Chye-Ling Huang made a podcast about the intersections of sex, love and race - and naturally, used herself as a case study. She shares what she learned from the filming of The Elephant in the Bedroom, co-hosted with James Roque and available on RNZ's Tahi and from all podcast providers now.‍

My friend and I are both Asian artists, outspoken about racial prejudice and representation in Aotearoa. James is Filipino-Kiwi, I’m Chinese-Pākehā, and both of us grew up in Glenfield. We started a company together called Proudly Asian Theatre, fresh from drama school in 2013, to combat stereotyped roles and to give our careers a fighting chance. 

After years of dissecting race and identity in our works, an in-joke about our dating pattern became a nagging feeling of hypocrisy: we wanted to know why our ‘type’ was white people, if that was a bad thing, and what should be done about it if it was. We weren’t alone in this experience - many other friends of colour felt the same unease to ask it aloud. So we decided to try and answer it in a podcast called ‘The Elephant in the Bedroom’. 

Two things were true at the beginning of this project: 

I’d never had a serious, long-term relationship with someone who wasn’t white. 

And I had never made a podcast before. 

At the beginning, it was very silly. We made pie charts of our dating histories and swapped stories of first crushes and interviewed our friends. But our key question quickly turned into a spider web, a vortex, a can of sexy worms. 

We wrestled it into five episodes, grouped into major findings. But in reality, the journey looked more like a crime wall; pinned up with all our gory prejudices and privileges, hilarious and heartbreaking romantic encounters, and the historical hardships our families have faced that somehow link into our love lives in the present.

We wanted it to come across as real as it felt to be learning this all first hand, but that quickly proved problematic for the broadcast length that we were tied to. We recorded voice notes to ourselves at all times of day and night. We interviewed our partners lying in bed. We would escape the office after an emotionally harrowing morning to get a quiche and end up talking to the Pasifika barista about her dating history. I’d end up talking about it on actual, real life dates (I’m in an open relationship). It became all consuming. 

The can of worms crawling everywhere now had names like ‘geo-political proximity’, ‘representation’, ‘in-group favouritism’, ‘nature vs nurture’ and ‘sexual imprinting’. The conversations you hear between James and I are semi-scripted, condensing our turning points and making scientific concepts more understandable. Behind this: countless hours of crying, laughing and long chats with guests as the snake (or worm) started to eat its own tail over the year that we made it. 

What you also don’t hear is the huge involvement of our producers and longtime friends; Ruby, who is Takatāpui, non-binary and Māori, and Kelly, a cis Pākehā woman, who were in the conversation 99% of the time. They shielded us from having to have triggering conversations with execs and reminded us of the audience, POC and Pākehā, as first timers to this prickly subject. 

We were a team who enabled each other’s silliness, encouraged depth and had each other's backs when it got sensitive. To say my friendships deepend here would be an understatement - for example, my experience with porn as an Asian woman infiltrating into my sex life was something I’d never shared before. Though painful, many of those moments were deeply cathartic. 

But we all felt a bomb go off when we realised we had spent far too much time obsessing over dating Asian people as the antidote to dating only white people, and had sidelined Māori and any other non-Asian POC person in the conversation. We always knew this was our bias as two Asian hosts, but it rang out hurtfully one particular day. It was an awful moment for us as friends and colleagues.

We agonised as a team over how to present what happened in the room. We realised that if we had Ruby talk to us on the show, we risked looking like we were wheeling out our one Māori friend and making them teach us about racism. But on the other hand, to not have them on the show, we risked ignoring an important perspective. We were between a rock and a hard place. 

After much soul searching, we landed here: with grace and bravery, Ruby themselves insisted on coming on and sharing their story, feelings and perspective. We tried our best to present that with as much care, and honesty, as we could. We built a condensed version (down from hours of unpacking) into the podcast. 

The decision to do this wasn’t taken lightly, and could, and maybe does, make us look like terrible people. But it was important for us and Ruby to acknowledge that even close friends and allies can be ignorant, and that we can and should face up to bias and move forward with compassion. This was something James often reminded me to have more of toward myself. I wasn’t very good at it, because I wanted answers, dammit! 

I remember interviewing a female Asian friend, and as we sat in her car I felt the walls closing in. The investigation was squeezing every hopeful romantic particle from my body and brain, made me feel like the worst person in the world and I just wanted to not care anymore - but I couldn’t not.

