Advice to help you make friends with, date, or marry Chinese men. Stories about knowing, loving and marrying Chinese men. All from one Western woman with a Chinese husband.
One Western woman reveals her love to a Chinese man, only to learn he can never love her back. Can she ever be more than just his friend?
LongingForLove asks:
I wonder about Chinese man act of love really. I have one guy from China and we become good friends first .We help and share stories together and have happy time also .One day i feel ” I love him ” but i don’t know what should i do really ? because he doesn’t show anythings to me that he love me ,only he always tells me that ” you raise me up.” So , i told him when i met him that ” I love you” and he replied me that ” i felt same like you ” but i feel uncomfortable if we thought like that .Whatever happen i expected we contact forever.
A woman wonders why her Chinese man doesn't show her love or affection, or give compliments.
Missing Dimension asks:
I am white, and I know my Chinese S.O. loves me, but he never says so. No affection, touching, except in the bedroom. No compliments. No flirting. He is 62, born in Hong Kong, and lived in Canada a little while. Mostly lived in NY. He can be highly critical. But I have controlled this to some extent. Is this normal for a highly educated Chinese American man? There seems to be a whole dimension of our relationship left out.
When a noisy Shanghai city works project brings migrant workers into our home -- literally -- I begin to wonder: just whose life is being disturbed?
Our neighborhood still echoes with a sour symphony of drills and hammers as the city of Shanghai makes water line repairs and fire extinguisher replacements.
The project finally reached our house in mid July, 2003, with work starting at the convenient hour of 6am (convenient, that is, from the point of view of Shanghai, which would never have its workforce toil in the heat of the day). The swarthy-faced men descended on our home like an invading army, with the grimaced, sweaty brows of exhausted soldiers in a foreign land. The truth is, Shanghai probably was a foreign place to them, because they had the look of migrant workers, perhaps from Anhui Province (which supplied many of the Shanghai migrants). I should know, because I walked over them, napping on the wooden staircase leading up to my apartment — the entire house oozed with grimy, slumbering men, as if they had just magically grown out of the cracks after I left for work that morning. Continue reading “Chapter 71: Migrant Workers in Our Staircase”
A Western woman had her heart broken, when the Chinese man she loved turned out to be married. How can you avoid dishonest men in China?
Just recently, a reader also shared with me how her friend, a Western woman, was heartbroken by a Chinese man who didn’t disclose his marriage — and pregnant wife.
Ouch.
There’s a saying in Chinese: 林子大，什么鸟都有 (there are all kinds of birds in a big forest). So, it goes for China too: there are all kinds of Chinese men. And some aren’t really looking for THAT kind of love.
What do Western women think of Chinese men? A study by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences provides further insight into why couples of Chinese men and Western women are so rare.
This week on Ask the Yangxifu, I’m preempting the usual Q&A to share with you an article published a few weeks ago, in Chinese, discussing a China study about what Western women think of Chinese men — a topic on the minds of many readers.
No surprises here — especially if you’ve read or followed the comments on my post On the Rarity of Foreign Women and Chinese Boyfriends/Chinese Husbands. Still, it’s nice to see a more empirical take on something we have understood more intuitively, or through our own experiences.
Just as SARS began, and panic slowly began to mask the public, it felt odd to be so in love, in China. (Image from www.wired.com)
I’d been working for barely a month in Shanghai, when news of SARS began to spread like the virus itself.
Masks quietly spread around the bus I rode into downtown Shanghai.
The women’s bathroom became our morning decontamination station, as everyone washed their hands more obsessively than Lady MacBeth — over conversations about whether or not to buy face masks.
E-mails about Hong Kong infected my inbox, with seemingly fictional photographs of people muzzled with face masks, and health workers dressed in outfits straight out of the Andromeda Strain.
Going to the hospital in China didn't mean my cough was serious. But it came just at a time when a more serious illness began to threaten China.
Going to the hospital. Before I came to China, the phrase seemed so serious, a harbinger of bad news — in the US, only those with a sickness or problem beyond the family doctor would visit the hospital.
But in China, hospitals handled everything, from minor colds to major surgery. You could not divine the severity of a problem just because someone went to the hospital.
