"Your sister’s cute!"
(pt 1) yes this is on white male-asian female relationships
This is the 1st installment/intro to a 23,000 word, 5-part manifesto that I’ve been chipping away at for a year on the culture, media, and discourse surrounding Whiteness, Asian America, “representation,” and White Male-Asian Female (WMAF) relationships.
When people ask what inspired this manifesto, I tell them that one summer day in 2021, I was taking a walk in Berkeley with my partner when a White man sped by on a bike and shouted, completely unprovoked, “Your sister’s cute!”
This White man’s explicitly racist and misogynist statement targets Asian women, Asian men, and the general Asian population, wrapping up nearly every grievance I cover in this manifesto in just three words. By brazenly directing this “compliment” at me, yet identifying me only in relation to my (Asian, male) partner, the White man draws on the age-old stereotype of submissive Asian women to undermine my agency as an individual.
This attempt to “claim” me in front of my partner also betrays the ingrained racial superiority some White men feel over Asian men, a dominance that few White men would admit today, but undeniably bolsters their ego and masculinity. The White man insinuates that we must be siblings rather than friends (let alone romantic partners), revealing a patronizing disdain for the inhuman Asian who lacks the individuality, purpose, and emotion to seek out our own relationships.
The fact that this happened in twenty twenty one — in Berkeley, California, the self-proclaimed, self-mythologizing, self-obsessed political activism bastion; the vanguard of free speech, ethnic studies, antiracist education, social justice, and radical student movements; the alleged birthplace of the term “Asian American” — suggests that we are not as far along in addressing Asian oppression as we thought we were. So many assumptions were wrapped up in that man’s three words, so many stereotypes that I could never have found a more succinct way to deliver!
At the center of the Asian American discourse is our ever-evolving relationship with Whiteness – White men, White supremacy, White masculinity, White feminism, White liberalism, White leftism.
I write this not as a blank check for an Asian American pity-party, or to assert our superiority over other oppressed peoples, but to offer a direct opinion that I rarely see in contemporary, spineless Asian American thinkpieces: I want to make it clear that White people have never, and will never, see Asians as their equals.
Some of us may be privileged, but we are not White. We need to think critically about the way Asian America has attempted to, and is allowed to blend in with Whiteness, how despite (or because of) our mainstream “success,” our unwillingness to criticize the consumerist, assimilationist, so offensively inoffensive drivel the mainstream celebrates as Asian American Culture, has reinforced a fictitious Asian American uniformity and further enmeshed us into western hegemony.
Rarely do I see Asian American essayists or thinkers or whatever, step back from celebrating the existence of our “representation” and take a look at who/what exactly we are allowing to “represent” ourselves – including but not limited to: Who is telling our stories? Who feels like their story is worth telling? What are their stories about?
I believe that Asian Americans unwittingly perpetuate anti-Asianness and American/Western hegemony in “progressive” representation by
unconditionally celebrating the post-racial feminism of White Male-Asian Female (WMAF) relationships
reinforcing meritocracy by upholding DEI-flavored Girlboss Feminism eg. Asian Boss Girl to blanket-disprove anti-Asianness
building reactionary identity-based movements like Stop Asian Hate1
uplifting aesthetic simplification and consumption as Asian American identity over lived experience
or rarely providing substantial cultural criticism of the influx of (mid) Asian American art/media (School for Good Mothers, Past Lives, etc) that give so much airtime to our grievances against White people that these stories ultimately become Stories About White People.
As such, Asian American Discourse has unfortunately not made it past its Assimilation Era.
I’ll tell you my stance now: I think Asian American discourse has seen little to no criticism about Who is making Asian American Content and What this Asian American Content entails, because we instead are over-indulging on A/ inoffensive, impersonal meditation on the distant histories of our ancestors (rather than our own current lived realities and actions) and B/ lighthearted consumption of the representation of Asian Americanness (rather than living in our literal Asian bodies).
