I haven’t been much of a daddy-oriented girl since hitting my mid-twenties. I suppose it’s because I was so consciously aware of my attraction to my father while growing up. By the time I was an adolescent, and by the time I finished college, I had successfully transferred whatever attraction I felt for my father to a series of crushes on professors and TAs. None of these crushes were physically consummated, but I flirted with each of them quite obviously. Their approval and attention motivated me to do well in school, and I was well aware of it.

Then, I spent three years of grad school falling in love with a former high school classmate, who was also enrolled in a PhD program. He was just as malleable and young as I was, and had a side project of writing on a blog which inspired me to do so as well. We were true peers, true collaborators, who admired one another. I guess this experience washed away any remaining daddy fantasies I had, until I started dating a wide range of men as a newly detransitioned woman.

Nearly everyone I’ve dated since has been squarely in their early to mid thirties, and I’m no longer interested in the idea of dating someone much older. And my actual dad, now, is someone I think of as totally foreclosed to me. He’s nice, he’s chill, we don’t really talk. I avoid looking at him, however, because I’m sure I’d still find an overwhelming attraction to his body if I were to stare too long. I’ve had a few dreams in which he died or I killed him. Once I ripped his face off. I think of him as beautiful, attractive, withdrawn, humble, unrefined, solitary.

To be clear, I understand that “daddy,” as an archetype, as a word designating “hot older man,” was never meant to denote our actual fathers. But I am curious to see if my current idea of my actual father has some bearing on who I might be attracted to now. Again, I haven’t been much of a daddy-oriented girl since hitting my mid-twenties. But I find myself now attracted to a “daddy” I found on the train. When I saw him, it was immediate for me: he was an absolute daddy.

I’ve seen this man three times. The first time, I was carrying my bike on the train, and returning home from Manhattan, probably at a somewhat odd hour, way before 5 PM, and long after 9 AM. He was this silver-haired, robust, somewhat tall man wearing a baseball cap. He looked at my bike a lot and at me sort of and seemed to smile a little. Not in my eyes, not at my face, but at the general visual construction of me and my bike. Maybe he was happy about something unrelated to me. Maybe he was interested in my general outline.

He ended up staying on the train all the way until my stop. I had a sense he was probably Jewish before we got there, but by the time we did, there was less room for doubt; I live next to a Jewish suburb. This might bring to mind Hasidic garb, but he’s not Hasidic. He looks like a casual daddy, not a religious man.

I saw him again, months or weeks later. The second time, we were departing from the same station in Brooklyn to go to Manhattan in the morning. He was really focused on his phone. I kept on trying to see if he was wearing a wedding ring but couldn’t see, as his hand didn’t budge, and someone was standing in my sightline. I was a little annoyed, but didn’t feel like it really mattered that much.

Today I saw him for the third time. He got on my train car this morning and sat next to me. There was another woman on the other side of him and he seemed to sit a bit more close to me than to her. He was so focused on his phone. He was wearing all black, and a Yankees cap, which struck me as a bit odd, because I heard that the Jews like the Mets. He was reading the Siddur Ashkenaz, I think, in Hebrew. I guess the facile thing about my attraction to him was that he didn’t look religious but he was, he was so serious about reading these prayers, and when he switched to a different text on his phone, it was also a religious text, and when he switched to yet another document, it was also a religious text.

At one point he pulled up a WhatsApp conversation on his phone with someone named Rosenberg and scrolled rapidly upwards, and then opened a scan of something in Hebrew. Meanwhile, I had Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams on my lap, and tried to read from Chapter 7, but felt too distracted.

The train kept on stopping and starting. It was quite bad. Eight stops of stalling at each station, so that I was in total twelve minutes late to analysis, when I normally get there five minutes early. So let’s say almost 17 minutes of delays.

But I was sitting next to Jewish Daddy. And I realized that I’d love to have a Jewish Daddy. He was a robust man with rather thick, strong-looking thighs. I’d say he was probably six feet tall, unlike the slight Aphrodite of the Subway. I felt so close to him. He exuded weight and solidity. And there was this guy I read as non-Jewish, standing, across from me, wearing black sunglasses and a leather jacket. I was worried that he was watching me look at Jewish Daddy, that he knew what a dirty voyeuristic girl I am, looking at the Siddur on Jewish Daddy’s phone, or looking too intently at Jewish Daddy’s hands. Thirty or so minutes into the train ride I saw that his ring finger was bare. He did have a picture of himself with a blond boy child on his phone, maybe his son, maybe a relative. Maybe he’s divorced. I wonder what his name is, I’d love to know it.

