don't stop the music

화요일, 2월 28, 2006

so here i am, thinking that this inter-racial dating thing is overrated.

i remember how when i was younger, everyone's eyes used to be as big as dinner plates when they heard you were dating someone of another race, accompanied by huge gushes of oohs and aahs if your special someone was white, or ang moh. supposedly, snagging a white guy was the end of the little chinese girl's troubles, because he-man would be the hunter gatherer and provider of all life's niceties forevermore. it was probably even better than going out with someone from your own ethnic group. in fact, a couple of people i grew up with actually had aspirations of meeting and marrying a white guy from a specific country e.g. american, but his mom's south african etc. usually based on the current celeb crush object they were obsessing on.

in fact, come to think of it, as i got older, some of my girlfriends only ever dated indian or malay guys. i remember asking one of them, let's call her A, why this was so. according to her, she wanted her kids to look chindian i.e. a chinese-indian mix, so that meant she only could go out with indian guys (as she was chinese) to achieve that "look" for her yet unborn sprogs - Q.E.D. similarly, i guess, the whole obsession with hunting down an ang moh guy, so as to manufacture kids with that pan-asian look which is quite hot at the moment. (changmoh is the term, so i hear, but having been out of the loop/lingo for some time, i cannot validate the accuracy of that phrase)

but, i digress. a couple of my friends are dating outside their ethnic group, some for longer than others, and for me, it's become a little bit of a normal thing. it still unnerves me a little bit to hear what my grandparents will say when they actually do meet Boy, and whether my relatives will automatically think i'm some sort of SPG who preys on lonely expat men (something which Boy is definitely NOT). it's hard to shrug off the stereotype that refuses to move with the times, and people still look at people who date interracially in a different way. it plagues me sometimes when i see a young, nubile chinese girl being pawed by a leery expat, automatically thinking that he'll dump her once he has to move back home/trade her in for a younger, more nubile model/whichever comes first. fair enough, it may be true, or it may be that they really are in love - who knows? but whatever it is, i'm in no position to judge. in fact, for this same reason, my mom warned me to be careful in the early days of dating Boy, and i used to get friendster messages from random-ass people saying "you're so cool, you're dating a white guy!" or on the flipside, "omg i saw your friendster pics - be careful he doesn't try and cheat you." (?????)

true, it has happened to some, but at the same time, loads of girls have been cheated by a guy - be he from the same kampung or halfway around the world. at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter who you date, so long as you know that he's going out with you for the right reasons. the reason why people choose to stay within their ethnic group is due to many reasons, religious or otherwise, and those barriers are sometimes hard to cross without raising a few tensions in the atmosphere. ultimately, when two cultures collide, they don't always have to clash, and the chinese girl dating the white guy doesn't have to look like a cheap money-grubber, because it's what's inside that counts. all relationships are not created equal, but the colour of one's skin doesn't have to be a determinating factor in that equation.