Part II: The Double Bind
After what happened in the grocery store, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the narratives that shape how Asian women with white men are seen.
Because here’s the thing: that woman didn’t just see me. She saw the story society already wrote for me. And it’s a story I’ve never had any say in.
The narratives are complicated, but two come to mind over and over again.
First: We’re traitors to our own race.
There is a running discourse - especially in online communities of Asian men (and sometimes women or otherwise) - that paints women like me as traitors. The accusation is clear: that choosing a white man is somehow a betrayal. That I’ve internalized white supremacy. That I’ve abandoned my own community. That I’ve sold out for proximity to whiteness.
This is a narrative - a story projected onto me. But the hostility I’ve felt because of it, the suspicion, the way my love is interpreted as disloyalty - those are realities. The words may be false, but the consequences are not.
Second: We will never be fully accepted into white society.
On the flip side, there is the belief that no matter how close we stand, whiteness will never embrace us. Asian women are tolerated but never equal, exoticized but never truly seen.
That too is a narrative. But the reality is that even standing next to my cis, tall, blue-eyed husband, I am the one singled out. I am the one corrected, the one questioned, the one held responsible. He gets a pass - his quirks are excused, his silence overlooked. I am the one fair game for scorn.
And this is the double bind: to be read as a traitor in one space and an outsider in another. Narratives written about me, acted upon by others, creating a lived reality where I belong nowhere. Where I must justify my existence over and over, only to never be enough.
This is the context in which that woman in the checkout line made her choice. When she turned to me and not to him. When she decided her words belonged in my direction. It wasn’t just personal irritation at a “chaotic” child. It was racialized, gendered, and scripted.
And here’s the part that stings the most: this is how microaggressions work. They are the everyday expressions of these larger narratives. They don’t always scream racism or sexism out loud, but they enforce the hierarchy just the same. A look, a sigh, a tone of voice, a single cutting sentence. A microaggression that may seem “small,” but makes the narrative real in my body.
In that moment, her words weren’t just about my parenting or how I was as a wife. They carried the weight of the stories society tells about Asian women: that we are compliant, that we won’t fight back, that we will quietly take the blame. Her words reinforced who is untouchable, who is excused, and who will always be judged.
I know these narratives. I know their history. I know their weight. But what broke me in that moment wasn’t just her. It was knowing that Zach saw it. That my five year old already knew who society blames, who gets a pass, and who doesn’t. That he knew how to comfort me because the world had just handed him the script, too.
And that is the cruelty of it. Not just that I live under these narratives, but that my son is already being taught to see them play out - through microaggressions that are anything but small.
