Sunday, October 08, 2006
quote from an Asian American civil rights activist

"My sincere hope is that Asian Americans will continue to side with the oppressed." ~Yuri Kochiyama

:: redeemed4hisglory @ 12:32 PM :: (0) comments


  Tuesday, October 03, 2006
thoughts on interracial marriage

My response to this post on interracial marriage:

My parents, both ABC's, each have a sister who married a Caucasian man, so while I sense my mom's preference is for me to marry an Asian guy, I am pretty sure she'll get over it if I don't. She's seemed critical of my grandmother's reluctance to accept my uncle, but at the same time my mom can be very ethnocentric. I guess I struggle with how the "good" (i.e. deferential) daughter is supposed to deal with that in a Christian family.

I grew up in a large Chinese church—800-900 people now (I think), where a majority of them are somehow related by marriage (a couple times over in some cases). When I moved home after Westmont, I taught at that church's Christian school, which has diversified quite a bit since I was a student there (it's still called Chinese Christian Schools, but they've had a significant influx of Koreans as well as increases in representations of other ethnic groups, primarily from a few families with a lot of kids). I did start attending another church, though, because I wanted to physically see the diversity of the Body. I have felt like somewhat of a black sheep in my peer group there; sometimes I wonder if I'd get voted "Most likely to marry a white guy," largely because one of my friends asked (in a way that suggested I would be more likely to do so than most of the other people there)... I think I said I was open to it, to which she replied with something along the lines of having cute kids, as if that was the only positive thing that could come from an interracial marriage. I get bugged by comments about interracial marriages producing cuter kids, and I am realizing that it probably has to do with the superficiality. Looking back at that conversation, I wonder what my friend really asked—if she asked about Caucasian specifically or someone of an different ethnicity generally—because the feeling I get is that people assume that if an Asian doesn't marry an Asian, they'll marry a Caucasian. It seems to me that people see Asians marrying Asians as having a strong sense of their ethnic identity and Asians marrying Caucasians as being more assimilated (but oh well, that's the price of living in this country); I don't feel there is much of a place for other interracial marriages in the Asian community. Sometimes I want to marry an African American or Latino guy just to mess with people's thinking; the one thing I do worry about in interracial marriage is communication because that can be hard enough between people with similar backgrounds.

:: redeemed4hisglory @ 12:36 AM :: (0) comments