One by one, utterly forgettable Single White Male faces slide past the camera. Ken is a 30-something US police officer, with gelled-back hair and a vacant smile: “I know for a fact I’ll end up marrying an Asian woman. I just know that.” Gordon, in his 40s, sports a brown, shoulder-length mullet: “It really makes no difference where she’s from within the Asian subcontinent.” From behind a pair of wonky, black-rimmed spectacles beneath what can only be a perm: “It’s the hair. It’s the long, black hair that’s really eye-catching.” A younger face this time, rimmed by a chinstrap beard best described as ‘questionable’: “With Asian women, it’s just, like, BAM!” And finally, from one particularly porcine chap: “I think they give more consideration to how the man feels than sometimes themselves…”
Meet the men with ‘Yellow fever’: Caucasian males whose sexual preference excludes all but the most exotic Far Eastern belles. These Asiaphiles (‘Asian fetishists’ in polite company) owe a great deal to Confucius, the Chinese philosopher who sometime around 500BC helpfully framed relationships in which wives looked up to their husbands as being ‘in perfect harmony’ (Thanks for that, ‘Fuc – Ed). Times may have changed, but the myth that Asian women make wives who are equal parts doting and dutiful still persists. Why?
Steven is a twice-divorced car-park attendant from California. “I’m 60. I’m an old guy now. I’ve been trying to figure out: do I want a farm girl to take care of me? Do I want an intelligent businesswoman to help me grow? Back and forth: what do I want? What do I want?!” Beaming bug-eyed at the camera, with all the glee of a little boy at Christmas, the ageing American giggles: “There’s this Vietnamese movie called The Scent of Green Papaya that’s got this idyllic servant girl who cooks these beautiful meals. And you think: ‘Gee, would it be like that?’”
It was men like Steven, found here in Cambodia aplenty, who prompted Asian-American filmmaker Debbie Lum to explore ‘Yellow fever’ fetishism in Seeking Asian Female. This magnificently cringe-worthy documentary follows the eccentric love story – if it can indeed be called such a thing – between one Asian-obsessed baby boomer, Steven, and the young bride he finds online. The results are nothing short of an epic multiple-car pile-up on celluloid – and perhaps serve as one of the finest lessons Single White Men in Asia could ever learn.
“The first time I met Stephen in his own home, I had to fight the urge to turn around and leave,” says filmmaker Lum, a fourth-generation Chinese-American (married to a Caucasian and the product of what she calls “very American parents”, she visited China for the first time while she was in college) who spent months scouring Craigslist and other personals for men suffering from Yellow Fever. “I’ve been stared at, hit on and harassed by so many men like Steven,” she says during one voiceover. “They usually try to strike up conversation by saying ‘Hello’ to me in Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean. This has bothered me my whole life.”
Cultural blogger Angry Asian Man (real name: Phil Yu, a Korean-American commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post) defines such men thusly: “To put it bluntly, that gross-out fetish when dudes have an unhealthy obsession with Asian women. Chances are, you’ve met or know someone like this.” It gets worse. Urbandictionary.com is even less forgiving: “Typically a fat white loser in his 50s who trolls around Southeast Asia for a slim, submissive young May Ping Pang who wants him for his money and will want to cement their relationship with a child ASAP.” And worse: “Look at that sweaty, red-faced Asiaphile. He can’t get a quality woman at home so he goes to Bangkok instead.”
And so it is that we first meet Steven – a grandfather – atop the stairs to his small San Francisco apartment, offering Lum a goofy “Hello!” from behind old-man spectacles. “Your hair looks cute!” he squeaks as she ascends. “You look very Chinese, with the bangs. You know I like that…” (more giggling). Steven has spent ten years and thousands of dollars searching for the perfect Asian “mate”, tugged along in the wake of evolving technology from mail-order bride catalogues to online dating sites. Along the way he’s amassed dozens of Oriental pen pals, an entire hard drive full of pin-ups and at least one gold-digging ex-fiancée.
Quizzed about his peccadillo when the film was first released, Steven told PBS: “There are so many problems with that phrase ‘yellow fever’. Lightheartedly I could accept it, but in reality it sounds far more strange than how I view it, like an affliction rather than a preference. I had never thought about it before until 10 years after the disastrous end of my second marriage. I avoided any romance for that period. Then I saw my son find a beautiful Japanese girlfriend he later married. They seemed so happy and looked so nice together. She was very polite and amiable but definitely not a subservient type. She was a powerful go-getter for sure, with strong opinions and high standards and a sense of purpose. I thought maybe this might be a new and better direction for my life as well. So I diligently searched for ones I might have chemistry with. Each nationality seems to have a personality of its own. Early on in my search and communications I discovered that the Chinese style of communication was what I enjoyed most.”
Enter Sandy, whose Chinese name is Jianhua and who grew up on a tea farm in the remote mountains of Huangshan. At 18 she moved to Shenzhen, China’s fourth largest city, where she worked her way up from the factory floor to become executive secretary at a fashion label. Still single at 30, making her a veritable old maid by Asian standards, she turned to the internet in her search for love, hoping for a Chinese man – and met Steven. In a voiceover, Lum wonders: “What kind of woman would move country to marry a man she met on the internet?” In Sandy, we find the answer: a brave one.
Arriving in the US on a three-month fiancée visa, Sandy immediately sets about organising Steven’s apartment – not out of a sense of duty, but rather to bring some semblance of order to her new environs. “Everyone said it doesn’t make sense,” she tells Lum. “‘You should try to find a younger guy. And why would you choose him?’ I felt like we had so many similar interests and hobbies. And he’s just so special. He’s really not like anyone else…”
Time inches excrucatingly forward. “After six days, it’s, uh, not bad. It’s pretty good. Before, when we were just chatting online, it was always happy. When we are actually living together, we may encounter some small differences, but I can tell he’s the type to make me happy.”
As the film unspools, these “small differences” conspire to create something more like a chasm. Chancing upon thousands of photos of Steven’s Chinese ex-fiancée on his hard drive, Sandy erupts in anger. Phone calls are made. Emails sent. Communications banned. Later, Sandy tells Lum: “The only reason I called her and emailed her was for this result. I had to make this woman mad at him. Then she would break it off with him. If I were forever getting mad at Stephen, he’d never end it on his own. Now that she’s out of the picture, we don’t have any more problems.”
Ultimately, this is the film’s most poignant message: a shattering of the idyllic fantasies that stereotypes about ‘powerful’ Caucasian men and ‘submissive’ Asian women tend to excite. “Some of the wives like to gossip and compare,” says Sandy of others who followed a similar path. “One said: ‘Oh, you’re so lucky. Your husband has a house. Mine doesn’t own a house.’ When Steven first contacted me, he told me his honest situation. Whether I choose to accept it is my responsibility. So anyway, all the wives asked me: ‘What’s your husband’s situation?’ I told them: my husband has no car, no house, no money. Three nothings! In China, people would laugh in my face: ‘How can you marry this type of guy? What’s the point of going to America? You should’ve stayed in China.’ But in China, it’s not like I could ever meet or marry someone wealthy. I’ve never wanted to marry for money. I think you marry the same kind of person that you are. I come from a really ordinary family. It’s better to be realistic, right?” But it’s Steven who needs Sandy, not Sandy who needs to be rescued. “If I had known marriage was so hard, I would have never gotten married,” Sandy vents at one point. Steven, meanwhile, tells the camera that he’s “dead without her”.
Beyond the subversion of stereotypes, the film enters rather more profound territory as an examination of the changing nature of East-West relations. As noted by theatlantic.com, “In Steven and Sandy’s clash of cultures, and the renegotiation of expectations and shifting balance of power that subsequently ensues, one can readily see a reflection of the larger picture of Sino-American relations. The US simultaneously sees China as an alluring and naive consumer target, waiting for the Coke-bearing white knight of corporate America to come sweep it off its feet, and as a determined and crafty rival, jostling for pre-eminence on America’s own home turf.” Says Lum: “This movie does end up, almost accidentally, saying a lot about the current state of America’s relationship with China. You realise how little the West and China really understand each other, and how much buzzwords and catchphrases and stereotypes end up shaping the dialogue, even though it’s literally the most important relationship in the world right now.”
WHO: Asiaphiles
WHAT: Seeking Asian Female screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 4pm May 31
WHY: Confucius didn’t know shit
PP is a great place to screen this. I predict the audience will be exclusively white and female. LOL! It burns them up!
What they dont say as they critique this couples match.. Is after the film was made and released both of them felt miss represented, that normal disagreements were turned into cultural chasms and that they are, after all these years, still together and happily married.
The movie deals with one interpretation of the east : west relationship. I think there are better and fuller accounts.
From a reading perspective try ‘The East, the West, & Sex. A History (Richard Bernstein) and ‘The Asian Mystique’ (Sheridan Prasso). These give more extensive accounts of the issues underlying the film’s themes.
Read them, together with watching the movie, and you will be much better placed to think (react) critically towards the processes that come into play when East meets West on the personal relationship front.
When west men meet east women, it usually turns out a marrige based on sex and money with an outh from a younger bride that she will take “good care” of the elder supporter. This is quite common in south-east aisa. I idon’t see any cultural clash is supposed to be concerned in this sort of cases. You are right, Confucius would have given it a shit!