I’m no longer dating white men
Share Story. Keep going! I was born in a small port town in Japan and moved to Eugene, Oregon, when I was 5 years old, where I lived until I graduated college. Friends casually called us racial slurs. I brushed most of these comments off as well-intentioned, if misguided, jokes. And old stereotypes about Asian men persist. Grace Kao, a sociology professor at Yale University, has been tracking how Asian American men fare in the dating pool for years.Her research offers a look at how much discrimination Asian American men face when dating. The data also showed that Asian women were half as likely to be unpartnered, compared with Asian men. She also found, in a paper she co-authored, that gay Asian men in America face the same discrimination in their love lives. Kao says the statistics show a clear hierarchy based on race that leaves Asian men on the bottom rung. Back then, Chinese people were portrayed in ugly caricatures with buck teeth and slanted eyes. During World War II, the same caricatures were used by cartoonists in an effort to drum up enthusiasm for a war against Japan. During the yellow peril era, the notion that Asian men were feminine or asexual also took root, says Connie So, an American ethnic studies teaching professor at the University of Washington. So says the stereotype started because, along with building railroads, many of the first male Chinese immigrants to the U.
https://img.freepik.com/free-photo/optimists-attractive-young-bearded-indian-man-hugging-cute-asian-woman-with-long-dark-hair-looking-confidently-camera-sitting-sofa-home_259150-58727.jpgWhen Asians say they’re not into Asian men
Later waves of male Asian immigrants from Japan and the Philippines also worked these types of jobs, and the stereotype grew into one of the strongest prevailing ideas about Asian men in America, So says. In many popular American films and TV shows, Asian men have been portrayed as weak or unattractive caricatures that could never be the serious love interest of a white woman. Yes, there was Bruce Lee, who played strong, fierce characters, but he was the exception to the rule, highlighting just how few Asian male characters were in films and TV shows at all, and how those few roles were mostly for weak or comical characters. And So points out that Lee was rarely seen in romantic or sexual situations. Because of these stereotypes perpetuated by the media, many of her Asian American male students have poor self-esteem, So says. I entered high school without having had my first kiss, shy and insecure, trying to subdue my Asianness as much as I could.
One way I did that was by only trying to date white girls. If I could date a white girl, I thought, I would be normal and accepted. In my freshman year of high school, I had my first kiss with a white girl, of course. And as I moved up the grades I casually dated white girls and eventually got my first serious girlfriend, who was white, near the beginning of my senior year. I had mixed feelings about that. Being told I was hot was an enormous relief after years of thinking I was unattractive.
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