Building cultural bridges with love. 洋媳妇谈中国
Advice and stories about daily life in China, from one Western woman with a Chinese husband from China’s countryside.
I’m excited to share with you my first-ever collaborative article, which I wrote with Susan Blumberg-Kason. Susan is the author of All the Tea in Chicago
This article grew out of stories that Susan and I swapped over the past year about going meatless in China, and especially going meatless in a Chinese family. Hope you enjoy it.
—– Continue reading “Things We’ve Learned About Going Meatless in China From Our Chinese Families”
Forbidden. That’s what someone once called my writing back in 2004 when I started sharing my relationships with Chinese men. It’s not as if I put some adult-store-version of my life out there, complete with salacious descriptions that would have everyone heading for a cold shower. Sex never even came up.
No, I just happened to write about my former Chinese boyfriends.
I broke with Chinese tradition, where you keep your past loves buried away in your heart (to be sure, I never used their actual names and changed some of their details, though everything I shared was essentially true). That comment shook me then — I never realized I crossed a cultural line in my writing. If my old files from that time are any measure — I steered clear of intimate topics for years — the comment impacted me in ways I didn’t even realize. Continue reading “Why I Write About “Forbidden” Love in China”
“Your Personal Store.” That’s the tagline for Watson’s, the most popular pharmacy/drugstore shop in Asia and my go-to in China for so many health and beauty items I need. But after my experience this summer, I began to wonder if Watson’s wasn’t becoming “Your A Little Too Personal Store.”
Last summer, I lived mostly with my in-laws and visited Hangzhou or Shanghai only a few times. For me, that meant no Watson’s conveniently just around the corner or a short bus, subway or taxi ride away. So when I saw a Watson’s, I would sometimes kick into “storage mode.” That meant buying some extra peppermint hand wipes, another bottle of Johnson’s Baby Wash (for my sensitive skin), and, say, some more Durex condoms.
I’m a married woman, and yes, I wanted to replenish my condom stash. I sure couldn’t do it in my Chinese husband’s rural village, which probably sold those dodgy ones with what always looked like adult movie stills printed on the package. On this day in question, I still stayed with him in his rented room in Shanghai for a few more days, we’d have a few weeks or so together at the end of the summer before returning to the US, and what we didn’t use, we could always take home. Yes, condoms would definitely come in handy.
But I’d have to go alone on this one. “It’s easier for you,” John said. “They expect foreigners to buy these things.”
I couldn’t deny the truth in what he said — that many Chinese believed foreigners, especially foreign women, were so much more “open” about sex. Sure, I liked sleeping with my husband, and wasn’t afraid to say so. But that didn’t make me some foreign Jezebel ready to screw on the spot. Besides, I couldn’t hide in China — people noticed me everywhere as a foreigner, and that meant they might even notice my purchase even more.
“But people will stare at me, it will be so embarrassing,” I said.
He flashed me one of those “go-get-’em” smiles, and said, “You have self-efficacy, you can do this.” Then he patted me on the shoulder. That was all his way of saying, there’s no way in hell I will buy the condoms. Continue reading “Getting Personal When Buying Condoms at Watson’s China”
A few weeks ago, Carolyn Phillips wrote this to me:
Food is such an integral part of Chinese culture that it’s really hard to fit into a Chinese family if one isn’t adept at the cuisine. I suppose this is true to some extent with any country, but the Chinese are probably on par with the French and Italians when it comes to the importance of dining well.
This is probably doubly important when a yangxifu doesn’t speak Chinese fluently but still hopes to be accepted. Have your readers talked much about this? I truly feel that the old saw about the way to a man’s stomach etc is gospel for us yangxifu.
Carolyn should know — she’s a yangxifu who devoted her adult life to mastering the art of Chinese cooking. She blogs about food at Out to Lunch and tweets about it as @MadameHuang. She’s also working on two forthcoming books on the subject — “Simple Pleasures from a Chinese Kitchen: Authentic Seasonal Recipes from Every Region of China” and “Culinary Goddesses: The Women Who Changed Our Dining Landscape… Recipes Included.” — and is a regular contributor writing about Chinese food for Zester Daily. In addition, she’s even fluent enough in Mandarin to do court interpreting.
In any event, Carolyn has discovered a thing or two about what it takes to woo a Chinese family that truly loves to eat through food. So I sat down with her — from one yangxifu to another — to talk about all things related to food and Chinese family. As Chinese New Year approaches, it’s a topic that will come in handy for lots of readers.
