I remember it like it was yesterday. I was laying in bed and it was close to midnight. There I was in the dark with the glow of my phone shining on my face. I was mindlessly scrolling on TikTok, which should become my nightly ritual to help me fall asleep. That's when I came across a video of an East Asian woman doing a food review with her boyfriend, a tall white guy. But it wasn't their cutesy video that caught me. It was the comments.

Hundreds and hundreds of the same cryptic phrase. Oxford study. Oxford study. Oxford study. Oxford study. What the hell is Oxford study?

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Have you heard of Oxford Study?

I have, yeah. I did see it when it was like really booming on TikToks and reels and stuff. Like I looked it up at that time. Because I was like, I don't know what this means.

That voice you hear, that's my good friend, Christine. I'm talking to her because I really wanna have an honest conversation about interracial relationships between white men and Asian women. She's been in a relationship with her partner for eight years. He's white, she's Chinese American. I'm not gonna lie, y'all. This episode almost didn't get made. My production team didn’t want to do it. They said it's too polarizing, controversial, much too complicated to unpack in a 30-minute episode. They also said they're scared we might get canceled or that we can really hurt people's feelings and cause harm if we're not careful. There was a lot of fear, worry, and tiptoeing. But this is exactly why I want to make space to talk about it.

Why do you think this is so confronting for so many people? Like this topic triggers a lot of emotions in so many different people. Why do you think this is so activating?

Because I think it is forcing people to reckon with something in themselves. Their beliefs about themselves that are reflected in their beliefs about other people in their own feelings of superiority, inferiority. I think it forces a certain type of self-reflection that's really uncomfortable.

Is love just about what's inside our hearts? Does race matter? What are we really navigating in our relationships? And what do our romantic choices say about our beliefs, values, and desires? What does it say about who we are and what we want for ourselves and each other? Hold on to your seats, y'all.

We are about to get messy.

Okay, so back to Oxford Study. Turns out, it's not a real study at all. It's a made-up internet meme mostly used to troll Asian women who date white men. That cute Instagram photo of an Asian bride and her white groom? Oxford Study. That TikTok of a fit couple, Asian woman and white guy working out together, Oxford Study. It's code. It’s mockery.

And it's always aimed at Asian women, not me. The whole thing reeks of misogyny and the intent is clear – to shame, humiliate, and strip the women of their complexity. But putting aside the harm I began to wonder, was there some validity to the underlying critique?

Research shows white-Asian pairings are the most common interracial marriage type, with Asian women being almost twice as likely to marry a white person as Asian men. What is causing this, and were the commentators right? Were Asian women manifesting their internalized racism through their romantic partnerships?

I think for me, like I fit the sort of very stereotypical narrative of an Asian person who wanted to be accepted and who wanted to assimilate because I moved to this country and I worked really hard to learn English and make white friends and just kind of scrub the immigrant-ness off of me. And I thought when I was seen as desirable by a white man who not only wanted to like have sex with me, but who wanted to be in a long-term relationship with me, that felt like such an accomplishment. That felt like a milestone for me. It felt like, wow, I am being seen as an American. Like I am now desired in this type of way. And so I think there was definitely this like internalized racism that I was expressing through my relationship with white men. And of course, like the realization that came later in life where, oh ⁓ but that actually wasn't me being accepted as that. It was actually a very clear cut example of being fetishized and being seen as an exotic, sexualized being because both the white men that I had long-term relationships with had a history of dating exclusively Asian women, and you know, it was all the like red flags that I just didn't want to give credence to. And I'm curious, how did you feel when you saw Oxford Study and when you learned about what it was?

It's a mixed feeling because on the one hand, I think there's like reality in the ways that like folks who have marginalized identities may subconsciously, right, be drawn to places where there might be more power or privilege. That's a real, like, phenomenon, social phenomenon that we see play out all the time.

There's some realness in like that kind of way of dissecting it. But I also think that it flattens people's identities and relationships and realities and lived experiences into this very like agency-less, like we have no willpower or agency or ability or complexity in our relationships, and you are flattening that dynamic into only a race based analysis or picture. Like it's just such a flat frame. And the way that they're using it is violent. It's like it is meant to shame and demonize or to like create this sort of narrative where Asian women are the enemy again, right? Like I feel like there's this element of it where it's like, oh, you both don't have any agency and you also are actively hurting our community. So it's like, it's a real mixed message, right? That only serves to make Asian women feel like shit.

