Tracy Moore is a writer in Los Angeles.
In Netflix’s holiday rom-com “Love Hard,” comedian Jimmy O. Yang plays Josh Lin, a Chinese American everyman who uses the photo of his much-hotter, mixed-race Asian friend Tag (Darren Barnet) to get dating app matches. The ploy works. He links with and falls for Natalie (Nina Dobrev), a White woman so smitten she flies cross-country to surprise him.
But — shocker — Josh isn’t the beefcake in the photos, but a regular guy. Natalie is incensed, though not about his race. Guilty about his catfishing, Josh helps Natalie woo handsome Tag instead.
Natalie also meets real Josh’s Chinese family, where his father is married to a White woman and his brother dates one. These arrangements surprised me — Asian male/White female relationships, called AMWF online, are rarely shown on-screen. That has finally begun to change, but I’m still waiting for the couples to talk about it.
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I’m in such a relationship myself — me, a White woman from rural Tennessee, and my boyfriend, a Chinese American man from Queens. We have much in common, yet we’re a statistical oddity. Pew research found White women and Asian men rarely intermarry, much less to each other. While there is increasing acceptance for interracial relationships, people are still cool to the idea of AMWF.
We don’t need data for proof. Even in Los Angeles, as my boyfriend and I go about our business, we see people look to him, then me, then back to him with puzzlement. Sometimes Asian men or women give us unmistakable side-eye. Older White men seem particularly flummoxed, their eyes darting back and forth between us, as if solving a mystery.
We often discuss (and sometimes laugh) about this, but our on-screen doppelgangers don’t. In “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” Rebecca (Rachel Bloom) is nuts for Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III), but they never discuss his Filipino American experience. Season 1 of “Love Life” featured Darby (Anna Kendrick) and Augie (Jin Ha) briefly entangled, but no racial chitchat. (Season 2 weaves organic discussions of race deftly, but regarding Black men and White women pairings.) It doesn’t come up between Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan), who married on “The Walking Dead.” (In fairness, zombies are a more immediate concern.)
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In an interview with Yeun in early 2021, Jay Caspian Kang called Glenn and Maggie a revelation, noting, “An Asian man dating a white woman on the most popular show on TV was seen as not only a marker of progress but also a permission slip for white women to maybe start dating more of us.”
Share this articleShareYeun replied that was “basically saying that I can only feel like a man if I’m with a white woman, which is just a terrible thing to think.” His response underscores the double bind Asian men experience: It’s progress to depict an Asian man and a White woman pairing up, but also insulting that this path is the only sure way to White validation.
Normalizing mixed couples is a good thing. And while I’m not expecting a treatise on racial identity every time people like us grab drinks on the screen, Hollywood is engaging in magical thinking when its characters completely dodge issues they may face. Asian men dating online receive fewer messages and matches than men from other races, but when they do match with White women, the relationships come preloaded with stereotypes. Search the phrase “AMWF relationships,” and see that the White women are presumed to be gold diggers, while the Asian men are judged to be in search of trophy wives.
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Cultural differences are as inevitable as economic or religious ones. Sometimes it’s awkward. Once, my boyfriend wondered if I was fetishizing him after I recalled a teen crush on Tony Leung in “In the Mood for Love.” I noted his enthusiasm for White actress Margot Robbie in “The Wolf of Wall Street” — was he doing the same? In the end, we discovered a common enemy: I simply hadn’t seen Asian men as love interests growing up; he’d absorbed the Westernized feminine ideal we all have.
Other times, it’s genuinely tough. As someone who grew up poor and White in the South, I once ignorantly admitted I was envious of what I believed the model minority idea was — that some groups are automatically predestined for success, something I had never experienced. But when he asked me if I would trade that for being erased or burdened with harmful expectations of behavior and presentation, I had to confront the privilege to which my class disadvantage had blinded me.
For me, fielding discomfort is nothing compared with his lifetime of discrimination. After Yeun was nominated for an Oscar, this paper reported on the challenges Asian men face in love even as they advance on-screen. “One of the worst things I hear is, ‘You’re good-looking for an Asian,’” a Vietnamese American man told The Post. “I try not to take all the bad compliments as an insult, because sometimes people are still learning.”
I’m still learning — especially how to understand my role in effecting real change. The only way to do that is by talking. We just wish TV and films, whose conversations have far greater reach than ours, would join us.
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