Just be warned, Carolyn mentions a lot of delicious Chinese food with links to her recipes — you may not want to read this one on an empty stomach. 😉 Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: Carolyn J. Phillips On Charming A Chinese Family Through Food”
Last summer, I attended the Hangzhou wedding of my good friend Lao Da at the end of May. But it wasn’t until two weeks later — when we met over Dragonwell tea and snacks at a local teahouse — that I learned exactly how he met his new wife.
“We met through a colleague. He happened to be going out to dinner with a group of women who worked at the bank across the street from our office and didn’t want to go alone. So he asked me to come with him.”
“So, it was love at first sight?”
He shook his head. “No. I didn’t actually contact her until a few weeks later.”
“You didn’t have any special feeling for her then?”
“I had some. But later, my colleague said she had mentioned me, and he wondered if maybe we should date. You know me, I am not so outgoing. So I said I would meet her.”
Of course, Lao Da’s how-we-met story remained uniquely his — just like his geek-chic glasses, ocean-blue Chuck Taylors and funky stonewashed jeans. But I couldn’t help but notice that their story came down to the actions of one person: his colleague. Continue reading “Matchmaker, Informal Matchmaker”
Ken asks:
I went over to New York when I was 20 years old and I finished my BA and my MBA there. I also worked there for about one year before I decided it was time to come back to China with my classmate/girlfriend then who was from New York. I was able to make the decision of coming back to China because my girlfriend was very supportive of this decision, which, to be very honest, was really to my surprise because she never had been outside of the States except for going to Canada that one time. Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: More On Finding Western Women to Date in China”
As Jemma’s story reminded me, I’m not the only one that never expected to find love — and more — in China. I’m also not the only one who had a few friends intervene on my behalf to find a better man. 😉
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When I arrived in China in 2008, I figured I would stay two years and then move on to another place. But that was before I met my Chinese boyfriend.
I dated a few men, all Chinese, and had some horror stories and some that just didn’t work out. One night, I happened to share my latest bad date with friends. The date was a nice guy, but seemed only interested in me because I was a foreigner. After hearing this, one of the friends decided to give my e-mail address to a man he met at the gym, a guy who had jokingly asked him to set him up with a foreign woman.
At first, this man and I only spoke on the Internet, until he finally got the courage to ask me out for dinner. When we met that night, I liked him straight away — maybe not tall, but definitely handsome. He was a perfect gentleman in the corny, traditional sort of way. He opened doors for me, pulled my chair out, always checked to see if I wanted more food or drink, and refused to let me pay even though he was still a student. After dinner, we went for a walk in the local park and talked for hours, until he finally walked me home and said good night.
But the next week, I heard nothing from him. I was devastated. I thought, maybe my loud Western ways scared him away. Continue reading “Double Happiness: The Date In China That Changed Her Future”
Allison asks:
I’m a vegetarian in China and am finding that in general vegetarianism is a really difficult concept for people to understand here. Did John always know you were a vegetarian? How did that affect you guys when you were dating? and is/was it awkward with his family? Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: On Being Vegan in a Chinese Family”
“A Western woman walks into a bar…” sounds like the start of a joke. But instead of coming back with a punchline, a number of Western women came back with Chinese men who they would eventually marry.
Sure, bars get a bad rap in the world of dating sometimes — yet these women show that your local watering hole just might turn into the backdrop for your “how we met” story. (In their case, the “how I met my Chinese husband” story.)
Continue reading “Double Happiness: A Western Woman Walks Into A Bar”
Just last month, I discovered a new celebrity couple in the cross-cultural community of Chinese men and Western women — Li Yang, the founder of Crazy English, and Kim Lee, his American wife. If only it weren’t because of revelations that Li Yang beat and battered Kim for many years.
If you’re in China, chances are you heard the news long ago. How Kim brought up the domestic violence by posting photos of her bruised body on Sina’s Weibo. That Li Yang admitted hitting his wife to the public, but then offered an unrepentant response.
If there was a “model Yangxifu” award, Kim Lee deserves it. She courageously shared her private turmoil with the public, starting a national conversation on domestic violence and spurring the Chinese government to reconsider dormant domestic violence legislation.
But Kim’s relationship with Li Yang could easily play into some of the worst cross-cultural marriage nightmares — and, I might add, negative stereotypes of Chinese men.
Of course, I don’t fault Kim for anything. She did the right thing. Still, a celebrity couple in the community of Chinese men and Western women in love makes the headlines… and, unfortunately, it’s for domestic violence. I couldn’t help but wonder — will some people come away with the wrong kind of message? Continue reading “On the Kim Lee and Li Yang Domestic Violence Story”