As far as my stomach could stand, I read comment after comment calling Asian women self-hating traitors, banana for being yellow on the outside and white on the inside, and white wannabes alongside the phrase Oxford Study. As someone who has been the target of mass online trolling numerous times, I know how easily women, especially women of color, are targeted online. With the Oxford Study trend, the majority of the hateful comments seem to be coming from a particular demographic, Asian men. It didn't feel good, feeling as though as Asian women, we are their easiest and most accessible target. And a part of me wanted to humanize those Asian American men too and try to understand the source of their anger. At the stereotype of them being weak and undesirable, at the cultural erasure and emasculation, and seemingly at these Asian women who hadn't chosen them.

But isn't that so exhausting though, that like, then Asian women are responsible not just for their partner and whatever, but they're also responsible for all Asian men's feelings too. Like the way that the comment is used is to be like, take care of our feelings. I'm not gonna interrogate why I might not be dating the person that I wanna date. The push towards us as Asian women needing to be the caretakers, emotional caretakers, physical well-being caretakers. There's so many ways that we are charged with. And I think in some ways fetishized as caretakers, as mild mannered, like always putting other people first. Again, this is broad, broad sweeping statements, but I think that it is another way that that is being manifest in these men being like,

How dare you hurt me by living your life in the way that you want to. And like now you must care for the way that I feel offended by your existence.

I hate the way people feel entitled to Asian women's desire. Like, our sexuality is some kind of commodity that gives people a sense of dominance. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how our sexuality is wielded and who has access to it. It's dehumanizing, to say the least, not to mention how it continues the historical pattern of hypersexualizing Asian women as a way of asserting control over us.

After the end of my last relationship with a white man, all those moons ago, I decided I just couldn't do it anymore. I was tired of feeling the need to defend my choice. I was tired of questioning whether my white partner was actually in love with me or I was just a fetish. I was tired of sometimes feeling like the distance between us was too wide to close, no matter how much we loved each other.

After finding out my white ex-boyfriend eventually married an Asian woman, his third Asian woman partner in a row, I swore I was never gonna date another white man ever again.

Being in a relationship with a South Asian man today, I do feel an odd sense of relief. Maybe because I no longer feel the need to defend my choice or over explain how my partner's race is not a representation of my values or sense of self-worth. I feel less conscious about the external gaze and people's judgment. But why should anyone have to carry that weight?

Even when I was dating white men and I was in a relationship with a white man, I felt responsible for what he knew about race and how he was behaving in front of my friends and how I felt like I needed to both defend my choice, but also give him the tools and the awareness that he doesn't have. So I felt…exhausted. Like I feel like I was constantly thinking about other people's gaze and my partner's ability to sort of defend himself, but also like my desire to make him seem like not like those other white men who fetishized me. You know, like there's this like needing to have my partner be exceptional.

Yeah, I think in social justice spaces, feeling like worried that like my most intimate personal relationship will be used against me, will be used to say that like I don't have credibility, that I don't actually believe the things that I say I believe in, that I'm like betraying myself by being in my relationship. I think those are all things that I've, I, at different points in time, am sitting with and feeling like this over identification of like anything he does or says is a reflection on me and then I'm responsible for it forever.

I can't tell you how many arguments I had with my ex-white boyfriends about how to be a good white partner. I'd be on edge whenever we were hanging out with my friends of color, worried he might say something stupid or insensitive. I'd look for my friend's approval, desperately signaling to them, he is not like the other white men. Whenever I felt disrespected by my partner, I'd feel extra triggered because it wasn't just a mistake.

It could never be. I'd feel the need to explain power dynamics, microaggressions, and the whole damn colonial and white supremacist history while arguing about taking out the trash.

One time, my ex-white boyfriend and I were at a Korean restaurant. We ordered his favorite dish, soondubu, or soft tofu soup, which came out with a colorful spread of side dishes and freshly made stone pot rice. While I dug right into the soup and rice, he only ate the soup. I insisted he eat the soup with the rice, telling him, no one just eats the soup. He explained he doesn't want any rice because he was on a diet.

I don't know why I felt so angry. I spent the entire meal nagging him for not touching his rice, embarrassing me by disrespecting our culture. God forbid a man wants to shed a few pounds. Looking back, I know what I really wanted was a freedom to be myself, to feel seen, understood, and embraced for exactly as I am, including the choices that I made in my most intimate life.

I wonder – having a partner that's white makes that sort of bar even higher, you know? Because I think sometimes how I feel about my relationship, Amrit, being an Indian person, there's almost like this layer of giving myself a little bit more grace or giving him grace that I felt was impossible for me to give to a white partner. Like when our values are slightly misaligned or is expressed in ways that I don't like or that I'm judging him for, I think there's still this like level of tolerance that I am able to exercise and I'm like aware of that I don't know that I necessarily gave to my previous partners who were white.

Do you think having a partner that's white makes you more vigilant, like hypervigilant around like seeking these places of friction and trying to smooth them over?

