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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]I'm Chinese and if parents are anything like mine, they'd complain you should have married someone Chinese if you married white or any other Asian
And if you did the right thing by marrying someone Chinese, well, that wasn't good enough either.[/b]

The best thing I ever did was realize they'll never be satisfied with anything I do, or don't do.

However since tallness is a virtue, maybe they're just complaining because they wish your kids were taller. I do happen to have a kid with a white father and my parents love to fawn over how tall he is. Every.time.he.visits.

Whatever, live your life and not theirs.[/quote]

Lol this made me laugh because it is so true. Second gen Chinese here married to a white man. If your parents are like mine, the grass is always greener on the cherry-picked path not taken.

I have a lot of thoughts on the Asians marrying whites phenomenon but I will just say that I found it hard finding and dating Asians in a non Asian dominant environment because there was so much self-hatred (is a strong word but something akin to that) in the asian community. It does seem the older I get, the more I wish I had married someone Chinese.[/quote]

Can you elaborate more on your last comment about wishing you'd married someone Chinese? I'm an Asian who married an Asian and am really curious about what the Asian/non-Asian pairings are like (e.g. what are extended family dynamics like)?[/quote]

PP here, sure. For me, I realized how much I wished I could share/pass down the Chinese language to my kids and to share the second gen Chinese American immigrant experience with my spouse. On the first, sometimes it really pains me that my kids won't be able to speak the language of my childhood that I used to communicate with my grandparents, now long gone. And though my English far surpasses my Chinese, Chinese was technically my first language and there is an intimate feeling I cannot quite describe when I use my pathetic Chinese. That's an intimacy I likely will never share with my husband and probably not with my kids either.  Yes I could enroll them in Chinese school or tutors or speak to them and I have tried but have concluded that I simply do not have the bandwidth or ability to do this on my own.

On the second point, I am convinced that as people get older or maybe come under more stress, they kind of revert to the way they are comfortable being, and closer to their upbringing. People can change in all sorts of ways but mostly the childhood things that bring them comfort stay consistent. I just wish my spouse and I shared that.

[b]It is interesting that another PP mentioned rarely seeing second gen Asian couples. I thought about my high school friends and they pretty much all married non Asians. And this is in an area with plentiful (but not dominant) Asians. Sometime funny happened our generation I think. Maybe too much emphasis on assimilation. Maybe most of us had such stressful home lives with our Chinese mothers that we all wanted to escape and not add another Chinese MIL.[/b] [/quote]

It would be interesting to see a sociological study on this.

Also, I know many Asian female/White male couples (though the reverse is becoming more common), and I feel like they mostly hang out with similarly composed couples.

It's funny you bring up the MIL thing. I used to think that I wasn't "Asian enough" culturally to please a future Asian MIL but that their expectations would be different for a White spouse. [/quote]

I had a Xmas gathering with some high school friends this year, all Asian. And now going through each one, I realized not a single Asian married another Asian. Women, men, didn't matter. They all married non Asians.

Thinking back, I think when I was young, the Asians around me were all having their own identify crisis. The parent generation were all immigrants who pushed academics and not much social skills. These immigrant parents also rarely showed any affection towards each other and with the kids. On some level, the kids envied the white families with seemingly affectionate and reasonable parents. I think in some ways, marrying out was a way to escape that suffocating experience. Of course it is not until we get older that we realize that experience defines who we are in more ways then we care to admit and it would be nice to have someone who understands that background. [/quote]

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