A Valentine’s Note

As Valentine’s Day nears, heart-shaped chocolates, cards with inscriptions of “I love you,” and bottles of champagne wrapped in red and white foil line the store shelves and bombard shoppers with subliminal messages that if you don’t have a lover, you’re missing out.

For sure, to be wanted and viewed as sexually attractive are valued qualities in America -- where beautiful people move to Hollywood and movie stars become presidents. And in a nation invariably obsessed with sex -- where pop magazines, television and music titillate and tantalize -- not being seen as sexy is equivalent to living a life of loneliness and boredom, an existence devoid of power and even happiness.

So it is not surprising that many Asian American men are feeling frustrated that Asian American women tend to date outside their race much more than men do, creating a perception that they are not wanted by anyone, not even fellow Asian Americans.

For Asian American men, observing such a disparity brings to mind the disparaging media images of Asian men that began a century ago and persist today -- images that portray them as bucked-toothed nerds and karate-chopping, desexualized fighting machines.

Such caricatures have damaged the reputation of Asian American males as anything but virile lovers, and reinforced racist stereotypes that have more or less stripped them of their masculinity.

The stereotypes have been constantly present throughout the media’s history, from the branding of early Chinese and Japanese immigrants as a “yellow peril,” to the visions of the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu, to the characterizing of Asian men as impotent buffoons. And in the 1960s, that stereotype reached an all-time low when Mickey Rooney played Audrey Hepburn’s buck-toothed and grossly-caricatured landlord in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

It’s doubtful that those images are changing, even as Asian and Asian American male actors rise to stardom in Hollywood.

For example, international superstar Chow Yun-Fat, though tall, dark and handsome by many standards, remains limited primarily to chaste, yet bad-boy, shoot ’em up roles. Though he plays a Thai monarch in his latest movie Anna and the King, Chow’s previous U.S. movie -- The Replacement Killers -- had him playing opposite Hollywood’s shapely Aphrodite, Mira Sorvino, as an asexual, gun-slinging fighter.

Apparently incapable of making any sexual advances to Sorvino’s character, the closest Chow comes to a “sin of the flesh” ends up as nothing more than a simple hug and an “I will miss you” -- a pathetic consummation to their relationship.

Had anyone else played the leading man -- Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, Pierce Brosnan -- a fornication scene would have been an iron-clad clause in their contracts. Similar examples of apparent Asian male chastity are endless.

Many Asian American women seem to have been convinced by these notions, choosing to date and “outmarry” white men at a lopsided rate. In California, 7.7 percent of API males were married to whites, compared to 16.2 percent of the women, according to the 1990 Census.

And particularly in Asia, where the standard of beauty is Western, and Americana is exported through big-budget Leonardo DiCaprio blockbusters, those images are equally, if not more, harmful to the Asian American psyche when newly arrived immigrants insist on dating whites only.

That’s not to say that interracial dating or marriage is unhealthy. Indeed, a multiethnic society like that of the United States should be integrated in more ways than a classroom or an office.

It is unhealthy, however, when media stereotypes drive coupling patterns, convincing Asian American men that they are not “good” enough to date white women, and conditioning Asian American women to favor white men.

But stereotypes of Asian men are only one factor in Asian American-white relationship patterns. Other factors include stereotypes of Asian females -- also quite well-known and widespread (look up “Asian” on the Internet).

Therefore, it behooves all parties -- Asian American men and woman, white men and women -- to evaluate their susceptibility to media stereotypes and ask themselves how sincerely they view themselves and each other.

With this in mind, have a joyous and blissful Valentine’s Day.