Where my bubble tea drinkers at?
September 15, 2009 8:27 AM   Subscribe

Jen Kwok implores you to Date An Asian. (SLYT, language NSFW)
posted by hermitosis (73 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
I was thinking about linking this here the last few days, but I feared people here would be jerk-asses over a SLYT post.

This video is fucking brilliant.

"At least fuck one!"
posted by chunking express at 8:37 AM on September 15, 2009


I would, but I have a hard time locating those Uzbekistanian women I find so comely.
posted by adipocere at 8:38 AM on September 15, 2009


Women? Did you watch the video?
posted by chunking express at 8:39 AM on September 15, 2009


adipocere did you like the crying game
posted by boo_radley at 8:40 AM on September 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


It's delicious!
posted by jeffamaphone at 8:46 AM on September 15, 2009


Ooh! Can we debate whether dating an Asian man will make me a hipster? Please?
posted by Help, I can't stop talking! at 8:47 AM on September 15, 2009


I was kinda like 'mmmmmeee....hhh....' and then the last 30 seconds or so were awesome.
posted by six-or-six-thirty at 8:49 AM on September 15, 2009


It is interesting to see binormative assumptions every once in a while. We have plenty of media that just assume we are all heterosexual, but the assumption that we are all bi is kind of a novel thing. How long until we see homonormative stuff?
posted by idiopath at 8:49 AM on September 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


Bet you can't eat just one...!

...date two, they're small!
posted by markkraft at 8:49 AM on September 15, 2009 [2 favorites]


Ooh! Can we debate whether dating an Asian man will make me a hipster? Please?

No. Fuck that shit.

We can quote funny lines from the song though. "Yeah I'm dating a white guy, but I ain't no hypocrite."

She has a website. And there is a website for the song as well.
posted by chunking express at 8:51 AM on September 15, 2009


(Fear not, chunking express: I was being all kinds of sarcastic.)
posted by Help, I can't stop talking! at 8:53 AM on September 15, 2009


everything about that is amazing. I'm a cynical bastard, but shit like this reminds me that sometimes the world is an okay place.
posted by shmegegge at 9:01 AM on September 15, 2009


Many years ago I translated something that was going to be part of a submission to the EU, on the history of Chinese migration to Europe. Anyway, apparently when Chinese people first arrived in Liverpool it was a sailors, what with the 'Pool being a major port and everything, and it was exclusively men given the gender make-up of the merchant navy at the time. The local women were keen on Chinese husbands as anecdotally they were less likely to drink and beat you than their English counterparts, though on the down side they might be more likely to gamble everything away behind your back.
I think that should be enough stereotypes to be going on with for the time being.
posted by Abiezer at 9:02 AM on September 15, 2009 [8 favorites]


What, Irish farmers aren't good enough for 'em?
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:05 AM on September 15, 2009


It is interesting to see binormative assumptions every once in a while.

I didn't see it as binormative as much as just inclusive. Date an Asian man if you're a lady or a dude.

"Just please, don't date my Dad"
posted by jessamyn at 9:09 AM on September 15, 2009 [3 favorites]


Holy crap the end was SO AWKWARD.

Also: Put Asians in movies.
posted by amuseDetachment at 9:09 AM on September 15, 2009 [3 favorites]


I agree with six-or-six-thirty.

The "Don't Date My Dad" breakdown turns comedy gold into comedy platinum.

(black guy married to a cantonese girl for 29 years. Yes, I'm laughing at your "hipster" ass)
posted by djrock3k at 9:09 AM on September 15, 2009


jessamyn: "I didn't see it as binormative as much as just inclusive."

Typically a shift in implied gender of a romantic interest would also be accompanied by a shift in implied audience - but she continues as if she were still addressing the same imagined audience. She is not overtly calling her audience bisexual, but there is something going on there I am pretty sure.
posted by idiopath at 9:13 AM on September 15, 2009


I'm not gay, but I wouldn't kick Chow Yun Fat out of my bed either.
posted by Astro Zombie at 9:15 AM on September 15, 2009 [5 favorites]


"I'm not gonna tell you his name, cuz you're not gonna be able to find him now"

This was great. I'm gonna watch the rest of her uploads now, as I suspect further greatness may be found on that list.
posted by EatTheWeek at 9:15 AM on September 15, 2009


I loved this video. Hilarious and light-hearted. But I think there's some real pain underneath this idea.

