More Asian Girls Dating White Guys

The future of our relationship depends entirely on his answer. Some people may see no harm in a man who dabbled for a couple of years in Final Fantasy , orders Thai food at least once a week on Deliveroo, and has a penchant for Taoism. As an East Asian woman, these are red alert flags for me: abort mission. By Zing Tsjeng. Society has taught us, especially first-generation immigrants, that validation comes with being invited to sit next to white people — even though none of us will ever actually make it to the table. Dating as a woman of colour is stressful under any circumstances. Add white men into the equation, and I can feel my anxiety going through the roof. I see compassion in their eyes, because they know what it tends to entail. The politics that come into play in interracial relationships are never easy given the marked power imbalance within society as a whole. If someone compliments you, does he find you attractive because of traits relating to your ethnicity and culture, or because of the traits that are unique to you? By Daniel Rodgers. By Georgia Day. Even within China, women continue to be fetishised by white people. When I used to visit my sister in Shanghai, I would constantly get into arguments with white men trying to woo me with their lousy broken Mandarin. Many white expats laowai are the direct progeny of Western imperialism and indulge fully in their East Asian fetishism. They reserve tables on rooftop bars and act like colonial soldiers, surrounding themselves with Chinese women whom they often provide for financially, even though most of them have a wife and kids waiting for them back home. In the end, no matter where you are in the world, or how much you love and trust your partner, there will always be this little voice inside your head telling you that you could be replaced by another woman with the same physical features. By Susie Lau. All of that being said, I have dated really nice and loving white men who are aware of these issues — if not in the beginning, definitely by the end of our relationship.

https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/90-Day-Fiance-Brandon-and-Julia.jpg?w=1000

I’m a white guy who dates Asian girls—but I don’t have 'yellow fever'

Interracial relationships might always be political, but by opening conversations about the power structures at play, we can work towards changing them. By Alex Kessler and Emily Chan. By Sophia Li. December Issue. Save this story Save. Read More. Most Popular. Our editorial content is not influenced by any commissions we receive. As a white kid growing up in a largely Chinese suburb of Toronto, I spent much of my time thinking about Asian girls. Back then, the term was shorthand for someone white who had a crush on someone Asian, and at our school, it applied to the girls as much as it did the boys. To me, it was just another form of teasing that I threw into my sizable trashcan of forgotten terms, lying dormant all these years—until now. To some, its subtext is heavily charged. A sexual objectifier. Such men believe all Asian women are docile and hypersexual, and happily project these qualities onto potential romantic partners. On the contrary, I'm sure my friends see me as the educated, well-intentioned, liberal-minded guy I am. Think for a second about what my friends are saying when they describe me as someone with yellow fever. I accept that.It suggests that their race was more important to me than their other attributes. The term, then, becomes a way to shame white men and Asian women for entering relationships with each other. So, why is our default reaction to just shrug it off? Why is it okay for white guys who date Asian girls to regularly hear that they have yellow fever? I have a healthy attitude towards women and race! By accusing me of objectifying women based on their race, I felt compelled to do just that. But I wrote this essay because the term is becoming more popular. So, why not dump the term altogether? You are also agreeing to our. All Rights Reserved. By Sean Hebert.

Because I am small and Asian, I am fetishised by some white men

Image via Complex Original. Complex Original. Sign up for the Complex Newsletter. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Latest in Life It was fight or flight for this passenger. Alana Bechiom claims a Christmas party descended into drunken chaos when her manager was seen having sex with his wife, who was kissing her female manager and another female co-worker. Beauty influencer Kelly Kim opened up a can of worms when she detailed why she ghosted a friend who gifted her boyfriend a sandwich. A Maine man alleges that the mother of his child violated a non-disclosure agreement. The health risks of loneliness can be as bad as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. The terrifying incident took several turns for the worse, and it was all caught on video. The brawl started all because a woman snatched a phone out of someone else's hands. Jimmy Fallon even joked about it on The Tonight Show.

Introduction

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.

What’s the difference between having a “type” and fetishisation?

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.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. 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.

To All The White Boys I’ve Dated Before

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. Share Story. Keep going!

Am I a 'race traitor' for dating white people?

As someone who's slept with and dated many white men, and someone currently in a relationship with a white man, the idea of the "race traitor" is something I'm particularly attuned to. Even though it shouldn't matter, my first crush was on a Filipino boy, my first kiss was with a Vietnamese boy and I've dated and slept with men of varying ethnicities. For what it's worth, non-white boys have broken up with me as many times as I have broken up with them, and I've been on dates with more non-white women than white women. But that's the point — it shouldn't matter. I don't remember what I tweeted to prompt this response, but a woman who has never met me in person and who knows nothing about me once sent me a tweet at in the morning:. I'd seen prominent Asian American women be viciously attacked online for having white husbands or boyfriends, but I was just a normal person on the other side of the world. I found it interesting and upsetting and infuriating that an Asian woman was angry at me for even considering white men as potential partners — most of the attacks I'd seen in the past had come from Asian men, who were incensed at my audacity to sleep with or date whoever I want, regardless of their race. Sleep with too many people and I'm a slut; sleep with too few and I'm a prude. And now, according to this woman, sleeping with the wrong people means my vagina supports white supremacy. My brain stumbled into a panic.

Primary Navigation

None of my Australian friends were awake, so I scoured my Twitter feed for someone who might be. I ended up chatting to a Singaporean Chinese woman who lives in the UK — an acquaintance I'd interacted with briefly online on a few occasions, but someone I'd never met in person. She reassured me, validated my belief that this sort of ideology was bullshit, and let me know that it was okay to feel shitty about something as seemingly insignificant as a tweet. She also told me to go back to sleep. But halfway through our conversation, she made a point I hadn't really considered before: "I don't know how many people on Twitter have worked out that my girlfriend is white but I have NEVER gotten flack for dating her, which just goes to show what people's priorities are. I followed her advice and went back to bed, but the thought still lingered when I woke up at a more appropriate time: am I a race traitor? Do I actually have a glut of internalised racism that I'm not aware of? Does dating or even casually sleeping with white men mean I throw away all these aspects of my Malaysian Chinese identity? Asian men in Western societies certainly have to combat unfair stereotypes of their own — they are commonly seen as socially awkward "nerds", subservient and sexually unattractive. These stereotypes continue to be perpetuated in popular culture — see Raj in The Big Bang Theory, or the imaginatively named Chang in Community. Yet Asian men who date white women don't get the same treatment or the same level of public vitriol. I don't see articles calling out Asian men in such relationships, and I'd be willing to bet that, unlike some of the outspoken Asian women I follow on Twitter, they don't get strangers hurling death threats at them. In what can only be described as a hypocrisy of extraordinary proportions, these men are lauded by their peers for their ability to land a white woman. For example, Madalene Chu writes in an article for SBS that her Vietnamese Catholic partner Andrew would "regularly get high-fived" when he was dating a Caucasian girl. Stories like these are relatively commonplace. When I mention the "race traitor" phenomenon to my Asian friends, most of the Asian men I know have only heard snippets of it here and there, if at all, but most of the Asian women I've talked to know what I'm talking about straightaway. As Dr Jane Park, a senior lecturer of gender and culture studies at the University of Sydney, says on the Shoes Off podcast, "I would deny the fact that any Asian woman who dates a white guy is a race traitor. If you do that, you're saying, all people who date outside their race are traitors. Just as I'm not any less a woman because my partner is a man, I'm not any less Chinese because my partner is white. I don't start wishing for blonde hair and blue eyes, just like I don't forget the superstitions my parents taught me when I was young, or how to read or write or speak Mandarin.