Tag: chinese women

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‘The Chinese Exclusion Act’ on PBS Reminds Me Asian Stereotypes Haven’t Changed Much

The other night, I had the chance to stream The Chinese Exclusion Act, a nearly two-hour film documenting the events that led to America’s one and only piece of legislation targeting a specific nationality and race, as well as the aftermath and eventual repeal. The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law in May 1882 and didn’t end until December 1943.

Much of the film centers on the mid- to late-1800s, and yet it feels timely because many of the stereotypes originating from that era still persist to this day, continuing to shape US media portrayals of Asians as well as how many Americans still view the rise of Asian countries such as China.

Here are 4 stereotypes from the 1800s that have still survived – sometimes in slightly different forms – to this day, as mentioned in The Chinese Exclusion Act.

#1: The stereotype of Asian men as “inferior”

A few years ago, I wrote Debunking the “Model Asian” Myth: Five Ways Asian-Americans Still Face Discrimination for Hippo Reads, which includes the following paragraph:

Justin Chan spoke for generations of Asian men when he wrote, “Are Asian Men Undateable?” in Policy Mic. Years of pernicious stereotypes have branded Asian men as emasculated, weak, asexual, and even too small in a certain department—essentially, editing them out of the most eligible bachelor pool. Not surprisingly, Freakonomics calculated that an Asian man would need to earn $247,000 more than a white man to be equally appealing to a white woman. That’s like requiring every Asian guy to own a Bentley before asking out the white girl next door.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that, back in the late 1800s, when Yellow Peril took hold, white Americans cast Chinese men as being inferior to white men, as experts point out in part 1 of The Chinese Exclusion Act (emphasis added):

John Kuo Wei Tchen, Historian: So what happens is that class and racialization converge – get confused. And the “Coolie question,” and the Chinese question, really become the big question nationally of labor and class.  Can the American man compete with this degraded Asian male form of labor?  They don’t eat as much; their nerves are farther away from the surface of the skin, so they don’t feel as much; they eat rats.  You know, all this  gets played out even more and more around not just class lines and racialization, but also around gender.  The Chinese male is inferior – is not the same as white manhood, right.  So you have that famous cover – “Meat versus Rice.” American manhood vs. Asiatic coolie-ism,?   And, of course, the Asian male is inferior – but tenacious, because there are a lot of them.  So they’re dangerous because they’re so many of them, right.  Not because they really rival the actually superior white male.

#2: The stereotype of Asian women as “sexualized”

A major stereotype that still persists is this idea of Asian women as sexualized and subservient (see Kristina Wong’s post earlier this year titled I Give Up On Trying To Explain Why The Fetishization Of Asian Women Is Bad).

And again, we see echoes of that stereotype in the late 1800s in America, prompting the 1875 passage of the Page Act, which forbade the immigration to America of those coming to work under contracts and as prostitutes. The latter prohibition was aimed squarely at Chinese women, as The Chinese Exclusion Act explains (emphasis added):

Scott Wong, Historian: There developed this sexist, racist, misogynist attitude among Americans, that Chinese women were naturally prone to become prostitutes.  And, therefore, Chinese women, who wanted to come to the U.S., had to prove that they were never prostitutes; that they weren’t prostitutes then; nor would they ever become prostitutes.  Now, of course, one can’t prove what will not happen or happen in the future.  So many women chose not to even go through that humiliation. So we had that first act that’s passed, that is very racial and gender-specific.

#3: The stereotype of Chinese “stealing jobs/opportunities from Americans”

When major elections roll around in America these days, there’s one thing you can count on – those politicians claiming China is “stealing” jobs and opportunities. And as Chinese students still comprise the largest group of foreigners studying abroad at US institutions of higher education, you’re sure to hear complaints from Americans, alleging Chinese are also “taking away” slots at colleges and universities that belong to American students.

Sadly, this narrative has hardly budged from the late 1800s, when white workers concocted this stereotype that Chinese were also plundering their economic opportunities back then, as The Chinese Exclusion Act noted in years following the California Gold Rush (emphasis added):

Narrator: As surface gold in the river beds became scarcer – hydraulic mining run by companies increasingly displaced the lone prospector panning for gold.

Ling-chi Wang, Scholar: A lot of white independent prospectors went bankrupt and became unemployed. But instead of turning their anger against the gold-mining company and the water company for exploiting them, they turned against the Chinese.  They say: “Ah, the Chinese were here.  They take away our jobs.” And so that is really the beginning of white working-class agitation for Chinese Exclusion.

#4: The stereotype of Asians — including Chinese — as “perpetual foreigners”

Back in 2016, Christopher Hoffman penned the post Perpetual Foreigners: A Reflection on Asian Americans in the American Media, commenting on a racist segment aired on Fox News titled “Watters’ World: Chinatown Edition”, and noted the following:

The larger problem is the segment clearly challenges the American identity of Asian American citizens in Manhattan’s China Town. Frank H. Wu’s Race in America Beyond Black and White defines this idea of Asian Americans as the “perpetual foreigner.” By assuming Chinese Americans have a better relationship with the country of their ancestral heritage, Watters is placing Chinese Americans in a second-class citizen role, unable to fully adopt all the characteristics to become a full citizen of the United States of America. This idea of the “perpetual foreigner” is not limited to Chinese Americans, but a xenophobic image many Asian Americans from a variety of Asian backgrounds must face.

