Chinese Girl Confessions: Sex and Love, Asian Style by Angelina Zhang © 2014 Angelina Zhang
Table of Contents
Chinese girls don’t have sex, or do we? What makes a Chinese girl Chinese? Chinese girls, Chinese beauty standards What Chinese people want, and how you can take advantage of it My first boyfriend Dating, China style "Bride price": the dowry is alive and well Round the bases All your man is belong to us Sex, China style, and how to please a Chinese girl in bed About chinese hookers Are Chinese Men Really Wife-Beating Abusers? Do Chinese guys really have small ones? How to attract a Chinese girlfriend Final words
Chinese girls don’t have sex, or do we? Chinese girls are hot. Hot like hot, my friends tell me, and also hot like popular. Everyone is curious about us. Have you wondered? What we look for in a man? What we like in bed? If we even get in bed? When you’ve seen cute Chinese girls on TV, on campus, at the airport, at Starbucks, wherever, have you ever thought about their private lives? What the truth is, somewhere between prim and proper studious good girls and hyper-sexualized-geisha-style? Chinese girls are often portrayed as quiet, demure, subservient, and sexless. That’s not true. We can be and maybe still are quiet, and depending how you define it, demure. We know when to act subservient, but you shouldn’t take that at face value. And we put on a good show of being sexless. But like many aspects of Chinese society and culture, reality isn’t exactly like surface appearance. You can use this book that to learn about how Chinese and Asian girls really are. Maybe it’s because you’re curious. Or maybe it’s because you’re dating or want to date a Chinese girl, in the United States or in Europe or even in China. There’s nothing wrong with that. We certainly have our attractions. Or maybe you wonder why your husband is so intrigued with that Chinese girl in his office, and you want to know more about us. I’ll talk not just about myself and my sex life, but talk about Chinese girls in general, in ways that can help you. Not many people know about my sex life -- in fact, nobody who wasn’t there when I was doing it would know about it. I don’t talk about it casually. Even among us Chinese girls, in our dorm rooms, tea gatherings, we don’t talk about this stuff. It stays hidden. We all assume one another to have sex lives, maybe even vibrant ones, but each one of us individually pretends that she’s the chaste one, and it’s her friends that are rolling around Shanghai hotel room bed threesomes with wellendowed foreign guys. Well, I’m here to tell you the private things, the dirty details, everything that Chinese girls don’t even tell one another. Why? To help you, to get rid of a lack of understanding out there in the
world, and also to satisfy my thus far in life stunted desire to talk about Chinese girls’ sex lives! Too often, I’ve bitten my tongue when people talk about Chinese girls and sex in front of me. In a lunch conversation, a white coworker might mention vibrators, and give me a look of “you probably don’t even know what that is, you innocent Chinese girls.” And I want to say “I know full well enough, but I get enough of the real thing.” And instead I just give a clueless, quizzical, and very very innocent look, as we Chinese girls do. I confess to everything. If I just wanted to confess, I might as well write it in a private diary. I’m writing a book rather than a private diary not only to satisfy my slight exhibitionist desire, which I do admit I have, but also so at least my experiences and my retelling of them can benefit my readers. I guess we Chinese people always think of practical benefits. For every dollar spent or minute of effort expended, we want to know what we’ll get in return. So what will you get from this book? It won’t help you scrub your sink or cure your back pain, but it does have a lot to teach you. So here’s what you can get from this book, and the questions it can answer: What happens in Chinese and Asian girls’ private sex lives? How can I meet, attract, and seduce a Chinese girl, if I’m not even Asian? What should I expect from dating, marrying, and yes, bedding Chinese girls? What makes many men so attracted to Chinese girls? Can other girls learn anything from this? Are our vaginas really slanted? I can answer the last one right away. The answer is, of course, YES! Our pussies are slanted into the ever-seductive horizontal position. It drives men wild. Boys, you haven’t lived until you’ve experienced a
slanted China vagina. Of course, everything I tell you is true. And when it’s not, I hope that you’re smart enough to know it. I do intend for this book to be educational, especially about the first four topics, even if not about the fifth. I hope I can demystify and illustrate some of the unique dynamics of Asian girls, especially Chinese girls, for all interested parties -- which includes both men and women. If you’re wondering “How can I get a Chinese girlfriend?” this is your book. If you wonder “How can I get with a guy who wants a Chinese girlfriend?” this is your book. If you want to know “How can I keep my husband from leaving me for a Chinese girlfriend?” then also this is your book. If you’re wondering “How to shave topiary gardens into my pubic hair?” then this is probably not your book. But maybe you can write your own.
