relationships

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Thanks to the success of our last discussion question on college and careers, we’ve decided to continue with an engaging topic (hopefully) once per week. Here’s the latest and greatest by a very special guest blogger!

Hello MMIAF readers,

It’s guest blogger time! I’m Ho Chie Tsai, creator of the web portal site TaiwaneseAmerican.org, frequent speaker among the Taiwanese American high school and college crowd, and occasional behind-the-scenes co-conspirator with Serena. In an effort to encourage discussion among all of you, it’s time to get you to talk about the best of all gossip topics: Boys and Girls! And Dating! Or not dating… It’s more common than you think. You know who you are.

Within my discussions among the Asian American youth community, I’ve heard it time and again… all the complaints and pressures when it comes to that time in your life when you develop those “oh-so-special tingly feelings” a.k.a. “attraction.” It’s hard enough as it is navigating your way through life, but figuring out how you fit in or how you’ll ever meet that standard of beauty exemplified in all those magazines is a whole other level. We’re all looking for acceptance at some level, and sometimes it can be just plain stressful!

Oh, the anxiety! I mean, who among us doesn’t remember feeling insecure about ourselves, yet feeling excited about that special someone. The heart skips a beat, and you lay awake at night dreaming and hoping. Except that nothing ever happens because the guy just doesn’t know how to tell the girl how he really feels, or because both justify their inaction because they are too busy with studying or work anyways. My personal favorite is the good ol’ excuse from the girls that “my mom says I’m not allowed to date til I’m 25 or when I get married. Whichever comes first.”

How do we deal with all the age-old questions about love and relationships? Does he/she like me? Will it work out? Will my parents approve? I’m sure I don’t have all the answers. And there’s no doubt that it causes stress and anxiety among the best of us. There’s got to be a connection with the fact that the highest depression rates are found among Asian American teens. Even so, maybe the place to start is to open up conversation about dating and relationships.

So here’s the part where you get to reminisce about your first love, the romantic crushes you sent secret notes to, or the ones you loved, but treated as “just friends” because, well, you just didn’t know any other way around it or you didn’t want to “ruin the friendship.” Or just admit it, you just were afraid of rejection. (Where’s the manual on this stuff for us Asian Americans anyway?).

Whatever ethnicity you are, Asian American or not, we want to hear your stories. So spew away, and tell us (anonymously, if you want) about how growing up in your particular culture/community influenced your love or dating life (or lack of), and perhaps even explore how your parents affected your perspectives on expressing love and affection. Were your parents the restrictive type? The nosy type? The contradictory type? Or maybe they were oddly supportive? Let’s not even get into the ones who so willingly gave the “birds and the bees” talk… 10 years too late. Ah. Parents. We love them anyways.

So no matter what stage of life you’re in, it’s your opportunity to share, but please remember to be respectful. Leave names out or change them to protect privacy. Our hearts always remain fragile throughout our entire lives. But maybe through this process of sharing, we’ll discover some uniqueness to our experiences, or maybe we’ll find out that we’re just not that different from each other after all.

In any case, we want to know everything. Spill it.

P.S. Want to hear more? Serena and I are teaming up and speaking at two college-level conferences this month on the topic of generation gap issues. Our workshop is entitled “Back in my day, we walked to school. Uphill. Both ways.” It’s not too late to register and join in on our madness. We’ll be in southern California http://usc.itasa.org and Illinois http://uiuc.itasa.org.

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