Ever since Newsweek published that now-infamous article on Asian men as the new trophy boyfriend for white women, the community is all abuzz with trying to figure out if Asian men are indeed, hot or not. Most of us (Asian men that is) already knew the answer long ago (duh, it’s yes) but even before Newsweek printed that silly piece, astute Asian American culture watchers could have already spotted the awakening trend. Male friends of mine still complain that they still a disproportionate amount of Asian female/white male pairings rather than the other way around but clearly, these are folks who haven’t been to the movies.

About two years ago, I lamented the paucity of images that dealt with Asian Americans being romantically involved with other APIs (heterosexually at least). In an article about the 1999 S..F Int’l Asian American Film Festival, I noted how so few films — whether shorts or features — have portrayed functional, passionate relations between API men and women and I openly wondered at the psychological causes and ramifications of this kind of absence. It seemed to me that filmmakers loved using the trope of interracial relationships as a way to enhance familial and cultural conflict between "Americanized" second gen kids (usually women, surprise, surprise) and their "old country" conservative parents. Think Wayne Wang’s "Joy Luck Club", Mina Shum’s "Double Happiness" or Mira Nair’s "Mississippi Masala." Curiously enough, it was almost always Asian women who were outdating and one could argue that this reflected/contributed to the statistical trends already apparent in society.

The weird thing is — in just the last two years — the trend has switched completely. These days, it seems like you’re just as likely — if not more — to see API men as the ones who are outdating in various movies. More importantly, what had previously been seen as a big social taboo and cause for much consternation is now so normalized, it’s almost as if you’re not even supposed to really notice.

Recent films like Daniel Yoon’s "Post Concussion", Augustine Ma’s "Yolk", Justin Dorazio’s "Beautiful World", Tom Huang’s "Freshmen", Julie Gilfallan’s "Restless", and Mieko Ouchi’s "Samurai Swing" all prominently feature relationships between Asian men with non-Asian women (usually white) yet rarely make the racial dynamics of those relationships part of the narrative’s import.

In Yoon’s "Post Concussion" for example, the lead character Matthew Kang, is involved with not just one, but two white women. One is his ex, an opportunist hippie-type who dumps him after he’s hurt in an auto accident. The other is his friendly downstairs neighbor, an East German physicist-in-training. At no point does anyone in the film stop to say, "hey, what’s this Korean American guy doing dating all these white women?" It’s almost as if…race…didn’t…matter…

I hesitate to call this a wholly positive new trend. On the one hand, I think it’s great that Asian men are suddenly being portrayed as desirable to women of all colors (and one has to acknowledge Chi Muoi Lo’s "Catfish In Black Bean Sauce" for his rare look at Asian male/black female romances). I also think that it’s healthy (not to mention more original) for filmmakers to start seeing interracial romance as an actual romance and not just an easy allegory for cultural conflict (I’m still peeved at Mina Shum for doing this in "Double Happiness").

At the same time, I feel like some of these films go too far in naturalizing the process, almost to the point of erasing the reality of race. Race shouldn’t be everything but it should stand for something — because the personal is political and even our most intimate personal decisions —who we sleep with, who we marry, who we love — are crafted within a social matrix where race matters. Race isn’t everything — shouldn’t be everything — but ignoring it can be as dangerous as obsessing over it.

But even more important, I’m still waiting for more API filmmakers to deal with intra-Asian romance. Looking over the body of work in API cinema, it’s easy to find movies that have passionate romances between API women/white men as well as API men/white women, but where did the API women/API men stories go? Sure, we have Wayne Wang’s "Eat a Bowl of Tea", Chris Chan Lee’s "Yellow" and most recently, Gene Cajayon’s "The Debut", but I still feel like there’s a generation of film that somehow got lost. Maybe people just think API-API couplings are too boring to portray, but think about it — if it used to be hot to see API women with non-Asian men, and now it’s hot to see API men with non-Asian women, how hot would it be to see API men and women together?