"My Last White Boyfriend" by Lisa Chen
This story from our archives is featured in Epiphany’s My Last White Boyfriend anthology, available now for sale from Ristretto Books, which collects the last 20 years of Epiphany’s greatest prose hits.
My Last White Boyfriend spoke Chinese better than me. His intonation was flawless. Every time he swung his tones up and down, I died a little in my mouth.
I looked the part, but my fluency was for shit. When my brother and I were kids, my parents worked long hours and refused to speak Chinese to us. We were to become professional Americans, not FOBs like them who had to keep Chinese-English dictionaries by their bedside, the page corners folded down to mark the section on vernacular phrases. (“Shoot the breeze.” “It’s no sweat.” “Right on.”)
Of course this was all before China’s neo-capitalist economy blew up. Now there’s a story in the news every day about the terrifying might of Chinese consumers, like when a craze for pecans soaked in vanilla brine swept across the country, threatening pecan pie makers here in America, or how bourgeois parents in New York are paying Chinese nannies $70,000 a year to give their toddlers an edge in the new world order.
Take the case of Arabella, Ivanka and Jared’s six-year-old. Online, you can find a short video clip of her reciting a Chinese poem:
Little white rabbits, oh so white,
Both ears standing upright,
Love to eat carrots and greens,
Bounce! Bounce! They are really cute!
Little Arabella is cute in the way that all children, with their enormous balloon heads, are cute. But watching her speak Chinese and knowing her lineage is dispiriting, like watching a robot beat a Russian master at chess.
***
To his credit, My Last White Boyfriend made the decision to learn Chinese before China became a juggernaut. If you ask him why he wanted to learn Chinese, he’ll claim it was because he watched a lot of kung fu movies on TV as a kid. Dig deeper and you’ll uncover a story of a Chinese exchange student rubbing her white-socked foot back and forth across his eleven-year-old crotch as he lay transfixed on a tumbling mat in gym class.
He liked calling me by my Chinese name, as though by doing so he was recognizing the real, pre-assimilationist me, a ghost that did not exist. And yet when he called me by this name, I felt, fleetingly, like a more interesting person.
It wasn’t just the superiority of his Chinese that bothered me. It was the way he jaunted through life like a child who is aware that he is adorable, and, in fact, has been adored all his life. When I encounter such children on subway platforms or in grocery aisles, I stare squarely into their faces with a dead expression. I’m doing my part to level the playing field.
I never told My Last White Boyfriend about these ugly feelings. Common decency is not actually all that common, which is why everyone is always clucking their tongues about its absence. My Last White Boyfriend has decency in spades. This made him attractive. Also, cunnilingus. He could make me come like the finale of a choreographed water fountain show. It was not lost on me that the tongue that was outdoing me up top was the same one undoing me down there.
Things got serious. The time came to introduce My Last White Boyfriend to my family. He was excited. He never doubted for an instant the impression he would make. I could tell he couldn’t wait to unleash the shock and awe of his impeccable Mandarin on them.
By then my parents had long since divorced. Ba remarried and vanished into Taiwan as though this entire American episode had never happened. Much to everyone’s surprise, Ma ended up with her own white boyfriend. My mother’s boyfriend was bald, with a big mustache, which made him look like a walrus. It also made him look the type who might ride a motorcycle, specifically the low-slung kind that looks like a loveseat with large storage compartments, so it was more disappointing than usual to discover he drove a Honda Civic hatchback. They met as volunteers on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign (’08). Ma had never expressed much interest in politics before, so this, too, was a surprise.
If Hillary needs help once she’s president, she’ll have Bill by her side and all his experience, she had said.
Ma! I said. The whole point of standing behind Hillary is that you believe a woman can lead, period. She doesn’t need a husband to do her job.
Okay, okay, she said. But having Bill in the White House is like back up, like safety school.
This analogy didn’t make any sense but there was no use getting mired in a subsidiary argument.
We arranged to meet—mother, daughter and boyfriends—for lunch at a Taiwanese restaurant in a strip mall sandwiched between a Kumon and a mattress store.
Wo hen rongxing renshi ni! my boyfriend said upon meeting my mother.
My mother took a step back as though she had been struck across the face. She refused to look at my boyfriend but locked in on me instead.
How did he learn to talk like that? She demanded in Chinese, forgetting momentarily that I could barely understand her.
The Walrus smiled his rheumy walrus smile, also not understanding. When my mother makes him oxtail soup, she doesn’t tell him the meat is actually chopped-up chunks of a massive bovine’s tail, the same tail the bovine once employed to flick flies away from its gunky bung hole. He can’t handle the truth, my mother assures me.
But My Last White Boyfriend scanned the laminated menu and ordered expertly for us all. Xiao bing, dou jiang, xiao long bao. Come on. Even I could have done that. My mother was beyond pleased. Good, very good! she murmured, as though he were her pupil. And yet I never seem to get credit for my forays into whiteness, like vineyard tours and sides of steamed broccoli florets with my entrée.
When My Last White Boyfriend and I lived together, I would come home from my advertising job and complain to him about how I hated myself for not being more assertive with my ideas, or for not calling out bullshit when I saw it dribbling out of people’s mouths, and how I hated fulfilling the stereotype of the quiet Asian woman who everyone thinks works really, really, really hard but is not particularly smart.
