Editor's note: Fridae welcomes its newest columnist, Shinen Wong. Malaysia-born and Singapore-bred Wong is currently getting settled in Sydney, Australia after moving from the United States, having attended college in Hanover, New Hampshire, and working in San Francisco for a year after. In this new fortnightly "Been Queer. Done That" column, Wong will explore gender, sexuality, and queer cultures based on personal anecdotes, sweeping generalisations and his incomprehensible libido.
In University, I fell in love with a boy whose name is S. I was 21, and he was 19. I was in my third year of university, just one year short of graduation, whereas he had just matriculated, fresh out of high school, nervous and excited, a gorgeous mess of a character. He was scruffy, lightly bearded on his boyish face, with short sugary-brown hair gently tousled on his head. He was Caucasian, with a lean, tight-framed, slightly lanky body. He stood about half an inch or so taller than I, about 1.27 centimetres in metric, something he and I had joked about once, foreshadowing our insurmountable differences.
Two years later, I was graduating from university, and I had seen my heart endure many blows from my relationship with S. For two years, he and I had gone through a rollercoaster of relational madness. At the beginning of our friendship when I had finally mustered the courage to say hello while he was working for the dining services, we had both overcome our shyness and embarked on a friendship that was so euphoric it felt unreal. It was hard to pinpoint the exact reasons our relationship went awry. Perhaps it was related to our having slept together when the both of us were unready. I became very needy of him; I wanted desperately for him to be my boyfriend. I was so lonely in college, in America. I wanted to show him off, this gorgeous nerd of a boy, I wanted him and I to grow up into men together. I wanted him so that when I got older, I could remember my small New England college experience with that romantic nostalgia that I had prior only ever seen accorded to white, heterosexual American couples on television. I wanted to be Hollywood, Rolling Stones, but instead, my only bristle with Americana from our relationship was in its mimicry of the tragic death of James Dean. Gorgeous and short-lived.
Life, of course, is never cut quite so cleanly into the mould we hope for it to be. Firstly, I was, after all, already a jaded gay man when I first met S, I had already had boyfriends before him, and I was already misshapen. Our first date was less a triumph in its own right, and was more a relief from the excruciating monotony of my own melancholy coming out from previous relationships. Additionally, I was not American, and so whatever relationship I could have imagined pursuing with him was partially marred by the underlying fear that one day, I would have to leave the country. And lastly, I am Asian.
Which of course, need not be a source of upset or insecurity, but I must admit that years of interacting online both with white gay men and other Asians had left me a little unsettled about my racial and sexual identity. I had never before conceived of myself as masculine, as I had usually subjected my smooth body, hairlessness, and my demeanour to a stereotypical reading of East Asian bodies as feminine, de-sexed, or else only available for the scrutiny of white men much older than myself. I was the first man that S had ever been with, and I remember my astonishment when he first said to me that he loved my masculinity. Never did I think a white boy my own age could find me masculine or attractive. I refused to believe it.
And it was this refusal, armoured by my insecurities, that was finally to my own detriment.
One day, S and I were flirting online from our respective dorm rooms, at a time when we were openly into each other again (after a painful period of many ups and many downs). I told him how I loved his face, how my fingers trembled to touch his skin, to press into his lean body, how I loved threading them through his little beard, how I loved counting his infinite eyelashes that opened up like soft, dark drapes to reveal his sky-eyes. And after many cyber-smileys and blushings, after bathing him with compliments so he was soaked in my ardour, I took the opportunity to ask him what he felt attractive about me. He responded that he thought me "exotic and modern."
A few days after, S and I were not speaking again. The pattern of our relationship was always urgent and hesitant at the same time, desperate and distant. He always found himself put off by my easy vulnerability, and I always found myself frustrated by his emotional distance. I was too much of a pushover, and he was always so cold; his words could cut me like glass. However, this time, my frustration turned from weary sadness into sickening anger.
I obsessed for months and months about having been called 'exotic.' I had no idea why this word stung so much, especially as he had meant it as a compliment. In the past, when I was in Singapore, when other Caucasian men had called me exotic-looking, I had always calmly and gladly received it as a compliment, and yet this time, I was torn apart by it. Why?
