Rant of the Exiles

I disagreed with my previous post even as I was writing it. It was something of a thought experiment. I was reading Weike Wang’s short story and thinking “Wow, her writing is amazing and she’s Chinese American. How come most Chinese American guys I know don’t communicate like this? Oh and it’s about dating a white guy and it’s about power dynamics. And oh, she’s married to a white guy in real life. Let’s write a provocative post about the intersection of all these ideas”. Oops.  I’m now aware of the numerous problems with my opinion piece starting with the misleading, clickbait title. I don’t actually think Asian American (AA) women have more “courage”, nor is the post really about courage. I couldn’t come up with a word that captures the specific aspect of EQ that involves verbal emotional expression, but Brene Brown’s concept of vulnerability came to mind and that’s how courage came about. I made unsubstantiated negative generalizations about AA women, AA men, and whi...

Update: What I learned after writing this.  What does the outsized willingness of Asian American women to date interracially reveal about courage vis-a-vis their male counterparts? It’s well-documented that Asian American women date and marry outside their race far more often than their male counterparts. Most estimate around a 2:1 ratio but I’ve read up to 4:1.   Weike Wang’s New Yorker short story perfectly captures the power asymmetry in Asian female-white male dating relationships with this memorable line: "So it was settled. The big question of why he was dating her was out of the way. Her Chineseness was not a factor. They were merely one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.” ONE BILLION Asian girl - white guy couples. That’s certainly what it feels like in the San Francisco bay area and other urban centers like New York City, where her story is set. It’s a trend I observed in my high school over two de...