When I was young, I remember my mom telling me once that she really had only four big hopes for me. \u201cYou do these four things and I will be happy,\u201d she said. \u201cOne, practice piano. Two, go to a good college. Three, become a doctor. And four, marry a nice Taiwanese girl.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thirty years later, and I’m two for four. I reminded her of this other day: \u201cRemember that list you had for me back when? Well, I’m batting .500. In baseball, that makes me a superstar.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, in testing, 50% means you fail,\u201d she retorted. I love my mother.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the conversation came up because we’d independently emailed each other an article recently published in the New York Times \u201cStyle\u201d section, detailing the latest hot trend to hit the Times breakroom: Apparently, more and more Asian Americans are defying convention by\u2026marrying Asian Americans.<\/p>\n
You see, based on a just-released Pew Research Center report, although Asian Americans are still more likely to outmarry than any other race \u2014 a full 28% of Asians marrying in 2010 wed a non-Asian spouse \u2014 this percentage actually represents a drop from 31% in 2008.<\/p>\n
That’s interesting in and of itself. But it’s the reason given for this fall in Asian American outmarriage rates that really caught both of our eyes. According to Times reporter Rachel Swarns, the reason why younger Asians are choosing to marry other Asians is that they’re experiencing a \u201cresurgence of interest in language and ancestral traditions,\u201d and selecting partners that will help them preserve that precious heritage \u2014 particularly spouses who are first-generation immigrants, and thus closer to the original old-world source.<\/p>\n
My mom subscribes to Cultural Bucket Brigade Theory, which is to say, every generation hands a pail of culture to the one that follows, and winces as the latter clumsily lets half of it spill out. So to her, the Times article was nothing less than a vindication. \u201cYour kids barely speak any Chinese as it is,\u201d she says. \u201cI don’t know what would’ve happened to my grandchildren if you hadn’t married a Taiwanese girl.\u201d<\/p>\n
And she does have a point. My Chinese is approximately at the third grade level (assuming you’re talking about slightly slow third graders). By contrast, my older son Hudson, who’s actually in third grade for real, can speak Mandarin at the fifth grade level. Which is about where my Taiwan-born wife’s Chinese skills are. Look, mom, more water in the bucket!<\/p>\n
But I certainly didn’t marry Heather out of respect for her middle-school language abilities or her pretty much nonexistent knowledge of Chinese ancestral tradition. And in talking to friends who dated mostly non-Asian people before settling down with an Asian, none of them cited a desire to \u201cpreserve culture\u201d as a particularly important motivation either.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis may sound weird, but when I was in my 20s, I really thought I should marry a non-Asian because I wanted to have mixed race children,\u201d says Mina Lim, an editor and writer who lives in Baltimore. \u201cI thought the human race needed to evolve, and I wanted to be part of the \u2018beige-ing’ of the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lim’s first marriage, which ended in 2003 \u2014 a half-decade after it began \u2014 was to a non-Asian, and she says that during their relationship, she constantly felt self-conscious. \u201cIf there happened to be another Asian girl-white guy couple, it always seemed awkward, especially if we got seated at adjacent tables,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd one of the worst experiences I had was traveling to Asia back in the late 1990s. Everyone we met thought I was his translator. Meanwhile, he expected me to have some kind of miraculous, mystical connection with my \u2018homeland.’\u201d<\/p>\n
A few years after she and her first husband divorced, Lim met and then married an Asian American guy, and they’ve been happily together ever since. \u201cIt’s easier,\u201d she says. \u201cWith him, I feel like I can just be myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mina says that that’s the case despite the fact that she and her husband aren’t of the same ethnic background. Although her family is Filipina and his is Taiwanese, there’s enough that’s just \u201cunderstood\u201d about their respective backgrounds that, in her words, \u201cthere’s no having to explain things\u201d \u2014 important stuff, like the centrality of family and the significance of education; silly stuff, like taking your shoes off when you enter the house.<\/p>\n
