Asian Girls Go For White Guys?
I know I said I wouldn’t be blogging much this weekend with my exam and all, but after 6 straight hours of Japanese colonialism, export-orientated industrialization, “embedded autonomy” of state elites, and finally explaining why Malaysia’s “New Economic Policy” of 1971-1990 and then “National Development Policy” of 1991-2000 only make it look like a developmentalist state but really just producing a rentier class of Malays instead…then you too would want a break and some laughs.
I’ll probably get a lot of hits with a post title like this, and maybe a lot of trolls too, but actually I first saw these videos at least a year ago (and only just found them again thanks to poster “fu sheng” here), so it’s not like they’re the hottest thing on the internet at the moment. If this is your first time to see them though, don’t take them too seriously, but if it’s true that East Asian women are often more attracted to White men than Asian men when given the opportunity, then I think the Indian guy at the end of the first video identifies the most likely reason why (and without being racist), and this is confirmed by some women themselves in the second video (although I’m sure the choice of them is selective).
As you can probably guess, I do think that many Korean men are not very confident when it comes to dating, although I’m not saying for a moment that all Korean men are this way or that I’m a confident assertive stud myself: quite the opposite, in both cases. But like I discuss here, the vast majority of Korean teenagers go to single sex schools, and for much longer each day (and sometimes Saturdays) than their Western counterparts, and while they can mingle a little in after-school institutes, and increasingly do in their limited free time away from either, by the time they’re of age to want to act on their hormonal impulses they’re usually too busy with homework until 1-2am each night to do so.
Add all that up, and you end up with all too many University students here approaching the opposite sex with the confidence, assertiveness and raw unbridled sexuality…of 13 year olds at a school dance. At a Christian school. With their parents watching them.
Korean women can get away with being passive of course (not that that’s a good thing either, but it’s not like their Western counterparts are universally bold enough to ask guys on dates yet either), but I especially feel sorry for Korean men, suddenly being expected to be manly and assertive after an upbringing like that.
To compensate for not asking or being asked, Koreans have developed elaborate systems of blind dates, group dates, blind group dates, and of course for freshmen there’s “Membership Training” or “MT” in the first few weeks of semester, where they go on weekend hiking trips and things like that with other members of University clubs they’ve joined, and in March you’ll see groups of 20 or more of them sitting in a circle on Haeundae Beach in Busan, or along the Han River in Seoul, introducing themselves and then being randomly paired off. But my favorite kind are the blind dates where the man hangs around in a public place wearing something identifiable, and if the girl sees him and thinks he’s hot stuff will come up and say hi, but if not won’t make contact at all and bugger off home, while the man, unaware of who she was, hangs around longer and longer past the meeting time…thinking he’ll just kill himself if the next girl he sees doesn’t come up to him and say hi. Sure, this may well sound like a lot of blind dates a lot of Western guys go on too, but back home the woman deciding not to introduce herself would be considered quite untactful and rude, and so it’s the stuff of sitcoms. But in Korea, its an accepted risk of the arrangement so to speak. Sorry I can’t remember the Korean name for it right now.
I could go on, but even at 24 when I first came I had little interest in or patience for such rituals, and I have precisely zip at 31, but this makes me remember the spukiness of the woman waiting at my doorstep one evening to make sure she got her man, very bold even for a sophisticated Seoulite in 2007, let alone that country girl in Jinju in 2000 that I married 4 years later. Sentimental and soppy I know, but I forget how lucky I am sometimes.
Back to the books…groan…
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The videos and questions raised by them and by you are interesting. I saw the first one ages ago, and it amused me, but also made me raise on eyebrow.
Did you notice that in neither of the videos did white women even get one minute of time as anything more than a nebulous presence? The claim to wonder why Asian men and white women don’t date is not one I believe — I think, as is repeated over and over, it’s really all about who Asian-American women choose to date, ie. “why are we losing ‘our’ women to white men?”
This raises a second point: the question of whether and how the dynamic differs among Asian-Americans and Asians in Asia. After all, the same pattern seems to exist both in the East and in the West: Asian woman + white male is more common than Asian man + white woman.
It may be that the reasons are the same, are different, or a combination of the two.
Of course all of these dynamics are complex, and differ between invidivuals, but there are broad patterns and we should be able to pull out some kinds of useful generalizations. (Along the lines of Frantz Fanon’s in Black Skin, White Masks.)
I suspect, indeed, that the patterns carry over to the West mostly because of relatively similar reasons, not different ones. And namely, the culprit to me seems not to be Asian/Asian-American men themselves, but their parents and families — a conclusion I think is probably reconcilable with the conclusion the first video reached.
