Editor, Daily Nexus,

This letter is in response to Meghan Palma’s article (“White Guys, Yellow Fever; Dating’s Just Not Easy,” Daily Nexus, April 4). I am a first generation immigrant from the Philippines who moved here when I was 14 years old, went to UCSB and graduated, and did all the prerequisites for a professional career and all that family stuff. I dated all races – brown, white, yellow etc. – and I didn’t really harness any “awful superiority complex … in some way betraying my own race.” I eventually married a Caucasian woman, not because she was in any way a reflection of my desire to climb some sort of a racial social status ladder, but it does seem that way to most of my Asian friends and family.

In my humble opinion, I believe the reason for the anxiety over the motivations of interracial dating lies in having to “explain” our “peculiar idiosyncrasies;” all based on our very personal upbringing and values that we hold dear.

Asian people in general are full of guilt, in certain ways, whether we have to keep up with the Joneses or whether we have fully performed everyday actions in conformance to our Asian customs and beliefs. The Caucasian ideal of individualism is certainly a thing to which we all aspire, but this is something more of an exception rather than the rule. Until we shed all of our preconceived ideas of race, economic status and family structures that are based on ill-constructed perceptions, we will always wonder whether we are doing “the right thing.”