Deep Purple

Ending my self-imprisonment

This is the most personal piece I’ve published. It’s about my journey undoing internalized racism and unlearning rules I created for myself.

I shared this story at Red Room Open Mic - an event I organized to celebrate Asian sensuality/sexuality.

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By any other standards, it was a Tinder date gone wrong.

She burst out crying as soon as we kissed. Then she fled my apartment, saying sorry, she couldn’t do this, because she realized she wasn’t over her ex. I was left standing in my bedroom and… I was glad.

She was the first East Asian woman I had ever kissed.

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There was one other Asian in the town I grew up in, and his name was Joe Malley. Joe Malley was adopted.

I, Daway Chou-Ren, was not.

The great shock to my life came when I was 10, when I moved to a town that was 30% Asian. I realized until that point, I had managed to live a life within an ideal – the ideal that “there is no such thing as color.” Now, unfortunately, I saw it. I saw that I was Asian, and others were white.

In my teens, I learned exactly how I was “undesirable”: it was my small eyes, small penis, small stature. The way I looked like every other Asian kid, especially from the back. Even my strengths became places of shame because they fit me into stereotype – like my intelligence and skill at tennis.

My parents named me Daway, a simple transliteration of my Mandarin name, 大為. Daway occupies a strange middle ground as an Asian name. It has no Xs or Zs. It’s clearly foreign but not particularly hard to pronounce. And it’s not a generic Asian-American name like Kevin or Michael or Peter. For better or worse, I felt different than other East Asians.

I thought if I could distance myself more from “them,” I could finally belong to the world. So I began kicking down on those who looked like me, but weren’t me.

I figured out that the clearest way to do that was to date someone who was white. So I dated Paulas, Anyas, and Claires. Non-whiteness turned out to be okay; my only real rule was you couldn’t look like me. Pakistani passed; so too did Filipino.

I decided if I were to be seen with an East Asian woman, it would have confirmed every stereotype I was trying to outrun. I lived like that for many years.

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So that day, when my Tinder date left in tears, that was the first time I had ever broken my own rule. It was the day my great chase for whiteness started ending. It was the day I started being free.

The unravelling of my internalized self-racism has not happened overnight. It’s taken years of tracing my thoughts to their origins. Following the thread until I find the imprints of Modern Western Culture – memories of overheard conversations, lines from movies, images from advertisements – that have left lingering imprints on my energetic body.

It’s taken gaining the distinction that some of what I thought were my thoughts or fears are actually sourced by others; I just took them on. (And the correlating distinction that it’s possible to give those fears and thoughts back to where they came from.) It’s taken developing a relationship to my space of sexual energy and noticing what stories and beliefs I’ve allowed to accumulate there. It’s taken learning to reflect the inherent love I can feel for other Beings back onto myself.

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This year, the page really turned. I’ve started engaging in physical and erotic intimacy with people who look like me. It’s new. My baseline for an intimate partner has mostly been white skin, European features, and brunette or dusty blondness. In learning to love other Asian bodies, I’m getting to be with distinct new colors and tones. When I run my hand through their hair, I am surprised that it can feel thick and brushlike, just like mine. When I look at their lips, I am surprised to see the deep purple I see every morning when I brush my teeth.

In learning to love Asian-ness with this detail, I am learning how to inhabit the appearance and culture that I spent so long trying to hide in myself.