This just came up in a conversation. Back in ’04, I posted a looking-for-love ad on L.A. Craigslist on behalf of a fictional female. I wanted to see what would happen. She was Asian, 20-something, from Brazil, maybe with a “mainstream Brazilian” grandparent or two — can’t remember. Like many females on Craigslist, she had a race preference. She was after the elusive Asian male.
All text, no photos. Send. Sky opened right away. So many messages rained down on my pre-Gmail inbox so fast, and for days… It was scary. It felt creepy to be clicking through them too. All that prime Asian-male time: wasted. An experiment fueled by karmic debt. I skimmed through respectfully. It blew my mind. Message after well-crafted message, these guys were well-written, talented, financially on track. They were Renaissance Asian men. Greek gods from the Pacific theater, to put it multiculturally. And a lot of them said things like, “Thanks for choosing us Asian guys.” You couldn’t go wrong. I couldn’t go on, then or now. It made me sick.
I left L.A. in ’08. From afar, things seemed to get better for my horse in the race. Maybe that was just a low point in our collective career. If so, I like to think I played a fine-grained, one-in-a-million part in making it better. Not through any endeavor described herein, claro. (But Y’all should’ve seen this other ad I posted on L.A. Craigslist this one time, back in ’04…)