With a lot of couples I’ve known in Korea composed of a Korean and a foreigner, the Korean expresses positive appreciation that the foreigner’s family is not an overbearing burden, deeply involved in the couple’s life, demanding of the “daughter in law,” and so on. (This is even true where the foreign partner is the woman. However, I think in Korea, men’s relatively stronger benefits from traditional, male-centered values and attendant relationship expectations makes Korean men more likely to internalize those values and bring them to a relationship. This amounts to more pressure about values in a male-Korean/western-female relationship, and a relative relaxation of expectations and stresses in a western-male/Korean-female relationship, especially one in Korea.)
When you combine this with the kinds of pressures that are sometimes placed upon a Korean daughter-in-law. it sometimes seems as if there’s a great incentive to marry a foreigner in terms of quality of life — not because all mothers-in-law are monsters, but because just enough of them are, and just enough of the sons of such monsters-in-law are going to side with their mothers, that marriage can indeed mean a great burden. I used to think this was a movie/TV stereotype, but I’ve been told enough personal stories, or been related enough posts from a “couples” website in Korean, to realize that this kind of stress and conflict is more common than I thought.
(I’d be interested to see statistics for mental health issues for women following Chuseok and Seollal, for example. Over the years, several people have claimed to me that many nervous breakdowns follow, and I thought that was the stuff of urban legends till I experienced a real old-fashioned Chuseok. And that was with a really balanced, happy family. Add in some in-law pressures, and I have to wonder…)
For Asian-American women, living in the West, it would be understandable that they might wish to date or marry Western men, because being with a man of comparable Asian parentage would mean a familiar set of pressures and stresses — a familiar, and long-troublesome, history with a similar disconnect between their social world and their family life. Being with a western man can mean not only less of that, but in fact kind of effective “assimilation” into the wider society they’ve grown up, and might thereby be the easier route.
(And I can say that, having had parents who were immigrants to the place where I grew up, this whole social/familial disconnect issue can indeed have a profound effect on how one lives and how one experiences social life. Add in being a male in a family with male-preferring tendencies, and perhaps, in some cases, a kind of beseiged-fort mentality like the one my folks seemed to develop until I broke down some of the barriers, and you could get a very big effect on young men.)
Asian and Asian-American men, on the other hand, have a lot of specifically Confucian pressures. The family line goes through them explicitly, and even in the most liberal family, there will be friends or relatives or grandparents who still think that way — the ideas will be in the air, the way an Indian friend of mine reported Koreans in India were sayingabout how lucky she was that her second child was a boy. Right. In. Front. Of. The. Firstborn. Daughter.
I had a Korean male friend who fell in love with a Chinese girl. He told his mother he wanted to marry her, and she said it was out of the question. After all, the mom said, “She can’t cook Korean food.” (Which is a stupid excuse, after all. Cooking a cuisine isn’t an inborn skill, but rather is easily learned.) The real objection, of course, was rather that one’s firstborn son shouldn’t marry out of the race, but anyway, the important part wasn’t the closed-minded parental objection: it was that the son caved almost immediately, and broke up with the Chinese girl. I’m not saying all Asian men, or all Asian-American men, would cave immediately, but I’m saying there are special, and powerful, pressures that exist in the relationship between parents and firstborn sons in Asian families, and that’s a pattern likely to continue for at least a couple of generations when those families are transplanted to other cultures.
All of which isn’t to say that your observations about education and so on are probably worthwhile, but that I suspect family-of-origin issues are the real underlying basis of this.
James, The girl in thw photo beneath the video is gorgeous.
First of all, I liked your analysis of the cultural unpernnings for the social phenomenon. Here’s some food for thought–it has to do with perceived status and human nature:
Let’s take an example of a colonized country and its imperial masters–cases of men of the imperial side going for women of the colony were much more frequent than the other way around. For the woman of the colony, often it’s something to show off that she’s with a white man. But not so the other way around. Women from the imperial side did not go for men on the colonized side. Power versus no power. Being from the west in Korea has a certain “status” to it–and more so if one is from the west and is white–and there isn’t just english institute hiring behaviour as proof, although I’m not about to make footnotes–anyway, the behavious has existed all throughout history: men courting a woman of lesser status, lesser confidence, lesser education, lesser… than he has, has never been unusual (in fact, it’s often been appealing); women doing likewise has always been a different story, and I think, always will be.
(Of course, I’m not saying that’s the case for all interracial relationships, or even most, but I’m confident it can explain at least part of the statistical skew)
This was quite interesting.