In Freakonomics they discussed a study of roughly 300,000 users from a "major online dating site":

Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their email queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men. Is it possible that race really didn’t matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them? Or, more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter because they wanted to come across—especially to potential mates of their own race—as openminded? The gulf between the information we publicly proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast.

Dating is difficult. Dating While Minority is really fucking difficult.
posted by naju at 9:17 AM on September 15, 2009 [2 favorites]


Amusingly, Jen's Dad is listed on the about page of the DateAnAsian site, with a hyperlink and everything.
posted by jessamyn at 9:21 AM on September 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


naju: "real pain underneath this idea"

On this note, I have heard descriptions (my google fu is failing me for links) of how this is particularly difficult for black women and asian men. There is a stereotypical continuum of masculinity / femininity that I have heard explicitly described (in reference to porn):

Black - White - Asian

Where a pairing "works" in terms of stereotypes of gender and race if the man is in the same position or to the left of the woman. Many people, consciously or unconsciously, seem to take this seriously. For simple mathematical reasons, this makes it much harder for black women and asian men to find partners.

Just to be clear, I don't know for certain that trends in interracial dating actually follow that rule, and the perception of that trend may be a part of the stereotype.
posted by idiopath at 9:26 AM on September 15, 2009


This was great. When I got to the "Just please, don't date my Dad" part, I was very glad that my cubemates were all in a meeting somewhere else, so I wouldn't have to explain why I was laughing and falling out of my chair.
posted by rtha at 9:29 AM on September 15, 2009


Dating is difficult. Dating While Minority is really fucking difficult.

In speed-dating studies, women of most races exhibit strong same-race preferences (Asian women apparently do not). Of course, this has the effect of producing serious obstacles for both men and women of minorities.
posted by grobstein at 9:38 AM on September 15, 2009


Asian men need to date black women in order to balance the stereotype of black men going after white women and white men going after asian women.
posted by snofoam at 9:41 AM on September 15, 2009


Grobstein, here's that speed-dating study (PDF) from the Review of Economic Studies. Women of all races, including Asian, were biased most favorably towards men of the same race, and against men of some or all other races.

Women of all the races which were studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race for marriage, with the caveat that East Asian women only discriminated against Black and Hispanic men, and not against White men. A woman's race was found to have no effect on the men's choices. [here]
posted by kid ichorous at 9:49 AM on September 15, 2009 [10 favorites]


At the dating service I worked at so long ago, race not only turned out to be a Big Issue, but in ways that we really did not expect. We had some very broad strokes categories, and, after a tussle between "Oriental" and "Asian," "East Asian" was settled upon as being at least more descriptive. Data from the studies cited in the research from the business plan (which had some very amusing bits of significance we didn't really want to put in the dating profiles, like head size) indicated that race was a factor, and that pre-weighting that preference slightly helped. So, if you were Caucasian and you felt that dating other Caucasians was more important to you, as an individual than, say, height, that'd be under consideration in the calculations.

However, we realized that "East Asian" turned out to be too large of a category, after we matched people who identified that way with other people who identified that way when they said, "Yes, I'd like to date someone who is East Asian." We heard from numerous Chinese folks that they would not date Japanese folks, and vice versa, and that even suggesting a potential match (even though they marked down that they preferred East Asians) there was not only Right Out, but fairly offensive.

I suspect/hope that this sort of thing has died off, but who knows?

Dating is hard. Dating While Minority is harder. Online Dating While Minority When The People Constructing the Matches Have a Naive Understanding of the Complexities of Race Relations ... hardest.
posted by adipocere at 9:54 AM on September 15, 2009 [4 favorites]


I've met enough Asian women who wouldn't ever date anyone outside of their ethnicity that I suspect it all balances out. Wake me when marauding hordes of unmarried Asian men are rampaging through the American countryside, burning farmsteads and absconding with Latinas.
posted by 1adam12 at 10:04 AM on September 15, 2009 [2 favorites]


MetaFilter: Laughing at your "hipster" ass.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:10 AM on September 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


Geez, 1adam12, that's a bit problematic. Aside from the data upthread not showing that to necessarily be true, what if Asian men understandably don't want to date/marry the kind of person who "wouldn't ever date anyone outside of their ethnicity" (i.e. a racist, yes)?
posted by naju at 10:21 AM on September 15, 2009


As someone who is black and asian, I never fully got into online dating sites and I strongly suspected that when presented with someone who looks black most people would be seeing my profile through stereotyped-colored glasses.

