The Meaning of the White Male

In the wake of Donald Trump's ascendancy to the Presidency, I questioned whether I could really date a white man.

Don't get me wrong.  The election was only the final straw in a process of reflection that has been going on since....2004?

That was the Bush era.  I was staunchly conservative, Republican, and more Christian Fundamentalist than just about any other Asian American female I'd ever met.  I dated a white guy my Freshman year of college, and in the summer of 2004, when we were both in Washington, D.C. for a political conference, he asked if I wanted to begin a courtship.  I was 18, and he was 23.  We had a pretty solid friendship, but I didn't think it was a good idea.  We agreed to remain friends.

Sophomore year, I was interested in 2 Japanese-American guys at USC.  Both were petite but built, athletic, engineer-smart, and Christian.  What bothered me was the fact that their ancestors had oppressed mine.  My grandparents were alive for WWII, and even though I had visited Japan and gone to Japanese school as a child, I could never erase history from my heritage.

Junior year came, and I did end up dating one of those Japanese-Americans.  It helped that his mother was Taiwanese and he spoke Mandarin.  The Japanese parts of him were positive ones: his last name was (more) pronounceable to white Americans (than many Chinese last names), and he was very punctual and diligent.

Senior year came with the looming reality of graduation, and I questioned whether we would work out in "actual life" outside of college.  A biracial friend (his mother was Korean and his father was American with an Irish last name) and I had a deep emotional connection, and I wondered about the potential of that relationship too.  Meanwhile, I was slated to graduate and then go straight into a Master's degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures.  In the classes I was taking, I was gaining a deeper understanding of what it meant to be Chinese.

This understanding became useful when I finally had my first official relationship at 23.  He was originally from Guangzhou, China, and he had a Chinese name.  Having studied modern Chinese history, I had an easier time relating with his parents, who had undergone the Cultural Revolution.  It also made me realize that I wasn't quite as Chinese as I had previously thought--and that having parents from Taiwan did create some differences within a shared culture.

We hit some pretty rocky patches in our on-and-off (3-year-total-saga) courtship.  In the midst of those patches, I learned how to swing and blues dance, and I was confronted with issues of sexuality (both his and mine) that had never arisen in previous relationships.  I also befriended a white man with a German last name and Austrian blood on his mother's side.  I began to see a preference for those with Germanic heritage in white men.

This was further confirmed when I was at Yale, and I realized that Anglo-Saxons (as my mom likes to call them) made me feel alienated at times and that my closest guy friends were either German or some derivation thereof.  I spent a lot of one-on-one time with a white male with French-Canadian heritage, but I never really could have the kind of deep emotional connection that one needs to take things further.

Enter now the first white male with whom there is spiritual and emotional potential.  We don't talk about it much, but his parents have both German and Irish (and maybe a tinge of Scottish?) blood.  How do I negotiate this tension between not wanting to be just one more Asian female who ends up with a white male and the possibility of a real future between two people?

This afternoon, I read a chapter from More Than Serving Tea, a book by Asian American women that deals, among other issues, with the topic of dating and intercultural relationships.  I don't think there are any easy answers, but what I read reminds me of the truth of what I've experienced: the most important thing is that Jesus be at the center of all relationships.  For it is in Christ alone that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Amen.