Actress Diane Farr writes amazing book on interracial romance, Kissing Outside the Lines [tampabay.com]What’s so funny is in this exact moment of time, Asians are having like a moment in the sun, between the Tiger Mom and the cover of New York Magazine, and they’re being portrayed as either Nazi-like parents who have no sense of humor or meek, short, sheltered cattle. It seems everything about being biracial in America is about black and white. Sometimes I even feel funny to say I’m in a biracial marriage because people are like, ‘Oh, he’s Asian?’ The subtext is, ‘Who cares?’ You didn’t marry a black person. No one’s paying any attention to you. So for the first moment that we’re paying attention to Asians, we’re putting them down.
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I think so much of the time when parents are saying, no, I don’t want you to marry outside of your race, they’re worried about either the death of their own culture or what’s gonna happen to their kid because it’s out of their realm of knowledge. And if we can keep it in that idea that it’s from fear, it’s not from hate … yes, of course, it’s ignorance, but that people are acting from love or fear, it’s just one or the other.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Diane Farr, who wrote a nice column for the New York Times regarding interracial dating (involving stories about her Korean American husband) gave a good interview about her new book, Kissing Outside the Lines. A quick sample:
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My favorite part was this one:
ReplyDelete"It finally occurred to me that I had been ignoring the elephantine irony of this happy scene: I was born in Korea to Korean parents, meaning the only history I share with Ichiro is that on several occasions over the past thousand years, his people have brutally occupied my home country. Rooting for a Japanese baseball player because he fit in the same constructed minority category was like if an Irish ex-pat began rooting for Manchester United because the good people of China couldn't distinguish between his accent and Wayne Rooney's. And in most ways, it was a lot worse than that."
awesome article, though:
it's interesting how the author found himself engaging with his minority on the terms of those who had conceptualized his minority (as fellow asian-americans), rather than on his own terms.
I'd be interested to learn more about these flows of self-identification... I know that in Korea, expats also internalize some parts of the Korean conceptualization of them -- I saw a youtube video where some kid in his ninth month in Korea trotted out every stereotype about English teachers you can find in Korean discourses about it, and so many of us call ourselves "waygooks," and imagine we have affinity wiht people whom, back in our home countries, we'd say we had nothing in common.
Diane Farr on Adam Carolla Show @ 39 min : http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/theadamcarollashow/2011.06.13ACS.mp3
ReplyDeleteWarning: it's very very crude humor.
link
ReplyDeleteNow this is the kind of discourse I like to see... gives me hope. A lot of it.
ReplyDeleteHer story really got my interest because it's a Caucasian Woman marrying a Asian/Korean Man. You don't see that often.
ReplyDelete