Kumiko Nemoto's Racing Romance: Love, Power, and Desire among Asian American/White Couples uncovers how a classic, colonial dyad—white man/native woman—manifests in the interracial coupling of whites and Asian Americans today. Or, to put it in terms of popular street lingo, why do Asian American females prefer whites (and vice versa) and not males of Asian descent? Such a coupling, simultaneously romanticized, celebrated, and frowned upon, is the iconic subject of numerous Orientalist cultural productions, from Madama Butterfly and The World of Suzie Wong to Miss Saigon. The prevalence of Asian female/white male couplings and the paucity of its reverse pairing—Asian male/white female—suggest that a set of discursive assumptions is shaping the conditions of possibility for this kind of romance. Love, in other words, is bracketed as a transcendental feeling and subsumed within social and cultural discourses.

Refining these inquiries in a sociological study, Nemoto accounts for the way desire is inflected by racial and class differences, and constituted by powerful discursive formations and imperial encounters. She is careful to link Asian/white romance to a complex of historical and socioeconomic factors, as well as colonial ideologies and national policies that are intrinsically gendered. For instance, U.S. imperialism in Asia, the model minority myth, and colonial hegemonies of whiteness provide three prominent back stories that structure racialized perceptions of masculinity and femininity, Asian sexuality, and gender expectations. For instance, she accounts for a disgruntled white man's complaints about being excluded from the Korean American community as historical amnesia. It has less to do with Korean racial superiority or close-mindedness and possibly more “to do with the history of the United States and Korea, or the history of sexual exploitation of American GIs on Korean sex workers” (p. 95). In this regard, military wives, native whores, mail-order brides, docile Orientals, and the emasculated Asian male become some of the tropes that organize the erotics of this romance and its cultural assumptions about Asian Americans. If interracial marriage is seen as an ultimate sign of multicultural utopia in the United States, its celebratory color blindness “masks white hegemony and reluctance to acknowledge historical and existing racial problems” (p. 25). For instance, professional middle-class Asian American males tended to adopt white middle-class masculinity and its normative, patriarchal assumptions as a way to maintain their marriages to white women. Rather than forging acceptance of otherness, these ideologies affect the power dynamics of the couples whose own racialized images are far from being transformative of the patriarchal logics of nation, family, and marriage.

Nemoto's main contribution is fifteen case studies of Asian American/white couples whose lives exemplify “the actual effects of gender and race” (p. 35). In other words, her empirical account of these relationships is a way to show how the dynamics of difference (class, gender, race, generation) are actually embodied, lived, and negotiated in the everyday interaction, thoughts, and gestures of her subjects. Such an approach, she claims, is among the first to go beyond a study of racial images as the basis for analysis of interracial couples and to “delve into gender inequalities beneath racial dynamics.” In each of the five chapters following an introductory survey of related discourses and images, she “enfleshes” the discursive constructions of Asian and Asian American women and men that play out the requisite stereotypes and ideological tensions with uneven effects. As the titles suggest, there are no surprises as to the tropes or types being examined: chapter 2, “The Good Wife”; chapter 3, “A Woman Ascending”; chapter 4, “A Man's Place”; chapter 5, “Playing the Man”; and chapter 6, “Men Alone.” Each chapter narrates the author's encounter with a couple in descriptive terms, from details of their home furnishings, their individual looks, and their background, to an account of their romance and life together. Following the ethnography, she provides a detailed analysis to reiterate the main arguments framing the book regarding the role that the nation, patriarchy, racism (alternately acknowledged and disavowed), and gender assimilationist pressures are either internalized or manifested in the behavior, choices, and affect of the subjects.

The book's structured and straightforward account complements its empirical study of Asian/white romance, and the work is a needed contribution to the field of sociological Asian and Asian American studies. Its attempt at broadening conceptions of Asian America is, however, hampered by its “oversampling of second-generation Chinese American women,” which needs more interrogation than being a matter that is “not intentional” (p. 15). For those seeking some evidence of racial and gender performativity in Asian/white couplings, the book provides several clear and compelling examples. But read beyond an empirical study, the theoretical underpinnings of the book bear some elaboration. For instance, the psychoanalytic framework is underdeveloped, and the conflation of terms such as sex, love, and intimacy adds little to each of these critical discourses as individual and intersectional fields.