What Did They Love Me For

When I was a freshman in college, a friend of mine took me to a house party near downtown Minneapolis. I didn’t think much of it at the timeâ€"being nineteen, I seized any opportunity to drink un-cardedâ€"but after we arrived, I forgot about the booze. The group was entirely male: about 90% Asian, most in their twenties, the rest white and significantly older. These were hawkish yet clumsy men who lumbered from Asian guy to Asian guy, leering, while the Asian men giggled, or flirted, or acted strangely grateful. Some of the Asian men danced. Some stood at the perimeter, assessing. All of them, it seemed, were vying for the attention of the older white men.

I got a beer, avoided eye contact, and when I returned to my friend, a fellow gay Asian guy, I leaned in and said, “What is this?”

“It’s an Asian group,” he said. “For Asians and their admirers.”

“And all the admirers are old white guys?”

He shrugged, drank. “I guess,” he said.

I felt, for a moment, unmoored. Though I’d told him I didn’t care where we went, just that I wanted to drink, I hadn’t expected to be thrust into such a coded environment, one with a clear race and age divide. As we mingled, I felt scrutinized, an obvious newbie, so I stayed close to my friend.

“Relax,” he said. “You’re acting weird.”

I breathed in deep, took deep swigs of my beer.

He introduced me to a group of guys, all Asian, and I smiled, chatted, gave perfunctory answers to perfunctory questions. When my friend excused himself to go to the bathroom, I tried to join the conversationâ€"yes, Madonna was amazing, and no, I hadn’t heard the new singleâ€"but it became very clear very quickly that I still languished in the land of perfunctory responses. The group, disapproving, turned abruptly exclusive, and I found myself alone, feeling dreadfully conspicuous.

Then, a savior.

A man came up to me. A white man thrice my age. He said, “Let me guess, Chinese.”

My stomach dropped.

“Well you’re not Vietnamese or Indonesian or Thaiâ€"you’re too big. Japanese? No. Too thick. Not Korean either because your face isn’t…hmm. Mongolian?”

External expectation demanded that I not only know but love the exoticism attached to my exterior.

I looked toward the bathroom, willing my friend to come back.

“I’m right, aren’t I,” the man said.

“I’m Korean,” I said.

“You’re not,” he said. “Oh my god. But yeah, I see it now. God, I love Koreans. The food, the culture. Amazing.”

I flushed. These conversations embarrassed me. I was a Korean adoptee, raised in North Dakota by white parents; I had yet to understand what being Korean actually meant. External expectation, however, demanded that I not only know but love the exoticism attached to my exterior, so while I’d experienced plenty of these conversations before, they still felt shockingly fresh every time they occurred. What are you? these people implored. Oh you’re that? I love that! Let me tell you how much I know about you. Let me compliment you because you’re that. Feel welcome because I understand you! Feel impressed by my knowledge! Feel honored that I’ve studied you! Your kind is amazing!

In high school, I remember watching a Seinfeld episode titled “The Chinese Woman.” In it, Jerry, after getting off the phone with a woman named Donna Chang (who, it’s revealed, is actually a blond woman from Long Island named Donna Changstein), admits to liking Chinese women. Elaine calls him out, tells him that what he’s said is a bit racist. He responds by saying, “If I like their race, how can that be racist?”

Back then, I agreed with this sentiment. Racism was about hate, I thought, not love, so if Jerry professed a desire for this particular race, how could it be racist? If your feelings were positive, how could they be offensive? People had preferences. Some liked blonds, some brunettes, some tall, some shortâ€"so what was the difference if someone preferred Chinese people?

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Because I’d had so little exposure to Asian people of any sort, it didn’t occur to me then that “Chinese” wasn’t a physical characteristic. Once in a while, I’d see an Asian person depicted on TV, mostly in an unflattering way, and I’d be like: Nope. No way. Not me. Not what I’d want in a partner. I effectively othered this group of people, from whom I categorically distanced myself, because they were depicted, on TV anyway, as unattractive, short, dark-haired, small-eyed people who spoke broken English. Who’d want that? I thought. But then: if that’s your thingâ€"different strokes and all.

It wasn’t until college, until I befriended a number of international students, that I reconfigured how I saw race, and my own race in particular. Through many conversations, I learned that my thinking, for years, had been rooted in a refusal to accept myself as part of an Asian community. I was different, I’d thought. I wasn’t like them. My parents were white. My friends were white. I was basically white.

But of course, I wasn’t. And I wouldn’t be treated as such, no matter how hard I tried.

At the Minneapolis party, the man continued discussing his love for all things Korean. He said Anyeonghaseyo. He talked about bibimbap. He talked about Korean men being more assertive, more manly than Japanese. He said, “It’s my dream to go to North Korea, you know? Just to see it. I know it’s messed up, but it’s gotta be fascinating.” I stood quietly. I didn’t know what he was talking about. My experience with anything Korean was limited to the posters in the student union advertising study abroad programs. I had no Korean friends. I knew no Korean words. I’d had very, very little experience with Korean food. But still, this guy went on.

“I know I said Mongolian before, but I actually knew you were Korean,” he said. “I have this intuition.”

The man had yet to ask me anything real about myself. The “Korean” identifier gave him license to know me. I was, to him, a set of preconceived ideas. Later, of course, I’d understand that this stripping of humanity embodied what it meant to be a fetishist.

