kevin, why don't you date asian women anymore

[erf_]

What do you see in the face of a local white American woman?I see swaying maples. I see hazel in her irises, and hair the color of warm earth, and gentle, soft skin. I see memories of Saturday morning cartoons, of the prick of rocks and shells in the sand along a hot July beach, of the sweet tang of varnished libraries and ancient drywall. I see

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[erf_]

I'm incredibly flattered that this entry stayed with you after all this time. I think my feelings about our ethnicity are a little different now, but I'm still not attracted to Asian women at all.

Getting back in touch with second-generation Asian-Americans from my hometown recently taught me something I didn't understand at all when I wrote this entry: Asians have their culture forced upon them; Asian-Americans get to make theirs. A few of my friends from New Jersey frequently complain about how they can't stand up for themselves because Asians are meek and weak-willed, how they have terrible social skills because they were raised to be antisocially studious, how they can't get laid because Asians have no confidence and are mediocre at the arts because Asians are tiger-mommed into being rote memorization machines, and I get fed up. I blow up at them. I tell them about George Takei, who grew up in a freaking internment camp and is now one of the most vivacious, beloved personalities in Hollywood, about Jin Tsen Wu and Deimos Chiang, about Chiang Kai-Shek's Hungarian wife, about Jay Chou and the renaissance in Taiwanese Mandopop, about Gangnam Style, about the NEHSers I grew up with in a newly post-fascist Taiwan who despite being the epitome of the unthinking Asian student drone managed to find the initiative to run our yearbook, dances, and all our school clubs ourselves. I told them about the Californasians at NEHS, how they were lively and vivacious and went to church and played guitar and did swing and improv, and how all the stereotypes New Jersey Asians have about themselves are myopically regional. Never having left their tiny Asian enclave in New Jersey, which will soon be extinct (and all its stereotypes with it), they were incredulous.

The way I see it now is this: When you're sixteen, you get to complain about your upbringing because at that point your upbringing is your life. When you're twenty-six, if you're still living with your parents and still complaining about this stuff, your upbringing is just a starting point. The torch has been passed, and you are holding it. At that age you're a grownup, even by Asian standards, and nobody gets to tell you what it means to be Asian anymore. You are elderless. You raise the next generation, not your parents. You dictate what it means to be what they are (until they grow up and challenge you themselves), not society; it's what people see in you, not your parents, that determines how your children will be perceived. It's not like being black, where widespread stereotypes based on a legacy of slavery hound you at every corner no matter how you frame yourself, or being white, where your ancestral legacy is part of the very institutions that guide our everyday lives. If you are second-generation Asian-American, you are a blank slate and a pioneer. No one in America knows who you are, so no one can force an identity on you. You decide what it means to be Asian, what good parts to keep and what bad parts to get rid of, what parts of your culture to preserve and which to relegate to the dustbin of history. You can will three thousand years of rigid Chinese patriarchy into oblivion by setting a better example. And future generations have no choice but to follow your course.

Asian Asians, on the other hand, are pretty fucked in that regard--no personal assertion of identity is going to override millennia of cultural expectations. But folks like you and I have the rare privilege of starting over. And our elders, who will soon be under our care and at our mercy, have no choice but to go along with whatever we choose. We are the elders now, and it is a responsibility we should take seriously.

[erf_]

That said, the American patriarchy is also real, and sucks. And if you ever move to San Francisco or Detroit, you have to deal with stereotypes created around previous generations of Asian-Americans as well. :/

But you do have a degree of control over your own fate over here that we could have never dreamed of back at NEHS. And with that control comes the opportunity to move beyond how we were raised, rather than perpetuate it.