For one, he insists on calling her by her family nickname, “Jing Jing,” in spite of his inability to pronounce it correctly. The novel milks her boyfriend J’s white ignorance for dramatic tension. Saturated with paranoia, the narrative portrays white-male/Asian-female (WMAF) couples as relationships inevitably doomed by ethnic difference.Īlexandra Chang’s autobiographical novel, Days of Distraction (2020), follows the travails of a Chinese American woman, also named Alexandra, who uproots her life in San Francisco and moves with her white boyfriend to Ithaca, where he is starting a Ph.D. I am an Asian woman, and a certain narrative about relationships like the ones I have had with white men has infiltrated recent Asian American literature. There was the drummer in the middle school jazz band, the high school class clown, the teaching assistant in political theory, the melancholic college debater, the aloof mathematician. Since Ben, I have yearned after many others. I am addicted to love: its hot flushes, its cold sweats, the way I am unmade and remade by it. But when it comes to matters of the heart, I throw myself headfirst, not so much falling as diving into love. ![]() I am precious with my body, the reason why I avoid sports that involve fast balls or speed in general (which is to say most sports). Maybe Ben was just sitting alone because he didn’t have any friends. I was eight and already doing the thing that I would catch myself doing, again and again, in my teens and then my twenties: idealizing the objects of my affection, creating characters with whom I proceeded to fall head over heels in love. Or at least that’s how I remember it, though who really knows. I imagined us kindred spirits, keeping a dignified distance from the ruckus of our fellow comrades. Nonetheless, I liked sitting next to him with a book open in my lap, admiring his air of quiet intelligence. I couldn’t talk to him, my ability to communicate in English at the time capped at raising my hand, mumbling “toilet,” and frowning. He often sat at the computer in the corner of the classroom, tapping away. Ben was a pale, thin boy with sandy hair and hazel eyes. ![]() The first white boy I loved was in the fourth grade, soon after I had moved from Taiwan to Australia.
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