I wrote this whole thing to start to fill this gap in the discourse and say that we Asians
contain multitudes that we may never be able to express in words,
should be more willing to criticize everything including ourselves, and
should care less about White people.
About that last one, I’m joking, but I’m also not. In case it doesn’t become obvious, I’m anti-WMAF, but for the thousandth time, I am not! calling! you! a! race! traitor! Stop projecting.
Part A of this manifesto is about Who? gets to represent Asian America. I will discuss White Male-Asian Female relationships (WMAF) because, unlike what boba liberals want you to think, simply pointing out that are a lot of WMAFs in Asian American popular culture, and wondering why, should not out you as incel, anti-feminist, or the legendary Reverse Racist. Our focus on history at the expense of the present contributes to the refusal to award legitimate consideration to the contemporary phenomenon of White Male-Asian Female (WMAF) relationships, a microcosm of how Asians operate in a White man’s world today.
Instead, anyone who doesn’t immediately praise the abundance of WMAF couples as a post-racial feminist win is shamed for policing Asian women’s love lives. There is no room for nuanced discussion about the racial dynamics between White men, Asian men, and Asian women.
In this manifesto, I will be referring to WMAF not only as its own unique phenomenon, but also as emblematic of broader Asian American (non) discourse about Whiteness in our communities. Specifically, my focus is cisgender, heterosexual, White-Asian dynamics, because that’s the common thread represented and celebrated in contemporary relationships, media, and infamy.
I will analyze the current state of WMAF discourse not through the “official” means of statistics and sociological research, but with what people are really saying in real life on Reddit, TikTok, Youtube, podcasts, music, and 2020s literature by Asian American female authors who all happen to be liberal, (often elite, private) university-educated women with White male partners. I will touch on all the live wires – the Oxford Study, Celeste Ng, incels, Men’s Rights Asians, r/AsianMasculinity, and anti-feminists – to explore how White feminism has framed the straw man argument between Asian women and Asian men to conveniently overlook the thorny topic of racialized standards of (Asian) masculinity.
Part B (and C!)2 of this manifesto is about What? our representation is bringing to the table. Through my discussion of recent books by Asian American authors, like Jessamine Chan’s School for Good Mothers and R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Babel, and films centering cultural differences between Asians, like Celine Song’s Past Lives and Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, I illustrate how many contemporary authors are still pandering to Whiteness by building their characters’ Asian identities in the negative space of Whiteness.
By framing the conflict in their stories as White vs non-White/Asian and resisting nuanced portrayals of Asian relationships, these writers force our Asianness to lean on Whiteness to define itself by what it’s not. To me this is a kind of assimilation, a reduction of embodying Asianness into simply not being White.
I discuss how this unwillingness to thoroughly analyze contemporary Asian-White dynamics manifests in the ubiquitous and boring Asian Identity As Consumption trend that seems to drive Asian American discourse today. We conflate surface-level, observable culture like food, stories, holidays, food, and food with unconscious, inexplicable norms like definitions of kinship, relationship with animals, notions of fairness, and concepts of self.3 All this flattens our idiosyncrasies to remain understandable and palatable to White people – a phenomenon that much of Asian America believes we’ve already left behind.
I will zoom out to the West’s pathologization of all Asian bodies (not just those in America) as inhuman and homogeneous, lacking emotion, agency, and creativity and Asian Americans’ collusion with these stereotypes. In our anxiety about our ever-changing, multi-layered positionality being too complex for White people to accept, Asian Americans scramble to claim belonging to White America instead of Asia by constructing Asian American as an identity linked by consumption of Asian culture in America, rather than the existence in Asian bodies.
From the indignant “I was born here” to the bitter “I’m not Asian enough for Asia and not American enough for America,” we conceptualize our belonging as mutually exclusive, as a multiple choice question with only one right answer, as the “normal” and not the “other.” This separation only affirms American stereotypes about the Asians “over there.”
No matter where we go, anti-Asianness follows: in movies, sports, fashion, commerce, family structure, and labor.
