Reflections on reactions to an Asian bride

* Although the post below was written in about an hour this morning it’s fair to say it’s the culmination of a lot of thought on the subject. Finally I also asked Loan to read it. I wouldn’t have posted it if she hadn’t been comfortable with every word.

***

I’m just back from Thailand and like most people who visit it was hard not to be repulsed by the sight of older western men with young Asian girls.

Of course, this time my thoughts on the matter were influenced by the fact that I too was with an Asian woman.  There’s a mere six years between us but I still wondered how other people judged us.

Certainly I can think back to my very early days in Vietnam when I struggled with the whole concept of Western/Asian marriages.   It’s now hard for me to remember why. Undoubtedly I had my own prejudices. But how valid were they?

I think there remains a perception that the foreign bride is a make-do.  A catalogue order.  Or perhaps a better fit for men who’d like to continue to behave badly without having to apologise. I’ve heard the phrase “losers back home” applied to expats generally but especially those married to local women.

Getting married at 39 I suppose, being brutally honest, I could fit into the “making do” category.  Although it doesn’t feel like it.  When I decided to return to Vietnam there was no plan for marriage.  I always maintained you couldn’t plan for such eventualities.  At the time getting back to Hanoi was the only thought in my mind.

Is my “Asian bride” a better fit for me?  Well yes, of course she is.  I wouldn’t have married her otherwise.  But, that doesn’t mean that any Asian woman would have been.  I met someone and fell in love.  Their ethnicity has nothing to do with it.

We clicked. Hearts, flowers, the world seemed wonderful and we couldn’t stop smiling.

Beyond romance, we worked well together.  We are a good team. Isn’t that how it is supposed to feel when you meet “the one” regardless of where they are from?

“You’ll just know.”

I did.

About the time we first got together I read this article.  A man travelling in Asia with his Asian wife. He is really uptight about pointing out she is US born.

He writes:

There is a lot of subtext crammed into the nine-word question “Where in the Orient did you meet your wife?” even when you exclude the geographical relic of the term “the Orient.” As I explained that even though Aileen’s parents are from Taiwan, she has lived in New York City all her life and that, subtextually, I didn’t rescue her from a pimp in Shanghai, the light in his eyes dimmed. After I finished he sat for a moment, staring at the waves, and then looked up and said, “Huh. Well isn’t that nice.”

That writer, throughout the article seems desperate to distance himself from other Western and Asian couples.  I can empathise.  But can it be excused?

I’ve suffered similar paranoia.  My wife dresses fairly conservatively but on a hot day when we’ve gone for bun cha in the neighbourhood, the little shorts have come out.  In the past I’ve been very sensitive about that.  I didn’t want her to wear revealing clothes because I didn’t want to look like the kind of guy who would be attracted to a Vietnamese woman because of the way she dresses.

How do you tell a woman that she should cover up, even in her own country where she knows perfectly well what is acceptable?

Truth is you can’t.  And you don’t.  And you shouldn’t.

I apologised.

But the foreign wife is not often portrayed well. Especially the Asian wife.

The Vietnamese female as “me love you long time” prostitute remains a widespread cliché.  I’ve read backpacker blogs detailing the many many prostitutes in Hanoi.  It took me a while to realise that for the most part they were just seeing what they expected to.

Any young woman was a possibly a prostitute in their eyes.

It’s hard to feel any kind of kinship with the very old man with the very young Thai girl I saw on Bangkok’s Skytrain last week.  It didn’t look good even before you took into account a ludicrous toupee.

So here I could poke fun at him and list the many many ways in which we are different.  But I won’t.

Because perhaps we are all on a sliding scale of acceptability.

And it’s not just men.  Spend any time in Africa and you won’t have to look too far for older (often larger) white women, with very young, attractive African men friends. Sometimes more than one.

Is an older white woman with a young African man more acceptable?  What about if it’s an older white man with a young African bride? Ask yourself why any of these scenarios should be deemed more acceptable than any other.

It confuses the liberal-minded.  For: same-sex marriages.  For: mixed race marriages. But against marriages of differing backgrounds, age or means?

Marriages.  Good marriages.  They work on a whole host of levels.  In Cameroon I talked long into the night with my boss and he said what “whiteman” didn’t understand was their love came from being made to feel safe and looked after and not from simply looks alone.

And the more I think about it, the western concept of love at first sight (lust at first sight?) is flawed. Simply liking the look of a person is deemed reason enough to fall in love.  Yet taking into account all those other qualities it takes to build a relationship can  be deemed as suspiciously calculating.

Alongside our love I believe there is also a healthy amount of pragmatism in our relationship and that’s something I’m very happy about.

And I can write of the many ways that a relationship with an Asian woman is different except that – any relationship with any woman is different.

I didn’t marry a region, a country or a city.  I married a person.

If other people want to jump to conclusions about why I did that then it’s best just to let them.

Me? I’ve got to be the opposite of the journalist quoted above. I have to realise that I don’t have to explain or justify anything.

I never expected to marry a local woman.

But then again – I also never expected to be this happy.