I said I’d convert to placate my boyfriend. But his family would never disregard the fact that I was Korean.By E. Tammy Kim
New York City’s least remarkable interracial couple is the Asian American woman/Jewish man. In middle-class, over-educated enclaves of Manhattan and Brooklyn, it’s an inescapable pair.
Yet it took me a while—a decade in the city—to join these ubiquitous ranks. For years I had dated mostly Korean and Asian-American men, opting for bodily familiarity and trying to fulfill my parents’ vision of an appropriate mate. As I hacked my own path through the brush of my early 30s, however, I grew open to new possibilities of attraction and desire.
It’s an experience we’re quickly losing to the glance-and-swipe froideur of Internet dating: the man who’s not your type but sends you reeling in person; the unwelcome Eros that barges its way in. That’s how it was with P., my first Jewish boyfriend, whom I loved and who loved me in equal, unwitting measure. In our universe of two, we might have had many more years ahead of us, but in the real world, we succumbed to the fatal, familial tribalism that dating profiles articulate as “preference.”
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