I will explore the demonization of Asian parenting through White flight from schools and the Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex, the relentless doping allegations against Chinese athletes that are just a dog whistle for (supposedly obsolete) concepts of scientific racism and the superiority of the White body, the militaristic representation of China’s counterfeit industry and New York’s Canal Street as a site of foreign enemies and national security,4 and the West’s obsession with casting Asians as inhuman creatures – cunning, crass, or psychotic5 (Squid Game, Parasite, The Vegetarian, Netflix’s adaptation of Three Body Problem) or unfeeling laborers (Past Lives and Perfect Days).
By refusing to celebrate, or even acknowledge, our differences from White people and our kinship with Asians in Asia, we collaborate with our oppressors to universalize norms that “preclude recognizing and affirming a group's specificity in its own terms”6 and instead offer White people digestible, bite-sized narratives of our humanity.
Opening up this kind of discourse exposes how White supremacy and White liberalism have infiltrated the Asian American community and discouraged us from building a healthy Asian “identity politic” alternative that can contend with the reactionary Asian-focused carceral solutions a la Stop Asian Hate, or the misogynist Asian racial purists who harass women in WMAF relationships.
Notice that my focus is on Asian Americans for the simple reason that I am a 2nd generation Chinese American from suburban California. My parents are immigrants from southern China. I am not yet another random white person writing about race who fails to ever let you know they’re white. My own positionality matters because as a Chinese woman, I have developed the foundation of my manifesto by simply living in our world and interacting with things that interest me. Notice that this manifesto is not in defense of “identity politics,” despite my focus on Asian America, because I don’t want to waste my breath trying to define “identity politics.”
Rather, I’m concerned with the “deference politics” of contemporary boba liberals who brush any and all Asian concerns under the rug because it’s just “not as bad” to be Asian as it is to be Black or Brown. This submission to the White leftist’s simple “hierarchy reversal…with black people on the top and white on the bottom” conveniently allows White people (like White leftists) to evade criticism while still “consolidat[ing]...power under the guise of virtue granted by [their] black friend,” as
quips.7Instead of desperately whining about the (now comprehensively disproven and outdated) “Black-White binary” and trying to satisfy the Whites by picking a spot closest to them and shutting up, we can understand anti-Asianness as rooted in, rather than subordinate to, historically anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, meritocratic and capitalist systems of oppression. We can begin to understand how Asian Americans are “dynamically positioned and weaponized by the U.S. state as it seeks to preserve structural anti-Blackness” and “consider how [we] might resist or subvert these patterns,” as Claire Jean Kim writes.8
We can contribute openness and understanding, rather than the weight of guilt and self-deprecation, to repair the fraught relationship between Asian and Black people. Addressing anti-Asianness is neither a higher or lower priority than addressing other axes of oppression.
Ultimately, liberation does not come from public and desperate self-flagellation. It can only come from exploring Asian American positionality relative to Whiteness and Blackness from all angles, approaching inconvenient truths head-on, interrogating our own socialization, actions, and values, and building confident solidarity with Black, Brown and Indigenous struggle.
I have a lot more to say about everything I mentioned. Here’s part 2:
you can't just call everyone an incel
(pt 2) spineless asian american essays, wmaf + asian masculinity, and avoiding accountability for our own relationships with whiteness
Here’s part 3:
Here’s part 4:
Here’s part 5:
Sorry I hate inconsistency, but I realized after publishing Part B Ch 4-6 that Ch 7-9 should be considered a different Part with a different theme. So now there’s Part C.
From Zaretta Hammond’s 3 layer “Culture Tree” depicting Surface, Shallow, and Deep culture in her book, Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain
Wow thanks for writing this! I also have a lot of thoughts on these topics, but could never really sit on them for too long (growing up as a token in a rural white area kinda messed me up). Really glad for your perspective, looking forward to the rest!
Thanks for the mention and looking forward to the subsequent parts! It's always especially fascinating to get an Asian American woman's POV from this angle. There's are a ton of Asian American female perspectives that never get promoted because they don't fit into that Asian American culture you criticize in your piece.