I think at times in our relationship, yes. And I think when you're talking about like patience and like compassion and grace, there have been so many times when I've had none of it, none of it for Dave. And I think the thing that makes us able to keep going is that he has a lot of grace and compassion and patience for me, knowing that he is a white man, like he knows that about himself. And so when I'm really not having it with him or when I'm kind of smushing him down into a single story or a single version of himself, the fact that he's able to just like kind of be with it, he's like, okay, and him being as direct as he is, he'll be like,

Yeah.

And also that's not the only thing here. He interrupts it a little bit in me. But yes, I do think having a white partner makes me heat up much faster around these issues, makes me jump to a place of like existential crisis more quickly too. this is a fundamental like breaking thing in our relationship.

I think it does happen more frequently.

Maybe if we lived in utopia, we can see love as just love, plain and simple. But in this reality, where complex histories exist, racial dynamics exist, harm and violence and trauma exist, it feels impossible to not complicate the story about who we choose to love. After all, what is personal is political. And the most intimate choices in our lives surely deserve our earnest reflection and curiosity. And maybe making space for these complexities and uncomfortable questions is what reveals the paths to get closer to ourselves and each other.

When the Atlanta spa shooting happened in 2021, I was flooded with messages from other traumatized Asian and Asian American women looking for support. So many expressed their rage, grief, and profound sadness about what had happened and how easy it was to see the violence being firmly rooted in anti-Asian misogyny and dehumanization of Asian femme sex workers.

Among the hundreds of messages were Asian women who were in relationships with white men who reached out saying they felt helpless and so alone. They said their white partners didn't understand what they were going through and they didn't know where to turn. The aftermath of this horrifying incident revealed just how much our most intimate relationships are tested in moments of trauma.

I had immense amount of just sorrow and sadness reaching out to me because they needed their most intimate partner in their life to be able to understand and see their pain but they didn't have that and I didn't know necessarily what the best course of action is at that point and I think that was such a reckoning moment for so many Asian women who are in relationship with white men. And of course that's not the only experience, but that is something that was lifted up to me.

I mean, there are a couple of things that are popping up with me. This might be a little like edgy, but I wonder, I do wonder. I wonder if their experience would have been notably different with an Asian partner. That's one, one kind of inquiry, line of inquiry that kind of sprouts up for me.

I think that's connected a little bit to the other part of it, which is like, for me, there are parts of me that Dave won't ever fully comprehend or know from a visceral, lived standpoint. That is the distance between the two of us because we are different people. Dave was able to be with me as I had big feelings. But I don't know that he had, right, like a direct insight or ability to really like, tend to or care for that part of me. But he was able to be with me and to not dismiss it or diminish it. And the places where I felt most held and seen were with other women of color with other Asian women. So I think that's real, right? I think those experiences are real. And it also is that question of like, what are the conversations that feel important to be able to have in your most intimate relationships? What are the ways that you, that are non-negotiable, right? Like that feel like critical to be able to, like, what are those capacities that you really need?

In my relationship with Dave, Dave is always on my side. He is so incredibly patient when I am dealing with all the intricacies of the trauma and drama of my family and my history. And that's what I need in my most intimate partner. Because I also have a broad community.

Right? Like when we talk, our hearts just, they meet right where they need to meet. That particular heart connection is a different heart connection than I have with Dave. It's different than the heart connection that I have with, you know, my brothers or, you know, so I do also think that part of that loneliness and isolation can come from expecting for our partners to be able to hold all of it for us, with us. I'm not saying we can't be moving towards that, right? Or that like he can't over time see more and more of me or be able to like meet me in the places where I need him. But I think those capacities are only built through time and through like some real risk taking.

in terms of like showing those parts of yourself, those parts of myself to a partner, those parts of myself to a good friend.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for sharing all that. That makes a lot of sense and it resonates. I also wonder if part of the loneliness and the longing to be seen is something that we also need to rely on the broader community, depending on the context. And I think so many people rely on their intimate partner to be that community, be that soul connection, be that person who sees and understands everything. And I think even though I have a really incredible community of friends, sometimes I put that expectation on my partner too. And I don't know that I actually got what I was looking for during that time from Amrit either. And I also turned to my community of Asian women who viscerally understood what I was.

I attribute that to him being a cis het man. He may not be white, but I think there is that distance that I feel. And sometimes that distance, I wish that that distance doesn't exist, but it's impossible for it to not exist because we're two different people.

I think part of why this topic of interracial relationships between white men and Asian women feels so difficult is because it asks all of us to get honest. It requires us to lead into vulnerability, the real kind, and be courageous enough to face all of ourselves. Ask those hard questions about our desires, survival shaping, insecurities, and fears without judging what surfaces. What if we didn't make any of our inner worlds wrong, but okay to be cared for. What if we made it okay to ask those questions for the sake of deepening our understanding and connection to ourselves, rather than from a place of judgment and accusation? And what would it look like for us to practice this level of vulnerability with each other?

