Essay for ‘They’re All So Beautiful’, an online forum for Debbie Lum’s documentary ‘Seeking Asian Female

This was originally published in 2013, but the website has since been left to expire and fade away into the digital nothingness… I was recently asked about my Mongolian love story by a filmmaker coming to Mongolia to document stories about love. I figured it would be handy to have a link to share again.

I wasn’t particularly good at dating. I don’t think I got enough practical training with pretend boyfriends in grade school. I can’t even remember my first date. I took on my first domestic partnership at 20. I moved from Memphis to Minneapolis, and spent two years playing house. Within a year I was shacked up with a new guy, and we played house for about seven years. I thought it was the closest I’d ever get to marriage. We moved cross-country together, got a second dog together, had a joint auto insurance policy, bought a house together, and fought a lot. It seemed like marriage enough to not have to make it official, and when it was over, I was convinced I’d never enter into another long term social contract ever again.

After we split up, I went on a bit of a dating rampage. I imagined I had fallen in love once or twice, had a few one-night stands and took on a few “boyfriends”, all the while taking stock of what worked and what didn’t. It was systematic and predatory. About 90 percent of the time, the men were the prey. I offered up disclaimers about intimacy and had to apologize for being “emotionally unavailable” and “cold” when things didn’t work out.

I had no idea what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want more of the same.

Different has always been my normal. I’m the child of an interracial relationship that was complicated. My mother met my biological father in Korea in 1975. I was born out of wedlock (strike 1). My father was a 2nd generation Portuguese-American living in Korea, doing contracted work for the US military there (strike 2). My mother was from an affluent, well-connected family (strike 3) and not prone to blindly following the rules. Back then, mixed-race kids living in Korea were all thought to be (and many were) the children of wanton women canoodling with US soldiers on the peninsula, to get better access to Pringles and Spam from the commissary, and maybe even end up with an American husband. Regardless of my mother’s circumstances and social standing, living in Korea, I was still going to be a perpetual outsider, and judged by small-minded people. It’s only a little different in Korea now, but back then, growing up half-Korean in Seoul would have been rough-going.

My mom wasn’t keen on my growing up in an atmosphere of prejudice, and when she met my adoptive father, she knew she had found the best person on the planet to raise me as his daughter. After they were married, I moved to the US, where I lived up until last year.

It began in 2010, which I dubbed “The Year of Men”. In my search for something different, I promised myself that 2010 was going to be the year I bagged an Asian.

I’m the Asian girl that never had a problem being attracted to Asian guys, but had a problem with them being attracted to me. I had all kinds of crushes on scrawny, bowl-cut, nerdy Asian boys, as well as the strapping and popular ones. I don’t know what good it would do now to speculate why they weren’t asking me out – in fact I’m not sure that’s ever a good thing for women to waste their time on. We get bombarded daily with messages that tell us we aren’t skinny/pretty/young/demure/rich/cultured enough to be considered desirable. Society has that covered – no need to do any heavy lifting of our own.

But yeah, Asian guys didn’t dig me, so I dated everyone else instead. I didn’t have a preference for white guys, but I came across plenty that had a “preference” for Asian women. Some were disappointed with me being “only” half-Asian. I can safely say that I never entered into serious relationships with anyone with Yellow Fever, but I did have less-than-serious relations with some of the afflicted.

In 2010 I went to Mongolia for my first solo vacation ever. I fell in love with the country after just a couple of days in its less than loveable capital, Ulaanbaatar. The people on the street looked more like me than any other place I’d ever been to, and I don’t even look that Mongolian. I saw a place that was a juxtaposition of East and West, was in a constant state of flux – despite being rooted in ancient cultural traditions, and things just made sense to me. It was exhilarating. The men were also crazy hot. I was crushing on every stranger on the street, from high school boys to leathery old men who looked like they had given up their lives on the steppes and reluctantly migrated to the city. My best friend joined me for the last half of the trip. After a two hour drive out of the capital with an incredibly handsome Mongolian driver who just smiled when I giggled at how hot he was the two of us went on a 7-day trek with a translator and a nomadic herdsman who spoke no English.

The nomad ended up being my first Asian.

Two years later, the incredibly handsome driver became my husband.
I moved to Mongolia early last year, after a second trip here in 2011. My now-husband was my driver again, and he talked instead of just smiling when I giggled. We had the longest long-distance relationship I had ever had, and had to have a third party present to translate for us. We’ve been married for a year, and now have a daughter. I have a massive family of in-laws that I adore, and while I miss my friends and family terribly, my life here is fulfilling in ways I never imagined.

I wanted something different, and I found it.

Maybe I should have been diligently pursuing Asian men all along, but I think the missing ingredient was the Mongolian man. I knew that in the field I had been playing, I was dating men I could emotionally dominate. I kept telling my gal pals, I needed a partner in crime. I needed a man’s man who wasn’t a bro. I needed to steer clear of depressed guys who looked up to me for the wrong reasons. It seemed hopeless until I stumbled upon Mongolia.

Mongolian men have their own brand of machismo that I adore in a really primal way. It stems from Chinggis Khaan (better, but inaccurately known as Genghis Khan) and his legacy of fearlessness, conquest, and sovereignty. The modern Mongolian man is a lot brawnier than the Asian-American boys I grew up with, and he can feel threatened by outsiders, but doesn’t lose sight of his pathological dedication to representing the mythology of his roots. Perhaps 70 years of Soviet governance and its related cultural isolation (on top of geographic isolation) kept them sheltered from the negative stereotypes of the Long Duck Dong Asian male. Maybe it’s just unbeatable Chinggis spirit. Either way, I’m glad they were spared for a little while.

