A Match Made in Heaven?: "Past Lives," Asian Women, and White Men
The racialized love game between the Asian woman and the white guy—what can Celine Song's critically-acclaimed "Past Lives" teach us about immigration and mourning an intimacy untouched by whiteness?
by Karissa Korman, Lifestyle and Culture Editor
In June, my friends and I left our sluggish corporate internships and met up at the AMC in downtown Boston to see Celine Song’s Past Lives. We’d been witnesses to an influx of promotional material for the movie that summer: short social cuts on TikTok about a Korean Canadian woman, her old flame Hae Sung from Seoul, and her third-wheeling white husband. As a group, I thought we hit the film’s target demographic right on the head—all young Asian women, one or two generations into American citizenship, a few better-off-forgotten relationships (from our past lives, if you will) under our belts.
On a Monday night in the middle of the quiet season in the city, when the neighboring Emerson and Suffolk students jump ship until fall, the ridiculously cavernous theater (visually and spiritually akin to a Las Vegas casino, or a Cheesecake Factory) was empty save for my friends and a handful of other Asian girls—on dates with their white boyfriends.
“Wasn’t it weird for them?” said one of my friends when we left. “Couldn’t they read the room?” she was asking. I agreed with them and their derision for the theater’s unexpected pairings, even though I knew that of all people, I had precariously little ground to stand on.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask on the Green Line platform, but I wondered if my friends felt as doomed as I did about Past Lives, like Song had invoked my name on-screen without my permission. I was an immigrant too (on a debated technicality; I was a Chinese adoptee to white Americans). Like the film’s protagonist Nora, I couldn’t really speak my native language (see: “adoptee from China”), and I’d also dated a white guy and run into all the strange, outsized geopolitical anxieties that came with it. But on the train home, I settled for laughing at the irony and saying the others just must not have seen the ads.
I was toeing dangerously over the border between self-deprecation and outright hypocrisy, but our less-than-keen observations about the other summer leftovers who’d gone to watch an earnest white guy lag behind his film’s first- and second-billed Korean leads were a product of a kind of pattern recognition that would be myopic to disregard.
Past Lives had Nora and her husband Arthur. And the 1960s had Yoko Ono and John Lennon. American soldiers spent the latter half of a century bringing their war brides (from Japan in the 40s, Vietnam and Korea in the 50s, and Vietnam again in the 60s and 70s) back home to meet the parents. Mark Zuckerberg married fellow Harvard student Priscilla Chan in 2012, the day after Facebook went public. Indie teenagers keep tabs on beabadoobee and the tall untanned boyfriend who’s taken residence in her Instagram stories—hairpin triggers for accusations that she’s unwittingly fallen prey to Yellow Fever from commenters who fantasize about dating her themselves. Even Capitol Hill has freakish Republican twin flames Mitch McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao—the first Asian American woman to serve in a presidential cabinet but only one in a line of many Asian Other halves, in a fraught history and inheritance we’ve learned to recite by heart.
Somehow less a matter of “colorblind” romantic happenstance than a mess of racial and sexual politics, the metaphysical Asian woman and white man of our cultural imagination has evolved into a damning match made in heaven. In this arranged meet-cute, a white guy manifests his exotic fantasy into a souvenir girlfriend, and an Asian girl gives in to his looming imperial sway, somehow a traitor to her race and a hapless, stupid victim at the same time.
An Asian girl and a white guy—we know when we see it, and we seem to know exactly what we think about it when we do. But seldom do we interrogate exactly what it is we’re looking for in these couples.
It’s difficult to breach the subject of Asia and America’s long-term historic relationship without invoking the names of movies that spanned the 20th century and helped to encode the sexual racialization of Asian women into our American imagination. Hollywood films like Sayonara (1957), The World of Suzie Wong (1960), and Full Metal Jacket (1987) latched onto perverse tropes meant to mirror white American attitudes toward Asians at home and abroad: simultaneously provocative, submissive, and sinister Asian women who sought to dominate and be dominated by white hegemonic masculinity paired with Anglo-American men who enlisted in the military and carried out their duties as the purveyors of good over Asian women, their foreign countries, and their exotic bodies.
The West has long since been invested in the romance of this “Far East Orient” and its violent climax in imperialist American militarism in Asia and the Pacific Rim, figured for decades as sexual exploitation and subjugation. The successful hyphenation of Asian women as Asian-American is reliant upon shows of obedience to white Westerness and masculinity, an always-on, impossible piety meant to soothe Orientalist anxieties about our supposed sexual infidelity and political deviancy.
