Before you read this article, read Yellow Fever: Why Western Guys Date Chinese Girls, posted on eChinacities last year. Take your time, and be sure to peruse the comments as well. That's why this article keeps catching my attention – people keep leaving revealing comments on there.

 

The article itself is a bit hypocritical. The author starts out by pronouncing a judgement on what she seemed to think was an improper coupling of an unattractive, older white male with an (I'm assuming) out of his league, attractive and younger female.

My friend and I looked at each other in horror. Then she sniffed in disdain.
"As if he’d get anyone as cute as her back home."
"Or as young," I added.
"So typical."

She finishes with this conclusion: “It’s easy to generalise about western guys’ reasons for dating Chinese girls. Whether it’s to boost their egos, to improve their Mandarin, or simply to have fun, as long as it’s consensual, it isn’t really anyone else’s business to judge.”

Although she had already made her share of judgments… Now take a look at some of the comments:

hhuu: “goodluck white boys your white power wont work in china. no matter how many ugly chinese girls you try to f**k.”

Asian Guy: “These white men are the rejects of America. They are the ones American society sweeps under the carpet and keep ’hush hush. Also, independent thinking women and gender equality to these people are like kryptonite. They cant handle it! Add to it the fact that white women overwhelmingly choose a strong black man over a beta white man and you start to understand the mass migration of these losers to Asia.”

Don B.: “I just get tired of the creepy mythology about ME having a "fetish" or being "obsessed with Asia" and all that bulls**t. (and Asian men do not have any of that even though they are the very ones that go after Asian girls for the very stereotypical reasons white guys are always accused of)”

Centrist: “’Yellow Fever’ is a myth. The question ‘why do white guys go after Chinese girls in China’ is so obvious: Because 99.999% of the girls in China are---CHINESE! It's just the mathematics of it.”

Zak: “...Not yellow fever, just mutual care, respect - holding and being held at night, with the occasional outburst every 6 months, lasts 3 hours then back to normal. It's funny. I don't think of her as being Chinese, I just think of her as my wife. And I'm very tender with her. That's the key.”

Why do I care? As a Canadian man married to a Chinese woman, we're getting it from both sides and I'm sick of it. I can't count the number of times that my wife and I have heard a Chinese person say something derogatory to her, such as “traitor” or “you are losing Chinese people's face.” Just as numerous are the times that I've had to listen to white girls in China complaining about the Western guys with the “yellow fever” disease, while they themselves refuse to date Chinese guys:

As the author of Boys, Boys, Boys: Dating Chinese Guys put it: “The last thing I want to imply is that I’m racist by discounting a whole country’s worth of men, but I don’t find the majority of Chinese guys attractive...I just don’t see them in a sexual light.”

I'm also sick of the stereotypes that the Chinese women who date foreign men are after money or green cards. While that may have been true of a few girls at one time in the past, all the Chinese girls I know are very aware that the rich Chinese are A LOT richer than even the well-to-do expats. Case in point: A manager for a large MNC that I know thinks he's well-off because his company rents a nice villa for him to live in; but the landlord owns ten of those villas. A girl who is after money is better off being the mistress of the Chinese landlord than the wife of the expat manager.

All this stereotyping, jealousy and insecurity needs to stop. Seriously folks, interracial?

Did everyone not get the memo? According to the Human Genome Project, “race” is a completely made-up term which has no basis in scientific fact.

DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other.

It’s hard to tell what the official view of mixed marriages is. In 2007, China Daily ran this story about mixed marriages being on the rise. And then in 2010, this story about the rise of mixed divorces – which does seem to be the inevitable result of the previous stimulus. The first article is actually very positive, and includes a line I like:

"Yes. He has big eyes and a large nose," said Cao, 38, a self-employed jewelry dealer. "But he is not foreign to me. He is my husband, my family."

Why do I like that line about, “...he is not foreign to me”? I like it because that is the cure that I talked about in the title. It's not just the cure for “yellow fever.” It's the cure for all “racial” thinking. When you know someone really well, you cease to think of them with a label and you start to think of them as a person. No matter what, if you just talk to people you will learn their story.

I met my wife 10 years ago while I was on a study-abroad program here in Chengdu. We survived a traumatic six year long-distance relationship before we ended up together. My Western friends who married Chinese girls all have similar stories. Some met here, some met abroad, but all of them have had to overcome adversity in order to find a way to be together. I have never heard any of these married friends, myself included, refer to their relationships as, “interracial” or “mixed.” As far as they are concerned, they are just people who are in love and want to be together.

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Related Links
Yellow Fever: Why Western Guys Date Chinese Girls
Boys, Boys, Boys: Dating Chinese Guys
Happy Endings in China Not Just for Men

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Keywords: western men chinese women how are mixed relationships viewed china mixed relationships china cure for yellow fever Yellow fever china