By William Wetherall
Asiaphilia is a warped love of Asia. Asiaphiliaphobia is emotional opposition to Asiaphilia, whereas anti-Asiaphilia is reasoned opposition. Then there is "beyond Asiaphilia".
Color fevers
An Asiaphile or Asiaphiliac is a person who loves Asia. These words are also used to mean a person who suffers from "Asiaphilia" defined as a racial fetish for Asian men or women.
Asiaphiles and Asiaphiliacs are mostly "non-Asians" who suffer from "yellow fever". But some "Asians" are also inflicted by this disease -- caused by a virus that has white, black, and other variants.
Critics of color philias view tastes in racial traits alone as superficial or shallow, on a par with height, body mass, or earlobe preferences and attractions for facial dimples or washboard abs. They see racial tastes based on stereotypic ethnic expectations as a form of racism. They are probably right.
Yet, as Woody Allen piped about his love for a much younger woman who he had helped raise when she was a girl, the heart knows what it wants. The difference between pathological and healthy feelings is mostly a matter of defining unacceptable or damaging behaviors. Such distinctions beg questions like agreeable or harmful to whom.
Abnormality turns out to be anything not normal. Deviance is that which veers toward the negative. Depravity is possession by evil and wicked thoughts and temptations that cause falls into sin. The most forbidden acts are called taboos.
Sexual transgressions abound. Incest is proscribed. Premarital relations are discouraged. Extramarital affairs are cause for divorce. Rape is criminalized. Prostitution is prohibited but tolerated. The definitions and consequences of such behaviors vary from place to place and case by case, and shift with time.
Drawing lines
The lines between love and philia, and hate and phobia, are also fuzzy. Philias and phobias are addictions, attachments, fetishes, obsessions, paranoias, morbid dreads or fears, abhorrence. Yet love and hate share opposite ends of the spectrum of affect. Both are blind to reason. Thought and dispassion render romantic love unconditional. Understanding and compassion defuse hate.
You can love someone because, on balance, you want to associate with the person -- despite some things you may not like and might actually hate about the person.
You can hate war because you know what war is -- yet you recognize that resisting and counterattacking an invader is as sensible as stopping the spread of, and extinguishing, a raging fire that threatens your home or neighborhood -- if not another country.
Philias and phobias, though, involve infatuations with, indulgences in, or fixations on objects as embodiments of imaginary, fantasized, or projected -- rather than actual -- traits.
A woman may lust after men whose physiques and mannerisms evoke, for her, masculinity, strength, adventure, wealth, and freedom. A man may crave women with physical and behavioral traits which, in his mind, promise sexual pleasure and servitude. These are only a few of the returns that individuals of both sexes seek from social investments in objects of sexual desire -- including, of course, everlasting love, companionship, and children.
What is the difference between an act of love and the feeding of a habit? When does craving swarthy skin or long blond hair become a form of substance abuse?
Luring a person who happens to be an object of carnal philia into marriage or another kind of conjugal relationship, and continuing to imbibe in that person's physical charms, may be like drinking wine for breakfast. But what if the dependency is coincidental (concomitant? comorbid?) with a courtship that involves complete recognition and appreciation of, and full respect and gratitude for, the person beneath the skin or under the hair?
Is "love" of the kind that leads to stable marriages and families, in societies that value personal freedom and choice, possible without allowances for the complex chemistries of interpersonal attraction? Across all manner of old fences that may still, today, be posted with no-trespassing signs?
Crossing lines
Romantic crossings of lines of faith, class, caste, blood, nation, and race can evoke the strongest revulsion and draw the most powerful censure from people who oppose mixing -- in their family or community, if not in principle.
I have been a subscriber to Amerasia since its start in 1971. The focus of Volume 25, Number 2, 1999 is "Crossing the Color Line: The End of the 20th Century".
The issue includes an article called "Yellow Visions" by Darrell Y. Hamamoto (pages 169-173). In the article, a review of the Sixteenth Annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, Hamamoto says this (page 171).
Each film confronts different aspects of Asiaphilia as it plays out through sexuality, food, and love. In an amusing twist, the autobiographical Beyond Asiaphilia (Valerie Soe, 1997) poses the provocative question as to whether an Asian American woman -- after a lifetime of racialized lust for blue-eyed White men -- can be considered an Asiaphile after falling in love with Hong Kong screen sensation Chow Yun-Fat and thereafter dreaming desirously of Yellow men.
San Francisco video artist and writer Valerie Soe is known for a number of stimulating works and productions. One of the more remarkable and personal -- an interactive video exhibition called "Mixed Blood" (1992) -- examines "interracial relationships" and "cross-cultural intimacy" in "the Asian American community" among other themes related to "miscegenation".
Since December 2008, Soe has had a blog called beyondasiaphilia. The blog, exceeding the promise of its name, is the antithesis of Asiaphilia -- a shrine, in its own right, to numerous counter fetishes.
11 November 2009
