Hey all. This is kind of not a real post, so please humor me for a sec. I've been wanting to write an Opinion article for my college's newspaper about something that has been bothering me pretty much ever since I went to China. But I've been having difficulty motivating myself to actually start on the darn thing, so I'll pretend I'm just writing a post on here about it, at least to get some ideas out there. Yeah. :)
-----------------
[Insert Title]
While I was abroad in China, I had a white male friend who proudly asserted he had "yellow fever." About half of the guys in my program, all white, admitted that the prospect of finding a Chinese girlfriend was something they considered when applying to study in China. And why shouldn't they be excited when Chinese girls are handing out their numbers to them left and right? Most of the white males in my program were hyper-aware of how easy it was for them to impress a Chinese girl with their whiteness alone. My friend often remarked on how much more confident he was when talking to Chinese girls than when talking to Asian Americans and was once upset when an "actually good-looking" white guy was in our vicinity.
This sort of behavior goes beyond simply finding Chinese girls attractive. Many white guys in China develop a strong sense of entitlement and interact with Chinese girls with the expectation that they will have their egos thoroughly stroked. For instance, one of the other white males in my program once flirted with several girls in one night. With each girl, he pointed to the Chinese boyband performing onstage and asked, "Who do you think is better-looking, them or me?" One girl answered, "Them." He later flew into a rage and said that the girl "wasn't supposed to say that." In his mind, Chinese girls should always prefer white guys and praise them, and if she does not, there is clearly something wrong with her.
There is a difference between having a preference for Chinese women and objectifying them. Having a preference implies that one still respects Chinese girls just as much as they would girls of any other race. Instead, many white guys in China behave as if these girls' primary function is to give them pleasure and make them feel desirable. Conversely, Chinese guys are usually seen as a non-threat, and white guys and girls alike portray them as unattractive and effeminate.
One of the main purposes of study abroad is cultural immersion and understanding, yet this attitude towards Chinese people promotes the exact opposite behavior. This attitude instead promotes long-held Western Orientalist views of the East: Chinese women are exotic, submissive sexual objects, whereas Chinese men are emasculated and inferior to white men.
The white guys I met in China all claimed to love China, its culture, and its people. However, one cannot claim to love a country and its people while disrespecting them at the same time. It is sad that many Americans only experience non-Western countries through an imperialistic lens. Is the belief of an 'inherent Western dominance' so steeped within our society that many white men cannot even have a conversation with a Chinese girl without asserting it?
