Racing Romance: Love, Power, and Desire among Asian American/White Couples

Chapter 1: Interracial Relationships: Discourses and Images

Relationships between asian american women and white men have historically been shaped and organized around three ideological constructs, which have also played a critical role in America’s maintenance of its national identity: (1) colonial/postcolonial U.S. imperialism; (2) discourse about model minorities and multiculturalism; (3) global and locally maintained desires for whiteness. The next three sections discuss how these three ideological structures have shaped the discourses and experiences of Asian American women’s relationships with white men. I focus especially on gender in these ideological structures and gendered effects on the relationships. From early in the history of the United States, Asian American–white interracial relationships were shaped by American imperialism in Asia, national security issues, immigration regulations, and domestic racial politics. The United States’ involvement in three wars—World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War—created a large influx of military brides from these countries. Existing studies indicate that many of these relationships reflect colonial/postcolonial gender dynamics, wherein a woman’s legal status and life is entangled with her subordination to the American patriarchal order.1 In the post-Vietnam period, the image of Asian women as docile and sexually available became pervasive as a result of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam, the development of the sex industry there, and the mail-order bride industry in Southeast Asia. With the rise of the Asian economy, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, multiculturalism and the idea of the model minority have reshaped and transformed the dominant image of Asian American women from that of the docile wife to that of the economically mobile woman. The concept of the model minority puts an interesting twist on the issue of gender. Feminism among Chapter 1 Interracial Relationships Discourses and Images 19 20 racing romance white women, which has generated cultural anxiety among American men, has interested these men in Asian American women, who are marked not only as possessing economic mobility, but also as possessing traditional femininity.2 In addition to these two historical periods that have helped to mark Asian American women as desirable objects, the notion of whiteness has generated the popular narratives of Asian–white intimacy on the global marketplace. Racialized desires among Asian Americans in the United States have similar dynamics to the colonial/postcolonial desires that occur globally, but in this chapter I argue primarily the notion of racialized desire among Asian Americans, and I discuss how racialized desires reproduce the process of disempowerment and inner struggle for, specifically, Asian Americans. As the Asian American experience becomes increasingly diverse and transnational, we find that examining the notion of desire in the context of colonialism/postcolonialism and U.S. racialization enhances our understanding of the complex histories and backgrounds behind these Asian American experiences. In the final section, I shift my focus to the issue of Asian American masculinity, often marginalized and stereotyped negatively in the United States. These popular images have affected Asian American men’s relationships with white women. I draw out the historical and cultural contexts that have shaped current images of Asian American manhood; finally I suggest looking at relationships between Asian American men and white women from the larger perspective of American masculinity. Brides from Asia Although the image of Asian military brides became widely popular after World War II, Asian American–white interracial relationships were already being influenced by American immigration policy (like America’s colonization of the Philippines and the Chinese Exclusion Act) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1800s, Chinese female immigrants were suspected by the U.S. government of being a demoralizing threat to whites. In the late nineteenth century, due to concerns generated by the growing Asian population and the resulting fear of miscegenation (seen as the “Yellow Peril”), various federal legislatures passed exclusion laws and antimiscegenation laws.3 Heightened public anxiety over immoral and contaminated Chinese “prostitutes” led to passage of the Page Law in 1875, which restricted Chinese and Japanese female immigration, as well as to passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of all Chinese laborers.4 Two distinctive images of Asian American women, as military brides and as prostitutes, derived from the long history of American military pres- Interracial Relationships 21 ence in Asian countries, where Americans established a stereotype of Asian American–white interracial relationships. As clear from reception of the...