Sandra Oh turned all eyes on Asian-Black relationships through her Golden Globe-wining portrayal of an intern wooed by an African-American surgeon in “Grey’s Anatomy.” I had my own interracial hook-up with a hot guy in China.
Growing up in Thailand, my middle-class, Buddhist-teaching parents freaked out when they found stacks of porn under my 14-year-old brother’s bed. Then they chuckled when they learned he’d seen the Titanic five times just to catch a glimpse of Kate Winslet’s bare breasts. My sister was also a rebellious teen who skipped school and snuck out on dates. Her frequent absence after dusk put my parents through years of insomnia. That made me the golden first-born who followed the rules. The only time I nearly gave my mother a heart attack was when I came home from an all-girl Catholic boarding school reporting that my period hadn’t come for five months. A small-town clinic nurse told my mother I was pregnant. “You can never trust kids these days,” said the nurse confidently. My mom took me to a gynecologist in another town where she was comforted that I was suffering from a typical teen trouble, unstable hormones.
In our society, Sex-Ed meant a one-hour lecture on how a woman got impregnated and how to prevent it. Talking about what was behind the bedroom door was “taboo” or “trashy,” yet at the same time prostitution and teen pregnancy were epidemic. Though a friend thought I had the exotic look and hot physique of Tia Carrere from Wayne’s World, and I got whistled at plenty, I had never dated when I started my freshman year in college, (even though most of my American friends got laid every weekend). Two studious years later, I had managed to go to many drunken parties and watch porn with a friend but remained a sex-curious virgin.
I met KJ on an overnight train ride to Xi-An. He was one of the two African-American students in our study abroad program and a quiet hunk. He dropped by my cabin while I was falling asleep to Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do.” We talked about everything. He said his mom had died of lung cancer three years prior. As he recited his memory of her last day, I held his hand and cried. I felt an instant connection. I shared the buried pain of losing my father in a plane crash two years before. It felt as if we were the only two people on the train.
As we studied hard and explored Beijing, our friendship grew along with our fluency in Mandarin. Everywhere we went people gawked at us, assuming since he was black, I must be his Chinese whore. We would stop by each other’s dorm room to chat about life, Buddhism and his first girlfriend, who was studying abroad in Kenya that summer. When the girlfriend dumped him, I stayed by his side.
One night out, after ten Tequila shots, we made out like fierce cats fighting. I got chills up my spine whenever he was around. We fooled around every time we were out clubbing, and the next day we’d act as if nothing had happened.
The last night in Beijing, under the disco ball light, I was on his lap with my bra undone. He licked my nipples and I had what I thought was my first orgasm. We hopped in a cab at 5 a.m. and ended up on his bed. “You wanna do it?” I asked. He undid his belt. “I won’t do it without condom,” I added coldly. “You are kidding me,” he said. He searched through a half-packed suitcase, pulling out a condom. I heard him mumble a thank you prayer to his over-prepared Jewish roommate who’d left it. While I patiently waited for him to put it on, he cried out, “Damn, I tore it.”
He got dressed, looked up the Chinese dictionary translation for “condom,” then disappeared for a long while. I waited, naked in his bed. Upon his return, his eyes sparkled as he earnestly shared his adventure. He’d found a small clinic with a condom vending machine but he had no money. So he turned toward the on-call nurses. Horny, drunk, sleepless and determined to get laid before going back to America, he formulated the sentence, “Wo Yao Zuo Ai De Dong Xi.”
“No, you did not say that!” I yelled. “Yes I did and here they are!” he said while showing off a handful of candy-colored condoms.
“I never did this before. My girlfriend was a strict Catholic,” he admitted. “You?” he asked. I told him I hadn’t either. “Then we are each other’s first,” he said, enthusiastically. I gave the first and the clumsiest oral sex in my life and, as I reckoned, so did he. Between too many gag reflexes, he still did not have a hard on. The alcohol we’d consumed numbed our nerves. I faked orgasm as he feverishly fingered me.
We went back to America, both still virgins. I blamed it on the alcohol, the hypocritical culture where I grew up and his Catholic ex.
Back in New York City, a male OBGYN broke my hymen at age 26. After ending months of orgasm-free lovemaking with another man who used his Greenwich Village apartment as a harem, I was up for a revolutionary change. No longer counting on a man, I purchased Kim Cattrall Sexual Intelligence and the Rabbit, intending to give myself my very own orgasm.
I remained friends with KJ, though we never talked about the indelible memory of Chinese nurses giggling over his impeccably pronounced request. It meant, “I would like a make-love thing,” which got him condoms, if not sex, in China.
