I was born in a small port town in Japan and moved to Eugene, Oregon, when I was 5 years old, where I lived until I graduated college. Friends casually called us racial slurs. I brushed most of these comments off as well-intentioned, if misguided, jokes. And old stereotypes about Asian men persist.
Grace Kao, a sociology professor at Yale University, has been tracking how Asian American men fare in the dating pool for years. Her research offers a look at how much discrimination Asian American men face when dating.
The data also showed that Asian women were half as likely to be unpartnered, compared with Asian men. She also found, in a paper she co-authored, that gay Asian men in America face the same discrimination in their love lives. Kao says the statistics show a clear hierarchy based on race that leaves Asian men on the bottom rung. Back then, Chinese people were portrayed in ugly caricatures with buck teeth and slanted eyes. During World War II, the same caricatures were used by cartoonists in an effort to drum up enthusiasm for a war against Japan.
During the yellow peril era, the notion that Asian men were feminine or asexual also took root, says Connie So, an American ethnic studies teaching professor at the University of Washington. So says the stereotype started because, along with building railroads, many of the first male Chinese immigrants to the U.
Later waves of male Asian immigrants from Japan and the Philippines also worked these types of jobs, and the stereotype grew into one of the strongest prevailing ideas about Asian men in America, So says. In many popular American films and TV shows, Asian men have been portrayed as weak or unattractive caricatures that could never be the serious love interest of a white woman.