This xenophobia can be traced back to the late 1800s and the Chinese Exclusion Act itself, where people believed it was impossible for Chinese to ever be fully American, as The Chinese Exclusion Act explains:

Martin B. Gold, Attorney: It really did two things.  One is an exclusion from immigration, and the other thing was an exclusion from citizenship.  at the time there were approximately 105,000 Chinese in America.  Now, they were just two-tenths of one percent of the overall American population.   So what happens to the people who are already here – people legally in the United States?  And what that law said was, “These people cannot assimilate.  They are too different in terms of their culture – in terms of their appearance – in terms of their language – the clothes that they wear – and the food that they eat – and the gods that they worship.  They cannot assimilate into the American population.  And in that sense, they are different from European immigrants.  So we’re going to make, as a Congress, a judgment.  We’re going to say that because they are an unassimilable population, they cannot come to the United States, and those that are here cannot become American citizens.”

If you haven’t yet viewed The Chinese Exclusion Act, I highly recommend streaming it — and noting how the legacy of oppression still lingers to this day.

What do you think?

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Roseann Lake’s “Leftover in China” and Leta Hong Fincher’s “Leftover Women” Compared

A huge thank you to Susan Blumberg-Kason, author of Good Chinese Wife, for this comparison review of Roseann Lake’s Leftover in China and Leta Hong Fincher’s Leftover Women.

Some months ago, there was a stir on social media about a new book on leftover women. Leta Hong Fincher is the veritable scholar on this subject, so was Roseann Lake’s new book taking credit from Hong Fincher by not crediting her work? I set out to read both books and compare the two since I hadn’t seen anyone else do so in detail.

Let’s start with the titles. Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed Books, 2014) by Leta Hong Fincher tells me that her book will show how women in China no longer hold up half the sky and women who don’t marry by twenty-six are suffering from this inequality. (Up until the mid-90s, before I read Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book China Wakes, I had thought China had done better a better job with gender equality than most other countries. If it wasn’t clear since then, Leta Hong Fincher certainly makes that case in her book.) Roseann Lake’s book is titled Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower (Norton, 2018) and to me sounds like it focuses on the women in China who are not marrying by twenty-six and are influential in China’s rapid rise. Both books are pretty true to their respective subtitles.

But could there be overlap? And how much and in which ways? These were the questions I was looking to answer when I read both books. I first kept my eyes open for statistics since those are easy to compare. I found similar facts on page 47 of Hong Fincher’s book and page 188 of Lake’s.

  • According to Hong Fincher, “The 2011 interpretation of the Marriage Law by the Supreme People’s Court, however, specifies that upon divorce, if both parties are unable to reach an agreement on the division of property, each side is entitled to keep whatever property is registered in his or her own name.”
  • And this from Lake’s book: “A 2011 amendment states that in the event of a divorce, the marital home belongs exclusively to the person whose name is on the deed.”

While these two passages are not word-for-word duplicates, the information is the same. It’s important to note here that Chinese parents strive to buy their sons property as a way to attract a bride. Even if the bride-to-be owns her own apartment, she sometimes puts it in her husband’s name so the husband doesn’t feel emasculated. The bride may sell her property and put the proceeds towards a new property she and her husband jointly own—with his name solely on the title per the custom in China. Hong Fincher doesn’t have copyright on this 2011 amendment, but this was a good place Lake could have cited Hong Fincher’s work, mostly because this information is the crux of Hong Fincher’s book.

Another part that stood out was when both authors cited statistics from Mara Hvistendahl’s fabulous book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs, 2011).

  • In Leta Hong Fincher’s book, she writes on page 22, “Mara Hvistendahl writes in her book on the global sex ratio imbalance, Unnatural Selection, about some remote parts of China with villages teeming with men, where the ratio of boys to girls had reached 3 to 2.”
  • Lake expands on this on page 23 of her book. “As reported by Mara Hvistendahl in Unnatural Selection…, there are places in China like Yichun, in Jiangxi province, where the ratio is 137 males for 100 females under age 4…and in Tianmen, Hubei, it escalates to a perilous 176 to 100, or the mathematical equivalent of 1 in every 3 men being unable to find a bride.”

So did Lake lift material from Hong Fincher in this case or not cite her? I don’t think so. Mara Hvistendahl’s work was cited and it’s interesting that both Hong Fincher and Lake use this material in similar places in their books.

As a sidenote, Tianmen is next to my former in-laws’ hometown. Two decades ago, I left my AMWF marriage because I was terrified my then-husband was going to whisk our son to his parents’ home so they could raise him. I didn’t know about the gender imbalance there, but that could have been the life my son would experience had the ex and his parents had their way. It makes me shudder.

Both authors address the somewhat common occurrence of gay men marrying women but not telling their wives about their true identity. Women are desperate to get married and not become leftover women (according to Hong Fincher, this label was created by the Chinese government to get independent and highly educated single women onto the marriage track when they realized the surplus of men, called “bare branches”, was left without wives). Because they don’t want to become leftover women, sometimes women won’t ask questions when their partner doesn’t seem quite into them.

Hong Fincher writes about LGBTQ activism and how property ownership is an issue for gay men who won’t and cannot marry. I didn’t find any similar wording in Lake’s book, which talks more about the history of gay rights in China. Both authors interview women who were or are still married to gay men. In Hong Fincher’s book around page 91-92, the woman was still in denial about her husband’s need to live apart from her while he shared an apartment with a college roommate (they shared the same bed), while around page 109 in Lake’s book a woman divorced her husband after she suspected he was leading a secret life that didn’t include her.

I may have missed other similarities, but the reason for that is that these books really did seem like different stories. Hong Fincher’s book reads like a thrilling narrative that centers around property ownership and all that entails in contemporary China:

  • parents not giving their daughters money for a down payment and instead giving it to a male cousin;
  • how property ownership is tied to masculinity and how independent women give up their property rights or are stripped of it by Chinese custom when they marry in order to avoid becoming a leftover woman; and
  • how Chinese women have enjoyed property ownership rights in the past, even going back to the Ming dynasty.

