Yellow Fever

They got it bad, and that ain't good.

Comments (0) By Vickie Chang Tuesday, Nov 7 2006

But to be honest, that's not always a stereotype. Cameron, a gay Vietnamese American in his mid-20s who used to work for USC's influential Asian Pacific American Student Assembly, acknowledges that the goal of upward mobility can make white rice queens seem attractive to Asians.

"It's the history of colonialism. The colonizers are attractive because they're the ones with power," he says. "If you want to move up in the world, you want to date white."

Photo by Jennie Warren. Makeup by Bill Child

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Editor's note:
This article originally appeared in OC Weekly, in Santa Ana, California.

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Dan says his last girlfriend before undergoing what he calls "The Change" was another Ann. Annie, actually. She was Chinese American, a UCI student and a born-again Christian who claimed a "secondary virginity."

By the conclusion of their five-month relationship, the secondary virginity had disappeared just as the first one had. Soon afterward, she made Dan disappear, too. Not long after that, Dan went through a tumultuous quarter-life crisis.

He's now dating Frida, a fourth-year film major of mixed Mexican and European descent he met while working at a local movie theater. He's glad to have renounced his narrow-minded ways.

"I was going through a lot of changes in my life and rethinking things," he recalls. "My obsession with Asian women was one of the aspects of myself I found to be not healthy."

He's a new man, he says, living by a new philosophy: "Asian women tend to be mean, stingy abusers."

*All names have been changed.