Does the universe sometimes provide what you need in life? I think most of history has shown that the answer is no, but what sometimes does happen is that out of sheer dumb luck, you spy something that could maybe help, if you decide to grab on to it.



For me, as a preteen on the cusp of adolescence, it was a mass-market romance novel called A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux. My oldest sister was a fan, and I happened to spy it in her bookcase one day.

I still don’t know what drew me in. It could’ve been boredom: I was a voracious reader, having little else to do but read, as my parents eschewed things like television, pop music, and movies — not out of any sort of cultural elitism or skinflint immigrant desire to deprive their children of as many opportunities to waste time as possible, but simply because they were too broke and too tired from working 12- and 15-hour days to think that we might want those distractions.

It might have been the cover, which described the book as “A glorious love story… the epitome of every woman’s fantasy...”

Perhaps it was the word “fantasy” and the ellipsis that came after it, promising... what, exactly? I didn’t know, but I suspected it would have something to do with the sinuously rumpled peach silk and roses and baby’s breath splayed on the front of the book. Over the course of one afternoon, curled like a shrimp in the bunk bed of the room that I shared with my younger brother, I found out.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that A Knight in Shining Armor was like a drug to me. Other books gave me a contact high, but this cheesy, over-the-top romance about time travel and a hunky British medieval earl and the hapless American woman who loves him and solves the mystery of who is trying to kill him and ends up not only saving his life but rescuing his reputation for posterity (I know, I know) shot through my young veins and straight to the pleasure center of my brain. I swear my body must have hummed through the entire book.

In one of the final scenes and what I would argue is the climax (no pun intended) of the story, the heroine, Dougless Montgomery, and her lover, Earl of Thornwyck Nicholas Stafford, are splashing around in a fountain on his mid-16th-century estate in England, right before she’s whisked back to the present day:

Nicholas rolled with her until she was on her back, and his passion rose as he entered her deeply, her body rising to meet his. They arched together, both with their heads back, then they collapsed, Nicholas on top of her, holding her very tightly.

"I love you," he whispered. "I will love you for all time."

Dougless clung to him, holding him as tightly as she could. "You will remember me? You won't forget me?"

"Never," he said. "Never will I forget you. Were I to die tomorrow, my soul would remember you."

"Don't speak of death. Speak only of life. With you I am alive. With you I am whole."

"And I with you." He rolled to one side and pulled her close to him. "Look, you. The sun comes up."

I cried. I was hooked. It taught me that, at its core, being a woman has something to do with dampness — a mixture of maudlin tears and the absurd quickening that happens between your legs.

From there, I consumed so many Regency-era romance novels full of British virgins that I actually believed my hymen would break when I had sex for the first time, and I would feel some sort of ripping in my insides. I read my fair share of bodice rippers that in retrospect were disturbingly rapey. I read cheap Harlequin romances that my sisters bought in bulk at the supermarket. At one point, I discovered the saccharine ocean that is Nora Roberts, and gleefully plunged in.

These novels found me at a time when I was beginning to grasp that the way others saw me, their gaze, could be intensely painful. I was one of three Asian kids in a school that was mostly white and Latino, where kids were casually cruel in a way that young people often are.

Earlier that year, a classmate of mine had devised a sort of ranking system that only middle school girls with too much time on their hands can come up with. Her system, curiously, was based on carrots — with each carrot representing one part of the body that had already matured and blossomed, or, at the very least, was supposed to. I don’t quite remember which body parts she chose to evaluate — I’m pretty sure one was for breasts, one for height, and another for the butt. In the locker room after gym one day, she eyed me critically and said, “You don’t have any carrots.”

I don’t think I said anything in response; as a child, I tended to escape these moments by absorbing these psychic insults and punches like a neutered prizefighter, with hardly a grunt or acknowledgement that they landed. I knew what she meant, though — that my body was somehow wrong.

Is it any wonder, then, that I reached for the escape offered by these books? (The coda to that hot, sticky summer day when I was 19 and I fled from that Barnes & Noble is that I went straight home, turned on the fan, grabbed the latest pulp novel next to my cheap Ikea futon, and drifted away on my own personal bliss cloud.)

These paperbacks, and they’re always paperbacks — disparaged by so many as “trash” and the lowest rung of “women’s fiction” — were the balm that I turned to, and still turn to, when I need to escape.

Because here’s the secret, the most seductive, complicated pleasure of all: I’m drawn to them because I don't see myself in any of these stories about love and lust and desire, not in spite of it — because most romance novels are filled with white people falling in love and having sex with other white people. It may seem counterintuitive, but their overwhelming whiteness is one of the aspects I love most about them.

I find relief in the fact that I never see myself in their pages (for the most part — Nora Roberts once wrote a novel where a peripheral character was Korean American and a doctor, natch, and I deeply resented this intrusion into my fantasy land).

I love that I never experience that shock of recognition, and thus I never have to think about how someone who looks like me, with my body, is represented on the page and lives in the world. In these fictional fantasy worlds, not only does racism not exist — race doesn’t exist, at least in the ways that we live and experience it on a daily basis. There are no men who feel the need to fetishize unsuspecting young girls, no bad first dates with guys who ask you why Chinese people eat dogs, no middle school mean girls, no white women who get in your face and scream “Go back to China” when all you’re trying to do is get on the train and go home. In the world of the romance novel, your body is just a body that gets to fall in love and experience several volcanic orgasms in a row, and in this world, when you Google “Asian women,” you probably would get a 404 error page instead of dozens of links on how to find a sexy Asian girlfriend of your very own.

Moving through the world as a woman, as an Asian woman, is exhausting.

Race fatigue (also known as racial battle fatigue) is what sometimes sets in if you’re the kind of person who is constantly thinking about race and experiencing being othered, a certain weariness that comes from monitoring every interaction for a sign that the other person thinks you’re less than. Layer being a woman on top of that, and it’s as if I have an immune system that’s always on a low-grade alert and ready to defend my body and my sense of self against any perceived intrusion or attack. I’m constantly inflamed, like a paper cut that refuses to entirely heal.

It’s the fatigue that comes from being hypercognizant of race and gender, of the way that your body is seen, in a way that white men (and often white women as well) don’t have to be. The writer Eula Biss posits that guilt is the dominant emotion of whiteness in the U.S., but I suspect that it’s actually something else, and its core is something very different from guilt. Guilt implies a recognition of responsibility, culpability -- knowing that you’ve violated some sort of unspoken social contract. The only social contract that exists in this country is this: You’re supposed to know when it’s OK to be racist, and when you have to hide it.

Much like a medically induced coma helps our brains heal from trauma, escape is often just a way to survive the very fact that we have to live in our bodies.