Why do many Asian women who write about Asian identity end up marrying or dating white men?

Why do many Asian women who write about Asian identity end up marrying or dating white men? - Quora

Details: "Some examples:

Shauna Singh Baldwin (What the Body Remembers)
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard (When the Rainbow Goddess Wept)
Lan Cao (Monkey Bridge)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Dictee)
Susan Choi (The Foreign Student)
Amy Chua (Battle Hmn of the Tiger Mother)
Shing Yin Khor (What Would Yellow Ranger Do?: A Cartoonish Tale)
Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior)
Jean Kwok (Girl in Translation)
Mary Anne Mohanraj (Bodies in Motion)
Nami Mun (Miles from Nowhere)
Fae Myenne Ng (Bone - her ex-husband was Mark Coovelis)
Ruth Ozeki (My Year of Meats)
Linda Sue Park (Seesaw Girl)
Aimee Phan (We Should Never Meet)
Wena Poon (Lions in Winter)
Amy Tan (Joy Luck Club)
Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Blu's Hanging)
Jhumpa Lahiri(The Namesake)

One would imagine that given how important Asian identity/heritage/culture is to them, they would be reinforcing it in their personal lives."


"Asian Americans are much more American than Asian, and American identity is, in essence, white. It means that Asian Americans grow up with white standards of attractiveness and white stereotypes of people that look like them. It is extraordinarily difficult to break free from the influences of your own background, even if you fight those influences every day, and for something as instinctive as choosing a partner, I think this is even more true."


"Politically-correct answer: People don't marry their spouses to make a political statement. People love who they love, and race doesn't matter.
Unpleasant-but-cuts-closer-to-home answer: Because people are hypocrites."


"My heavy suspicion is these people are externalizing some inner conflict within themselves in their work. Usually, the more vocal, fixed, and angry an opinion the larger the wound. In the same way, Asian men who rail against Asian women dating White men, are really dealing with their own pain. So deep inside is some ambivalence."


"studying Asian identity is what enabled these women to consider marrying someone non-Asian. Because when you understand your heritage and identity, it becomes internalized -- part of you. So you don't need "more of the same" to reinforce those cultural touchstones."


"I think it's because of the tendency of Asian-Americans who write about Asian identity to have spent much of their formative years in areas without many other Asian people, which makes them more cognizant of their identities as "different" to make them want to write about them in the first place."


"Chinese people living in China don't feel very Asian, because everybody around them is Asian. People in Norway don't feel white privilege because almost everybody is white. The women who write about Asian identity are qualified to write about the topic because of their experiences as Asians in a predominantly non-Asian environment."


"The number of White guys making their way to parts of Asia for Asian brides or just Asian sex Is such that when I was once in Germany and going on to Thailand I was asked a lot of questions that made it clear that as an older White male traveling alone to Asia I was presumed to be going for more than just business. (They handed me a brochure on safe sex too.)"


"Some of the women on that list are somewhat feminist and may be reacting to the paternalistic culture they have left behind. They are already outside of the culture looking back in. And while their books may celebrate their mothers or grandmothers, many of those ancestors may have suffered under the hands of men. As a result I think they are both drawn to and torn from their culture. They are outsiders to it in a way and are loving and critical at the same time."


"how many [Asian] guys want to marry an Asian feminist author? Can they deal with all that?"


"no matter how many Chinese vocab words I memorized, or how much I strove to perfect my Asian sense of fashion, I never found an Asian or Asian-American guy with a sense of humor that fit mine, whose personality also challenged me and added spice and warmth to my life.
Whatever the reason, I'm going to dare to speak for my "genre" of people and venture to say that Asian-American women often come to have dynamic personalities that plain out outspunk those of Asian-American guys, and we naturally go looking for that spark elsewhere"


"Both living with it and writing about it all the time would get boring and dilute your energy for the subject. One and not the other is a stimulating contrast."