Hong Fincher also includes chapters on spousal abuse and women activists.

Lake, on the other hand, includes profiles of women she met in China and tells their stories about becoming leftover women and how they’ve tried to find suitable partners or have escaped terrible marriages. Her book is lighter in some ways, for instance when it features a bikini waxer, which segues into the section about women marrying gay men in China. I’m still not sure about the relevancy of the bikini waxer, but it gives the book a different tone from Hong Fincher’s. On the other hand, Lake writes about the mistress culture in China, whereas I can’t remember Hong Fincher discussing it at all. Hong Fincher is not so optimistic about women’s rights in China as long as the property market is skewed against them, whereas Lake views the status of women in China to be on the right track if they can find better marriage prospects or feel all right about being single for life. They both conclude that women have it pretty rough in China.

Back to the controversy: should Lake have credited Hong Fincher? I think that would have been the decent thing to do, especially since she had contacted Hong Fincher while researching her book. In her footnotes, Hong Fincher meticulously credits scholars even for a conversation about a particular detail she wrote about in her book, whether or not said scholar wrote a book she used in her bibliography. Lake admits she didn’t read Hong Fincher’s book because she wanted to form her own ideas. I would have taken a different approach, but this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of an author admit to not wanting to be influenced by outside ideas. She’s certainly not alone in this.

After thinking about both books and recently reading Mara Hvistendahl’s, the bottom line to me is this: we need more books in this space. Between Hong Fincher, Lake, Hvistendahl, we’ve seen different ways leftover women and bare branches shape China today. Still other authors like Mei Fong and Lenora Chu write about the one-child policy and how that is shaping China, too. If we can have over half a dozen memoirs written by white American Peace Corps volunteers in China, I think it’s high time we listen to women’s voices, too.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife.

Leftover in China and Leftover Women are available at Amazon.com, where your purchases help support this blog.

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To the Girl Whose Boyfriend’s ￥8,000/Mo Salary “Wasn’t Enough”

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(Photo by Thomas Hawk via https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/130659141/)

My husband and I were having dinner the other night at a vegetarian restaurant in Hangzhou. It just so happens that you were dining only a few feet across from us with your girlfriend.

When we first sat down, I saw the both of you enjoying a bowl of the sour and spicy vegetarian “fish” soup with pickled vegetables. I remembered how delicious that dish was, and how I hadn’t ordered it in a long time. I thought to myself, those girls have good taste.

But that was before my husband and I overheard your conversation.

You told your friend about how dissatisfied you were with your boyfriend. You said his salary of “only” 8,000 RMB a month wasn’t good enough. You flicked your expensively dyed long hair aside with great disdain as you said, “He can’t possibly support me.”

Your girlfriend, wearing black faux-leather leggings and stiletto-heeled boots just like you, nodded in agreement.

The two of you went on to belittle this young man, who you fell in love with in college, for another reason. His hometown was somewhere outside of Hangzhou. It was yet another black mark against him. Yet more proof he would never be “rich enough” for you.

I’ve heard this sort of thing before.

Years ago I learned that, for many people in China, marriage is all about having a home, car and money. I understand that women often evaluate men based on these marriage must-haves. I’m aware that there was even a girl on TV who once famously said she’d rather be crying in the back of a BMW than smiling on the back of a bicycle.

There’s a woman in China who once told me, “The purpose of life and marriage is to make money.” On the surface, she has it all. She and her husband own at least five apartments, drive a brand new BMW, have a son, and earn lots of money through the family business.

But privately, she is the saddest woman I have ever met.

She is bitter and constantly complains. Despite her huge bank accounts, she is stingy to the core. Her husband has cheated on her; she fights with him all the time. Her son is on the way to becoming a juvenile delinquent. For a time, things were so bad that she actually threatened to commit suicide.

I would not be surprised if she had cried in the backseat of her shiny new BMW.

Never would I wish to change places with this woman, even though she has so much money. I’ve realized I’m actually happier than she ever will be. There are far more important things in life her money can never buy. A peaceful, happy marriage. Love. Friendship. Kindness. Generosity. The ability to see hope in the darkest hours.

You can’t measure these things in dollars or yuan. I don’t care what that woman once told me – money isn’t everything. It never was.

So if you decide to break up with this guy just because he makes ￥8,000 a month and isn’t from Hangzhou, there’s nothing I can do to stop you.

If you end up marrying a wealthier man, maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe he’ll be a nice guy who just happens to be rich.

But if he isn’t so nice after all, then maybe you’ll discover what it’s really like to have tears in your eyes in the back of your luxury car.

And if that happens, believe me when I say this: I won’t be crying for you.

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Is Beijing Becoming Dangerous for Couples of Foreign Men and Chinese Women?

This past Thursday, when I awoke to news of the disastrous Tianjin factory explosion, I didn’t think things could get any worse.

Then I saw this photo in a WeChat group I belong to, where one of the women recounted her horrifying discovery of a bloodied Chinese woman, stabbed to death by a katana sword, while passing through Beijing’s popular Sanlitun neighborhood.

Sanlitun-Uniqlo-stabbing

Did you happen to notice the white foreign man hovering over her? Here’s another photo from the scene – you can’t miss his blood-soaked T-shirt.

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I saw this on Twitter:

mmexport1439450389962 Here’s the story on Beijing Cream.

Then a friend on WeChat said, “There have been a lot of random beatings of foreign men with Chinese women in Gongti [District in Beijing] and Wudaokou [District in Beijing]. I wonder if [it is] connected or not.”

I immediately typed in the words “foreign men Chinese women wudaokou” into my Internet browser, and sure enough, the evidence surfaced – especially a story on The World of Chinese titled Group accused of attacking foreigners arrested, which notes several attacks where the victims were foreign men walking with Chinese women (or, in one case, a Korean woman who appeared Chinese to attackers).

