America’s Korean Adoptees, Part 3: Dating Inside and Out

by Sarah Idzik

“Most white men either see me as the ‘me so horny’ girl or I’m ‘cute.’ My white girlfriends think, ‘He thinks you’re cute!’ And I think, ‘No, he wants me in a school girl outfit,’’ said my adopted Korean-American friend Rachel, who grew up in my small hometown.

Well, this isn’t new. Most Asian-American girls could probably tell you a similar story. Rebecca, a 23-year-old adoptee from Wisconsin, once had a guy tell her that it’s “every guy’s dream to have sex with an Asian girl.” Rachel knows that “when I go to a bar and there are 80 white girls, 19 black girls, and me, I’m not surprised that I’m a… novelty, I guess.”

But this old story comes in some new flavors for the 100,000 or so Koreans adopted into the U.S. since 1953.

Female Korean adoptees are, more often than not, largely attracted to white men. Most adoptees grew up in very white communities, often isolated from other Asians. “Overall, I’m not attracted to Asian men,” Rachel said. “I’ve seen attractive Asian men, but where I’m located, it’s very rare to see an Asian male in general, let alone one I’d like to hunt down.” When someone in high school asked why she doesn’t date Asian guys, she responded, “Well, try finding me one that isn’t my brother.”

Heather, an adoptee from Baltimore living in Chicago, said that with a handful of Asians in her 300-per-class high school, her school was more diverse than most, but though she has dated Asians before, “if we were going on physical looks alone, I tend to be more attracted to Caucasians.” She attributed this at least in part to the fact that she’s not attracted to men who are smaller than her.

And Rebecca guessed that she’s attracted to white guys over Asian guys about 75% of the time. Caroline, an adoptee from Oklahoma, wrote that before traveling to Korea, she was only ever attracted to Caucasian men, because “there were no Asian men where I grew up.” (Though now that she’s in Korea, she “now only find[s] Korean men attractive.”)

Growing up feeling more white than Asian, our attractions naturally leaned towards the cute boys we saw around us. It makes sense for a cultural whiteness to carry over in this way, but in doing so, it carries over all the same consequences of identity uncertainty. The same way many adoptees see themselves as just like everyone else, and wish-and often automatically expect-to be perceived that way, plenty of adoptees struggle to have members of the opposite sex like them for who they are, and not for their appearance.

“I wish I could wear a sign above my head,” Rachel said, “that reads, ‘I do not know kung fu, I don’t eat fish, I don’t know how to make sushi, I’m not a horrible driver, I have sex but I’m not a sex slave, I’m not submissive, I failed math, I don’t speak any Asian language, please get to know me for me.’”

In college, I was casually seeing a guy that I thought was pretty into me too, and my being Asian never even occurred to me as a potential reason for his attraction… until I read an interview about Asian fetishes in the inaugural issue of my school’s sex magazine. In the article, he openly admitted to having one. It was a jarring experience, instantly casting into doubt every moment of attraction between us-because I thought he had just, as Rachel put it, been getting to know me for me.

A more seemingly innocuous example is my sixth grade boyfriend, who, when my best friend IMed him for fun pretending to be a stranger and asked if he had a girlfriend and if she was pretty, said, “She’s Oriental but yeah, she is.”

Barry, an adoptee from central Illinois, told me about the time a woman told him she “liked foreign guys.”

“It stopped me in my tracks,” he said. “My drunken tracks. I realized that she saw me as something different than other guys because of my ethnicity.”

Moments like this make an adoptee suddenly realize that that’s a club he or she is just never going to be able to join. For each person for whom your ethnicity seems to be as much an afterthought as it is to you-and I have had a person or two affirm this perception of me-there are a half dozen others a moment away from blurting out how attracted they are to foreigners just like you.

And there’s not always an opportunity to get into the other club either. If an adoptee does find herself attracted to an Asian man, there’s the added hurdle of her not being culturally Asian herself. Rachel pointed out that adoptees are often seen as “too Asian for white guys to be [take us] seriously, and too western for Asians.” That can be a pretty unhappy predicament: “You’re bad for being Asian and you’re bad for being American,” she said. “You lose the game of life.”

Joy, an adoptee from the Chicago suburbs, told me that she had intentionally not married an Asian man; her parents had advised her not to because they told her Asian men don’t treat women well.

So there’s some received messages there, overt and covert. Rebecca wrote to me that while she’s attracted more often to white guys than Asian guys, she didn’t usually date them in the past because “I always thought that they were too good for me.” And the realization that men you previously thought were interested in you as a person are actually somehow into your Korean-ness can create some serious trust issues. “I always feel like even if I found this great guy, in the back of my head, I’d never know if he loved me for me,” Rachel wrote. “If it was a fetish or not.”

After a while, she added, she’d have to trust that he was into her personality, but even with the people in her life now, “[it goes] back to me being adopted, where while I know people love me, I never really believe them.” It’s not at all that she’s incapable of loving others, she wrote. “There are things I love, there are people that I [love]… but the way I feel about people loving me… sometimes I don’t buy it.”

She wrote: “As much as I know my birth mother gave me a better life by putting me up for adoption, and as much as I’m grateful for my adoptive parents for doing so much for me… Do you ever feel like no matter how much someone will love you, there may be a day where they’ll just leave?”

For men, there’s an added layer of complication. Barry said that because the vast majority of women he came into contact with were white, he’s “been mostly attracted to white women.” But, he added, “I had the stereotypical white guy experience at some point where I realized…. ‘Asian chicks are hot!’”

He added that this was “so predictable,” but really, it isn’t. I admitted right away that the thought had not even occurred to me-I hadn’t considered that the attitudes and intangible science of attraction would be so affected by men’s environment that they would also, like their white peers, experience the phase of the Asian fetish.

Steve, an adoptee from Nashville, told me that at one point in his life, he was almost determined to be attracted to and eventually marry a Korean American. Not anyone that he wouldn’t have been otherwise attracted to, but he said that while it wasn’t articulated as explicitly in his mind, this was “going to be my way to become Korean American.”

“So you were attracted to Asian girls?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “like most white men. Oh wait.”

Romantic attraction was exceptionally complex for Steve. “There was me, wanting to claim some sort of authentic Korean identity. And wanting to get it on with hot Korean ladies. And also… wanting that sense of a tie to the country that was real. Having in-laws who spoke Korean. Belonging.” So did he end up marrying a Korean American? “Of course not! I met a nice white lady,” Steve said. “But it wasn’t for lack of trying!”

So he’s married. Others are still second-guessing. While Rachel knows that all kinds of men do sometimes leave their wives, relationship security feels even more precarious to her. “I feel like in my situation, I’m almost worried that there’s two times more of a chance that they will [leave me],” she said. “I know it’s not scientific, but it feels like, ‘Do you really want me? Are you sure? How do you know?”

Previously: Part 1: What’s Your Name?
Part 2: When Adoption Became Visible

Sarah Idzik is a writer living in Chicago.