Ambassador from the Planet Whiteboy

The debate about Sexual Racism has mainly focused on exclusive ethnic preferences, sexual rejection, and what I have called “market forces” – differential power relations created by the shortage of white men who’ll date/fuck asian men.  However, there has only been a couple of limited forays into the analysis of what happens after an asian guy hooks up with a white boy – how cultural difference continues to structure their negotiations towards achieving equality in their own relationship. 

Chong-Suk Han (2008) used a focus group of Asian-American men who work in the HIV education sector in America to argue that market forces leave asian men vulnerable to fulfilling the demands of white male sexual partners, resulting in what he calls “catastrophic” HIV infection risk.  I find that analysis deeply problematic, not least because it reduces asian men to victims, underestimating their potential for resistance and the adaptive strategies they put into action to mitigate the impact of racism upon their lives, but also because I don’t think we should have to prove there’s an HIV infection risk before sexual racism can be seen as a legitimate gay men’s health issue.  Maurice Kwong-Lai Poon and Peter Trung-Thu Ho (2008) have written a much more sensitive analysis, taking Foucaultian resistance and adaptive strategies better into account.  However, their consideration of the post-hookup challenges of a cross-cultural relationship is limited to reproducing their respondents’ scathing criticism of rice queen fuck-and-dump “collector” behaviour.

I think that’s an important and problematic gap in (an admittedly-sparse) literature.  It’s a gap mirrored in the conversations I’ve had with hundreds of asian men about this topic in chat sessions and coffee meetups since 2002.  Their focus has almost always been on their experiences of sexual rejection, not on what happens after they meet someone (white or asian) and start trying to build a relationship together.  And that’s understandable, because it’s the sexual rejection that hurts, but it’s also shortsighted, because it assumes once I finally meet someone everything will be perfect.  In fact, all of the things that made it tricky finding someone continue to have an influence after you meet him and couple up. 

Having now been in two serious, long-ish cross-cultural relationships myself, I’m starting to wonder if the cultural differences aren’t a hell of a lot harder to negotiate than the power relations produced by sexual racism.  I’ve been in a relationship with a Malaysian Chinese guy for a little over two years.  It’s an open relationship, something we mutually agreed (at his suggestion) from the outset, and he plays a lot more than I do.  He’s an attractive and confident guy who’s happy to play with older men if they’re into what he’s into, and on balance he finds it significantly easier to find sexual partners than I do.  That’s a reversal of the dynamic normally produced by sexual racism, where the asian partner sometimes has to worry about his partner dumping him for another (’younger, cuter, fresher’) asian guy.

The challenges in our relationship come from a mix of our cultural differences and personal histories.  I’m writing this only a short time after we’ve had an argument, so this should be taken more as an unthought-out rant than a considered overview.  The problem is that we still view everything through the lens of cultural difference.  I’m comfortable with a fairly high degree of mess and disorder in my home environment, whereas the same amount of mess makes him feel either extremely stressed (at first) or helpless (after we had argued about it endlessly).  Instead of talking about how we can strike a balance that both of us can live with, I feel like he’s constantly referring the issue back to my race, either trying to teach the stupid whiteboy how to keep house, or taking the clutter on the couch as proof that whiteys are all messy and incompetent.  I can scrub the bathroom clean or do a massive load of dishes but he’ll never feel satisfied because it should never have gone that far and look at the rest of the house. 

Another major area in which we barely meet amidst the differences is food: I didn’t grow up with parents holding a gun to my head to make me eat and like difficult foods, and he takes that cultural difference as an example of me being personally difficult (and for a whitey I’m actually pretty adventurous about food).  Ugh… just recounting them here, these battles leave me feeling bored and worn out.  In the end I feel more like an ambassador from Planet Whiteboy rather than myself, the Daniel, complete in my individuality.

Upon his graduation in December he’s due to return to Malaysia, to start the seven year bond that came with his scholarship from a large Malaysian corporation.  If we are to stay together, we have some seriously massive challenges to overcome.  We both have family histories marked by the experience of separation, loss and abandonment, and we have both battled depression.  I am downright terrible at managing money and I’m in the process of carefully rebuilding a career in HIV prevention after a bruising battle with the AIDS Council in my home state while and after I worked there.  He’s grappling with his rage at the slow pace of progressive change in Malaysian society and his disillusionment that Melbourne turned out not to be the utopia he was expecting.  We need trust and the energy to deal openly with those challenges, but it’s running out over routine domestic stuff instead.

---