On the other hand, f2f I found plenty of friends and romantic partners because f2f people also have a more data (a fuller experience of the phenomenological person) that renders their stereotypes irrelevant.

None of this is to say that I haven't had any dating/friendship weirdness affected by issues of race, but my sense is that online people might pursue their fantasies (that whole Lacanian screen thing) than encounter the Real.

Speaking of screens: fantastic video. Thanks, hermitosis.
posted by mistersquid at 10:24 AM on September 15, 2009



The "Don't Date My Dad" breakdown turns comedy gold into comedy platinum.


It's also a necessary component of the song if anyone is taking her advice. Her dad's kinda cute.
posted by louche mustachio at 10:31 AM on September 15, 2009 [2 favorites]


Is this something that I needed to be Asian to get?

Because I missed the lulz.
posted by subaruwrx at 10:40 AM on September 15, 2009 [2 favorites]


As a white man, I put my hands up for bubble tea because it is delicious.
posted by GuyZero at 10:46 AM on September 15, 2009


Is this something that I needed to be Asian to get?

Not even a little bit. I laughed myself sick.

And then I tried to Google her dad.
posted by padraigin at 10:47 AM on September 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


Also, a shout-out to Persians? I mean, Persians are great and all - I love the tiny limes guys - but that's kind of stretching the modern definition of "Asian".
posted by GuyZero at 10:48 AM on September 15, 2009


GuyZero: A little known fact is that we'll claim to be Asian when that's more convenient than trying to convince people that we're White. Personally I loved the shout-out!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 10:53 AM on September 15, 2009


Ah, man, where was this on alt.soc.oriental-fetish? Good times...
posted by jadepearl at 12:00 PM on September 15, 2009


that's kind of stretching the modern definition of "Asian"

Huh? Iran is between the Mediteranean and the Pacific, you know, in Asia. "Asian" is a geographic term. I'm about to blow your mind: Iranians are both white (Iran=Aryan) and Asian.
posted by Pollomacho at 12:23 PM on September 15, 2009


some korean eye candy
posted by needled at 12:59 PM on September 15, 2009


That was really quite funny. And now it's stuck in my head.

I also just realized the director is a guy who I went high school and college with, and the director of photography was my sorta kinda second grade boyfriend who lived down the street. I used to go to his house and watch him play Nintendo. And now I'm watching his work on YouTube via Metafilter. How worlds collide.
posted by mostlymartha at 1:35 PM on September 15, 2009


But I already married an Asian guy. Where's my video about how people think we're just friends because white girls can't find Asian men attractive, let alone get hitched to them?
posted by saturnine at 1:51 PM on September 15, 2009


saturnine: "people think we're just friends"

Are you being sarcastic or does this seriously happen?
posted by idiopath at 2:03 PM on September 15, 2009


That seriously happens.
posted by saturnine at 2:15 PM on September 15, 2009


The love whose name other people dare not speak I guess.
posted by GuyZero at 2:17 PM on September 15, 2009


saturnine: Wow. When I hang out with female friends people just take for granted that we are an item, and it's not like I am good looking or anything. Maybe the fact that people are prejudiced about particular kinds of interracial relationships is a sign of progress, and a nuance that would be less likely in a more racist time, but it is really sad to hear things like that.
posted by idiopath at 2:28 PM on September 15, 2009


I wouldn't kick Chow Yun Fat out of my bed either.

I'm not gay either, but Andy Lau or STFU!
posted by PeterMcDermott at 2:29 PM on September 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


I'd date Stephen Chow any day.
posted by The Biggest Dreamer at 2:40 PM on September 15, 2009


Hehehe.

Where my bubble tea drinkers at?