Whoa.

Still, it’s one thing to beat someone, and another to stab someone to death.

The following day, I discovered this Tweet (via an updated version of the story at Beijing Cream):

Note that “老外” is the Chinese term for foreigners (in this case, foreign men) — confirming this as a hate crime.

So, is Beijing becoming a more dangerous place for these couples? Is this the natural escalation of “foreigners behaving badly” in China? (You know, guys like Chinabounder, or these other high-profile cases of foreign men doing some really despicable things to Chinese women in public.) What do you think?

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Interview with Ray Hecht on “Pearl River Drama: Dating in China”

Reinventing yourself abroad is practically an expat tradition. Whenever I sit down with foreigners here in China, more often than not they have a story about how the Middle Kingdom unexpectedly transformed their lives, forging them into the fascinating person they are today.

Writer Ray Hecht, who hails from my home state of Ohio (he’s from Cincinnati and I’m from Cleveland), is no exception. But he has a different kind of story to share. After all, how many have you met who took the “go to China” plunge in a psychedelic haze in the Nevada desert (Burning Man)? Ray does have an easier time meeting Chinese and foreign women for dates, but he never turns into another “charisma man” (or worse, Chinabounder) because of it.

Even better, you can read all about his experiences in an honest and compelling new memoir titled Pearl River Drama: Dating in China.

Pearl River Drama: Dating in China

From the girls he could have loved forever to the “just sex” moments to the one who stalked him (yikes!), Ray doesn’t shy away from letting you into his utterly imperfect love life. He’s refreshingly self-deprecating about it all and ultimately comes across as a genuinely nice foreign guy just looking for love in China. (Note that, besides graphic descriptions of sex, this story does include a lot of recreational drug use, so reader discretion is advised.)

Pearl River Drama: Dating in China is a fast and entertaining read (I devoured it on the bullet train from Beijing to Hangzhou). I’m honored to introduce you to Ray Hecht and his new memoir through this interview.

Ray Hecht

Here’s Ray’s bio from Goodreads:

Ray Hecht was raised in America, from the Midwest to the West Coast, on a starchy diet of movies and comics and science fiction paperbacks. Mostly writing about such states as California and Ohio, and such provinces as Guangdong. Lived in Shenzhen, China since 2008, that Special Economic Zone & Hong Kong-bordering chaotic city of the future, occasionally partaking in freelance journalism for various local publications.

You can learn more about Ray and Pearl River Drama: Dating in China at his website.

I asked Ray about what it felt to have such personal stories out there for people to read, how he ended up with such a fascinating mix of women, what regrets he has (if any) and much more:

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What inspired you to write this memoir?

I went through a lot of drama back in 2013. While my writing career was going up, my love life suddenly exploded. I briefly thought I met a perfect girl abroad, one Chinese woman I dated basically turned out to be a stalker and caused me incredible stress, and then it culminated in having my heart broken.

I often write private journals. It helps me process.

This time, I thought it would help if I put it all out there as a blog. It may have been a rash decision. But it did give me some inspiration to further write, and a lot of the conversation it ensued really helped me think about things. I found a lot of supportive people in the WordPress blog scene, and I’m glad I did it.

I finished the blog at a certain point, because I didn’t want people who personally knew me in Shenzhen to know all of my business. I share a lot, but I do have limits. However, at least making it an eBook seemed the thing to do, and for that project it wouldn’t be freely on my blog. It would cost just a few dollars, and I could share even more…

I don’t know if this is was a bad idea or not, perhaps putting these revelations out there will come back to haunt me one day, but too late now.

Your stories get incredibly personal and intimate at times, sharing details that would make many of us blush! How does it feel to have these stories out there for anyone to read (including your former girlfriends/lovers)?

As said, the blog was less blush-worthy than the finished product memoir. I’m fine with acquaintances and stranger readers out in the world reading about my personal life. I’m much more hesitant about people I personally know well — especially if they were there in some of those experiences!

Surprisingly, I haven’t had any negative feedback from ex-girlfriends. A few said they liked reading. I even pointed it out, in the name of honesty. There’s really just the one girl I hope doesn’t read it…

You described yourself as “a nerdy American boy from Ohio” who wasn’t “particularly good with girls” and yet your dating life was transformed in China, where you ended up dating many women and found your stride. Still, you write that “I was lucky to date anyone who would have me.” How were you able to keep such a humble perspective about it all?

I don’t know if humble is the word. Self-loathing at times? Realistic?

I try my best not to be one of those obnoxious expats who think they god’s gift to (Chinese) women. And I have been rejected so many times. I have to have a real perspective. It’s not like I’m the one-night stand kind of guy, but I was persistent for a while there and I kept trying no matter how many bad relationships I was in. More than half were due to online dating, I admit, which is easier than the confidence it takes to pick up women in bars and that sort of thing I’ve never been good at.

Mainly, racking up all these stories shows there’s something wrong with me in that my long-term relationships were so seldom.

Over the course of the book, you write about being with a variety of women — from those you could imagine spending the rest of your life with to someone who actually stalked you for months. I was so surprised by the wide range of personalities and the drama of course! Why do you think you ended up with such a diverse (and fascinating) bunch of women?

Hey, diversity is the spice of life. I’ve always been open to having friends from different backgrounds, why not give anyone a chance no matter where they’re from? That’s one of the opportunities that comes from the expat lifestyle, I suppose. Ultimately I learned through trial and error that Chinese women may not be my type. No offense meant to any great Chinese people out there!

It has been just my luck that I got to meet so many fascinating people in the world.

