She said it was difficult to find anyone at all who had the qualities she was looking for: someone whom she could relate to culturally, as a Japanese woman who immigrated to the States, someone who would able to communicate with her parents, who speak Japanese, and someone who shared similar "restaurant habits" to her own. Tokioka, a serial entrepreneur in her late thirties, started the company after she found that major dating sites like E-Harmony and Match were limited when it came to Asian candidates. In other words: less Chinese-Exclusion Act and more Stuff Asian People Like. awesome," one Taiwanese-American friend said, before she threw her head back laughing, interpreting the ads, instead, as in-jokes. When I showed my Asian-American pals, a brief pause of incredulousness was sometimes followed by a kind of ebullient recognition of the absurdity. When I showed that last image to an informal range of non-Asian-American friends, many of them mirrored my shock and bemusement. An attractive East Asian woman in a bikini poses in front of a palm tree: "When you meet an attractive Asian girl, no 'Sorry I only date white guys.' " A selfie of another smiling East Asian woman in front of a lake is splashed with the words "Just like Dim Sum.choose what you like." A dapper Asian man leans into a wall, with the words "Asian Dating app? Yes prease!" hovering above him. Wasn't that exactly the kind of racial reduction that I'd spent my entire life working to avoid?įrom their tidy desks, the team, almost all of whom identify as Asian-American, had long been deploying social media memes that riff off of a range of Asian-American stereotypes. I had been interested in dating more Asian-American men, in fact- wouldn't it be easier, I thought, to partner with someone who is also familiar with growing up between cultures? But while I set up my own profile, my skepticism returned, as soon as I marked my ethnicity as "Chinese." I imagined my own face in a sea of Asian faces, lumped together because of what is essentially a meaningless distinction. I tapped on handsome faces and sent flirtatious messages and, for a few minutes, felt as though she and I could have been any other girlfriends taking a coffee break on a Monday afternoon, analyzing the faces and biographies of men, who just happened to appear Asian. (Swipe right to express interest, left to pass). The interface might have been one of any number of popular dating apps. As we chatted about the app, she let me poke around her personal profile, which she had created recently after going through a breakup. I met the app's publicist, a beautiful Korean-American woman from California, for a coffee, earlier this year. As if to underscore just how contradictory a belief in an Asian-American monolith is, South Asians are glaringly absent from the app's branding and advertisements, despite the fact that, well, they're Asian, too. (Take a small half turn in the wrong direction, and there are dark places on the Internet like WASP Love, a website tagged with terms like "trump dating," "alt-right," "confederate," and "white nationalism.") All of these dating sites skirt around questions of identity-what does it mean to be "Jewish"?-but EastMeetEast's mission to serve a unified Asian-America is especially tangled, given that the term "Asian-American" assumes unity amongst a minority group that covers a wide diversity of religions and ethnic backgrounds. If you are ethnically Chinese and looking for other ethnic Chinese, there's TwoRedBeans. If you are ethnically Japanese, looking to meet ethnically Japanese singles, there is JapaneseCupid. There's BlackPeopleMeet, for African-American dating, and Minder, which bills itself as a Muslim Tinder. JDate, the matchmaking site for Jewish singles, has been around since 1997. "I wasn't thinking about it, but now I am."ĭating sites and services tailored to race, religion, and ethnicity are not new, of course. "It's like this bag of jackfruit chips I got in a Thai grocery store that read 'Ecoli = 0' on the nutritional information," one user wrote. Reading through the thread feels like opening a Pandora's Box, the air suddenly alive with questions that are impossible to meaningfully answer. One user on Reddit posted a photo of the sign with the single-word rejoinder, "Kinda," and the sixty-something comments that followed teased apart the the moral subtleties of dating within or outside of one's own ethnicity or race. "Asian4Asian," the billboard read, in an oversized font: "That's not Racist." Last year, a billboard advertising a dating app for Asian-Americans called EastMeetEast went up in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles.
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