Wang, my Chinese husband’s cousin, seemed to have it all. A lucrative job as a real estate developer. Two new BMWs. Expensive suits. Nothing about him suggested his countryside roots — the same mountain village as my husband, where people still planted their own rice paddies, used wood-burning stoves, and had free-range chickens scurrying in and out of their houses.
But when he volunteered his silver BMW sedan as our wedding car in 2007 (of course, he couldn’t help but boast “oh, if you had mentioned this sooner, I could have prepared my bigger and better BMW.”), he discovered he was missing the ultimate accessory of all — a Western wife.
“He told me he wanted to find a yangxifu,” my husband recalled. “He asked if we could introduce him to some Western women.”
But we didn’t. Sure, we didn’t know any single Western women in China, since by then we lived in the US for nearly two years. But even if we did, introducing them to Wang had the kind of cheap, mail-order-bride feel to it that no friend would get their friend into. After all, he didn’t really care who she was, so long as she was foreign.
It’s just like I read over a year ago in a study about What Western Women Think of Chinese Men:
Those [Chinese] men with Western girlfriends or wives will brag about them, as if these women were a BMW.
Wang already had two BMWs to show off, but no such Western wife — never thinking, of course, that a wife, any wife, should never become a man’s bling.
“People who think this way have no suzhi,” my husband said as he frowned, using the word that Chinese often use to refer to the quality of people — which, in this case, was not much at all. “They turn their wives into objects, and try to show they are better than others in such a low way.”
Still, Wang could have gone much lower, as we learned two years ago while visiting the Kaifeng Night Market. After we bought almond tea from a stall run by lanky twentysomething wearing a white kufi — the hat worn by the Muslim Hui minority in China — he nudged my husband. “Hey, do you think you could get me a foreign wife? I could buy her a house and a car.”
John grinned as he shook his head. “It’s not that simple. Western women have different expectations.”
Then the lanky guy leaned over and whispered something in my husband’s ear — which John told me about later. “He said his penis is very strong.”
What do you think about this?
. When I got to the discussion about the kind of people who married someone from another culture, I discovered this list:
