When you are the only East Asian woman in the room and a guy cuts across the crowd with his eyes on you and only you and he's not an undercover agent and you're not a Bond girl, that's pretty much a man made overly-friendly by yellow fever. You can speak English--you may only actually speak English, but he will think you have a charming East Asian accent. The Internet has given this symptom a charming twist: If the man formerly didn't know you were an East Asian ethnic and discovers your place of ethnic origin, then he suddenly is able to discern evidence that you are not a native speaker of the language you speak at home and at school, English. Sure, one could blame this on the rotten teaching methodology that results in most college students barely passing the English comprehension and writing college exams, forcing them into Subject A classes, but too often that person is also a product of that same educational system. Ironically, at times, your English language skills may surpass that person's.
I was thinking about yellow fever and all those people who thought they liked or disliked my people (and worse those East Asians and East Asian Americans who wanted to tell me how to be more Asian) when I watched the 2012 documentary "Seeking Asian Female." In this film, we follow a 60-year-old overweight underachieving white guy at the end of his 5-year search for another wife.
The man in this case, Steven, comes off as more than a little creepy with all of the catalogues and photos of the women he's corresponded with in his decade long search. You can tell that he's not actually accessed the situation well when he takes up with an attractive 24-year-old. You later come to question his ability to understand concrete matters of daily life--such as how can a man who works as a parking attendant at San Francisco International Airport afford to travel to China and splurge on a big wedding.
Steven does find a woman to marry him--a 30-year-old Chinese woman, Sandy, who would be too embarrassed (lose face) if she returned home at the end of her 3-month fiancée visa. She's already told the director she just wants to earn her green card (the hard way) and then divorce Steven. According to the information at the end of the movie, Steven and Sandy are still married after four years. We'll have to see how that all plays out after the interest in the movie wanes and Sandy gets naturalized as a U.S. citizen.
Sometimes, I wish I could warn these guys with submissive geisha on their mind. Some women are looking for a green card or how about just a kid born in the U.S. Some have clearly made a decision to marry an American. Some go about it in different ways. Sandy isn't submissive. She's a real go-getter. According to her, she hasn't found a man in China because she didn't attend college and now she's, by China's standards, over the hill. The woman worked her way up from on the floor of a factory up to an executive secretary position at a fashion factory and speaks have local dialect, Mandarin and Cantonese.
Steven doesn't bother to learn Mandarin Chinese or much about the culture. He wants a Chinese woman, but he later complains, "This is not China and I am not Chinese."
Director Debbie Lum allows her feelings toward yellow fever and even Steven to color her documentary. We see Lum rushing around attempting to play interpretor for Steven and Sandy when Google Translate isn't quick enough. We don't get to hear enough from Steven's family--his son who married a Japanese woman, his daughter-in-law and his two ex-wives. All would give us a better idea of who Steven is.
You can look online and Steven isn't totally pleased with the product. According to Steven Bolstad:
I am not “rescuing” her from a plight in the rice fields. She had a great job, a cool apartment, and lots of friends in Shenzhen. And she has a mind of her own. She is a real person. That is exactly what i was hoping for. My friends all love her.She loves my family and my family loves her.Steven feels somewhat betrayed by Lum and her editing style although they spent about five years together as he commented elsewhere online. In my review, I note that we really don't know much about Steven or Sandy except what Lum tells us or what they themselves reveal.
When I did a little undercover work, thinking that mail-order brides might be a good topic, I attended a seminar for Japanese women living in Los Angeles. They were mostly divorced and might have children. Those two issues might make it harder for them to find a husband in Japan where:
- They might not want to live.
- Few families can afford to have more than one or two children.
- Divorce carries a heavier stigma there than in the United States.
The same is true with older divorced women from Catholic countries. Marriage can be a practical concern for some (over romantic) and that might be the case for Sandy.
The ick-factor comes when it is all about looks. Steven doesn't really seem to embrace the Chinese culture and doesn't seem to have learned much Chinese. Perhaps that's changed in the almost four years they've been married. Another ick-factor would be someone who doesn't care what type of women he marries just as long as she is of that nationality. I shudder to remember one student at the exclusive Japanese study center who pursued every Japanese-American single woman at the center and also any Japanese woman. He seemed determined to be married in a month or less. He was married before the end of the year and his end of the year speech was about cross-cultural relations--totally anecdotal and about as deep as an ant's wading pool.
I won't rant on like our favorite Asian American agitator, Frank Chinn, because I think you can be Christian and be a real Asian American. I think you can also find love across cultures and ethnicity. When my husband's father and mother married it was considered controversial for Hawaii. A lot of haole and mainstream Americans wouldn't understand because his mother is Chinese American and his father in Japanese American. He is by definition happa. I am not. I wanted someone who could enjoy eating most of the things I do and dance Argentine tango.
I have relatives who married outside of the Japanese American community--notably three uncles who married Caucasian women. Two remained married until one of them died. The other divorced. At the time they married, it was a gutsy move for the women. I wonder how their family felt.
Yet I don't define that as yellow fever--not because it was a woman marrying an East Asian ethnic male, but because they were from the same general culture and spoke the same language. I don't think was a case where my aunts only dated East Asians. They dated people.
When I was dating, I had several ads that were essentially the same except how I identified my race: nothing, Asian or Japanese. No photos even though they warn you you won't get a response if you don't use a photo. Still, the one for a Japanese woman got a heavy response. As an experiment, I added a little lie: black and white. I can tell you that Japanese and Asian got the heavier response, but also that when I refused to date someone--sometimes for something as basic as geography, men responding to a Japanese or Asian woman got angry, very, very angry. Some would then claim I was a lesbian or that I should be grateful for their attention. Some would send me photos of their erection (which I forwarded to my gay friends). Some would tell me that they had women prettier than I for a few bucks when they were vacationing in Asia and informed me that I was probably to old to be a whore.
Then there were the ones who seemed to be waiting for me to find my inner geisha and put down Asian and Asian American men, forgetting that my father was also Asian American.
Of course, I can't let off Asian and Asian American men. There were Asian American men who were angry that I would consider men from any race and felt it their duty to tell me how to be more Asian.
That's a different kind of yellow fever.
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