“they can’t be anything else”

She … turned to me and said that by being in bed with me she was also doing something she had never done before, which was sleep with a man who was Chinese. I thought of telling her that I was helping her do something I had never done before, which was sleep with someone who was Chinese … A Chinese woman once told me that many people want to have an interracial relationship once, but few want to have more than one. Suppose, I told her, all your relationships are interracial, they can’t be anything else because of who your parents were. In my case, a mixture of Chinese and English. In her case, a mixture of Chinese and German.

source: My Symptoms, a collection of short stories by John Yau