Looking back on your dating experiences in China, do you have any regrets? Anything you would have done differently?

I have so many regrets. I don’t want to get too specific, sorry. I guess I basically wished I knew what I was doing. I could have been more honest about the relationships that were to be short-term. I could have treated women a lot better when I wanted something deeper but couldn’t get that to happen.

But it’s not good to have too many regrets. Life is a series of harshly learned lessons, and I hope to move forward.

Social skills take a while to learn for someone like me.

What do you hope people come away with after reading your memoir?

I don’t know what people should think when they read my work. Feel some empathy with me? Simply be entertained by the more wild parts? It’s hard to say. I emphatically do not want to be giving out any pickup advice. I do hope that people who might like Chinese/Asian girls can read it and see that women are individuals and cannot be stereotyped. If anyone is an expat, I hope they can relate. If anyone is interested in becoming an expat, especially in first-tier cities in China, I hope they can see what they would be getting into with the social scenes.

Mostly, it but is what it is and if you like reading that kind of thing then more power to you.

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Thanks so much to Ray Hecht for this interview! To learn more about Pearl River Drama: Dating in China and other writings by Ray, visit his website today.

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Guest Post: “And by Interest in Chinese Culture, You Mean Chinese Girls?”

When you see an Asian woman and a white man together, what runs through your mind? Do you see just another happy interracial couple? Or do you wonder, is he another white guy with yellow fever? (Or worse, do you think he’s another Julien Blanc or Chinabounder, a man who comes to Asia with the sole intent of preying upon the women for sexual or personal gain?) 

That’s the idea behind Gerald Zhang-Schmidt’s guest post. He’s a guy who happened to come to China because he loved the culture. But since he has a Chinese wife, some people wonder if “Chinese culture” is really just a coded way of saying “Chinese women.” 

Gerald is no stranger to Speaking of China. He has written about The privilege of stereotypes about cross-cultural couples in China in a guest post last year, and the two of us collaborated on posts about the stereotypes of Chinese-Western couples in China a while back. Gerald is also the only man I’ve ever met who changed his name after marriage (he actually submitted a question about changing your name in China which for a time was one of the 10 most popular posts on this site).

By the way, please visit Gerald’s blog today, where you’ll find a guest post there from me about “How I learned to feel at home at my in-laws’ place in rural China“.

Want to follow in Gerald’s footsteps and have your voice heard on Speaking of China? Check out my submit a post page for details.

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(Photo by daniel sandoval via Flickr.com)
(Photo by daniel sandoval via Flickr.com)

I have written before about how privilege can be a double-edged sword. When you are part of the majority that usually goes unquestioned, you have it much easier than those who always have to somehow justify themselves. At the same time, you will be put on the spot much less because everyone assumes they know what you’re about.

Usually, you read about Asian Male – Western Female relationships here on Jocelyn’s “Speaking of China,” and it is a topic of interest by the same token. It is the unusual coupling/pairing that draws attention while the opposite WMAF relationship is a dime a dozen.

Ah, yes, another white guy in China. Who cares?

Speak Chinese in public, even just a few words, and you will be praised. And then you will find yourself compared to Dashan. (Or right now, internationally, perhaps to Mark Zuckerberg.)

Get into a relationship with a Chinese woman, get ready for everyone knowing just perfectly well why and how that would have happened. Oftentimes, it seems everyone will think they know better than you, without ever having so much as done anything more than caught a glance of you.

At risk of sounding like bad Chinese “news” pieces, “everyone knows” of some “rotten apples,” and it’s been killing the atmosphere. I wrote about my relationship to my wife, who is Chinese, and the thoughts it raised before on my blog. One comment that immediately popped up accused me of “yellow fever.” Fittingly, right next to the link to a more recent post talking about how “yellow fever” is a demeaning concept.

So, I spoke to a fellow passenger on a train in China. She asked me what had led me to China and I replied that I’d had an interest in Chinese culture for as long as I could remember. She then asked me if by interest in Chinese culture, I actually meant the girls.

My then-girlfriend and I went down the road, heads turned and stared. Not just in her small-town hometown, where the police hadn’t had any idea about how to handle my residence registration until they checked in with their higher-ups. But even more so in the somewhat bigger cities where people obviously, in disapproving looks and mumbled comments, expressed their dubious opinion of our relationship.

I can’t blame the Chinese, though.

Pretty much every culture around the world tends to “lose” the daughters to husbands, and pretty much everywhere, seeing foreigners “take away” women is seen as an indication of one’s own weakness vis-á-vis the “others.”

Add an awareness, even if just at the level of urban legends and social media hearsay, of (supposedly) rich foreign guys basically buying themselves brides (of course, such stories would turn into morality tales with bad endings), foreigners actually bragging about the ease and number of their Asian conquests, and stories of destroyed virginities (and thus, marriage prospects, as per traditional Chinese notions) and broken hearts. It’s no wonder there is suspicion.

It is just natural.

I find it less natural for foreigners to bring along their cavalier attitudes about dating and sex to China. Okay, one could argue that it’s not a big deal here, given the traditional attitudes towards the wife versus mistresses. But no matter what over-entitled and under-culturally aware people claim, a stranger in a strange land should act with more concern for his host country.

Nowadays, of course, the effects on foreigners aren’t just isolated to places like China. Everywhere, one lives in the shadow of aspersion cast by those who act… well, in this case, under the influence of their penises rather than their brains, it seems.

Argue that you are different, and in a case of “methinks [he] doth protest too much”, you appear defensive, and by association, guilty. But shutting up only gives more room for the worst voices out there. So, at least sometimes – thank you for the invite and the reminder to do so again, Jocelyn – I go on writing about this issue. Most importantly, however, I keep on living it differently, remaining true to the woman I fell in love with and continue to love, whose name I added to my own, and who I want to make happy.

