Susan and Gerrit Gong (Church News photograph)
There are any number of reasons I couldn’t be happier about the newly-called Elder Gong and Elder Soares. Elder Soares, a Brazillian, brings long-overdue representation from the southern hemisphere. I know several members of Elder Gong’s extended family, and they couldn’t be a more dynamic, talented, kind family. But if you would indulge me for a moment, I want to focus on one area of very specific, personal appreciation: the marriage of Elder Gerrit Gong, as an Asian-American man, to his wife Susan Gong, a white woman.
A photo of my husband and me should immediately clarify why this is a point of particular personal significance to me:
Jusok and Cynthia Lee engagement photo (La Jolla, CA, 2000).
Yes, my heart feels especially full today in seeing what I believe is the first interracial couple in the Quorum of the Twelve [1], and in knowing that my son and daughter can see children in the family photo of an apostle that look like them, too! Although it is 2018 and one would hope the simple fact of an apostle in a interracial marriage wouldn’t be a big deal anymore, it is. The Gongs were married in 1980, not long after the lifting of the race-based priesthood and temple ban in 1978. Until very recently, church instruction manuals for institute and youth suggested caution against interracial marriages. Although reasonable latter-day saints have long, long since realized there is no place for any disapproval of marriage based on race, this is still a big deal.
To appreciate why this feels especially significant to me that we have not only an interracial couple, but specifically a Chinese-American man and a white woman, we have to have a frank talk about how racism in the United States manifests against Asians and Asian-Americans, specifically in regards to gender and sex.
There is a misconception that Asians and Asian-Americans do not experience racism in the US, because their “model minority” status casts them as the ideal scholars and citizens. In fact, the “model minority” label is itself an example of racism, both because it exists really only for the purpose of supporting white supremacy by attacking other people of color for purportedly being less deserving of respect and success, and because it treats Asian people as a monolith. Although the character of the racism people of Asian descent experience in the US is very different from what Latinx and black people face, and the significance of that should not be minimized, it is still racism.
Both men and women of Asian descent in the US face a media and social stereotype of being more submissive, passive, and infantilized. For women of Asian descent, this results in a hypersexualized stereotype, an extreme but superficial sexual desirability captured in the ugly term “yellow fever.” For men of Asian descent, this same underlying stereotype results in media representations and prejudice against them as emasculated and lacking in sexual desirability or prowess. (For more reading on this, see here, here, and here.)
Even if you weren’t aware of all these nuances, you’ve probably absorbed from US culture the idea that it’s more “normal” or expected for a woman of Asian descent to be married to a white man, than for a white woman to be married to a man of Asian descent. This is because, in the white supremacist schema that subconsciously permeates our thinking, the latter is seen as “marrying down” in a way that the former is not, even though both are examples of interracial marriages. I have personally experienced stinging examples of this bias: confusion about our children, surprise about us being together, and even comments along the lines that I “did it backwards” by being a white woman married to my Korean-American husband.
I hope my expression of joy in today’s news does not in any way detract from any mixed feelings others may be having. It will be another important step when we have the first woman of color wife of an apostle, the first black man, more examples of lives lived on more continents and in bodies with different abilities, and–dare we hope–the first woman. Today we both celebrate and look forward. Representation matters. Representation matters!
[1] [Updated x2] There were early, polygamous members of church leadership who had Native or indigenous wives. One is Jacob Hamblin, often nicknamed “Buckskin Apostle,” though he was not actually part of the Twelve. However, much discussion among leading historians of Mormonism has so far failed to turn up any examples of an interracial marriage in the Twelve. I will update the post as I get further information…