On a superficial level, exotic does have some 'positive' connotations. Something that is described as exotic must be excitingly different, unusual, strange yet interesting and intriguing. However, conventionally the word is used to describe rugs, vases, plots of land, strip dancers, different species of animal. It was difficult then to receive this word as a compliment was I was caught up in how objectifying it was, and how possibly was, subconsciously, a manifestation of his need to distance me. After all, "exotic" cannot be a permanent quality of any object. In order to enjoy the exotic, we must keep it at a distance. As soon as we possess it, it becomes familiar, and it ceases to be exotic. It becomes part of our framework, and we must find other qualities within it if our love for it can be sustained.
Though Singapore is a country with an ethnic Chinese/Asian majority, the country often advertises itself as an "exotic" island and culture for foreign tourism (America, Australia, and most of Western Europe, I imagine, does not). In and of itself, I have nothing against valuing difference; Indeed, I encourage it, for it is through dialogue and interaction that different cultures mature into our globalising world. However, I am suspicious of the identity we Asians create for ourselves if we identify with our own exoticism. After all, the flip side to the "exotic" is the "normal." When S called me "exotic," he was simultaneously suggesting that he was "normal," that his culture and his body were the blank canvases, the neutral slates against which all other cultures and bodies in America might be compared.
In a way, the term "exotic" when used to describe me in Singapore did not hurt as badly as it did when I was in the USA, because in Singapore, I had no fantasy that I could ever be regarded as normal. My homosexuality was already legally beyond consummation, and since I was racially in the majority, I even considered it flattering that my racial "difference" might be recognised and regarded as sexy.
One of the insidious effects of colonisation for any culture, is in how it suddenly establishes certain images of sexuality and creativity as normative (as standards of normalcy), and in how the colonised peoples internalise these messages and are even willing to identify with our own inferiority or 'otherness,' even in our own countries.
In America, I got caught up in the American dream of the melting pot, where all cultures would come together and melt into beautiful American homogeneity. I became infatuated with being a part of American culture, with inheriting its long histories of racial and sexual revolution. In a way, I was exoticising America! But when S described me as exotic, it was a reminder that I could never fully attain that dream, and in a way, my relationship with S with all its personal tragedy was a part of that dream. I had to resign myself to the reality that, given my being a young, gay, "westernised" Asian man in our current world, I may very well perpetually be regarded as foreign, whether in the country I had grown up in (Singapore), or in the country in which I had hoped to make a home (the USA).
After I graduated from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 2007, I moved to San Francisco. S and I had already got together and broken up many times over, and I was too weary to keep in any significant contact. I was looking forward to establishing myself anew in San Francisco.
In San Francisco, I had a deep sense of its Asian American history. The whole San Francisco Bay Area has a visible and highly established culture of Asian folks who have integrated, assimilated and absorbed themselves into the creation of contemporary American culture, part of the fabric of the American national identity. With San Francisco's also famous history and visibility of gay and lesbian organising, this meant that there was an equally visible and strong presence of gay and lesbian Asians who were politically active participants in and creators of the larger Californian culture. As such, I never once felt exoticised while I was living and working in San Francisco. I felt like I was part of a strong history, and part of the culture. It was as if that awful boundary between my being gay (rejected or fetishised by straight folks) and my Asian racial heritage (rejected or exoticised by larger white/European-dominated gay communities) had finally dissolved into a blissful and integrated experience of my identity. I could be, to put it simply, 'myself.' For the first time, I felt like there was a world that could be my oyster.
Perhaps "exotic" is simply a reflection of a historical moment in which Asian sexuality, even in Asia, is still considered to be something "new" in its openness and in its articulation of a cohesive self-identity. Perhaps "exotic" is that intermediary state between the wholehearted rejection of that which is different and strange, and the final integration and absorption of difference into the mundanity of familiarity.
When it comes to love, of course, where would I want to be on this spectrum of rejection - exoticism - integration? As exciting as it may be for partners to regard each other as exotic, the initial excitement of encountering such difference usually fades into familiarity. Will the familiar be calm, sensual and serene? Or will it be unsettling, unsexy and tedious? Whether any initial exoticism in our relationship is interracial, interethnic, international, intercultural, intergenerational, interreligious, or even inter-gendered (such as in heterosexuality), what are the more permanent qualities on which a source of attraction might be based, so that our relationships might last?
I still think of S sometimes. I miss him like I miss America. The fantasy of the perfect land, the perfect person, the perfect working democracy, the superpower of being in the perfect relationship, but I know now that this is just a fantasy, an exotic dream, that when the lights are switched on and I open my eyes, maybe I can see that reality, with all of its imperfections, is even better.