Dear World,
I didn't always know what it meant to be Asian. Growing up, the things I knew for certain were simple. I knew that my parents spoke Vietnamese to me. I knew we celebrated extra holidays as a family. But it never occurred to me that I could be different than my classmates by a way of racial background until I was older. Actually, it's more accurate to say, I didn't know it could mean anything to be different racially until I was older. Until then, as a kid, I just I knew I looked different. I had black hair, but so what? My best friend's hair was blonde, and my neighbor had brown hair, and the girl who sat next to me had red curly hair. More important things to me: I liked my bike. My bike was cool. Books were really cool. And the coolest thing, was being able to find people who could share these cool things with me.
My hometown was hardly diverse in the 90s. It was a newly developing suburb. It was nice. I look kindly on my childhood to this day. It wasn't until I reached high school, when I began to meet more kinds of people. I suddenly began to realize, holy shit--there's been other people like me on the other side of town. Subconsciously, I made these little connections, like figuring that maybe they went through similar things I had gone through too. Maybe we could just get each other. So, a sense of camaraderie grew and I just wanted to be accepted, understood, and to finally be a part of something. I was on a constant struggle to understand my identity.
But I am skipping a lot of things that lead up to that moment; racial slurs and stereotypes, culture clashes, and self-hatred deriving from confusion--a lot of it. Because each are its own story to me, I save the detail for a time I can talk about it with justice and with the attention it deserves. Yet, every time one of those things happened, it had added up to the hope I could make more sense of things. In retrospect, we were just a bunch of kids who were figuring ourselves out. But we wanted so much more.
We made stupid rules. It wasn't like we sat down and wrote ten commandments on being Asian, but it there was sort of unwritten, yet distinctively known set of rules that we lived strictly by. Example: it was like a sin to wear Abercrombie, especially after they kept slipping with politically incorrect t-shirts like "Two Wongs make it White." Understandable response on our part. Then, Fast and the Furious came out and I remember the whole explosion with racing cars and JDM imports. There was really hardly any Asian representation in the media. So we were just scrambling together to try to find out what it was to be us. It was as if we were only given this defined scale of WHITE to BLACK. We were that weird gray area in-between to work with and we stayed somewhere in-between, like where breakdancing and basketball would be.
We were always constantly nervous in some way. But if we were hard on each other, it was because we were hard on ourselves. And to make matters worse, there was the DATING scene. As if it wasn't hard enough, racial tension had to muck it all up for us and make it even harder.
I always found myself attracted to all races. In my hometown, there just happened to be a lot of white dudes. That's just how it was. There was never a problem that I like-liked any of them until I was older. Like in any interracial relationship, it was added tension. The first time I went on a date with a white guy in high school, I felt like I was betraying... something. I wasn't the only person who felt weird about it, but like others, I couldn't just sit down and explain the entire situation intelligently. So we made jokes, lots of them. That was how we dealt with the tension.
This is where my apology comes into play. For a long time, I bought into the hype of hating on interracial relationships. I have to say this now very generally: interracial relationships. Even though at the time, I was actually ok with all and any interracial relationships outside of Asian and Caucasians, for me to have that one exception makes it just as bad as having a problem with any. When I think about it now, I don't think it's justified to say, well white guys who are totally into Asian girls are totally different than, say, latino guys who are into black chicks. But for a long time, it really did feel justified to have that one exception.
I regret feeling angry. I've been pretty short-fused towards nearly any politically incorrect interaction with a white guy. These guys came off like I was some anime character who would squeal Japanese catchphrases in exaggerated immaturity. They would shout out names of various Vietnamese (if they had it right) food, sometimes even complete expressions for ordering food in Vietnamese, as if culture was a cuisine. Or they would try to find out my race before even bothering to find out my unique personal interests. What upset me the most was hearing one-dimensional complements that usurped my humanity to an Oriental object of display or exotic collection for their amusement. YELLOW FEVER! I'd groan with disgust. I'm a PERSON, and my upbringing involved more meaning and complexity than these random Chinese character tattoos and those samurai swords on your mantle!
But here's the thing: why was I so spiteful? Why did I have to be so angry? Instead of finding a snarky response to alienate the ignorant, I should've just seen the opportunity as someone who is interested but just doesn't know any better. Hell, I've been just as confused in my own life. The more knowledge we spread--genuinely, and not in a heated tirade--the sooner we can move forward as a society. Anytime I got angry, clammed up, or threw my hands up in disgust, I was just as stuck as the person I was accusing. We aren't going anywhere with that kind of mindset.
For all the comments I get as an Asian girl who is seen with a white guy, and all the annoying "oh yeah, of course she'd be with a white guy too" expressions--EVEN if I am just having lunch with a coworker--I should know better. But I let these things happen. I let this phrase, "yellow fever" be okay, simply by accepting the usage. How, in our society today, do we still encourage these thoughts? I have tried so hard to defend my relationships in the past--to say WE are not one of THOSE couples, when I should've been defending against the thought of what "those" couples would be on a whole. A couple is just a couple. Why are we even disputing others' decisions with such scrutiny?
I do think that disingenuous relationships exist. But I'm starting to feel like the mindset of anti-yellow fever has grown to this crazy monster that applies as disgust towards any time an Asian girl is with a white guy. I know that there will still be some guy out there who will say politically incorrect things about his interest in Asian girls. But instead of saying, UGH, WHITE GUYS! Why can't we just agree on, "Oh man that guy is just creepy!"
World, I am sorry I have been a hypocrite. I'm sorry I've been encouraging Yellow Fever hate. It wasn't fair of me. I can be comfortable about myself and my own relationships instead of judging others. I am going to stop using that phrase: Yellow Fever. And anyways, it wouldn't be fair to the flavivirus, which doesn't actually discriminate humans by race.
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