Jewish Daddy and I got off at the same stop that morning, the one after Wall St. Sometimes I get off at Wall, sometimes at Fulton, depending on whether or not I have extra time to walk. Due to the delays, I sprung up the stairs quickly, and as I turned the corner I turned my head to see if I could still see him behind me, if I might perhaps catch his gaze. But I only caught a glimpse of his orange tote bag around the corner of the stairs. After walking a few paces down Maiden Lane, I turned once again to see if he might happen to go down the same street, but he wasn’t visible anymore. It was all very big in my head, the turning and looking. I perhaps wanted to signal to him how much I liked him by running away and still turning around; if he had seen the whole thing he would have known my desire.

I went for a run that evening around the neighborhood, hoping that I might catch a glimpse of him again. I don’t run regularly anymore, so it was truly an act. A few minutes into the run I saw a huge and fragrant lilac bush and stopped to smell it. Lilacs smell a bit bready and aqueous like cucumbers, what a striking and possibly off-putting smell. I believe lilacs are related to olive trees, and sometimes I wonder about the Mediterranean Sea when I see a lilac. The word lilac descends from an Arabic word, and lilacs are associated with Easter in Greece. Lilacs are of recent importance to me because I purchased a lilac perfume, which I grew to dislike over time. But sometimes I appreciate it.

There were a lot of pink flowers blooming on the trees. Magnolias are almost all gone and have converted to fresh, light green leaves. The façades of the houses and shuls looked divine that evening and the sun set at 7:40 in pink and golden shades. I’m quite aware that my attraction to Jewish men has something to do with my desire to belong to an ethnic group bound by a body of texts, and I like how sprawling and diverse the Jewish diaspora is in Brooklyn. I actually began camming after I started watching a Youtube channel about Hasidic Jewish communities in Brooklyn; something about the seriousness of the channel run by a Jewish woman compelled me to wonder about the lives of Jewish women, and as I was unhappily alone on a Friday night, I felt a certain envy or jealousy of those Jewish women I imagined to be either having an ornate dinner with their families, or fucking their husbands, just a few doors away from me.

I thought over those weekends about the idea of the fetishized Asian in juxtaposition with the idea of the fetishized Jewess. I did some internet searches on belle juive and its variants, and ended up finding a pornographic blog created by one fetishist of Jewish women. It made me incorrigibly horny, and I found myself going on CB, with the intent of broadcasting myself for the first time.

Promiscuity had been a kind of private religion for me for the two years leading up to that time, and I suppose I thought I was fulfilling a kind of mitzvah. But it wasn’t primarily exhibitonism or voyeurism or a desire to encounter a wide range of men that led me to the site. It was, first of all, the drive to reckon with racialized sexuality or sexualized racial identity which led me to CB.

To be clear, I think of the racial look as a fiction—none of the five Jewish men I’ve been with look alike, and I suspect someone who primarily dates Asians will say the same about their selection of lovers. The thing we like about the ethnicity or race is in reality nebulous and fantastical and hard to describe.

What I found so fascinating about the blog, however, was precisely the intensity of its attempt to catalogue and describe a very large collection of women who were ostensibly all of the same fundamental type. It ended up being a mess. He placed the women in his collection in five different categories, ranging from the Jews with alleged Khazar traits, to those who looked indistinguishable from the members of the “white race” they were supposedly defiling and destroying, to those who weren’t Jewish at all, but who nevertheless embodied some of the sexual traits of the Seductive Jewess. In spite of the diffusion of his collection, I figured that his identification of a preferred ethnic or racial type had allowed him to enjoy these women as being entirely separate from his own “race”—i.e., from his lifelong and intergenerational entanglement with his mother and father.

So if the figure of the Jewess allowed him to fall in love with everything outside of or beyond his own personal history, I suppose the same applied to me.

Jewish Daddy resembles J, a Jewish philosophy professor I had sex with once. But J, in turn, resembles my father, just a little bit. On our first and only date, he had told me that he couldn’t imagine marrying a Jew, or a non-Jew. I lit up at this statement of his, perhaps because I imagined I could be neither. His mother had grown up in my neighborhood, and the shortened form of his name was the same as my birth name. He also smelled incredibly good to me, like my first Jewish boyfriend. I felt extremely drawn to this web of connections.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, he preferred blondes. So J was into shikses.

My first Jewish boyfriend taught me the word shikse. It’s a word I felt an immediate attraction to, and continue to love, as a variant on “slut” with exogamy built in: a shiske is simply a non-Jewish woman. This first Jewish boyfriend, A, didn’t have sort of a history with Asian women, but he had spent years studying Russian, living in Russia, and dating Russian women, who seemed to allow him to get closer to a kind of oblique, semi-Jewish motherland.