Of course, there’s a dark side to Mongolian machismo. Domestic violence is generations away from being dealt with in a way that the Western world would find suitable. Women here commiserate about the tendencies of their brawny, brazen men to get silver back gorilla about gender roles. Despite generations of Mongolian women leading households, workplaces, and academia, there are still far too few women in government, and too many glass ceilings.

But back to me… Realistically, the actual missing ingredient I spent my single life searching for was the specific Mongolian man that I met and fell in love with. Reaching a point in my life where my priorities finally fell in line with my heart also helped considerably. Race and ethnicity really had nothing to do with the final outcome, unless you factor in the role that they played in getting me here. I spent most of my life accepting that my racial identity mattered to others, and thereby letting it matter to me.

Now I’m a truly a foreigner again. My race doesn’t complicate matters, but my limited language skills and national identity do. It’s a whole new host of relationship challenges. I have to bridge cultural barriers every day. I have to justify the American way of doing things and make compromises with the Mongolian way. My husband’s friends see me as “the American wife”, not the Korean-Portuguese wife. My American-ness is exotic, not the fact that I grew up eating kimchi with every meal. Restaurants with American menus are suggested by friends and in-laws (not Korean ones) in their efforts to make a connection and make me feel more at home in their environment. Somehow the assumptions made are all more acceptable than the assumptions made back home. The efforts are sincere and practical, worlds apart from the white guy who grew up in a Midwestern suburb trying to prove he’s got his finger on the pulse of Asia just to get laid.

Or maybe they’re the same and I’m just too blissed out on life to get self-righteous about it. I’m still trying to figure it out. Get back to me in another 36 years.

Addendum:

I realized that I kind of wussed out on elaborating on the rejection I experienced in my younger years. We’re having an honest conversation here, and this is a safe place, right? I can honestly say that I truly do believe women shouldn’t dwell on why desired partners don’t desire them back, but I know it happens to a lot of us. I think when we stop wondering “why” is when we start to be better human beings, free to focus on how to be better to ourselves instead of wasting energy on how to appear better to someone else.

I know that now, but it’s been a fairly recent discovery.

There were these twin Korean boys in 6th grade. I don’t remember their names, but they were adorable. They had 80s shaggy bowl cuts, wore clothes that kind of matched, and I was obsessed with them. I so badly wanted to be their friend, and in the world of pre-pubescence, I would have been pretty excited for one (or both of them) to be my boyfriend. They never shared my vision, and in the weird way that twins live in a bubble, they mostly kept to themselves at school and rejected all of my aggressive advances for platonic friendship. This was a recurring theme in future encounters with Asian males I had the hots for.

My mom always told me to watch out for Korean men – not when I was in 6th grade, but later. She said they could be domineering and unkind. I could see it. The Korean men I knew, with the exception of my grandfather, seemed a little cold and brusque, nothing like my American dad. I wanted what most people want, a partner who would appreciate me for who I was, and shower me with affection and devotion, but not drown me in it. Growing up, I didn’t see a lot of Korean men doing that, so I figured my mom was probably right. But I also didn’t grow up around a ton of Korean men.

I know better now. I watch lots of K-Dramas and see men plastic-surgeried into perfection, emoting themselves to pieces for women equally perfect. They display the softer side of “han”, and they’re delicately delicious. Maybe more accurately, I formed my truths about Asian men by watching 90s Asian cinema. Tony Leung, Chow Yun Fat, Beat Takeshi – these were sexy men with emotional depth, who could also kick ass. Sure I had to watch out for the men my mother warned me about, but I considered that maybe they were the exception and not the rule. I just needed hands-on experience to find out.

When I was finally a single adult, I sought out Asian men. I flirted in person and online to no avail. A few would poke around a bit, mildly curious, but then they’d vanish. Maybe it was the same problems I had with non-Asian guys who were looking for an “Asian” woman, I was only half the woman they wanted. Was I too white, or was I too Asian? A lot of the men who seemed somewhat interested had also dated white women, like I had dated white men.

The most obvious deduction is that these men simply weren’t attracted to me, but for the sake of debate, let’s consider some other factors. Despite being born in Seoul, being raised by an Asian parent, and being in-the-loop with Asian-American pop culture, I’m not very demure, I don’t speak my mother tongue, and I don’t always look very Asian. I don’t think I come anywhere close to fulfilling Yellow Fever fantasies of the Asian mystique, and I don’t think that I’m the kind of girl a good Number One Son can bring home to his parents. I’m loud. I’m tattooed. I’m brusque, and it takes a while for most people to see that I’m really a softie, but it’s rarely the first impression I make. These things don’t count against me in Mongolia, but back in Los Angeles, they kept me from getting Asian dates.

I heard similar stories from 100% Asian girlfriends. They told me about their experiences with Asian and Asian-American men, and feeling inadequately “Asian” as Asian-American women. In a way, it was reassuring to hear these stories.

We sometimes project a deluge of expectation on our partners. We want them to be the kind of person we want to be with, often ignoring that they are simply… who they are. I’m guilty of being with people based on the potential I imagine them to have locked inside, instead of accepting their current state of being. When we seek out partners based on race or other ideals, and are inflexible in our notions about how racial identity should be acted out, we set ourselves up for failure. We also fail when we project these things on ourselves. We get a lifetime to explore who we are, but we spend most of that time working furiously to renovate the facade we throw up in front of the open-pit mine of our egos.

Take a break from all that. Keep your eyes and heart open to the truth of people, and if all else fails, come visit me in Mongolia. I have lots of single in-laws.