When race and romance collide

Asian male-white female couples are hard to find. They’re hard to find on-screen and they’re hard to find in real life.

Only 3.9 percent of marriages and common-law unions are mixed-race. According to the 2006 Canadian Census, in almost every ethnic group within the umbrella term “Asian”—Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian, Japanese, Filipino, with South Asians/Indians as the only exception—females are more likely to marry someone outside their race.

The decision to frame relationships using “race” can be problematic. Asking people to think of their relationships as “interracial” places them into a certain category. It generalizes and simplifies the relationship—relationship dynamics are not as simple as interracial and same-race.

My interviewees often bring up the fact that they love their partners regardless of what race they are. Yet we cannot completely ignore the reality that Asian males are much less likely to marry outside their race than Asian females.

You might suggest that perhaps Asian men don’t want to date outside their race, but research on online dating profiles have proved otherwise.

Researchers Belinda Robnett and Cynthia Feliciano from the University of California analyzed 6070 heterosexual internet dating profiles.

They found that despite having higher education and income levels than the average American, Asian men were most likely to be excluded from online daters’ racial preferences. Asian men were more open to dating other racial groups than those racial groups were to dating them.

Academic research has looked at how Asian males face discrimination and often use strategies to “fit in”, such as identifying as white, compensating for negative stereotypes, and even rejecting the existence of stereotypes.

Some researchers focused on Asian men’s relationships with white women as an indication of power and status.

Kumiko Nemoto at Western Kentucky University argued that Asian American men seek out white women’s validation to climb the up the masculine social ladder. One Asian male interviewee said he is proud to be dating his white girlfriend, and knows that it makes him “different”.

Meanwhile Hollywood movies and popular television shows give little screen time to interracial couples, much less those involving an Asian male. Many of my interviewees said they see little-to-no representation of Asian male characters and couples like themselves in the media. But once in a while, a positive Asian-American male role model such as NBA player Jeremy Lin comes along and knocks the socks off North America and the world.

Mainstream media outlets in journalism have paid little attention to the issue, and even when it does, tends never to speak directly to Asian men about their lived experiences. (See here and here.)

So it seems Asian Americans and Asian Canadians took to alternative modes of media, media that are accessible to them.

The experience of Asian men is explored much more frequently on online media, on mediums such as blogs and YouTube videos. “Yellow Fever”, a video produced by Wong Fu productions in 2006, went absolutely viral. And this was long before YouTube even existed. In a humorous and light-hearted way, the video follows Phil’s journey to find out exactly why so few Asian men date white women. This is a prime example of why this issue is such a hot topic.

I decided it was time to ask Asian men what they were really thinking and experiencing, so I sought out Asian men in interracial relationships.

Despite the lack of media representation and existing stereotypes, the Asian male-white female couples I interviewed found a way to overcome these hurdles. Their stories are featured in my multimedia project, in the form of an audio slideshow.