I’d love to add that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, but we humans are social animals to whom other’s opinions do matter a lot. However, it would help a lot, for a start, if you could at least not think the worst of us without knowing anything but our genders and ethnicities.

Gerald Zhang-Schmidt is an ecologist and cultural anthropologist who spent three years living in China, and now resides with his wife in his native Austria where he writes about the ecology of happiness, chili peppers and being at home in the world.

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Speaking of China is always on the lookout for outstanding guest posts and love stories! If you have something you’d like us to feature, visit the submit a post page for details — and then submit yours today.

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Guest Post: What I’ve Learned from 15 Blind Dates in China

What do Chinese men face today when they go on blind dates in China? Just ask “Ted”, who has had 15 blind dates over one and half years and lived to tell his own surprising tales. Read on to find out what he has learned from his own blind dating experience.

Do you have a dating or love story, or other guest post you’re dying to share on Speaking of China? Head on over to the submit a post page to learn how you can have your experiences published right here.

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(Photo by See-ming Lee via Flickr.com)
(Photo by See-ming Lee via Flickr.com)

After using a mainstream dating website in China for one and a half years, I successively met 15 different Chinese girls in China. If blind dates are like interviews, then you could say I’m an “interviewee” with a lot of experience. In sharing my own “interview experiences” here through my blind dates, I hope it might help you find your own true Mr. or Mrs. Right in China.

1. Dinner and Payment

Chinese girls are usually not willing to pay the bill for dinner. In fact, one of the most important consideration factors for girls who are dating is this: Will the boy actively pay the bill for dinner? If a guy pays the bill without prompting or reminding, he’s considered a gentleman. Among the 15 girls I have dated, only 1/4 were actually willing to share the dinner expenses with me. The most expensive dinner I have had was with a girl who returned from a stint abroad. She said that she never brought her wallet with her when having dinner with guys because the guy would always take care of the expenses. Most of the girls let me choose where to have dinner. But for my most recent blind date, I decided on a fast-food restaurant for our first meeting. The girl expressed her dissatisfaction very clearly: “It’s not polite to invite a girl to have fast food on a date. Such bad taste. You should take a girl to elegant places such as a nice cafe.” Meanwhile, she was puzzled with my backpack. “As a guy approaching thirty, you need to learn how to dress yourself.” I was so confused – I work in the education field and here I was, being evaluated by a new graduate. As far as I know, a lot of office workers outside China use backpacks and so do professors in universities.

2. Salary and Apartment

The questions I frequently encountered on blind dates with Chinese girls include the following: How much is your salary? Do you plan to buy an apartment? What is your future career plan? Of course there are many girls who would ask private questions such as what happened in my previous relationships or why I broke up with my ex-girlfriend. As to my own experience, most girls hope that the guy’s salary will be 1.5 to 2 times higher than their own salaries. Most Chinese girls also regard owning a home an important guarantee for their sense of security. They even have specific requirements regarding where the guy needs to buy an apartment. Almost all girls consider the home a non-negotiable for marriage. Therefore you have no way to get married if you do not have an apartment in China, because you cannot give them the sense of security they require.

I also asked some girls whether they would ask for a house from an American guy. Their answer is, “Maybe not.” They think that getting married to an American guy means immigrating to the United States and living a good life, and most Americans have houses. An American passport is the ultimate worldwide passport, so they don’t care whether an American guy is rich or not. But when turning to guys in China, most of the girls I have met expressed different opinions. Guys should support their wives financially and they should surrender their ATM card to the girl after marriage.

3. Daily life and House Keeping

Another strange phenomenon is that I’ve found a lot of Chinese girls are not able to cook, nor do they know how to do housework. They think hiring a maid is the way a husband shows his love for his wife. In my family, my parents share the household chores. I am sure the girls I met are much different from our elder generations. For example, a pretty girl I met recently insisted she should not cook or do housework, and she should spend her own money while her husband supports the family.

Some of my female classmates got married to Americans. After marriage they are virtuous, domestic and share family expenses. I am just wondering whether all the sensible girls have gone to the United States or whether Chinese men are too obedient.

4. The Merry-Go-Round of Blind Dates

“You are the fourth guy I met today.”
“I met one guy in the morning and another in the afternoon. You are the third one.”

This is so awkward to me, a guy with a devoted heart. But the interesting thing is that a lot of girls I met showed great loyalty to their ex-boyfriends. It is not easy for them to forget the past heartbreaking relationships and they will usually mention their ex-boyfriends. By the way, girls love sweet talk; serious topics will make them unhappy.

In my opinion, compared to my father’s generation, these girls have really changed a lot. So now I’m shifting my focus to foreign girls and I wonder, will they be different?

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Speaking of China is always on the lookout for outstanding guest posts and love stories! If you have something you’d like us to feature, visit the submit a post page for details — and then submit yours today.

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Guest Post: The privilege of stereotypes about cross-cultural couples in China

(photo by Angela Sevin via Flickr.com)
(photo by Angela Sevin via Flickr.com)

We’ve all heard about yellow fever and the associated stereotypes. So what happens when you’re a Western man dating or married to an Asian woman and you’re supposedly living the stereotype?

That’s the heart of this thoughtful guest post by Gerald Zhang-Schmidt, who is married to a Chinese woman. 

You may remember Gerald from years back when he collaborated with me to write about stereotypes of Chinese-Western couples. He also submitted a question about changing your name in China that’s become one of my top 10 most popular posts (and incidentally, he was the one who ended up changing his name!). 

Want to follow in Gerald’s footsteps and have your voice heard on Speaking of China? Check out my submit a post page for details.

