Everything about Wouldn’t You Want to Marry A White Man?
“But Sally, wouldn’t you intend to marry a white man?”
We froze. It actually was a Saturday afternoon, and my friend and I also were passing a case of chips back and forth, talking about boys. Correction: she spoken of men, and that I listened. Whenever she informed me that a white guy from our English class seemed thinking about me personally, we responded that I happened to ben’t into matchmaking white people. The thing I actually required got that I happened to ben’t into people. But at the period of fourteen, I found myself unsure of myself and not able to fully grasp the variety of identities that crisscrossed my staying. Which was when she fallen the bomb: “But Sally, wouldn’t you need to get married a white man?”
We muttered something about are uninterested in wedding, additionally the time passed
Their concern, however, haunts us to this day. While my fourteen-year-old self had been vaguely offended but unable to pinpoint the offense, I can today determine just what harmed me personally then and consistently hurt me as an Asian girl for the U.S. My white buddy, possibly instinctively, produced two presumptions about me: very first, that Im heterosexual, and second, that we belong with a white people.
My friend’s assumptions appear to have stemmed from preferred stereotype that Asian women are passive appreciation interests of white heterosexual guys (Lee 117). Having grown-up in an all-white area, my friend got only observed Asians as small figures in television and movie before fulfilling myself. This indicates most likely, then, that she internalized these media imagery, which regularly perpetuate passive stereotypes of Asian women by representing you as some variation with the “Lotus bloom infant” trope: the Oriental figure that is hyper-feminine, fragile, and submissive to boys (Tajima 309).