Jungle Fever, Asian-Style

By Emil Guillermo

Census-takers are still banging on doors, but demographers and pollsters are already trying to beat the bureaucrats to the sexy part by getting the tough answers we all want to know. These inquiries are far more intimate than the ones about how many toilets are in your home. No, the really intimate questions involve who’s flushing with you, as in: “Just who are you hooking up with, like, for real?”

And as it turns out, raging jungle fever is taking place—but with a twist.

Mixed-race marriages on the whole were way up in 2008, with 14.6 percent of all new unions occurring between people of different races or ethnicities, according to a phone survey by the independent Pew Research Center. (How’s that for a booty call?) The figures might have been even higher, but the serious race mixers probably had the phone off the hook.

Let’s put our raging hormones in perspective to properly appreciate our latter day sexual revolution: The 14.6 percent rate is six times the rate it was in 1960, and more than double the rate in 1980. And the old taboos barely muster a raised eyebrow. Blacks and whites? One in 1,000 back in 1960. Now, it’s one in 60 marriages (and we can even see a very public one—Khloé Kardashian’s to Lamar Odom—play out on TV).

But that’s “old school” mixing.

The new school mix is all about Asian Americans. Of the 3.8 million married adult mixologists in 2008, 9 percent of whites acted like club soda; 16 percent of blacks acted like Coke;  26 percent of all Hispanics exported their taco sauce. And Asians? A whopping 31 percent said “I do”—but not with other Asians, preferring to slap that hot yellow mustard on anything but.

Pew said of the 280,000 new interracial marriages in 2008, 40 percent of intermarriages were white-Hispanic. Black-white permanent hookups were at 11 percent. Thirty percent were multiple ethnicities or cross-ethnic matches. Ah, the mongrel force. But Asian-white combos fell at 15 percent. Fifteen percent? I thought the whole Connie Chung-news anchor girl phenomenon would make that number higher. But it’s not. And it’s not due to the demise of the Jon and Kate thing either.

Just when you think we are living in the age of the Asian fetish, another study reveals a counter-trend  to intermarriage.

It’s intra-marriage. And it’s a conflict worthy of a marriage counselor.

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As much as we Asians like to marry white folks, we are starting to like each other more than we think.

In a separate study of census data from 1995 to 2008, sociologists Daniel Lichter and Julie Carmalt of Cornell University and Zhenchao Qian of Ohio State University identified trends that both confirmed and contradicted the Pew study.
While intermarriages were up as a whole, the sociologists discovered that the Asian woman-white male thing has stagnated at about 40 percent.

“We would have expected Asians to be more likely to marry whites over time, given the fact there is more workplace and neighborhood integration today than in 1980,” said Dr. Zhenchao Qian in a Wall Street Journal report.

What Qian discovered is that the stagnation coincides with a larger number of Asian American women marrying foreign-born Asian immigrants. The number jumped from 4 percent in 1980 to 21 percent in 2008.

It’s the dirty secret of diversity that is turning the jungle fever myth of intermarriage on its head. Overeducated, U.S.-born Asian women, according to the data, like it imported.

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Figures I’m not with the trend.

I’ve never seriously dated an Asian woman. And I didn’t marry one.

When it comes to relationships, I’m a race mixologist from way back. Religious, ethnic, furniture styles…I’m a commingler. As an over-educated, born-here Filipino, I am diversity’s intermarriage stereotype: I  married a Caucasian and my kids are Caucapinos. But I’m a firm believer that love happens where you find it. And the studies show that it is, indeed, happening. Inside the community, outside the community, cross-ways, side-ways. All ways.

And that’s not such a bad thing at all.

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