Having an Asian Appearance with an American Mindset Ruined Me for Relationships

My 85-year-old father recently told me on Father’s Day that he hates chocolate. We were never that close, so I never knew, but it came up when I offered him a chocolate dessert after our meal.

I was already familiar with his miserable childhood and how much he had to hustle to just have basic necessities like food and water while growing up in abject poverty in third-world South Korea during the 1930s.

During the Korean War when he was a young teen, he would often witness American GIs driving around through the dirt roads, and a bunch of Korean kids following them using their knowledge of the few English words they learned to beg the GIs for treats, like chewing gum and chocolate.

The American GIs would smile and throw handfuls of treats at them, and the kids would scurry around like a pack of ravenous animals and hungrily devour everything on the spot.

Despite my father’s extreme hunger, he never participated because the spectacle of Koreans debasing themselves begging for treats and Americans carelessly tossing off the treats onto the dirty, muddy roads treating them like a pack of animals disgusted him so much to the point of him swearing off chocolates for life.

My recent discovery of his disgust for chocolate reminds me of something I’ve always felt on a subconscious level about all of my romantic relationships.

I’ve been paranoid my whole life of being viewed and treated as nothing more than an Asian streetwalker, mail-order bride, and dainty, subservient lotus blossom with no opinions desperate to find a man to offer me a better life as long as I kissed his ass and offered him unlimited sex.

Relationships, marriage, or lifetime partnerships are already complicated without the added factor of this ingrained paranoia, but my experiences growing up, combined with those of my Asian friends, have only increased my paranoia and turned me off men for good.

My mother had me and my two brothers but always treated us differently. She was raised to believe that men are superior, and she tried her hardest to brainwash me into believing the same thing.

My brothers weren’t even allowed in the kitchen because she believed that kitchen work was deemed as inferior work for men. They should focus on their studies in order to attain respect and high-paying jobs while I had to focus on my studies but also look pretty and maintain my weight in order to attract a “better” man.

I was only allowed to major in piano and not my brothers not only because I had natural talent, but also because I was female, and my mother considered classical piano to be feminine and elegant.

I don’t know why she encouraged me to act more feminine, which to her really meant to act weak, stupid, subservient, cater to men, and follow the same shitty path as her.

I knew better. I could see that her life was shit because she was trapped in her own delusion. Like any woman who is trapped in a traditional, conservative, misogynistic culture, she was trapped in a loveless marriage and treated like an abused slave with no options but to go along.

But I was determined to follow my own path.

My two brothers both attended an all-White boy’s boarding school in Chattanooga, Tennessee and were privy to daily conversations of their White peers, and some of the conversations included their thoughts on Asian women.

Therefore, my older brother was adamant about me not dating a White boy who would view me as nothing more than an eager and exotic sex toy.

Like a typical Asian nerd, I did very well in academics and piano, so I wrongly assumed that I would never be mistaken for an exotic mail-order bride type eager to please a man for a buck. Never was this false assumption more apparent than the years I spent in New York City when I was an undergrad in my late teens to early twenties.

Many women experience catcalls, but Asian women experience catcalls on a different level. The men who harassed me on my daily walks on the Upper West Side to and from school knew how to greet me in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean although I spoke none of those languages. I’ve heard, “Me love you long time” so many times that as much as I love Stanley Kubrick movies, I fucking hate Full Metal Jacket.

My experiences growing up in a rural, redneck, conservative town in Tennessee and liberal, international New York City were a complete culture shock. My social circle in New York City consisted of only European and American Caucasian males and Asian women, few Americans and all musicians, and the only couples I knew were always mixed-race couples consisting of those two groups.

It was there where I learned and became familiar with the idea of “Asian fetish” or “yellow fever” and the ideas that were planted in my mind by my older brother in previous years. It was also there where I learned of young Asian women throwing themselves at their old professors in the hopes of advancing their careers.

