I received my first lesson in desirability politics via an unexpected text. A white boy from my high school, who wouldn’t make eye contact in the hallways but somehow found my number, sent me a message one night: “Is it true what they say about Asian pussies?” he wrote, followed by a string of winking emojis.
I was 14. I didn’t understand, so I Googled it. And then I understood too much.
That night, something lodged itself deep in my subconscious. At the time, I didn’t have the language for it, but I felt the weight. To be seen was to be exoticized. To be desired was to be othered. My body wasn’t just mine; it carried assumptions, stereotypes and histories I hadn’t agreed to. It was my first realization that attraction isn’t just neutral — it’s racialized.
Growing up as an East Asian girl in a predominantly white town felt like inheriting an unspoken rulebook on desirability. First, it was a slow accumulation of images, cues and social reinforcement. In school, girls debated who was the hottest: Zac Efron, Ian Somerhalder or Chace Crawford. Seventeen Magazine’s “Hot Guys of the Summer” lists were exclusively white. I saw how the most popular girls gained social currency when the most popular boys flirted with them.
I wanted that. Not necessarily them, but what they represented: acceptance, validation, proof that I could belong. I convinced myself of multiple lies: that I simply got along better with white boys, that I just happened to be more attracted to them, that holding hands with someone white would make my “Otherness” disappear.
And so, my dating life became a rotation of white men who, in retrospect, viewed me as something between a conquest and a curiosity. There was the white finance executive who proudly told me I was his “first Asian.” The Polish fitness guru who needed to call me his “Chinese bitch” to finish. The doughy-faced man at the club who whispered in my ear, “I wish you were off-the-boat Asian, so you wouldn’t know how to speak English.” Then, there was my white ex, who cheated on me with another East Asian girl ― then updated his bio to “Stop Asian Hate.”
If you’ve looked into interracial dating patterns, you already know the statistics: Asian American women prefer dating white men over men of any other race, including their own. But what motivates these preferences is more tragic than romantic. Studies show AAPI women often seek white partners for economic security, assimilation and social mobility — even when those partners fetishize them. Simply put, we are conditioned to put up with a lot.
Chasing white validation made my own identity and heritage feel insufficient. I taught myself to minimize anything too Asian — avoiding speaking Chinese in public, tossing my mother’s homemade Chinese lunches, hesitating to order chicken feet at dim sum.
But if I had been conditioned to see white boys as the ultimate prize, then what did that mean for the boys who looked like me? I wish I could say I was immune to the stereotypes about Asian masculinity, but I wasn’t. The messaging was relentless: Asian men were nerdy, awkward “nice guys,” but never the ones who got the girl.
In middle school, through the gossip grapevine, I learned an Asian friend had a crush on me. I dismissed it immediately. Not because he wasn’t attractive — I just hadn’t considered him. I had already absorbed the idea that dating a white boy would elevate me socially. That was the priority.
And then there were Asian women. I wasn’t just dating white men — I was competing with other AAPI women for their attention. I saw them not as friends, but as threats (albeit unbeknownst to them). To comfort myself, I crafted a fragile self-affirming mythology: I’m different from the other Asian girls. I have layers. I have individuality. If a white boy had to choose from a lineup, I convinced myself I’d stand out.
My mind clung to reminders of my uniqueness: I like film and the arts. I lift weights. I play competitive chess. But the more I repeated it, the hollower it became. What if I’m not as different as I think? Then the fear twisted into something even uglier: What if they are more unique than me? What if I am the forgettable one?
Instead of seeking solace among other AAPI women, I retreated into a self-imposed exile, ashamed of my own scarcity mindset. Where was my feminism? Where was my solidarity? These thoughts festered in the shadows of my mind: the shame, the fear, the humiliation of knowing I had been complicit in my own erasure.
It took another Asian woman to show me what I had been too ashamed to see. She was petite with a straight-layered haircut, a few years younger than me. She lived on the other side of the country, and I had never met her before. She was also the woman my white ex-boyfriend had been cheating on me with.
She found me on Instagram and messaged me: Are you guys dating? I’m so sorry, I had no idea. She was honest and forthcoming, sharing screenshots of their messages. There was no defensiveness, no misplaced jealousy, just the quiet understanding of someone who knew what it felt like to be reduced to a “preference.” In a way, she was protecting me. I dumped him that same day. She did, too.
It was in that moment I realized she wasn’t my enemy. She was me. And yet, I had spent years seeing women like her as competition instead of my allies.
Thus began my quest to decolonize my desire. I followed a framework from the “Invisibilia” podcast, where an East Asian woman decided to stop dating white men:
- Bombard your brain with images of hot men of color.
- Be suspicious of white men. Is he actually hot or does he just take regular showers and wear cool glasses?
- Swipe left on white men.
This wasn’t about punishing white men. It wasn’t even about never dating them again; it was about interrogating why they had always been the default in the first place. I had dated two men of color before, but I had never fully reckoned with how much whiteness had dominated my desires. I sought to reject the system that conditions attraction in harmful ways and liberate myself from a societal hierarchy that had never served me.
Just days after that pivotal breakup, I re-downloaded the dating apps. At first, my thumb hovered over white faces. The old reflex kicked in. Then I caught myself — was it a good jawline, or just … bone structure and basic hygiene?
Attraction isn’t just personal — it’s programmed. Studies show that repeated exposure to certain beauty standards literally rewires our brains to associate desirability with what’s most familiar.My “type” wasn’t just a preference: It was an algorithm shaped by media and colonial history. If my brain could be trained to prioritize whiteness, it could be retrained to desire something else.
But desire also isn’t just about attraction. It’s about recognition. No matter how close I got to whiteness, I was still Othered, operating on borrowed terms. What I truly craved was the ease that comes from being understood without explanation. There’s an unspoken recognition forged through the shared struggles of people of color: the pressures of assimilation, the need to navigate multiple worlds, the tension between honoring our heritage and surviving in a world that wasn’t built for us.
Eventually, I met my long-term partner, who is South Asian and the son of Pakistani immigrants. With him, I no longer feel the pressure to shrink, dilute or translate my culture to make it more palatable. There’s no need for exhaustive explanations — why my relationship with my parents is fraught, why they insist he sleep in the guest room when visiting, why I instinctively modulate my behavior around them.
The relief reveals itself in the smallest moments: the ease with which I now order chicken feet, without hesitation (he loves chicken feet, too). The simple pleasures of cooking with scallions and gochujang and lotus root without having him ask, “What is this?” The way that he seamlessly fits into conversations with my AAPI friends without missing a step. And perhaps most comforting of all, the assurance that I can leave him with my parents and trust that he will meet them where they are — with curiosity, warmth, humor and not a flicker of discomfort at my mother’s broken English. With him, my reality is simply understood.
Go Ad-Free — And Protect The Free Press
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
Perhaps most healing of all, I have redefined my relationship with other AAPI women. Before, I saw them as competitors in a scarcity game built by white supremacy. Once I let go of needing to be “different” from other Asian girls for the sake of appealing to white men, I found so much joy in sharing spaces with them. We have dumpling-making parties on Lunar New Year. We go to hot pot and joke about how our lives would be different if we grew up with loving parents. We protect each other. We watched ”Parasite” win Best Picture and have a group chat called “Bong Joon Hoes.”
Decolonizing my love life wasn’t just about avoiding fetishization. It was about reclaiming my narrative and untangling years of internalized messaging that told me my worth was tied to my proximity to whiteness. White men were never the dream ― they were just the default, the easiest illusion to chase.
Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at [email protected].