But this moment drove me to an important question. Who cares who we date? Why do we care? Why are we doing this to ourselves? 

Because, deep down, we thought we might be perpetuating racist ideals in our dating lives. 

With such a heavy theory, framing the investigation was its own challenge. It shouldn’t be too scientific - nor could it, to be fair, as the hosts are two artists - but it should be well researched, and entertaining.

The somewhat ridiculous question emerged - if choosing to date white people over any other race is racist, should we end things with our current, long term white partners to break the cycle? 

We chose the most extreme ‘what if’ to hang the journey of the podcast on, at the risk of it sounding too absurd to be seriously considered. The heightened aspect definitely gave us a lot to argue with as a concept. But part of me has always wondered - behind their jokes (or blatant call-outs) on my dating life, if other people have considered this the best option. And that thought has itched away at me for years. 

This brings me to my biggest personal challenge - navigating my relationship to my Asian (artistic) community, ironically having started the podcast to explore my relationship (literally and figuratively) to whiteness.

It’s important to note here that I am very much biracial, in the way I was raised, and the makeup of my family. I did a DNA test which literally came back 50% Chinese and 50% white (mostly Irish, some Scottish). 

My hang-ups of not being Asian enough to fit in with my community had mostly been quelled, but dating was a sore spot. When I’ve been called out on dating white people, or working with white people too much, it takes me back to that deep insecurity of not belonging. The paradox is, as an Asian media maker, the people who have judged me the least for any work I make, or any person I date, have been non-Asian and white collaborators. 

Making a podcast like this without a map was trial by fire, and it’s as flawed as our journey through the subject matter. Now that the podcast is out, it’s easy to say I welcome the critiques from my community, whom I feel I represent and have a responsibility to, whether I wish to or not. But I have to examine in myself why it hurts, when those I assume will be unequivocal allies are the first to tell me outright what they didn’t like about it, or are noticeably silent.

I surprised myself with this lingering insecurity. It really took facing every facet of my biases and contextualising them to be able to feel like I’m allowed to be proud of who I am within my own community, no matter who I date. That also means being ok that what we made will never be an exact reflection of a very multifaceted community. It won’t be for everyone, and that’s ok. 

All that said, choosing to do this investigation in the way we did was still that - a choice. And as hard as it was, I’m really glad we did it. As a friend put it, we inadvertently jumped on the grenade for others who share this anxiety about their dating type. Opening up a pretty intense taboo will hopefully give others a chance to explore it without the same social risk.

As for the investigation: my theories on my thing for white people are many, (we didn’t have time to go through them all) including the attachment to loud and confident people as a shy person wanting to become un-shy, learned bias from my environment/media (Wheeler from Captain Planet was my first crush) and a the fear of perpetuating the Electra complex in my biracial family dynamic (i.e. dating someone like your Dad, mine is Chinese).

How did my dating life fare? The jury’s still out, but my partner/s made me feel extra grateful to have to have such resilient and curious people in my life. A POC person I’ve dated casually for years admitted that when we met, I wasn’t their type - I was their first POC date ever - because of their own bias toward white people too. My partner (the one on the podcast), from small town NZ, did a semblance of the pie chart, and his experience is racially diverse, opposite to mine. The same goes for my other partner in the UK. All these conversations brought increased vulnerability to my relationships, and certainly didn’t make me want to cut and run. 

Episode 5 sums up how I feel about dating white people best, so I won’t repeat myself too much here. But two things: life is increasingly unpredictable, and I’m going to continue to love hard and take nothing for granted. And increasing everyday awareness of your biases/privilege is a lifelong task, which I’ll always keep working at. 

Lastly, a two-fold learning for my creative output and my identity: I have to remind myself that the ‘Asian community’ itself isn’t a monolith that I need to seek approval from. I’d come to see the Asian community as a mother-figure that I crave acceptance from, for my work, myself, my Asianess. But doing this discredits the very thing I’m constantly trying to do; to put the individual face back on to stereotypes, to break up the wash of ‘Asian’ and to illuminate our uniqueness. To tell stories that are as complicated and messy as people themselves, so that we can all be brave enough to be fully human, however we show up. And to that end, I think we nailed it with this podcast.