A blogger on a wedding site I frequent just posted this Marie Claire article. It’s appalling. The author wants to address the issue of ‘Asian trophy wives’ who marry older white rich men…but she also deals with Asian women in general who enter into relationships with white men.
It assumes white men are fetish predators and Asian women are passive (and materialistic). It fails to acknowledge the multitude of same-race May-December romances in society, and the article mistakenly attempts to show these relationships as a new ‘trend’ although many of the partners (Woody Allen-Soon Yi Previn, Rupert Murdoch-Wendi Deng) are hardly new news.
Of course on a personal level it also disturbs me that the multitude of WM-AF couples I count as close friends are so carelessly disregarded as white male fetishes of passive unthinking females.
I guess I’m especially disappointed to see this coming from a North American context. It’s common in Korea to hear such rubbish as Korean women are still disparaged for dating foreign men. Some female friends have been called whores or traitors for dating outside the perceived cultural and racial boundaries (justified by citing cases of women who became pregnant by departing American soldiers). There is also a group of Koreans…not to be named here…who stalk white men they suspect of doing drugs, teaching children outside of regular classroom hours, and gasp…..dating Korean women. The implication here is that Korean women are being blindly conned by white men into having sex to feed the fetishes of outsiders.
Are there white men with an Asian fetish? Hell yes. Are there Korean women with a white fetish? Hell yes. I’ve seen the sexually explicit notes female university students write their white male professors (who everyone knows are married). I know of men pursued by older female students despite explicitly stating time and time again that they have a wife and child at home. I know of Korean girls who sign up for English academy classes because they want their own trophy boyfriend or at least a ‘unique’ experience to brag about. But there are many more white-white, black-black, Asian-Asian one night stands, affairs, and trophy marriages. Furthermore ‘white’ and ‘Asian’ are ridiculously enormous categories. Are Vietnamese women really the same as Japanese women? Can we categorize Russian, British, South African, Serbian men into one large mammoth group?
Seriously, the only reason people obsess over biracial hook-ups and relationships is that a) they have racial hang-ups of their own b) with globalization our ranks are growing.
And then there’s the fact that the couples the author mentions are MARRIED couples. They are not fetish-flings. Some are strange…..Woody and Sook-Yi come to mind, but there’s a whole lot of other weirdness going on in that relationship apart from the bi-racial-ness! Perhaps these couples found an initial attraction based on a racial feature, but it takes a lot more than that to stay together, raise a child, and ride through the ups and downs of a long term relationship together (For the record, FI and I initially became attracted to each other based on our mutual love for Arcade Fire and Stars).
And then there’s that other ‘fetish.’ When FI announced to his parents that he was going to marry a white girl, there was definitely opposition. But in the wider world of Korean society we have never experienced discrimination as a bi-racial couple….we encounter wonder. This wonder is never from Korean women – it is always from Korean men – especially older men – who have a white woman fantasy. The relative absence of white women dating or marrying Korean men (or at least the public display of such couples) makes us all that more fantastic.
While bringing the cats home from the vet last week, a talkative taxi driver asked if we were married. When FI explained we were getting married next year, the driver did something I’ve encountered many times – starred at me sitting in the back seat through the rear view mirror, gasped with his mouth open, and then clapped repeatedly while proclaiming congratulations!!!! (All this in the middle of the infamous Seoul traffic!) I have never experienced this reaction by myself. When students/taxi drivers/inquisitive shop owners find out I have a Korean FI they look at me confused…but when I’m with FI and it is ‘confirmed’ that we are indeed a real couple, there is joyful celebration by older Korean men for my FI. This show of congratulation is most certainly reserved for my FI. He has ‘somehow’ managed to ‘catch’ the elusive white girl (who may also have a magical pass to a resident visa in Canada…although FI is less excited about our intended return to Canada in 10-15 years than those around him).
The difference between how our relationship is perceived and accepted by Korean society is striking. I haven’t spent enough time in Canada with my FI to evaluate how Canadian society understands us although a few have hinted that FI must have an underlying motive to move to Canada (usually from the same people who can’t distinguish the South Korean economy from the North Korean economy). It’s fascinating that white women entering into relationships with Asian men are never perceived as oppressed/conned/exploited. There’s a cultural reason/perception for that..but I think that there’s also a gendered reason for that.
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