That someone going to a hospital, one evening in mid-March, 2003, was me — a young foreigner gripped with a relentless, raw cough. I felt so sickly before John, my Chinese boyfriend, who never took ill because, unlike me, he had met much of the bacteria and viruses in China once before in his lifetime. My health had been a source of consternation before, and still was. So this evening, as we walked into the hospital, John wrapped his arm around me, gently stroking my shoulder to comfort me, like a parent soothing a doctor-phobic young child. Continue reading “Chapter 59: Going to the Hospital in China”
In Shanghai, my Chinese boyfriend and I were almost as close as husband and wife. All of the signs said we were headed to a wedding -- so why did I have to ask?
There was no history of casual dating in John’s family. His maternal grandmother was a child bride, sent to live with her grandfather’s family when she was seven or eight, without the ability or understanding to contest her fate. She went from being a virginal pre-adolescent to a wife who would immediately bear children.
John’s mother, her daughter, married during the Cultural Revolution, in 1972 — with a “revolutionary marriage certificate,” stamped in red, to prove it. She was never a child bride, but still a stranger to this man, introduced to her through a matchmaker in the village, with a courtship that fast-tracked them straight to a wedding. Marriage was simply a practical matter, solving what the Chinese often refer to as their “personal problem.”
Should you wait to tell your Chinese boyfriend "I love you?"
Should I Say “I Love You” asks:
I’m an American woman dating a Chinese American man in the US, and need your help.
After just a few months [with him] I find myself thinking of him constantly! We talk all day long, via text, and spend at least an hour a day on the phone. We live about 50 miles apart, so sometimes I drive through hours of traffic just to see him; and he has to walk to a bus, take a train & then I pick him up & we drive some more to come to my house. We do our best to get together every weekend, but have gone 2 weekends without seeing one another and it was BRUTAL! The closeness of our connection and the quickness of it scares us both.
We talked about it a few weeks ago; I am just coming out of a HUGE relationship that I thought was going to last forever and I am now in a big ugly financial mess as a result–3 years ago he was ready to propose to someone who broke his heart, and now he is working full time while going to school full time and his priorities are finishing school [With an A average and no less, of course ;-)] and hopefully landing a job in his dream career. We talk about societal pressures to “settle down”, have kids, “grow up” and neither of us are really willing to conform to those norms. We discussed how it is good that we kind of live far apart, it allows us to take care of our responsibilities etc. during the week, and then really enjoy each other’s company on the weekends. But even with that distance, we are extremely close and I think both frightened by it.
A few weeks ago, we had spent the weekend together and it was beautiful. The next day we talked on the phone, and he shared with me that he is nervous that his feelings for me are much more than he expected, and he is afraid if our relationship moves too fast he will not accomplish his goals. I appreciated his honesty, he told me once that expressing himself openly is often very hard for him, so I knew it was important if he told me about it. Frankly, I think our relationship right now is PERFECT! We connect intellectually, emotionally, and most DEFINITELY PHYSICALLY (Yes!). The distance and other circumstances does prevent us from moving way ahead of ourselves and it’s a little safety net.
So here it is……………I am in love with him. No matter how I try to rationalize myself out of it, or think of reasons this could just be a “fling” or a “rebound” I have just connected so deeply with this man on so many levels it can be nothing but love. Certainly not at all what I had expected, but I guess it’s better when things happen that way, isn’t it? I am not ready to tell him this, because I feel it is too soon, and I don’t want to put any unnecessary pressure there at all. But sometimes the way he looks at me, right into my eyes, he seems that he wants to say the same thing too. It was after the first time he looked at me this way that we had our “I’m scared” conversation. It’s like every time I look into his eyes I want to scream “I LOVE YOU”, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Am I wrong for holding that in? Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: Waiting to Say “I Love You” To a Chinese Boyfriend”
Should you stay abroad with your Chinese spouse? I share with one reader our reasons for returning to China someday.
To Stay or Not asks:
I am an American woman who just married a Chinese man, and am so excited to find your site! We are planning on coming back to the US so he can go to graduate school. I know your husband is currently in school in the US, and you wrote somewhere you both plan to return to China. Could you tell me why you won’t stay in the US? I would like to know, because I sometimes wonder if staying in the US is right for us. Xie xie!Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: Why We Won’t Stay in the US”
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