He said, with exasperation: Why do you care so much what people think? If you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to talk. Just be yourself.
O, Last White Boyfriend!
***
Naturally, I had an affair. Reader, he was white. And worked in finance. I met him at a cheese class. I was there, in theory, being the wing woman for a friend who was trying to detox from online dating. The cheese class was where we hoped to learn more about cheese and meet other equally ignorant cheese enthusiasts who might, one day, love us. Lila and I referred to the class as “Kraft Singles” because it is less painful to participate in your own reality when you can imagine yourself floating above it on an airbed of air quotes.
Lila said: I am so sick of meeting men at wine bars and chit-chatting about our lives around those stupid little tables. They’re the size of a personal pizza, which, frankly, is what I’d much rather be eating than tiny toast with anorexia spread.
She said: The thought of going on another date makes me want to drink myself into stupor, pass out, wake up, and set myself on fire. And: I’m running out of outfits.
I said: But these are men you’re meeting for the first time. They’ve never seen any of your outfits!
She said: Yes, but some of them are starting to droop with bad karma.
I might have to give them to Goodwill.
Give them to me! I wanted to shout, but then I remembered the size of her waist, which was the circumference of a Yankee Candle, and said nothing.
As it turned out, most people in the cheese class were already spoken for. The cheese class was their date. Nonetheless, sex pheromones mingled with cheese fumes, and it was I who ended up with the unattached stock broker. Just as you would imagine, the Wall Street Bro Effect made the sex hot and degrading. The whole lying there with my ass in the air and my face mashed against the pillow so hard my contact lens was nearly squeezed out of my face was like being pillaged in a good way.
The next morning I lurked inside his walk-in closet and ran my fingers across the shoulders of his bespoke suits. An entire fleet of motherfuckers. I put two fingers in my mouth and pictured myself getting gangbanged by him all.
He emerged from the shower, rubbing himself dry with a towel in front of me, smiling and not saying anything, like a mash-up of about five different Christian Bale roles. The morning light blasted from the windows behind him.
Then he said: Can I make you some eggs?
In fact, the bank broker was quite decent. More than decent: good. His parents operated a neighborhood deli in Ottawa and he was putting his siblings through college with his Wall Street paycheck.
He said: Sunny-side up or over easy? He didn’t make it easy.
***
When someone tells you to “just be yourself” it is meant as reassurance. Let the gleaming wonder of your soul shine through! I am here to tell you that even the purest of souls—mine, yours, us, them—are corrupted by our daily interactions with others, and together we slosh in the catheter bag of society.
Besides, sometimes I am myself and that doesn’t work either. I once had a Black boyfriend who took offense when I made jokes making fun of Asians. But these are some of my best jokes! It was inconceivable to him that my jokes didn’t come from a place of racial self-hatred. Did he think this because he thinks all Asians are hopelessly whitewashed, or was it my delivery?
My Last White Boyfriend and I had problems of a kind perhaps endemic to any two people intimately entwined. He could be judgmental and dogmatic. I was selfish with my time. He had impulsive tendencies. I read too much into things. We had clashing ideas about cat care. I was withholding, including of my Asian jokes. We weren’t perfect—we annoyed ourselves—but always I felt the presence of something darker, larger—a blockage. I think he felt it, too, and thought it was me.
But the blockage was bigger than me, or him. It was both outside us and inside us. I felt the blockage whenever he complained that I let my mother walk all over me; whenever he stayed silent when his parents made cringey compliments about Asians as prodigies of the American Dream because we didn’t expect charity; whenever I stayed silent, too; whenever he made winking Asian jokes about math or frugality; whenever I joined in or withheld my own jokes, both of which soured me afterwards; and whenever either of us devil’s advocated to exhaustion how the other interpreted certain misconducts of others or ourselves (conclusion: I was paranoid; he was oblivious). Look, I know all this sounds like no more than an eight-ounce can of beans in this crazy world, but it was blockage all the same.
For a while, I yearned to talk to a girlfriend about my issues with my white boyfriend, but my white girlfriends were out of the question and my POC girlfriends all had white partners—well, a lot of them. White boyfriends are like the HPV of people—you don’t have to do much to somehow end up with one. Then, before you know it, you all have them, and what then? Love trumps ideology.
Or not. I broke things off with My Last White Boyfriend. He said: Did you meet someone else?
Me: No.
He said: Is this about race?
I equivocated. Things escalated.
He said: Why can’t this just be about you (jabbing the air in front of me) and me (hooking his thumb back at himself)? Why you do have to politicize everything? Why can’t we just be two people who love each other? Who cares what the world thinks?
I admit, this had a crazed, romantic logic. I loved him for it, the same way I sometimes missed my younger, ignorant, happier self.
I said: That’s the problem. You don’t have to think about what the world thinks because you are the world.
That wasn’t our last fight, but we were getting there.
Lisa Chen is the author of Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton) and Mouth (Kaya Press), which won a writing award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She has received a Writers’ Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, a Center for Fiction fellowship and was a resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. Born in Taipei, she now lives in New York City.
