I find your observations quite fascinating, Alex. You state yourself to be "30-something", which adds to my vicarious interest (as someone who is substantially older than that and whom has seen much and experienced more).
Back in the 70s, while living & studying as an undergrad in Berkeley (CA, USA), I was a student of both Asian and Asian-American culture. This translated principally into primary emphasis on Japanese and Chinese cultures, although given Korea’s historical relationship with Japan, that nation’s as well.
Early-on, I found Japanese and Chinese family attitudes quite preferable to those in my native USA. I also found Asian women to be among the most aesthetically attractive of all women. My ambition was to marry either a Chinese or Japanese descended woman and have children, a motivation that was strongly influenced by the fact that my own father had died prematurely when I was only 4 and I earnestly desired to be an excellent role model for my offspring. Moreover, I also found Asian children to be aesthetically FAR more appealing than Western (read: WASP) children and the sight of an Asian mother, closely tending her children typically made me feel emotionally quite empathetic.
Many years later, I was shocked to find that a great number of younger (Asian-American) women who learned of my fixed interest in Asian women immediately and somewhat viciously attacked me as possessed of an unhealthy white obsession with ‘yellow women’…dismissing me as merely another one of those ‘young dudes’ who exclusively seek out Asian women for relationships instead of and in preference to their white counterparts.
My interest was not principally sexual, of course; rather I so admired Asian culture that I felt that I wanted to have children with an Asian woman (but one who met my stringent intellectual and aesthetic criteria). Explaining this to these critics was difficult, since men are generally regarded as sexually predatory first, with any other motivations shaking out subsequent to that.
At any rate, while practicing cardiovascular technology at a San Francisco Bay Area hospital, I met and began an intensive relationship with a China-born ‘paper-daughter’ who was in her residency there. Although the details are too all-consuming to go into here, long-story-short is that although we were by that time living together (in her house), she eventually dumped me for a UC Berkeley law student (after aborting a child we had conceived, feeling it would have kept her from completing her medical residency). [Note: This has forever adversely prejudiced me against lawyers, LoL.]
That unhappy circumstance prompted me to ‘join the foreign legion’ (which meant taking a series of lengthy medical contracts in the Middle East), but I never, ever really got over the intense hurt from it. While in Saudi Arabia, I met another woman of Korean-Canadian nationality whom I found myself equally attracted to, and also very much smitten with. Both of these women were possessed of high-grade intellects…a fatally attractive asset in my estimation…but again, we eventually ended our association. After my ME contracts ended, I then traveled to Taiwan where I met a number of very bright, well-educated (Ming Chuan College) young women, any one of whom would have been a wonderful mother and companion, but still licking my emotional wounds, I didn’t propose anything serious between myself and any of them.
Since my work in Taiwan involved consulting at the Taipei Adventist Hospital, working for a computer corporation (SERTEK), radio announcing, and teaching English, I had considerable opportunities to observe man/woman relationships, norms, dating protocols and attitudes (both social and sexual). I also encountered all of the gambits you reference in your remarks, including flattering female sycophancy, female attraction to the ‘three talls’ (roughly, tall height & good looks, wealth/economic status and family status/position/connections), quirky nuances such as the fact that a big Western nose is equated with phallic prowess, and a great number of other cultural specifics that are not at all apparent to anyone not of that culture.
Eventually, I returned to the USA after many years abroad in a range of countries (including several European nations), and met and married a Chinese-American woman, whom I subsequently married. We were both in our mid-40s at the time. It has now been 33 years since we married and despite all my vaunted academic familiarity with Asian culture, I find myself constantly tripped-up by small but very consequent differences in our cultures, almost on a daily basis. I can also be candid in saying that despite that ‘iron fist in the velvet glove’ aspect of Asian feminineness that endures remarkably for a long time, once menopause works its ugly physiological magic, things change remarkably, no matter how much of a Western Asian scholar you regard yourself as being! All that shared, I can also say that there is no more loyal, committed and supportive woman alive than my wife, even if the passion is no longer what it formerly was. [As many wise individuals have remarked, when sexual lust and passion fades (as it always shall), you’d better hope you have a worthy companion for that final phase of life!]
Ironically, we never did have children, having agreed that the world is taking a nose-dive into a terrible and perpetually miserable state of being, but also because the typical ‘ugly American’ cultural milieu of today is not one we would wish to subject any children of ours to! Hindsight has borne out the astuteness of that foresight, sadly, but the somewhat sad result is we do not have any offspring to enjoy as I had originally hoped (as a young, knowledgeable but inexperienced young man).
In short, life turned out to be invariably a completely unpredictable surprise that the very best and most prescient of anticipations could ever quite forecast fully! Thanks so much, Alex, for sharing your observations with us…even those of us for whom it is far too late to make much difference!
One last remark here: As a life-long fan of 70s era poet/writer/eclectic Richard Brautigan (whose books were translated into Japanese and found quite a following), one aspect of his life that is particularly interesting is his fixation on Japanese women. If you ever find yourself bored and looking for a fascinating subject to explore, do some backgrounding on him (particularly regarding his Japanese wife Akiko Yoshimura and a young Japanese grad student he met while teaching at the state university at Bozeman, Montana, named Masako).
I’ll close with a brief poem by Brautigan. QED.
JAPANESE WOMEN (by Richard Brautigan)
If there are any unattractive
Japanese women
they must drown them at birth
Tokyo
May 28,1976