On- and off-screen, Asian women are triply subordinated at the intersection of sex, race, and imperialism, and whether we like it or not, this kind of historical inheritance becomes almost impossible to forget in our relationships with white men, whom history would have cast as our mutual Yellow Peril.
The accusations—from white people, Asian men, other people of color, and even from among Asian women ourselves—about why these couples get together are as predictable as the pairing itself. Self-hatred, internalized racism, a Freudian second-generation parental hang-up, a sick and twisted secret desire to participate in some kind of Lotus Blossom fetish porn. Tying all of these hypotheses together is a vision of Asian women circumnavigating the world of whiteness, its men, and the privilege they must promise. Whether they’re war brides stealing patriotic enlistees from their forlorn fiancées at home, exotic prostitutes making a buck off of American G.I.s, local women cashing in on men’s sexual tourism sprees through Asia, or too-smart Model Minorities climbing the ladder, Asian women have always posed a corruptive threat to the “goodness” of America.
It’s difficult not to succumb to the allure of intimating a proximity to whiteness, especially for a group of people who experience a kind of xenophobic racism known as “Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome,” which imagines Asian Americans as forever foreigners and innately Other to Americanness.
I was raised in Tennessee with a white last name and the parents to match, but at eighteen with a blond-haired, blue-eyed boyfriend—a statistical inevitability in a town that was almost 90% white—I’d still managed to inherit Asian women’s generational curse. It seemed like my connection to a white man, the one thing meant to rescue me from my perpetual foreignness and fated exotic promiscuity, was its own self-fulfilling damnation.
Around this time last year, I went on a date with a Chinese American guy who’d moved to Boston from California, which I imagined naively as some kind of diverse, pan-Asian mecca. He wanted to go to a cartoonish country-themed bar outside Fenway Park, saying it was line dancing night, so we had to go. About halfway through a generic conversation about spending Chinese New Year in Manhattan, he unceremoniously asked me if I had any exes. I must have made a face, because he dropped, “Oh, was he white?” as a follow-up question, which I thought was awfully judgemental for someone who wanted to go to an over-decorated Cracker Barrel that sold alcohol.
“Great,” I told my friends when I came home. “He probably thinks I hate myself.” We didn’t go out again.
In the past, I would’ve rolled my eyes and assured any naysayers that even my teenaged self had the sense to differentiate between my status as a girlfriend and a fetish. But the news cycle from the last few years alone is wretched proof enough that some fears are healthy to hold onto, if only for our base survival. It turns out that a legacy of sexual imperialism is tough to shake.
In an essay for The Cut, author Elaine Hsieh Chou described overhearing two white men divulge to each other how to successfully get Asian women (nationality notwithstanding—they’re all interchangeable, after all) into bed with them. On a train in Taipei, they’d assumed no one around could understand them.
Eight years later, Chou was living in New York and working on a novel about a Taiwanese American woman with a complicated relationship to white men—“She is both attracted to them and disgusted by her attraction,” she wrote. Chou’s research took her to sluthate.com, a forum where she stumbled across a white man who fantasized about raping his half-Japanese teenage daughter, christened on the website as a “little geisha fuck doll” and “little neo-colonialist jewel.”
On another forum, Chou found a post from a white man asking if he could still call himself a white nationalist if he wanted to fuck Asian women at the same time. “In the replies, men advertised us like an infomercial, touting our supposed pros over cons: ‘their pussies are really tight’; ‘their skin feels so nice’; ‘they open their legs easy,’” Chou wrote. Another blog declared that Asian women were bound to be enslaved to white men. The manifesto ended with the commandment: “If an asian woman becomes old, ugly, out of shape, disfigured, or diseased, then she should be divorced, abandoned, sold to someone else, or sent back to China or wherever she came from; and the White master can go back to Asia and pick out a new asian woman to replace her.”
In 2021, a man traveled to three spas in the Atlanta area and killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women. He told the police himself that he had a “sexual addiction” and murdered the women in the parlors to eliminate his “temptation.” In the months following the shooting in Atlanta, Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition that gathers data on racially-motivated attacks, found that Asian women reported 63.3% of all recorded hate incidents—that’s over twice as often as Asian men. In 2022, Michelle Alyssa Go was pushed into an oncoming Times Square train. Another man in New York assaulted seven Asian women in two hours. Manhattan police found the body of Christina Yuna Lee in her apartment—she’d been followed home, stabbed to death and left half-naked in her bathtub.
