Modern Love: Modern Love — To Keep but Not Be Kept

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“Where’s the party?” they asked jovially. “You know, Chinese girls. Where can we get one of these?”

They meant me.

My boyfriend cursed at them and held me close as we crossed the street, but I dropped his hand. For the six months we’d been together, we had endured more than our share of stares, from curious to smug to hostile, from Chinese and Westerners and everyone in between. But nothing had been as flagrant as this. Suddenly, I felt as if those men had seen the truth, while what we knew of ourselves was a sham.

He was no longer the boyfriend whose home I shared, the journalist whose dedication and drive kept me inspired, the man who scratched my back through entire seasons of “The Sopranos.” In that moment, he was just a laowai, another foreigner in China taking home an Asian woman like a souvenir.

And I was no longer the girlfriend he loved, the native New Yorker like him, the Chinese-American who had moved to Shanghai on a Fulbright to research a novel, the woman who challenged him on a daily (he’d say hourly) basis. I was just another local naïf, maybe a gold digger, possibly a prostitute.

My boyfriend tried to reason with me. Those men were bumbling tourists. The truth of our relationship was in the life we shared. He said, “All we can do is be who we are.”

But that was part of the problem. He was a successful white man ensconced in cushy expatriate life. I was a young Asian female who had somehow ended up living off him.

We had met at a reading sponsored by the United States Consulate. He told me later he was struck by the question I asked the author as much as by my eyes. I liked his authoritative yet easygoing presence, the unassuming way he talked about his work, the respectful way he asked about mine.

I had a strange feeling of warmth and well-being sitting beside him. But I didn’t see him as a romantic prospect, not even when he asked for my number. My reasons were both superficial and not. He towered over me by more than a foot. He was at a different stage of life. He was a laowai in Shanghai.

Back home, I had grown up grimacing with my girlfriends at what seemed to be the rampant coupling of white men in pursuit of the exotic with Asian women seeking a socioeconomic boost. Partly for this reason, I had always tended to avoid dating white men. It wasn’t until I moved to Shanghai that this preference became a principle.

Everywhere I looked, “yellow fever” seemed amplified to a cartoonish extreme: paunchy white businessmen towing petite Chinese girls decades their junior; personal ads seeking “hot Asian women, no English required”; local call girls working the lobbies of hotels.

But when the journalist called, that warm feeling washed over me again. I agreed to meet him. Drinks stretched into dinner, then into a weekend, at the end of which I remembered to tell him that my time in China was nearly done. My grant was expiring. I missed my family and friends. I was tired of Shanghai.

He was about to embark on a 10-day reporting trip down the Mekong River through southwestern China and into Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. After that, he was heading to Sudan, then Europe. By the time he returned, I’d be gone.

He asked me to join him on the Mekong. I reminded him we hardly knew each other. This was more than a fling, he said.

When I mentioned I couldn’t afford the trip, he offered to cover everything. I had never been dependent on a man, and I didn’t like the prospect. He didn’t want my dependence or even gratitude. All he asked was the chance to prove that our connection couldn’t be dismissed.

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