Thank you. I mean, I feel like so much of what you've been putting out into the world recently has been around like us relearning how to relate to each other, like us relearning how to be in community, like in real mutual care in our community, in our relationships, like in every relationship, including our intimate partners. But that is like a skill and a practice. that it's really hard to nurture when things can feel so fraught, like when things can feel so high stakes, like, oh, I can't bring my most vulnerable self into a space without worrying about being judged, without worrying that it like, that me having concerns or having, you know, not being 100% sure about things isn't gonna degrade trust or love or care. think there's a lot of fear that comes into it that, you know, when Dave and I argue that is such a core part of like, like it's stirred up is like, can I see you as a full person without latching on to the most vulnerable part of you and using it against you, which I think sometimes when we were talking about the Oxford study, that's kind of what it feels like. Like I'm finding the thing that is most vulnerable in your relationship and using it to attack you, to isolate you, to push you off to the side. And I think that contributes to the distance between all of us is that I'm like, if I tell Michelle that I feel conflicted about, you know, about my relationship with my white husband, that she's gonna be like, then she doesn't know anything about anything and like, I don't want to be friends with her anymore. I don't want to like talk about this. If we can't build our capacity to like share those things and have space for that, that dissonance, cause I mean, I'm saying all sorts of stuff, but yeah, there's dissonance all the time around what it means for me to be in this relationship. Sometimes that dissonance is louder and sometimes it's quieter, but it lives because again, what you're saying, like we're different people and there is a distance between us.

And what that means for how I'm able to live my life in or out of alignment with my values. And I know we talked about this a little bit at a different point in time, but you know, our race is one aspect of our relationship. But ultimately, I think a lot of this conversation is around values, is around what is central to our lives and what we care most about and what it means to live every day in a way that is aligned with that, which is, you know, basically impossible, but it's something that we're constantly struggling and striving for. And what that means for our relationship and what we have to get right in our relationship and what we actually have to have hard honest conversations about. So, it's the both and like, yes, there is all of my fear around other people's perceptions and judgments. And then there's my own judgments about the ways that I want to live out my values that I'm grappling with. And then it's my real judgments about the way he chooses to live his values. And the work that we do together is like where, not that we're compromising, but like, where do we actually meet? Like, where, where do those things actually come together so that we're living the most meaningful version of our lives together.

In every romantic partnership I've been in, I have longed to be seen fully, to be loved as my whole complex being. Sometimes the longing was so great it ached. And in this ache, there was always disappointment. But there's some healing too. Maybe love isn't about finding someone who understands everything about us, but someone who is willing to stay in the room long enough to learn. Someone who is willing to bear witness to our deepest ache, even without the embodied knowing. And maybe we don't have to figure it all out today. Maybe we just need more spaces where we can ask the messy questions and be courageous enough to face what is here. So if you're in a relationship that feels like a question mark more than a period right now,

You're not alone. I feel that way too.

Listener 1 31:45

Hi there.

This is Cecilia calling in. I wish more people talked about not just the race part, but how much you identify with an immigrant experience versus like second generation, third generation, or just American community is a huge part of things that create tension, conflict, or just differences.

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Listener 2 32:36

My name is Mila calling from Atlanta, Georgia I am an asexual transracial transnational Korean adoption survivor in an interracial relationship with a white cis het man one experience that goes unacknowledged is the profound isolation you can feel in an interracial relationship This isolation is what I call the negative space Created by the dissonance of him being a white man and me being an Asian woman. This negative space is filled with the absence of lived experiences that my partner will never be forced to navigate while it also includes all the affirming experiences, this quiet invisible space can often create a chasm of jealousy and be hurt and misunderstanding.

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Listener 3 33:27

I'm calling from California. Something I wish more people talked about is how interracial relationships are perceived by people versus how they feel for the individuals involved in the relationship, specifically with regards to being with mixed race people. I am Taiwanese. My husband is part Chinese, part miscellaneous European American. Neither of us feel like we are in an interracial relationship, but I think that probably if we asked the average person, they would consider us in an interracial relationship, but he very much feels the most Chinese. I see him that way and for us, it's not an interracial relationship.

A huge thank you to my bold and courageous friend, Christine. You can watch the full interview on the I Feel That Way Too YouTube channel. This episode was produced by Geraldine Ah-Sue, Eunice Kwon, and me, Michelle MiJung Kim. Written by Michelle MiJung Kim and Geraldine Asu. The sound designer, Katie McMurran. The music you heard today is by Katie McMurran and Jiyeon Park.

This podcast is brought to you by Asian American Future. Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next time on I Feel That Way Too.