FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/fashion/more-asian-americans-marrying-within-their-race.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
Published: March 30, 2012
WHEN she was a philosophy student at Harvard College eight years ago,
Liane Young never thought twice about all the interracial couples who
flitted across campus, arm and arm, hand in hand. Most of her Asian
friends had white boyfriends or girlfriends. In her social circles, it
was simply the way of the world.
Michael J Charles Photography
Xin Gao and Liane Young married last June.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Ann Liu, a Taiwanese-American, and her husband,
Stephen Arboleda, a Filipino-American, who married in October, in San
Francisco.
Jerry Yoon Photographers
Ann Liu and Stephen Arboleda in October at their
wedding in San Francisco. Ms. Liu later changed into a qipao.
But today, the majority of Ms. Young’s Asian-American friends on
Facebook have Asian-American husbands or wives. And Ms. Young, a
Boston-born granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, is married to a Harvard
medical student who loves skiing and the Pittsburgh Steelers and just
happens to have been born in Fujian Province in China.
Ms. Young said she hadn’t been searching for a boyfriend with an Asian
background. They met by chance at a nightclub in Boston, and she is
delighted by how completely right it feels. They have taken lessons
together in Cantonese (which she speaks) and Mandarin (which he speaks),
and they hope to pass along those languages when they have children
someday.
“We want Chinese culture to be a part of our lives and our kids’ lives,”
said Ms. Young, 29, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston
College who married Xin Gao, 27, last year. “It’s another part of our marriage that we’re excited to tackle together.”
Interracial marriage rates are at an all-time high
in the United States, with the percentage of couples exchanging vows
across the color line more than doubling over the last 30 years. But
Asian-Americans are bucking that trend, increasingly choosing their soul
mates from among their own expanding community.
From 2008 to 2010, the percentage of Asian-American newlyweds who were
born in the United States and who married someone of a different race
dipped by nearly 10 percent, according to a recent analysis
of census data conducted by the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, Asians
are increasingly marrying other Asians, a separate study shows, with matches between the American-born and foreign-born jumping to 21 percent in 2008, up from 7 percent in 1980.
Asian-Americans still have one of the highest interracial marriage rates
in the country, with 28 percent of newlyweds choosing a non-Asian
spouse in 2010, according to census data. But a surge in immigration
from Asia over the last three decades has greatly increased the number
of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes, giving young people many more
options among Asian-Americans. It has also inspired a resurgence of
interest in language and ancestral traditions among some newlyweds.
In 2010, 10.2 million Asian immigrants were living in the United States,
up from 2.2 million in 1980. Today, foreign-born Asians account for
about 60 percent of the Asian-American population here, census data
shows.
“Immigration creates a ready pool of marriage partners,” said Daniel T.
Lichter, a demographer at Cornell University who, along with Zhenchao
Qian of Ohio State University, conducted the study on marriages between
American-born and foreign-born Asians. “They bring their language, their
culture and reinforce that culture here in the United States for the
second and third generations.”
Before she met Mr. Gao, Ms. Young had dated only white men, with the
exception of a biracial boyfriend in college. She said she probably
wouldn’t be planning to teach her children Cantonese and Mandarin if her
husband had not been fluent in Mandarin. “It would be really hard,”
said Ms. Young, who is most comfortable speaking in English.
Ed Lin, 36, a marketing director in Los Angeles who was married in
October, said that his wife, Lily Lin, had given him a deeper
understanding of many Chinese traditions. Mrs. Lin, 32, who was born in
Taiwan and grew up in New Orleans, has taught him the terms in Mandarin
for his maternal and paternal grandparents, familiarized him with the
red egg celebrations for newborns and elaborated on other cultural
customs, like the proper way to exchange red envelopes on Chinese New
Year.
“She brings to the table a lot of small nuances that are embedded
culturally,” Mr. Lin said of his wife, who has also encouraged him to
serve tea to his elders and refer to older people as aunty and uncle.
Of course, race is only one of many factors that can come to bear in the
complicated calculus of romance. And marriage trends vary among Asians
of different nationalities, according to C. N. Le, a sociologist at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Dr. Le found
that in 2010 Japanese-American men and women had the highest rates of
intermarriage to whites while Vietnamese-American men and Indian women
had the lowest rates.