Everyone should be raising their hands for that one. It's delicious.

posted by lazaruslong at 2:43 PM on September 15, 2009 [2 favorites]


that's kind of stretching the modern definition of "Asian"

It varies from area to area. In Australia and along the Pacific Rim, an "Asian" is typically someone from China, Japan, Korea or south-east Asia. In the UK, however, "Asian" commonly means Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan.
posted by acb at 2:51 PM on September 15, 2009


It's delicious.

Can't. Texture issues. Eeeeeeeee.
posted by jessamyn at 3:09 PM on September 15, 2009 [4 favorites]


"therefore, you won't be able to date him"

You don't hear the word "therefore" too much in popular songs. I don't know why. It's a good word. Not up there with "placenta" or "lucidity", but still pretty good.
posted by Mike Buechel at 3:40 PM on September 15, 2009


What music has taught me about romantic relationships with women: date an Asian, never make a pretty woman your wife, she gotta pack much back, and never let your partner smell yo dick if you come home at five in the mo'nin' 'cause you been out all night cheatin'.
posted by HotPatatta at 3:46 PM on September 15, 2009




I am so going to date her dad.
posted by ursus_comiter at 4:18 PM on September 15, 2009


MetaFilter: don't date my dad; I'll cut you
posted by bwg at 4:35 PM on September 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


It's not really her dad! It's comedian and photographer Phil Nee. And according to facebook, he's single...

i looked it up cuz i don't want her to cut me
posted by raztaj at 4:39 PM on September 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


But don't kill them.
posted by cogneuro at 7:31 PM on September 15, 2009


It's no Jungle Fever.

Okay, it's not trying to be nor is Jungle Fever trying to be Date an Asian, they don't really have anything in common except jokes about interracial relations. Really, the only reason I'm linking to this is that after listening to that song more often than I can count I can't hear the word Punjabi without thinking "you can try but you won't rob me."
posted by Kattullus at 7:49 PM on September 15, 2009


OK, excellent on several levels. I like how it starts by inviting everyone to agree that dating asian women is awesome, then switches to asian men without breaking stride.

Also, the guest rapper Soce the E.W. amuses me to no end.

I'd hit that.
posted by LMGM at 8:48 PM on September 15, 2009


Where my bubble tea drinkers at?

here!
posted by pinky at 10:03 PM on September 15, 2009


That was excellent.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 10:11 PM on September 15, 2009


I'm not gay, but I wouldn't kick Chow Yun Fat out of my bed either.

Come on. Like anyone could kick Chow Yun Fat out of anywhere he wanted to be.
posted by No-sword at 4:28 AM on September 16, 2009 [6 favorites]


I'm pretty sure Chow Yun Fat enters all rooms through a plate glass window, firing two .45s and followed by a flock of doves.
posted by EatTheWeek at 9:32 AM on September 16, 2009 [7 favorites]


GuyZero: Also, a shout-out to Persians? I mean, Persians are great and all - I love the tiny limes guys - but that's kind of stretching the modern definition of "Asian".

How is Iran not in Asia? The modern definition of Asian is stupid.
posted by sid at 10:24 AM on September 16, 2009


It's clumsy because it's a geographical term used to refer to a racial group. The two are connected but they won't align perfectly. Iranians look like white Europeans is all.
posted by grobstein at 12:41 PM on September 16, 2009


Iranians look like white Europeans is all.

Yeah, I mean it's not like they are Caucasians or anything.
posted by Pollomacho at 12:49 PM on September 16, 2009


lolol
posted by grobstein at 12:52 PM on September 16, 2009


I'm not gay, but I wouldn't kick Chow Yun Fat out of my bed either.

I am and would, since he put on weight.

some korean eye candy

Not that I'm versed in K-ent or anything... While Xiah Junsu is cute and awesome, he does not have the Best Body. Not even in his own group. A case can be made for Yunho, but not Junsu.

Where is Hyunjoong on that list?
posted by fatehunter at 1:32 PM on September 16, 2009


Q&A with Jen Kwok on Sepia Mutiny. (That's where I saw this video first.)
posted by chunking express at 1:41 PM on September 16, 2009


I like bubble tea, and I'm not even Asian.
posted by bwg at 5:06 PM on September 16, 2009


Where is Hyunjoong on that list?

still recovering from swine flu at the moment.
posted by needled at 5:38 PM on September 16, 2009


« Older Wonder what this will do for book sales?   |   IANARL Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments