Some drink and become merry, others are of a merriless kind. Which can be a bummer in December. I have a glass of wine, and histamine hysteria ensues, followed by a cat nap. When I'm not nodding off, I can be stubborn, aggressive (but passive) - as confrontational as bubble tea (lychee, mostly). I'm a superstitious sort; insofar as a fast-spinning fan fills me, inexplicably with asphyxiating dread. You won't find me sleeping in a room with one, I wouldn't be caught dead. My carbohydrate of choice, and possible source of elusive merriment, is white and dome-like and comes in a bowl. My eyes - venetian blinds into my soul.

Type "Asian American men are" into Google and it will helpfully complete your search by adding "...the least preferred mate of Caucasian women". This thoroughly forgone conclusion was one reached by a 2008 UCI case study that codified stated racial preferences of 6,000 Yahoo! Personals users. I think I went to high school with the sample set.

We, the yellow - masters of the manicure, purveyors of fine dry-cleaning - are not amused, and if we were, you wouldn't be able to tell for our Great Wall of granite expression (if Mount Rushmore were made of yellow stone). The mostly tame rhetoric surrounding the issue ranges from the usual claims of poor or inadequate portrayals of Asian men in Western media to a tough but vaguely wounded "we don't care if white chicks dig us". I beg to differ.

But what if Asian chicks don't either?

Damn Gina!  (She's what I like to call a "disgrasian")

The average Asian man (urban Chinese, South Koreans, Japanese) is 5' 7 ²⁄₃", making him 3" shorter than his white American counterpart. The stereotype that Asian men are lacking in height is evidently true (the other one about a certain male organ is more difficult to verify). It's no secret that women respond to height - Asian women, like our friend Gina, not excluded. She and others are fleeing the chinkin' coop - for taller fowl. But the UCI study found that white women who state a racial preference are about 20% less likely to exclude Hispanic men than Asian men. With the average height of Hispanic men a few straight black hairs under at around 5' 7", it appears height is less a factor than we like to think. I'll return to Asian superficials further down the page, but first - a white man making full use of his height advantage:

Asian stereotypes in general, and of men in particular, are in part a legacy of WWII era phobias - the so-called Yellow Peril. De facto ambassadors of the Asian person were found in as decidedly craven characters as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, both highly intelligent men of dubious maleness. Displays of male aggression in American men are seen as macho and even heroic, whereas in Asians they're seen as dishonorable, crafty or simply insane. There exists a castration of the Asian male essence into a hormone-neutral state. Captain America vs. The Yellow Eunuch! Puzzlingly, this emasculation of the enemy seemed not to apply to the erect, well-uniformed Nazi. Americans fought man-to-mensch with the European fascists, while the Japanese, though none less assertive in their might, were perceived as effete and impotent. Underlying this obvious difference in perception is a more subtle difference in culture: that East and West have fundamentally opposed paradigms regarding male gender roles.

American boys play cowboys and indians. Asian boys play samurai and...well, other samurai. While it may seem like the samurai is the Eastern analog of the cowboy - Hollywood thought so - Technicolor fails to capture the shades of gray. They're both strong, silent warriors - in short, badass - but what's up with the harakiri? A cowboy is a maverick, all defiance and swagger. He's ultimately self-preserving, whereas the defining feature of a samurai is his self-sacrificing loyalty. If a cowboy is brought to shame, he gets on his horse, kicks up vengeful clouds of dust, and blows six holes into the offending party. A samurai simply disembowels himself. Enjoy:

Across the Pacific, aggression, in fact, all emotion, is often turned inward. The spate of extreme Asian horror movies over the past decade seem to depict an inordinate number of stomach-turning acts of self-harm (warning: this link is not for the faint of heart). Rebellion in American teens manifests in an "acting out" and for Asians a "shutting in". Technology helps to facilitate this reclusive tendency by allowing for solitary modes of companionship - emotional self-sufficiency. Hence girlfriend avatars that are forever nubile and grown men in love with their pillows. But fans of Korean soap operas know that Asian anal-retentiveness has its limits, and when those limits are breached, the ensuing torrent is eyebrow-raising to say the least. This underscores the all-or-nothing approach to Eastern emotionality - one that is at stark odds with Western expectations of social behavior where emotions are slightly better calibrated.

