To all the (white) boys and girls I’ve loved before
Tina Nguyen
Intro
I wrote this response mainly to Nellie Wong’s “When I Was Growing Up” and Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem” as an open letter addressed to the communities I thought I had invaded, and to all the people I’d thought I had fooled, including myself. Both of the writings mentioned a turning point motivated by frustration, fatigue, and a general feeling of being fed up. I wanted to explore this anger in free form writing, and found myself writing something halfway between a lecture and a rant.
Just to clarify;
Wanting to become a white woman, or to be desired by white men as some sort of exotic plaything,
is really cringey.
Why would I give them the satisfaction of smugly pitying me for the way that I choose to wear my makeup, bleach my hair, lighten my skin, would I ever let them think that I wanted to be white?
“Oh, poor asian girl, she can’t live up to the white and western beauty standards,''
they'd say, flooding Seoul with pretty white women,
who don’t know a thing about Asian, much less so Korean, beauty standards and what they mean,
to interview young asian girls who’d shyly admit, only with their faces blurred on camera, that they’d like to look like Scarlett Johansen.
Rub it in, why don’t you.
It seems like admitting defeat, to me.
Those hours I spend after a day out in the sun, in the bathtub, scrubbing my skin with sugar and lemon, spent peeling away the slightly tanned skin,
Why would I do that for white people?
To give them the satisfaction of watching me from the top of a pedestal they built themselves,
How much would I have to hate myself to let that happen?
My best friend from highschool changed her name three times. Lin, Linda, Julianne.
She told me she wanted to be white. She was going to get all the plastic surgery she could after her 18th birthday, since her parents were rich, and neither of them cared that much. She learned french and gave herself a French name and flew to Montreal to date a french-speaking boy. She came back with a tattoo and a cat. She confessed to me all the ways she’d wronged me, and a month later, she left for Texas to meet an American boy, who would then convert her to Christianity.
“You seem like you’re going through all the white dudes in school, what’s with that?”
I laughed and shrugged it off. I had some sort of superiority complex;
maybe,
had I been more emotionally stable, I wouldn’t have seen “asian fetishist” as my target audience, but rather, something to avoid, like the fucking plague.
I put myself in danger because I wanted to feel like I could hold something over them, like I could give them something white girls could never provide.
Meeting their families, their friends, and their exes, I realized I could never have the kind of hold on them that a white girl could.
I scrolled through his ex-girlfriends’ instagram pages,
saw sunkissed blonde hair,
translucent skin,
tropical resorts,
soccer teams,
and realized,
I was a phase.
My friends had all been light skinned beautiful, blondes and brunettes, with piercing blue or green eyes, and fluffy eyebrows. I was infatuated with their existence, their resemblance to models and actresses on the covers of magazines. I braided their hair, painted them, and when we went out, I understood and sympathized with their admirers.
Play a different game so that you don’t have to compete. I’ll play the asian market.
You can have the rest.
And that's how I put a target on my back. I would call myself a bridge, getting stepped on for the sake of facilitating a conversation, but I was never that noble- I was more like a bungee cord.
Take a deep dive into the abyss, watch it, spend a second hovering above its depths, and with your heart pounding in your ears, you’re pulled back onto the cliff. I have done nothing for the abyss, but allowed it to be intimately gawked at, while you go home to your friends, and tell them about how tight it was,
how you clutched your wallet and passport,
how you would hike through it next semester,
Maybe they’ll try it too.
“I’ve dated a Vietnamese girl.”
How long did it last? Did you meet her family, and greet them in their language?
Did you fly over? Did you bike across the two by fours slapped between gaps in the swamps?
Did she ask you about the colour of her skin, and if it had any effect on you?
Was she a phase?
How lucky for you, to have had the experience.
Wearing your colourful dating history like a Boy Scouts’ merit sash.
Sincerely,
Your asian ex