(BTW I second on King)
Really? You don’t mean the first girl you see in the second video, do you? If you do mean the girl in the photo, well, I’m happy to hear it, but that never occured to me - I only included the picture because I liked their tense, restricted-looking poses. If I had to venture an opinion, I’d say I like her face, but she’s a little too thin for me.
Maybe it is due to chemistry,chemistry under different cultural background?But it is really an interesting phenomenon that some of my friends are dating Asian girls online,like cncupid.com/photo/romance, japanesefriedfinder and they find that most of the members on those sites are Asian girls,Asian guys and White guys.You see,only a few white girls.And most of the Asian girls say that they’d like to experience international romance and white guys are also interested in finding an Asian bride.Not many Asian guys say that they want white girlfriends,though “race” is not a problem. So,maybe Western male chemistry attracts Asian female chemistry??? Just a joke! I am not an expert on this.. lol
Korean girl’s don’t like korean guys to be really assertive though.
But I like your blogs !!!
that’s weird because all the koreans I know are over-confident sexy bastards… go figure.
Just a quick intro, I’m a 26 yoa twinkie male, korean by blood, raised as an italian catholic. Lived in NJ, TX and FL. I have never dated, let alone had a relationship with an asian girl. I think it is a social status meme, maybe subconsciencely in America, the closer you can get to being ‘white’ the better off you are. I’ve dated white, black, hispanic, native american, indian; just never seem to be able to get anything working with asian girls. I asked my two sisters ( korean adoptees too), and they refuse to date asian guys; they prefer tall white/black men. Nice article and awesome site.
-chris
Thanks gator, but I’m a bit confused by the “twinkie” reference…
I’ve read your blog on and off, and find expat’s view of Korea pretty interesting. Take this issue as an example. I think your “white” superiority complex is clouding a simple observation. Media. What’s US’s #1 export? Entertainment. Isn’t there so called Korean wave going on in Asia? Or have you not heard about it. Apparently foreign asian women think Korean men are very hot and romantic after watching some stupid drama. Lol. Jokes on them. And joke will be on most of these korean women too. Not saying your a bad guy, I’m sure you’re great to your girl. But real American men and Hollywood’s portrayal will be stark different similar to Kdrama’s portrayal of Korean men and real korean men. I think all other reason are valid, but will be distant second to the real starter, Hollywood and music videos.
Jip,
Can you please tell me where evidence of this “white superiority complex” of mine is? I was pretty clear in the 2nd paragraph about not taking the videos seriously and not generalising from them. To be precise, the most “racist” statement I make there is:
“…but if it’s true that East Asian women are often more attracted to White men than Asian men when given the opportunity, then I think the Indian guy at the end of the first video identifies the most likely reason why…”
And that’s the last time Western men even get mentioned.
You’re right that the media has a role to play too, but surely if the images and reality were so different then Korean and non-Korean Asian women would wise-up (about Western and Korean men respectively) after the first few negative experiences? Besides which, the video is about East Asian women in America dating Western and Asian men, and living there would mean that the disjuncture between the Hollywood image and the reality would take even less time to sink in.
I think that I may have run into the Parental Objections problem. One of my neighbors is a Korean-American woman. Very sweet, very intelligent, and unbelievably cute. We had spoken on several occasions when we ran into each other and I must confess that I developed a major crush on her. Several weeks ago I asked her for a date on the following weekend. She gave me a big smile and said
“maybe” in a tone of voice that sounded like it meant probably. She said that she was weighed down with work and school ( which is true) but she would tell me in a few days. Then it turned out that she seemed to avoid me for the rest of the week. I met her by accident that weekend outside her apartment and she looked very embarrassed and quickly went into the apartment after saying nothing but hello. She’s been friendly since then, but I never her for a date again since I am not too stupid to know what the probable result would be.
I realize that she may have thought things over and decided I was not much of a prize. On the other hand, I am quite suspicious that she called her mother who had gone back to Korea; I think that her father is dead. She may have asked her mother if she and any objections to possible date with me and gotten a more resounding and angry response than she expected. The woman herself was born in the US and grew up here, but I know that parental vetoes can still be effective in the second generation.
Does anyone who is Korean, Korean-American or who simply knows more about Korean culture than I do think that my suspicion is probably true or probably false?
I would appreciate it if you would post the answer on this message board. (I certainly hope that she doesn’t read it).
It’s never happened to me personally, but from what I’ve read about similar experiences that some foreigners living in Korea have had, it definitely sounds like she called her mother and she forbid her from seeing you. Her behaviour makes little sense otherwise.
Thank you. I think I am going ask her if that is the explanation - very tactfully.