Well-intentioned reformers of the Asian male image have surfaced, but seem mainly to post photos of hot Asian men as if to say "Exhibit A, your honor". Ideas about Asian beauty need a complete overhaul. Behind the yellow curtain, occidental mimicry is the modus operandi. Cosmetic surgery aids in transplanting valleyed features onto our open-plained faces. Noses are bridged, eyelids are creased. Meanwhile, Asian pop culture trends toward a High School Musical mindset. Asian tweens bop to K-Pop's own Justin and Britney (meanwhile Miley Cyrus remains Hannah Montana-non-grata). If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then we Asians are a sincere bunch.

This aesthetic conversion is part of a greater effort to finally gain that golden ticket into the American mainstream, currently an Asian Siberia. But behind the apparent lack of Asians represented on TV and radio, I feel, is a weakness in numbers. A show that attracts 100% of the Asian-American audience has garnered less than 5% of total market share - a Nielsen nightmare. Studio heads and casting agents therefore take cautious half-measures when introducing slanty eyes to the TV screen, usually in the form of half-Asian actors in familiar model minority roles (eg. doctor, scientist) and of course the token walk-on. Not that I don't feel a glimmer of vindicating pride when someone like Tim Kang or Daniel Henney comes along. Perhaps these chiseled yellow crusaders will carve out an interacial-sex-filled future for my yet-to-be-born children - but it would ostensibly be toward their advantage if their mother were white.

But a rehabilitation of the Asian male image is not served by fleeting wherever-you-can-get-it validations. It's an ultimately unfruitful approach made up of desultory increments. We long to close the height gap, an inch at a time - an elongation. We hunger for a beefier frame, one rep at a time - a slow invigoration. We think we can bench-press our way to fecundity. Body-build a brand new robustness. What the Yellow Eunuch needs is his own eureka moment. I will forgo trite proclamations of ethnic pride, and offer instead an equally trite American adage. If you don't like the rules, don't play the game. If the rules preclude a valid Asian mode of masculinity, I will refrain from play in this particular game. Instead, I improvise my own revision. Asian Male 2.0 has pheromones that are time-release, testosterone without the ostentation, a subtler swagger, tenacity, temperance. These are innate virtues, not handicaps in need of adjustment. My view is, after a century of immigration, the Asian-American is coming of age. Our historically jaundiced narrative is headed for a grayscale twist.

Perhaps we're drawing the wrong conclusion from the UCI study. It may not be so much that Asian-Americans, per se, are the least preferred mates of Caucasian women - we might rather say "Other races are the least preferred mates of Caucasian women". Of the 73% of women who stated a racial preference, 64% indicated, in a Jim Crow sort of way, "Whites only". 93% excluded Asians in particular, bookended by African-Americans with 90% and Middle-Easterners with 95%. Most notable about the study, is its chosen locations. The researchers culled data from four metropolitan areas - NY, LA, Chicago and Atlanta. NY and LA have the highest Asian populations of any U.S. city. This is alarming on one hand - one would assume ethnic diversity would foster greater acceptance, and we fear what this implies for areas with less heterogeneous demography. On the other hand, urban areas are the only even semi-reliable measure of racial preferences among daters, after all, how can you expect someone to indicate a preference for Asians, if she's never seen one.

But one important consideration is the predictive power of the sample set, writ large over the preferences of the greater urban community. These are online daters we're talking about, and ones who use Yahoo!. Yahoo! Personals boasts one of the highest numbers of singles among competing sites, but that may be part of the problem. In the opinion of this Asian, the masses are afflicted not so much with racist mores, but more with taste that is impeccably poor. In other words, I do care - in principle - if white chicks dig Asian men, but less if 93% of 73% of Yahoo! Personals users don't.

Change in race perceptions is generational in pace. The UCI study, caveats aside, can be discouraging, but is just part of a familiar arc - fear-marginalization-acceptance - that all minority groups move thru. Understanding this progression helps temper our collective insecurities, develop less reactionary identity politics, and forge a healthy Asian/American balance. Let's drink a toast our yellow brethren! Now it's time for a nap (keep that fan away from me).