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Maybe I just shouldn’t care.

It’s my own fault, after all. I’ve known Jocelyn, at least via Speaking of China, for years and read of her thoughts and travails with great interest. The way that Chinese society puts everyone into place, in their gender roles and in gendered expectations about behavior and the course of a life has fascinated me.

How could you not be fascinated? While public displays of affection are still viewed askance in many places, the requirements for an ideal partner are proudly and straightforwardly proclaimed in ‘marriage markets’? (“Westerners” may also see these advertisements as superficial and appalling, but one could just as well call them honest.)

How about a place where the women are portrayed as if they would prefer (and be preferred by) foreigners over their own men, whereas the men hardly even seem to stand a chance with anyone anymore? That’s where I’m caught squat in the middle. Speaking of China is all about the rarity of foreign woman – Asian man couples, draws readers because of that same rarity, and has lots of issues to talk about. Meanwhile I’m living all of those other, wicked, dominant, problematic positions.

I mean, according to all the talk about white male privilege – and its experience – I must clearly be privileged. I’m not supposed to talk, for it just reflects my attempts at staying on top and maintaining my privileged position. As the WM part of a WM-AF (white male – Asian female) relationship, I’m living the stereotype. “Oh my, clearly one of those guys with an Asian fetish and one of those stupid and/or calculating women dumb enough to fall for him.”

The privilege of being in a majority is that you’re questioned less. As a friend recently put it, “you are given more second chances.” For the same reason, though, you are also less visible — for better and worse. You don’t have to explain yourself nearly as much as the unusual Western (or other) woman who marries an Asian man or the lucky Asian man who was able to attract a Western woman. Because they are considered unusual, they attract attention. They get questioned. They have to explain themselves and live with the puzzled looks. But, they also get much-visited blogs and book deals for their memoirs. And so, they have a need, but also get a chance, of explaining themselves. In breaking the mold, they are viewed askance, but also as avant-garde.

Try getting a book deal for the story of a ‘stereotypically normal’ WM-AF relationship, when “everyone knows” (a favorite phrase of the Chinese students I was teaching) that it’s all just about the Asian woman looking to better her situation and the Western male with yellow fever.

Such observations of upsides and downsides all too quickly devolve into nothing but discussions of who’s got it worse or better, “the culture of shut-up,” as it was recently called. So who does have it better? The one in an extraordinary situation beyond usual stereotypes, yet facing more scrutiny because of it? Or the one barely noticed because the situation is so stereotypical, no one even bothers wondering?

It’s similar to how feminism and stereotypes are discussed in general terms rather easily, but then suddenly turn personal and get vicious, until the discussion turns into something that has nothing to do with them. The likes of a “sure, there is a privilege to being a white male, but *I* am hardly privileged (or do you see me becoming rich just so?)” even as the systemic difficulties of the not-privileged (and advantages of the privileged) certainly are there, or the “yeah, I’m all for feminism, I like strong women” from men, as if feminism were all about strength, let alone one person’s likes.

But that’s not what I want to discuss. I don’t want to discuss anything, really. I just want to provide my observations and make a humble suggestion. Relationships, be they romantic or otherwise, will always be influenced by ethnic, cultural, and other backgrounds and the views they give rise to. But relationships are, at heart, not between ethnic groups, not between social groupings, nor even between men and women. They are between individual people.

The trouble starts when we don’t want to see individual people and individual situations, and don’t suspend judgment. When we see someone who fits into a stereotypical opinion and immediately think we have a handle on who they are.

We should remember that we tend to not even understand ourselves half as well as we may think we do.

Gerald Zhang-Schmidt is an ecologist and cultural anthropologist who spent three years living in China, and now resides with his wife in his native Austria where he writes about the ecology of happiness, chili peppers and being at home in the world.

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Speaking of China is always on the lookout for outstanding guest posts and love stories! If you have something you’d like us to feature, visit the submit a post page for details — and then submit yours today.

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Why “white loser laowai & Chinese women” is a thorny topic

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(photo by Daniel R. Blume via Flickr.com)

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a friend who urged me to read an essay by Virginia Proud of Tales of Expatria. She dubbed the essay “controversial” but then again, as she put it “blogs thrive on controversy” and encouraged me to introduce the topic. Well, she said the magic word — “controversy” — so of course, I immediately clicked on the link and dove into the first paragraph.

But when I finished the essay, a feeling of dread settled over me…which had nothing to do with Virginia’s essay per se.

First off, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed the essay. The writing was exceptional — humorous, thoughtful and self-reflective — and you could clearly tell that Virginia has, as you might say, “been around the global block” in her own experiences as an expat.

No, my dread stemmed from the subject itself, which I’ll let Virginia describe for you:

If you spend enough time in Expatria you’ll meet this chap, we affectionately call him the LBH. The Loser Back Home. Best described as someone you wouldn’t normally touch with a barge pole, but transplanted to foreign soil, is suddenly hot property, especially with attractive, young local women….

The LBH has always been with us and probably always will be. I remember my first LBH encounters as a teenager, when my family lived in Hong Kong. I couldn’t understand these corpulent old buggers with their gorgeous Chinese wives, until my mother pointed out their diamonds. It was the glory days of British rule and massive salaries and no one cared if the men were boring, ugly, stupid, or even mean. But then again, money and power has always been enough to make men wildly attractive, even back home….

Yes, the LBH — or, as people call him here in China, the Loser Laowai. Or for the purposes of this blog, the white Loser Laowai who only dates local Chinese women.

To me, this topic feels like the “skeleton in the closet” in the realm of cross-cultural and interracial dating in China — a topic so icky I’ve wanted to stay far, far away from it. And in the few times I’ve gathered the gumption to attempt a blog post on it in the past, invariably I abandoned my drafts and turned my attention to other topics.

