Love in the Time of Multiculturalism
A retrospective at the Guggenheim showcased photographer Carrie Mae Weems’ “Kitchen Table” series, a narrative of melancholic yearning for black love disrupted by the twin power structures of racism and capitalism. I was struck by a familiar melancholy underlying the conversation among Asian Americans that we have become romantically allergic to — even abandoned by — each other. I imagined the black and brown husbands and fathers detained and disappeared by the carceral state; the young Asian men emasculated and driven to nihilistic violence by its discourse of white supremacy. I began to consider the metonymy of collective anxieties around racial crossings — a fear that as we are forced to make compromises with hegemonic whiteness, we are denying the fullness of our hearts, our selves, our history. Can we resist being flattered by power? Do we market our bodies as fetishes to resolve our unassimilability? Do we come home expecting our partners to give us everything we are owed by an unequal world?
My own wariness is not situated in a position of provincialism, separatism, racism, or xenophobia, but in a mistrust of neoliberal modes of intimacy and imperial forms of subjectivity, a keen sense of hypocrisy, a desire for truly transformative social change, and a love of love that is profound, totalizing, and authentic.
Interracial intimacy has become the promised catalyst of a multicultural and post-racial America, the embodied and democratic mechanism through which material privilege will be redistributed and the haunting of American racism exorcised. America has opened a new frontier, a miscegenated utopia requiring no major structural changes to manifest harmonious order, only the inducement of individuals to network in a globalized market of love. But who is embraced and who is excluded in this frontier? Whose crossings remain illicit and undesirable? Whose stubborn stagnation and structural immobility will reproduce the problems we hoped to leave behind us?
My sisters and I grew up before mixedness was chic, when it was still a social liability, despite our mother’s painstaking efforts to naturalize it as part of our convoluted and creolized transpacific roots. My parents had not serially dated racially fungible others, or selected one another based on racial preferences from neatly categorized online dating sites. Instead, they had found each other through a shared and intimate history of family loss that few others could comprehend. There were other mixed families in our Bay Area community, situated historically as a gateway to the Pacific, a nexus of global circuits of migration. One couple in particular had also met spontaneously, when one volunteered at a refugee assistance center during the Vietnam War. She welcomed a displaced family of boat people that included her future husband. This was a coupling born of supreme empathy and political urgency, a crossing that transgressed more than skins and phenotypes.
“‘O ke aloha ke kuleana ‘o kahi malihini.” — ‘Olelo No‘eau
“Love is the host in strange lands.” — Hawaiian Proverb
Six years into my own interracial relationship, I remain amazed at the general ignorance of the daily labor of sustaining love across intersecting differences, and the tendency and temptation of people to reduce us to signs. It took years to anticipate strangers, usually white gay men and straight women, interrupting us to say that we made a “beautiful couple.” They knew nothing of our frustrations translating love between cultural clusters, or the familiar pain of feeling mutually misunderstood. They were enticed by the curious pairing of African and Asiatic, pleased by the juxtaposition of mellow brown and high yellow — geometric, chromatic, and sterile.
Those who venture to satisfy their curiosity marvel that we found each other despite our ostensible racial differences, reducing us to fixed and exotic others without questioning the multiple intersections of our trajectories or the deeper chasms that remain to be bridged. Racial differences have posed salient challenges, but as daughters of islanders we found cultural synchronicities that continue to amuse, enrich, sustain, and query us. Over time we recognized shared things stored deep below the skin — the strain and exile of homosexuality, the pain and loneliness of abuse.
The continued fetishization of racial difference precludes discussion of the uncompromising reality of socioeconomic disparity — by far the greatest challenge we face. I am suburban, a JAP if you ask my mother—who grew up on O‘ahu between the blue-collar neighborhoods of coolie descendants and the tense melting pot of military bases. We complained about the copious leftovers every time she cooked, and stuffed ourselves listening to stories of her hunger. Inherited narratives could never instruct me on the embodied neglect and despair of an indefinitely empty belly, could never surrogate or reconstruct a childhood of urban poverty, feeding on WIC, wit, and cunning. I will always negotiate that shame, the embarrassment and vain apology, in ways I never would with a socioeconomically synonymous partner of any ethnicity.
I hope that as we move forward into this frontier, as we expand the economy of interracial intimacy, we consider alternative exchanges like friendship and solidarity as equally crucial; we concern ourselves with those excluded and impoverished by the social capital of enlightened and promiscuous mobility; we honor the long history, structure, and political economy of racial crossings; and we love, authentically and selflessly, others who transcend and disrupt our neat taxonomies of difference, who challenge us to become truly capacious selves.
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