The term Asian, as defined by the Census Bureau, encompasses a broad
group of people who trace their origins to the Far East, Southeast Asia
or the Indian subcontinent, including countries like Cambodia, China,
India, Japan, Korea, the Philippine Islands and Vietnam. (The Pew
Research Center also included Pacific Islanders in its study.)
Wendy Wang, the author of the Pew report, said that demographers have
yet to conduct detailed surveys or interviews of newlyweds to help
explain the recent dip in interracial marriages among native-born
Asians. (Statistics show that the rate of interracial marriage among
Asians has been declining since 1980.) But in interviews, several
couples said that sharing their lives with someone who had a similar
background played a significant role in their decision to marry.
It is a feeling that has come as something of a surprise to some young
Asian-American women who had grown so comfortable with interracial
dating that they began to assume that they would end up with white
husbands. (Intermarriage rates are significantly higher among Asian
women than among men. About 36 percent of Asian-American women married
someone of another race in 2010, compared with about 17 percent of
Asian-American men.)
Chau Le, 33, a Vietnamese-American lawyer who lives in Boston, said that
by the time she received her master’s degree at Oxford University in
2004, her parents had given up hope that she would marry a Vietnamese
man. It wasn’t that she was turning down Asian-American suitors; those
dates simply never led to anything more serious.
Ms. Le said she was a bit wary of Asian-American men who wanted their
wives to handle all the cooking, child rearing and household chores. “At
some point in time, I guess I thought it was unlikely,” she said. “My
dating statistics didn’t look like I would end up marrying an Asian
guy.”
But somewhere along the way, Ms. Le began thinking that she needed to
meet someone slightly more attuned to her cultural sensibilities. That
moment might have occurred on the weekend she brought a white boyfriend
home to meet her parents.
Ms. Le is a gregarious, ambitious corporate lawyer, but in her parents’
home, she said, “There’s a switch that you flip.” In their presence, she
is demure. She looks down when she speaks, to demonstrate her respect
for her mother and father. She pours their tea, slices their fruit and
serves their meals, handing them dishes with both hands. Her white
boyfriend, she said, was “weirded out” by it all.
“I didn’t like that he thought that was weird,” she said. “That’s my
role in the family. As I grew older, I realized a white guy was much
less likely to understand that.”
In fall 2010, she became engaged to Neil Vaishnav, an Indian-American
lawyer who was born in the United States to immigrant parents, just as
she was. They agreed that husbands and wives should be equal partners in
the home, and they share a sense of humor that veers toward wackiness.
(He encourages her out-of-tune singing and high kicks in karaoke bars.)
But they also revere their family traditions of cherishing their elders.
Mr. Vaishnav, 30, knew instinctively that he should not kiss her in
front of her parents or address them by their first names. “He has the
same amount of respect and deference towards my family that I do,” said
Ms. Le, who is planning a September wedding that is to combine Indian
and Vietnamese traditions. “I didn’t have to say, ‘Oh, this is how I am
in my family.’ ”
Ann Liu, 33, a Taiwanese-American human resources coordinator in San
Francisco, had a similar experience. She never imagined that an
Asian-American husband was in the cards. Because she had never dated an
Asian man before, her friends tried to discourage Stephen Arboleda, a
Filipino-American engineer, when he asked whether she was single. “She
only dates white guys,” they warned.
But Mr. Arboleda, 33, was undeterred. “I’m going to change that,” he told them.
By then, Ms. Liu was ready for a change. She said she had grown
increasingly uncomfortable with dating white men who dated only
Asian-American women. “It’s like they have an Asian fetish,” she said.
“I felt like I was more like this ‘concept.’ They couldn’t really
understand me as a person completely.”
Mr. Arboleda was different. He has a sprawling extended family — and
calls his older relatives aunty and uncle — just as she does. And he
didn’t blink when she mentioned that she thought that her parents might
live with her someday, a tradition among some Asian-American families.
At their October wedding in San Francisco, Ms. Liu changed from a sleek,
sleeveless white wedding gown into the red, silk Chinese dress called
the qipao. Several of Mr. Arboleda’s older relatives wore the white,
Filipino dress shirts known as the barong.
“There was this bond that I had never experienced before in my dating
world,” she said. “It instantly worked. And that’s part of the reason I
married him.”
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