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Time
spent in college can skew your perceptions on reality in
many ways, in one sense you gain a more complete perspective
on life, in another you are isolated away from the world.
The few chances you have to connect with the world again is
your summer and winter break. For those of us who come from
the city, it’s a chance to see how quickly the world changes
and how the world goes on without us. This break for me was
an affirmation of that, for the first time in twenty one
years of living in NYC, I saw more Asian male and non-Asian
female couples roaming the streets of NYC.
Since
the age that I first started dating, I've heard complaints
from many Asian guys talking about how “the white man” was
stealing their women or of how they meet Asian women who
won’t date an Asian guy. While most of the time I dismiss
this as the bitterness of men who have been rejected, there
is some truth in the fact that most of the time I see
interracial Asian couples, the woman is usually Asian while
the guy is another race. This is a fact that many of us in
NYC have come to believe and what I've come to believe is the
fact growing up in NYC. So this break provided an
eye-opening change when every trip into the city I saw at
least one interracial couple where an Asian guy wasn’t with
an Asian woman.
While
I've dated outside for my race several times in the past,
I've always considered myself an outsider or the strange one
in the group. Growing up too American to really fit into the
“Asian” groups but too “Asian” to fit into the “American
Asians” (for some reason speaking Chinese barred me from the
second group). Imagine my surprise going back to the city
and suddenly, inexplicably I find that the world has shifted
and I wasn’t so strange anymore. Every time I went out, I
was tempted to go and meet these couples but I figured it
probably wasn’t the best idea and in the end I never did
find out what was going on but the fact was it was
happening.
Of
course seeing all this and being a college student I had to
ask everyone I knew about this and if they had noticed the
same trend or if prolonged isolation on Long Island had
burnt out my mind. For the most part they said that they had
been noticing it more and more frequently and most of them
didn’t know what to make of it. Many of the more militant
Asian Americans that I had met were overjoyed and supported
them while other more conservative Asian Americans I knew
took it as a sign that maybe the image of the asexual Asian
male had started dying off.
Is it that more second or third generation Asian Americans
are appearing here on the East Coast that are more willing
to date outside of their race?
Is it that Asian men are suddenly in style and old images
like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu are starting to die out?
Personally I have no idea and for what its worth I don’t
really care how it’s happening, it’s just a good feeling
knowing that maybe other Asian American guys out there are
more like me than I think. That maybe I’m not the outcast
Asian American male that’s too “Asian” or too “American”.
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