These are pretty basic values that aren’t, for that matter, strictly limited to Asian Americans. And they’re hardly what my mom means when she thinks of \u201cculture\u201d; just ask my sister, who had several uncomfortable conversations with my parents about the cultural differences between various East Asian ethnicities prior to her marriage to my Korean American brother-in-law. (Note: They’ve now been married over a decade, and my parents think he’s awesome.)<\/p>\n
This, of course, brings up something that represents a real emerging trend among Asian Americans, almost entirely glossed over by the Times: Like Lim, my sister and a significant percentage of our social circles, more Asian Americans seem to be marrying Asian Americans that aren’t their particular flavor of Asian American.<\/p>\n
And yes, the statistics back up that anecdotal evidence. C.N. Le, a professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts\u2013Amherst, has done a remarkably in-depth analysis of Asian American intermarriage and outmarriage statistics and made it available on his public blog, Asian-Nation.org. His research has found that since 2006, the frequency of inter-Asian marriage has risen by more than 8% among all Asian Americans, and over 15% among Asians raised in the U.S.<\/p>\n
This trend actually points to a much better explanation for declining interracial marriage rates among Asian Americans than the Times’s \u201cback to our roots\u201d rationale: More Asians are marrying Asians because there are more of them around.<\/p>\n
\u201cGrowing up in a predominantly white neighborhood in suburban New Jersey, the only Asian girls I was exposed to were my parents’ friends’ daughters, and I never had any interest in them,\u201d says Matthew Cha, a Korean American consultant who met his wife while working in Seoul. \u201cAll my girlfriends were white because that’s what was available to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Similarly, Perry Manadee, a Thai American engineer who grew up in the Detroit area and who’s now married to a fellow Thai American, says that he also dated non-Asians \u201cnot necessarily by choice or desire, but due to the fact that the Asian American dating pool in Michigan was quite small,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Both Cha and Manadee essentially found themselves beginning to date other Asians when the option became more practical. (From personal experience, I can say that dating the daughters of your parents’ close friends is not practical.) This coincided with travel to Asia, or attending top universities \u2014 where there’s a disproportionately high concentration of Asian Americans \u2014 or moving to major cities on the East or West Coast, where Asian Americans cluster. And given that the overall Asian American population grew by approximately 46% from 2000 to 2010, the fastest of all racial and ethnic groups, this also explains much, but not all of the downtick in Asian interracial marriage: The more Asian fish there are in the Sea of Love, the more likely it is that you’ll net one \u2014 though not necessarily one from exactly the same coral reef.<\/p>\n
And given the spike in Asian interethnic marriage, that’s apparently increasingly okay. Far from obsessing over common language or tradition, most of my other interviewees mentioned the same thing Lim did: The general shared experiences and expectations they had with their Asian partners led to a comfort zone in which aspects of life other than race and ethnicity could come to the fore.<\/p>\n
For instance, Lim notes that she feels comfortable traveling with her second husband and consuming weird, awesome food without having to deal with her first husband’s visceral reactions of shock or disgust. \u201cAnd then, of course, there’s the golf,\u201d she laughs. \u201cWe both love golf.\u201d<\/p>\n
It’s not that a sense of easy common ground can’t be found with non-Asian partners \u2014 it certainly can. Nor is it guaranteed that two Asians, hailing from communities that comprise a staggering amount of diversity, will be reading from the same page. But if you look at the individuals spoken to for the Times’s article \u2014 Xin Gao and Liane Young, Ann Liu and Stephen Arboleda, Ed Lin and Lily Lin, and Chau Le and Neil Vishnav \u2014 two out of the four, half of the couples she interviews, are interethnic, a fact the Times writer totally ignores.<\/p>\n
As my mom says, \u201c50% means you fail.\u201d<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
There’s another reason people frequently mention for more Asian Americans marrying other Asian Americans, and that’s the fact that the media’s depiction of Asians has gotten decidedly better over the past ten years \u2014 particularly Asian men, who have gone from being relegated solely to the netherworld of houseboys and henchmen to \u2014 well, if not necessarily hunks, than at least humans.<\/p>\n