Before the party, I’d naively thought that people simply fell in love with people, that while physical preferences (which, in my mind at the time, included race) initially drew people to each other, love itself was as depicted in the media: that is, some cosmic, nebulous force that resulted in long stretches of mania, elation, obsession, and longing. The structural mechanisms dictating the circumstances for these pairings wasn’t something I thought too hard about. Why would I? I mean: what a downer! Love was love was love: no use pondering the muddy specifics. As time went on, however, and the dynamics of these parties crystallized, as I started befriending some of the Asians and white men alike, I realized that much more than preference shaped these interactions. A power dynamic was in play: the larger percentage of Asians longed for courtship from the small number of white men, no matter what they looked like, no matter their professional stations in life, no matter their social graces or (more often) lack thereof. As a collective, they accepted the standard, media-driven depictions of romance, which were populated almost exclusively by white couples. Since they weren’t white, since there was no way they could fully enter that world of amorous possibility, they sacrificed the mysteries and excitements of love simply to be partnered to a white person, some of whom they didn’t even like. They were often oblivious, or in denial, or so hungry for acceptance that they ignored their romantic obsessions with whiteness, chalking it up to preference.

The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves

Time after time I’d see an Asian man pine after a white man who’d ignore him, or publicly disrespect him, or mock him, or dump him unceremoniously for another Asian man, their bodies seemingly interchangeable. The Asian guy would inevitably fall apart while the white guy moved on to his next body of color.

Given these unsettling observations, I concluded that love was love was love, yes, but who you loved, often times, was determined by white supremacy. Those who professed undying allegiance to your exotic, faraway culture, no matter how or where you were raised, often demanded that you adhere to their faulty and reductive notions of your race, or else be discarded, your nonconformity assaulting their idea of foreign authenticity. Fetishism was often mistaken for love on the part of the fetishized, then, because of a desperate hunger for acceptance, and over the years, as indoctrination into power structures strengthened, this hunger developed into what we benignly called “attraction.”

Attraction is mysterious, but perhaps not as impenetrable as we think, and its examination can make us quite uncomfortable. Take me, for example. As an adoptee raised by white people in a very white state, I thought it pretty normal that my attractions would lie in whiteness. If that’s what’s around, and that’s what you knew, that’s most likely what you were going to be drawn to. I didn’t, however, realize thenâ€"before college, before I knew many Asiansâ€"that this also translated into wanting to be white, and often even thinking of myself as white (the main reason I constantly separated myself from unflattering Asian depictions on television), so when I envisioned myself in coupledom, I envisioned a monoracial set, and even through college, as my own self-acceptance emerged, I still thought it entirely normal for me to only date white men. It wasn’t until significantly later that I found this behavior somewhat aberrant, that by ascribing this friends-only status to all other Asian men, I was not only furthering the stereotype of the undesirable Asian man, but I was also bowing down to a construct I’d become pretty vocal against.

Love was love was love, yes, but who you loved, often times, was determined by white supremacy.

When I realized this, I felt extraordinarily helpless. I thought: What could I possibly do to change this? Was it even possible to reverse so many years of battering indoctrination? How could I strip away the structural, mechanized, pre-packaged definitions of beauty and value and allow actual beauty and value to flourish?

In 2009, I moved to Korea. I went there to research the particulars of my adoption and to reunite with my birth family. These were the main reasons, the propulsive reasons, but underlying these reasons was also a need to separate myself from such pervasive whiteness: to be an Asian among Asians, to desire both my own and others’ Asian-ness. I would only date other Koreans, I told myself. I wouldn’t even look in the direction of a white man.

And, oddly, it worked. The more I was with Korean men, the more I wanted Korean men, and the more I wanted them, the more I wanted to be them. Of course, the transformation wasn’t to happenâ€"I was too fundamentally Americanâ€"but wanting to be Korean, and failing, was an entirely different experience than wanting to be white and failing. No Korean ever came up to me and said, “Let me guess…” No Korean ever inquired about my hamburger intake or asked if I’d met Brad Pitt. Failing at being Korean, while very frustrating at times, never felt like a gross personal shortcoming. Instead, it felt like something I could gently work towards, and something, if I tried, that would result in a rounder and more charitable vision of myself.

Back at the Minneapolis party, it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t interested in this fifty-year-old man. His supposed flattery of my culture, then, turned quickly to words of spite. “Not much of a talker huh?” followed by “Maybe you’re just looking for a sugar-daddy. Figures,” and finally, “You know you’re not cute enough to be so stand-offish.” I’d hardly said anything the entire time, had just listened to him assess, examine, then berate me, and if I hadn’t been so young, if I’d had time to really understand what was happening, I might’ve been more angry than uncomfortable: this man, in a few minutes’ time, had effectively reduced me to a set of cultural stereotypes, and then, when I hadn’t responded positively, had further reduced me to a set of offensively simple characteristics.

But I was young, and I had yet to learn how to navigate this world, so instead of lashing back, I found my friend and urged him to leave.

“You’re not having fun?” he said.

“Just tired,” I said.

He looked at me for a while, then said, “You know, this could be fun for you.”

And I thought about that, how this could be fun, how right then it seemed anything but fun, but how it could be, if I tried, if I gave it a chance, because maybe this was my cohort, maybe these parties were what my adult life would move towards, maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough. I mean, what did I know? I was just beginning this grown-up life.

“There’ll be other parties,” I said.

He shrugged. We left.

On the car ride home, he told me that everyone had been watching me. The guy who’d approached me was apparently quite the hot commodity. He was recently single, having just broken things off with his young Singaporean boyfriend, and everyone, it seemed, was dying to have a go at him.

“So I was the lucky one,” I said.

“That’s what people thought. I mean, he’s not ugly.”

I didn’t say anything more.

The next time I saw the man at a gathering, he was talking to another guy, a young Malaysian guy, and he didn’t even acknowledge me.

I was fine with that.

James Han Mattson
James Han Mattson was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in North Dakota; he is the award-winning author of two novels, Reprieve and The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves, and is currently the fiction editor of Hyphen magazine.

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