That same night, he told me about how Jewish surnames were “made up” for the purpose of assimilation. I was also quite drawn to this idea of a sea of neologistic last names. The conversation had been brought on by my telling him that I had trouble identifying with “Asianness,” and with being attracted to other Asians either as lovers or as friends. A told me that he had some trouble with the notion of dating a Jewish woman. I realized that night that we faced a similar question, around a kind of repudiation of where one came from, though the reality was that neither of us really knew where we came from, and still we had a certain urge to escape. Yet the blurriness of his origins was quite distinct from mine; he had a clearer relationship to a set of cultural practices, and I had little sense of what constituted mine, being split between a Korean father and a Taiwanese mother, who had nothing in common when it came to language and tradition.

If I were to go on a date with Jewish Daddy, I’d probably tell him all this. I’d tell him all this with the devotion of someone who’s really got to do her homework on the nature of her desire and on the way she has repudiated her ancestors.

“Yeah, I have a type, and it’s you.”

“You resemble a man who resembles my father.”

“You overwrite my father; this is what I have to gain from desiring you.”

My expression would be self-critical, I’d perhaps be ashamed of myself for having skirted around the truth of what I had to gain by liking him.

But in spite of this, I’d gaze at him with a real appreciation for his particular, beautiful face. Then I’d tell him about my deep appreciation of my current lover, whose grandfather was a kosher meat inspector in our neighborhood. I’d say something about how I like the word punim, which my lover taught me. And about how I like the word shiske, and the exact circumstances under which I learned this word. I’ll tell him that the day after I saw him, I biked to a Kosher grocery store and bought a pastry that was unfamiliar to me, called kokosh, and marveled at its coiled insides. I wonder what he’d think of me, if he’d see me as irrelevant: irrelevant to the prayers in the Siddur Ashkenaz. I’d tell him that I looked up what he was reading and read some of it and was confused, it’s so different from literature, it’s so different from philosophy, it’s so different from reading Freud. Daddy Freud, he’s so popular these days, among academic gentiles. A lot of us became interested in Jewishness through Freud, through psychoanalysis, through beginning psychoanalytic treatment and psychoanalytic institutes in New York City, where most of the faculty remains Jewish. And we go to class and discuss the various meanings of the text; what did Freud mean when he wrote about “neutrality” or about the “death drive”?

Maybe he’d show me a picture of his ex-wife, who would be enviably pretty. He’d reveal to me no preference for Asian women, and I’d presume he didn’t feel a strong interest in me (of the five Jewish men I’ve been with, only one noted a preference for Asians). I’d tell her that she was beautiful, and he’d congratulate me on having found my current Jewish lover. Then I’d show him a picture of the last man I dated for a while and found extremely beautiful, who’s also half-Jewish. Look at him, look at his beautiful eyes. Look at the philosophy professor, how beautiful he is here. Look at the psychoanalyst I met on the train and went on two dates with; look at his beautiful cat. Look at this wonderful meal that A cooked for me. Look at how beautiful he looks here swimming.

Oh, and you are beautiful too, I smiled when I first saw you on the train, there are so many faces to appreciate in the city but I chose yours to alight upon. And why do you find me beautiful, he might ask. Can’t you see, can’t you see based on my narrative why I find you beautiful? No, he’d say, it doesn’t explain it at all; there are too many other Jewish daddies for you to enjoy in passing.

I still feel so hungry for Jewish Daddy. Would like to sink my teeth into him and have him see me looking at him. I have my own racial stereotypes when it comes to women like me. We’re ravenous, and slightly creepy in our horniness and we don’t really know certain social norms, each of us have different deficiences when it comes to following social mores. I sometimes want to be appreciated specifically for being Asian if this is what being an Asian woman means.

It’s a very specific weird way of being in the world, and a weird way of emphasizing the sexual. I hope that strangers on the street see me as lascivious or wily or overly, or perhaps secretly overly sexual. Maybe this fantasy underlies every subway encounter, every encounter with a man’s gaze in the street, because the first thing he will see is my Asianness, perhaps, if he has already determined that he enjoys Asian women more, precisely because of these traits which I hope he associates with them. Likewise, but with less immediacy, I speculate as to whether the Jewish stranger is Jewish before I determine that I am attracted to him, and when I discover that he is, I am all the more excited.

So, I’m finding a way to imagine what it’s like for a man to be into Asian women by describing what it’s like for me to be into Jewish men. That’s the argument of this post. But this is all in my head, and I’d be curious to read someone else’s account of their own type, and their relationship with the fact of having a type.

And I’m still very confused about why this matters so much to me, other than the raw fact of my immense interest in Jewish Daddy who I may very well see on the train again this week. I really do want to see him again, unlike Aphrodite of the Subway, whom I could capture and enjoy fully within one short encounter.