A key pivot point in this transformation occurred in 2006, when \u201cSurvivor\u201d had its controversial \u201crace wars\u201d season \u2014 where the show’s four initial tribes were divided into a white tribe, a black tribe, an Asian tribe and a Hispanic tribe. Those of you who followed the show know that the season’s million-dollar prize was ultimately won by Korean American lawyer and management consultant Yul Kwon \u2014 whose combination of smarts, nice-guy appeal and devastating washboard abs instantly catapulted him to People magazine’s lists of \u201cSexiest Men Alive\u201d and \u201cHottest Bachelors.\u201d While it may be excessive to say that Kwon singlehandedly reset society’s impression of Asian men \u2014 I will say between him and Jeremy Lin, it’s gotten a lot harder for the rest of us to keep up \u2014 there’s no question that his prominence changed the conversation.<\/p>\n
Kwon has been a little off the pop-culture radar recently, accepting an appointment as deputy chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau of the FCC, while crushing the hopes of women everywhere by marrying his girlfriend Sophie Tan (who’s Taiwanese American \u2014 another data point!); the two now have an 18-month-old daughter, Genevie.<\/p>\n
As of last week, however, he’s back \u2014 having accepted a role as host of a new PBS television series, \u201cAmerica Revealed,\u201d which premiered last Wednesday and will run for four episodes.<\/p>\n
Kwon jokes that, despite the potentially naughty implications of its title, the series \u201cisn’t about America’s love affair with Speedos, thongs, and hot pants.\u201d (Come on, kids: PBS.) Instead, it explores the four pillars of our nation’s economy and infrastructure: Food, energy, transportation and manufacturing.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou’re probably thinking this is a wonky show, but the visuals are absolutely breathtaking \u2014 we use aerial photography, GPS tracking, computer animation, and field interviews to reveal these systems in a way you’ve never seen before,\u201d he says. \u201cPlus, you’ll feel a whole lot better about yourself than if you spent an hour watching hot pants.<\/p>\n
During the show, you get to see Kwon show off some of his Survivor-esque skills \u2014 jumping out of a plane, rappelling down the blade of a 300-foot wind turbine, flying an ultralight aircraft over Shasta Dam, and riding in the pace car at the Daytona 500. \u201dI spent a lot of time curled up in a fetal position trying not to have a panic attack or throw up,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
What you won’t get to see is the famous Kwon washboard. \u201cBecoming a father and working in the federal bureaucracy haven’t been kind to my waistline,\u201d he says. \u201cI promise you’ll see things on this show you’ve never seen before. The one thing you won’t see are my abs \u2014 that ship has already sailed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tao Jones Index<\/p>\n
Must-click quick-hits from across Asia and Asian America<\/p>\n
Get Bent!: Oh, man, we’ve been waiting for this forever. The Legend of Korra, the sequel to the first Avatar: The Last Airbender series is finally here, and it looks fantastic enough to help us forget the crapbending catastrophe that was M. Night Shyamalan’s live-action film adaptation. Check out Speakeasy’s recap here. And meanwhile, if you want to fill in the gaps between Avatar and Korra, check out Gene Luen Yang’s spectacular graphic novel series Avatar: The Promise, the first installment of which is available now.<\/p>\n
Kick this: A few of our favorite Asian American performing females have new projects they’re touting over at Kickstarter! Actress\/poet\/producer\/director Emily Chang has been rattling the tin for her new short film \u201cMouthbreather,\u201d about socially awkward people and the socially awkward things they do. She’s already hit her goal, but hey, times are tight, why not keep the ball rolling? Meanwhile, actress Lynn Chen (of \u201cYes We’re Open\u201d) is looking for people to rally ’round a project based on a website launched by her husband Abe \u2014 \u201cThe Man’s category_ide to Love.\u201d As she explains here, the film is a romantic comedy based on the video musings of the many men who’ve contributed to Abe’s site over the past few years. They’ve got a ways to go, so pour them some juice!<\/p>\n
Mutiny No More: If you’re like me, an avid reader of Sepia Mutiny, the Internet’s most articulate, insightful and interesting community focused on issues related to South Asians in the U.S. and beyond, you’re devastated that the crew announced last month they’re closing the blog’s doors. Check out their final farewells; let’s hope these voices will stay loud, somewhere out there on the Interwebz.<\/p>\n
Tao Jones is Jeff Yang’s weekly column for Speakeasy on Asian and Asian American media, entertainment, technology and culture. Tune in next week for the next installment. Follow him on Twitter at @originalspin.<\/p>\n
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