Not-So-Odd Couple

You know, I see couples just like this one - aging white guy with a young Asian "friend" by his side - pretty much every day, but even so I still can't help feeling a little creeped out each time I do. It's not my business to interfere if two people of any age or background have managed to find happiness together, nor is it a mystery to me why any graying male would happily hook up with a pretty young thing who happened to be willing, but what I don't get is what these young women get out of such relationships. If these men were always unusually famous or successful, or if the women were immigrants from poor countries looking to land permanent residency, that would be one thing, but why would, say, an attractive young Japanese woman in London shack up with some undistinguished shlub with a paunch and a rapidly receding hairline - as has actually been the case with individuals I've known? Frankly, I can't understand this other than as a manifestation of a severe 白人コンプレックス。 It's no wonder wherever one goes there are so many creepy old guys hitting on Asian women young enough to be their granddaughters ...

[Via Gawker.]

PS: To forestall the usual apologias from those who feel as if they're under attack when people raise such issues, let me point out that these weird couplings are, if anything, even more common in the gay world: there is more at work here than people just "finding love" or women from poor countries looking for a leg up materially, and to me what that extra something consists of is clear - the conviction that even a senescent white partner is better than another Asian of the same age (or worse yet, some other minority even lower on the internalized racial hierarchy).

Comments

[timcairns]

In the case of the couple pictured, the man is a well-regarded author and the woman is californian-born.
A chinese-born woman tells me that the attraction for her is that the white men are "more masculine, less conservative". Perhaps some men find east asian women more feminine and cultured, and I wouldn't argue with that.

Me- I'm English, and I prefer non-English women. In fact, I don't particularly like British women of any race.
It's an international world. Being with someone who is like myself, in looks or culture, seems almost like incest.

[Abiola Lapite]

Well, there are a few points I need to reiterate here, namely

(1) I wasn't actually speaking about this particular case, as I was well aware of his background from the Gawker article I linked to. My point was that I know many other couples like this one in which the man is in no way, shape or form distinguished from the herd, and yet he has an attractive young woman of Asian extraction waiting on him hand and foot. What is in it for *her* in such a situation, *especially* if she's of the same nationality as he is?

(2) Expanding on the previous sentence, it isn't their differing *races* which I find bothersome, but their vastly differing *ages*; one would think a young woman like this could easily find someone closer to her own age to play the compliant little housewife to, and again, in many other cases there isn't even the "gold digger" or "social climber" excuse to latch unto: often we are talking about men who are clearly *losers* both professionally and socially - unaccomplished characters with nasty personalities and all the social skills of an orangutan - and here I'm speaking of individuals I know of personally, so I have more than enough information to go on.

(3) The fact that many women of East Asian backgrounds are willing to welcome the advances of much older men with nothing other than their whiteness to offer is one the "Asiaphile" element knows all too well, which is why whenever one goes somewhere Asians are known to frequent, these types are always sure to turn up, and to show an arrogant boldness in their advances that would be unthinkable with white women: I have *personally* seen men who ought to soon be collecting their pensions reach out and grab Asian female acquaintances of mine by the arm and attempt to pull them away to do god-knows-what.

(4) Finally, if this is all just a case of natural, healthy incest-avoidance, how does one explain the fact that with gays it's almost entirely Asians chasing after white partners, rather than the other way around? I believe that the reason why we see so many white pensioner types with Asian women in their 20s is the same one why such a large portion of Asian-white gay couples consist of over-the-hill rice-queens and their much younger lovers: widespread self-hatred and a resulting propensity to "settle" for any member of the desired race one can find, a tendency older white men are more than willing to capitalize on (and I don't blame them for doing so).

I don't know you, so I'm in no position to judge your situation, and in any case I'm not trying to say most mixed-race couples are somehow suspicious or blameworthy: what I *am* saying is that with a certain subset there's something going on which one has a right to feel nauseated by - young Asian women hooking up with loser grandfathers who happen to be white being a case in point.

[Won Joon Choe]

Abiola,

Let me begin with two disclaimers.

First, I know you said that you were not describing the relationship pictured above particular, but rather speaking of the general phenomenon of white "loser grandfathers" and young attractive Asian females. Second, I have seen this phenomenon too often myself to dismiss it as an urban myth. In fact, this topic inevitably comes up whenever I get together with my Asian friends.

Nonetheless, I had an epiphany just now, and I wonder if there is another phenomenon at work here whose impact we both have under-estimated.

Let me explain.

I looked up the man pictured, because your first commentator said he was a renowned author, and I had never heard of him. And surprise--the man is in his mid-30s, only a year or two older than us! Given that I assume the woman pictured is at least in her late 20s, this does not seem to be one of those relationships with a grotesque age gap.

To return to my point, all this perhaps presents another possibility that we may have overlooked: Could it be the case that many white male-Asian female couples appear to demonstrate a large age gap but in reality do not? As the stereotype goes, Asians--esp. Asian females--age at a slower rate than their Caucasian counterpart at least in terms of skin and other surface features.

Of course, this is not to say that the type of relationships that you find curious does not exist--or even exist in abundance. But I wonder if its frequency has been over-estimated, simply because we do not account for the aging (or more precisely "apparent aging") issue.

[Won Joon Choe]

P.S. I should mention that I looked up the writer picture on Wikipedia, where his birth year was given as 1972. I would not be surprised if Wikipedia's account is--as usual--inaccurate.

[Abiola Lapite]

If this man really is still in his 30s, that's just scary - I'd have pegged him for late 40s at best. In any case, his supposed fame* and age aside, this picture doesn't exactly suggest that he's particularly endowed with the social graces ...

*I'd never heard of him before either, and I'm not exactly a book hater.

[Abiola Lapite]

Oh, and by the way, to address your main point, I'm sure the percentage of "Asian woman/white man" couples who fit this template are not that high, but what does stand out is for me is their sheer *frequency*: I can tell the difference between an Asian woman in her 20s and one in her 40s without a problem, and yet here in London I see at least one of these "grandpa/granddaughter" like couples literally *every single day*. I do see lots of young East-European women on the arms of much older men every day as well, but the difference with the Asian case is that one can see at a glance that the man is either a gangster, a wealthy layabout or a banker type with too much free cash in his pocket: from the gaudy way their East European partners are dressed you can also tell they're extracting full compensation for their companionship, not sleeping with pensioners for free when not waiting on them hand and foot, simply in order to have a trophy [sic] white boyfriend.