Yet Virginia was able to produce a splendid essay that, to an extent, dealt with this topic, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s a matter of perspective. After all, Virginia, who is originally from Australia, currently calls Budapest, Hungary home and referred to this LBH in a more universal sense. She doesn’t have to address the proverbial “panda in the room” that immediately comes to mind once you move the topic to China — yellow fever. And for the purposes of this blog post, I’m referring to those white Laowai men who prefer Asians and potentially have highly racialized notions about Asian women.

See what I mean? Loaded stuff.

In my opinion the majority of white men with Chinese women do NOT fall into this “Loser Laowai” category. But still, we all know there are white loser laowai out there hooking up with Chinese women. And like the yellow fever phenomenon, their existence does have ramifications for couples of white men and Chinese women around the world. As Christine Tan of Shanghai Shiok wrote:

The problem, to me, is that shallow, superficial relationships between white men and Asian women vastly outnumber the same sort of suspicious pairings between Asian men and white women. And sadly, these types of WM/AF pairings are the most visible ones, because they often create spectacles of themselves….They are the Douchebags, the Jerks, and the Ambitious who think dating a white man or Asian woman betters them, financially or socially….those are the types of WM/AF pairings we remember, because they were too in-your-face to forget.

Which unfortunately could lead to the wrong assumptions when you see a white man and an Chinese woman walking down the street. Again, as Christine wrote:

I know that the white male/Asian female pairing has numerous negative associations attached to it. Words that immediately come to mind: Opportunistic. Gold-digger. Fetish. Sexualization. White-worship. Money. Exploitation. Lust. Pinkerton Syndrome. ‘Sarong Party Girl’ behavior was something I was warned against growing up.

I think a lot about why those associations exist. There are poorer women in China and the rest of Asia who view a foreign man as a meal ticket. There are Asian women who only date white men because most of the men they meet are white, and/or they find them more culturally/sexually appealing. There are white men who only date Asian women because of the society they live in — where the women are mostly Asian — or yes, they do find Asian women more culturally/sexually appealing. There are white men who come to Asia to hook up with local women in certain seedier places. There are local women who go to these places to hook up with the white men who come to Asia.

But then there are cases like mine — a mutual friend introduces a man and a woman and they get along, they like each other, they both like eating, and books, and the Barbie store. And oh, by the way, they happen to be white and Asian, respectively.

Enough said.

There’s another side to this topic of white Loser Laowai who only date Chinese women — when the men justify their dating choices by insulting the women back home, which Virginia alludes to in her essay. I’ve addressed this before and find it abhorrent that anyone would defend their relationship in such a hateful way. But it happens, most often in anonymous online forums. And because the expat gender balance is so skewed — far more expat men, who are overwhelming white, than women — well, let’s say if you’re a woman like me, you need a lot of courage to speak up about it in public.

Additionally, let’s not forget what Virginia mentioned near the end of the post: “And the fall out of all this, of course, lands on the head of the single expat women, who need to keep adjusting their ideas of ‘attractive’ as their dating pool starts to feel more like a puddle.” Or in other words, it’s the China Daily article published a few years back titled Foreign women label [China] a dating wasteland. This is also thorny territory…because then the question comes, why aren’t they interested in dating Chinese men? Some women have understandable reservations (for example, they’re not interested in marriage or getting too serious in a relationship) but others exclude locals for completely superficial reasons, often based on stereotypes.

Ugh.

In the end, I’ll never be able to write something like Virginia, not with all the baggage that accompanies this idea of white Laowai Losers with Chinese women. Still, I believe the subject deserves a conclusion. So, as someone who writes about relationships, perhaps it’s fitting that I sum this up with a phrase used on dating sites around the world: it’s complicated.

P.S.: For further reading on this “thorny topic”, I recommend They’re So Beautiful, the companion website to the compelling documentary Seeking Asian Female.

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Ask the Yangxifu: Rec’d Websites/Links With Dating Advice for Chinese-Western Couples

“You should check out this website.” That’s what I’ve been telling a number of readers who send me Ask the Yangxifu questions — I refer them to some of the fantastic sites that I follow and admire. So I thought, maybe it’s time to do a brief post and spotlight some of my favorites?

Western Wives, Chinese Husbands. I’ve dubbed this article, which I compiled together with the generous help of three other yangxifu (including Melanie Gao and Jessica Larson-Wang), “everything you wanted to know about dating Chinese men but were afraid to ask.” Whenever I hear from a woman new to the dating scene in China looking for comprehensive advice, I always send this along.

The Love Life of an Asian Guy. Ranier Maningding dishes out some of the funniest advice around, and speaks to both Asian men and the non-Asian women who love them.

My New Chinese Love. Whether you’re a Western woman dating Chinese men or a Western man dating Chinese women, you’ll find friendly advice from Jeff Cappleman and his Chinese wife that covers everything from courtship to weddings.

Middle Kingdom Life’s Guide to Dating Chinese Women. For the Western men dating Chinese women, I often send them straight to this incredibly comprehensive guide.

Candle for Love. This forum was created to help Americans bring their Chinese loved ones over to the US (and navigate the whole visa process). But it’s also a good sounding board for anyone grappling with cultural conundrums in their relationships — especially Western men dating Chinese women.

Asian Man White Woman Magazine. Founded by JT Tran, the Asian Playboy, this magazine bills itself as the lifestyle and dating site for AMWF relationships — and offers advice written by JT and white female bloggers. I also interviewed JT, and I frequently send this interview to Chinese men seeking advice on dating Western women. (Disclosure: I’ve written for his site, and JT is one of my advertisers).

What sites or articles would you recommend? Sound off in the comments!

 

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