Later that same year here in Boston, a 64-year-old Asian woman was kidnapped outside a train station by a man who strangled and repeatedly sexually assaulted her before leaving her in a mall parking lot. According to a transit police report, the man had tried and failed to kidnap a different Asian woman just 10 minutes earlier at the same station.
During this period, I was one of only a few Asian editors at my student-run newspaper, and reports on the rape of Asian women was quickly becoming my beat. The turnover was exhausting me. I’d tried explaining the impact to my then-boyfriend, who was politically liberal and tried his best to be personally sympathetic, but the gnawing awareness that he would never truly be fluent in the language I was speaking to him was becoming its own weight to bear.
The boundary between the racialized love game between Asian women and white men and any coincidental visible subscriptions to it is far from concrete. But I worry that discourse about whether or not beabadoobee’s boyfriend has an Asian fetish (probably not)—or even Mitch McConnell (probably)—misses the crux of what Asian Americans tend to recognize universally as an issue in favor of diagnosing the Asian woman at hand with an illness of her own that she caught by getting with someone so obviously ill with “Yellow Fever.”
It’s more than likely that the couples seated in the auditorium for Past Lives couldn’t all be followers of this kind of perilous binary set-up that must exist in explicit terms between Asian women and white men. And certainly Celine Song, an immigrant to Canada from South Korea—and one half of a multiracial marriage—herself, knew how to tread around Nora and her husband.
Deceptively simple, Past Lives is, after all, a story about immigration and the past lives we forget to mourn before it is a romance about star-crossed lovers or an opportunity to punch up at goofy white guys with much cooler Asian wives. I burst into tears just before the credits rolled in the theater—when Nora sends her childhood sweetheart off to the airport in a taxi and walks back to her husband in tears—because Greta Lee is just that good an actress and that contagious a cryer. Even though we poked fun at the irony of it all on the train home, my friends’ mascara was smudged and dried up around their eyes, leftover evidence of some kind of shot through the heart we couldn’t quite recognize in the moment.
I really didn’t want to like Nora’s white husband in Past Lives. It was my first summer out of a relationship with a white guy, and I wasn’t eager to succumb once more to another one—even if he was ultimately decent, probably Yellow-Fever-free, fictional, and important to the story at hand. My friends and I had left the theater oohing and aahing over Greta Lee’s perfect bob and Teo Yoo’s general face, with quiet acknowledgements that John Magaro’s Arthur wasn’t so bad. It felt traitorous to admit that, out of all the odd-throuple’s tense, loaded language (in English and in Korean), it was Arthur’s words that were eating me up inside.
“You dream in a language that I can’t understand,” he tells Nora one night. “It’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.”
When we got home, I told my friends that I’d had a near identical conversation with my ex-boyfriend. I wasn’t in the habit of revealing much about that relationship then, and my friends looked at me with a mix of pity and political disbelief that made me wish I could go back in time and repeat it to the guy at the line dancing bar, just to see his face.
Until the plot of Past Lives catches up with her, Nora has spent her entire adult life putting off grieving for the life she lost when she moved from Korea to Canada, covering up whatever holes might be left with English fluency, a flowy wardrobe from The Row, and a white husband. Nora was 12—old enough to walk away with memories intact, but too young to remember how to write with her native alphabet or speak with an unaffected accent—when she immigrated to the West, whereas I was a baby with very little life to leave behind me. But Past Lives caught me, too, busy putting off my own what-ifs had I grown up in China and never become a hyphenated American, sheltered in Anhui miles and miles away from any Western immigration point and the men who lied beyond it.
The diasporic nature of Asianness leaves us all suspended somewhere between here and there, or then and now. And regardless of who we love, growing into an Eastern body in a Western world leaves us dreaming of a language we can’t speak ourselves. There is a whole vacant place inside of us where we can’t go, somewhere unscorned and untouched by whiteness and its imperial hand—so we make do with spectral mourning and make our peace with our other halves.
Karissa!!! This is so beautifully written T^T ♡
one of my favorite articles about past lives! i think that there's a lot that people took away from that the film that is internally from our experiences which is why i thoroughly enjoyed it. plus, you described the feeling of seeing our media plastered with asian woman + white man perfectly!