Can this thread get pinned
I’m Filipino, but every boy I’ve bedded has been white. And with few exceptions, my lovers have been white in the whitest sense of the word: conspicuously light-haired and light-eyed. Some of them were so white they were almost translucent.
Unfortunately, my lust for the blond male specimen of the Caucasian race isn’t quite as purely motivated as a drawn-out Yeatsian sigh over a glass of wine.
Of course, I’m not the only one with a white-guy thing. Asian-American women are out-marrying at a growing rate — almost 40 percent of us will marry men who don’t come close to looking like our fathers and brothers.
It wasn’t the robust, golden-haired athletes of football fame and high school glory that I wanted to meet either. My particular fetish was for the ruddy-cheeked preppie: skinny arms, chicken legs and an awkward slope of hunched shoulders upon a thin, skeletal frame. Pretty-boy scholars with wire-rimmed glasses and sparse pubic hair. Pseudo-British, aristocratic cheeseheads emblematic of Ralph Lauren advertising.
“If I ever have a blond grandchild,” my father would declare at the dinner table, “with blue eyes. My god! I will go home to the Philippines to show them all what a de la Cruz can look like! Can you imagine?” My father was exaggerating slightly, but in any event, the message was clear: marry well, and marry white. I didn’t need much persuading.
Yet what truly horrified me about my sexual prejudice was how incredibly banal and predictable my secret crushes turned out to be. It seemed all the Asian women on campus were pre-programmed to like the same exact specimens that I did: inoffensive white men who exhibited a nauseating blandness of feature, dress and character. We didn’t want Mel Gibson. We wanted Melvin Milquetoast.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, I didn’t hate Asian men, but in truth, I didn’t particularly want to date them either. In my defense, the two Asian men I did find attractive — one a Filipino hottie on the swim team, the other, a Japanese fencer — both had blond shiksa girlfriends.
“I don’t know why you’re so guilt-ridden,” Madelyn, my college roommate, said to me once when I was angsting predictably. “I’m looking forward to my Amerasian children even if I don’t have a boyfriend right now. I mean, I know my husband will be white. Anyway, I think mixed kids look so cute.” She happily described how all her sisters married blond men with MBA’s.