It didn’t fucking matter that the famous professors were in their eighties or nineties and the young women were in their twenties. It didn’t fucking matter if the women came from rich families and didn’t need to offer their bodies like cheap prostitutes to get ahead. They catered to the rich, White privileged males anyway.

My often-drunk young male Caucasian friends weren’t sophisticated enough to obscure their racist and sexist remarks, and looking back now, I appreciate it. Up until that point, I didn’t have much dating experience, but at the time, I was at least wise enough to bypass it entirely.

Finally, my thirties! I absolutely hated being in my twenties. All I wanted in life was to be taken seriously because I worked hard to prove myself worthy and equal, but the combination of looking young, petite, and Asian and being immersed in a dysfunctional White male-dominated environment led me into my first nervous breakdown and serious depression.

Around this time, I met my African-American ex-husband. He was five years younger, sweet, funny, supportive, optimistic, sincere, and handsome. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t paranoid about being viewed as that dainty, submissive, sexually-eager exotic Asian.

For the most part, I felt lucky to find him, and his consistency and stability helped me cope through hard times, including my mother’s death.

He wasn’t rich, but I didn’t care, because I believed that we loved and appreciated each other, and we shared many good memories. Our problems began to appear when we moved to the SF Bay Area, where his salary increased dramatically.

His jobs required frequent international travel, and he developed a taste for Asian hookers. Apparently, if you’re a rich Western man on a business trip, desperate women will throw themselves at you like those impoverished Korean kids following the American GIs for treats.

As I’ve written elsewhere, he ended up flying in a mail-order bride from China and setting her up in an apartment without my knowledge while we were still married because it was apparently my fault for gaining twenty pounds after pregnancy.

Fuck. I’ve spent my whole life avoiding men like this and ended up with the same dysfunctional Jerry Springer shit anyway.

Finally, my forties! I’m running a piano school while going through a divorce, and all of my clients are witnessing my meltdown. My life isn’t over yet, so I decide to reassess my life in the typical clichéd fashion all alone in Paris in a female-friendly city.

It was there when I met the man who I believed was the love of my life, when I believed in such a thing, and on top of being French, handsome, kind, funny, sincere, and adventurous, he made me forget about my paranoia about being perceived as a dainty, submissive, sexually-eager exotic Asian.

Meanwhile, my Chinese friend who was going through a similar situation found a pretty Caucasian man to date and believed that she also found her soulmate. She grew up in communist China, so her views were completely different than mine.

We shared lots of stories over the years, and not growing up here, she never understood my paranoia of Asian fetish freaks. She believed that non-Asian men who professed their preference for Asian females was only about a physical preference like her preference for clean-cut pretty White boys.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, I found out that Frenchie dated only Asian women after his divorce, found them easy to manipulate due to their love of money, lack of opinions, and he used their ignorance of wines to make a profit. He couldn’t hide his contempt for Asians.

Pretty soon, I noticed that he spoke to me like I was one of those desperate Asian females eager to please and easy to manipulate. As soon as I recognized it, I cut off our relationship.

Pretty boy, who also dated only Asian women, was very condescending toward Asians and my friend. I couldn’t believe that she continued to love and date him despite some of the racist and sexist remarks he made about her.

During her twenties, her other pretty Caucasian boyfriend told her that he loved her but never wanted to have kids with her because he didn’t want mixed-race kids.

She continued to date him despite that statement. He went on to marry a Caucasian female, had a couple of kids with her, then divorced her after cheating on her with Asian prostitutes.

Another Asian-American friend dating an African-American male revealed to me that she saw a text between him and his friend referring to her as “The Chinaman”.

Double fuck.

I acknowledge, of course, that although there might be some decent men out there, they’re increasingly harder to find, and at my age, the dating imbalance overwhelmingly favors men over women.

I just don’t have the energy to sort through the garbage to find the diamond in the rough that may or may not exist, and my Asian appearance with an American mindset only complicates that.

And just like my father, I’m unwilling to chase after a few crumbs strewn along a dirt path.