What makes a Chinese girl Chinese? Maybe you think I can’t really be a Chinese girl, with such a dirty mouth. Or maybe you suspect that by “Chinese girl,” I mean that I’m an American who was born in, say, New Mexico, but whose great great grandparents came from China to build the railroads. Or that I’m from Singapore or Malaysia or some other Asian country that’s only partially Chinese. Nope. I’m the realest of the real Chinese girl, born in Shanghai, (“People’s Republic” of) China, 1985. I came to the United States in 2008, to attend business school, and also to follow my then-boyfriend, a white American guy. I’ve lived in America since then. With there being 700 million women and girls in China, there is going to be variation. Obviously. You’d be crazy if you expected all 700 million of us to be exactly the same. But actually, there is much, much less variation among Chinese people's mentalities than a Westerner might expect. Having met women from many countries in the world, I would say that women in China resemble one another more than women in any other country I can think of. (That’s true for Chinese men too. But especially for Chinese women.) That is something that always strikes me when hanging out with my non-Chinese girl friends here in the U.S.: even in my circle of friends, which is of course constrained by my tastes in choosing them and meeting them and so on, there is so much variety, in terms of interests, likes, opinions, clothing styles, body types, even life goals -- a lot more variation than I can ever imagine in a group of girls in China. That means that it makes much more sense to try to understand Chinese girls as a whole, as a valid subject in itself, than it would to try to understand American girls as a subject. (Do I sound pretty academic here? I know that in the U.S., Chinese girls are thought of as being very studious. I think that has more to do with the particular values of Chinese Americans than it does with girls in China itself. More about that later.)
There is so much remarkable similarity when you compare any two Chinese girls, from any country, that it makes a lot of sense to just learn what we Chinese girls are all about, because, well, more or less, that knowledge is what we called in business school “highly generalizable”: know one of us well, know a lot about us all. In fact, and this is a point I’ll talk about more later -- that homogeneity or the lack of homogeneity among many Westerners is what trips up some Chinese girls who just start dating white Western (say, American) men. She starts dating a white guy. She may have heard that her cousin is dating a white guy and that her cousin’s white guy loves to listen to Daft Punk. So she assumes that all white guys are the same way - because really, truthfully, all Chinese girls of the same generation are so similar that it would be unusual for them to have differing musical tastes. And of course she gets tickets for a Daft Punk concert as a wonderful surprise for the new white guy she’s dating. And that white guy tells her - predictably to you, but shockingly enough for the typical Chinese girl -“I hate Daft Punk! They suck! I like [Johnny Cash / Neutral Milk Hotel / The Village People / whatever]” -- and she is shocked, because doesn’t her cousin’s boyfriend like Daft Punk? Did her cousin lie to her? How can it be that this white guy didn’t like what the other white guy liked? Be prepared for any Chinese girl you meet -- one who didn’t grow up with many non-Chinese people -- to have sometimes ridiculous ideas of what you must like, because of that one time she met a white guy before, and that’s what he liked. That's also why almost everyone in China, except the youngest and best educated people, or those who have studied abroad, believe that in the United States, everyone is white, everyone is Christian, and everyone lives in a suburban house with two cars and a golden retriever. To Americans, that's just a funny archetype, but in China, people are so homogenous that they believe other societies are equally homogenous. Here's a fun experiment, if you're an American whose ancestors came from anywhere but Europe: introduce yourself as an American to a
Chinese person, and watch them either think it's a joke or you're a liar. Or just be completely confounded. I've met many Asian Americans who have traveled to China and decided that Chinese people are "racist," because they refuse to believe that those people are Americans. Well, yes, I guess it's "racist" to some extent, but really it's just failing to recognize that not all countries are as homogenous as China. And that "foreigners" don't all have the same opinion or even the same language. Chinese girls of the same generation, from China (as opposed to ethnically Chinese girls from other countries), will be remarkably, remarkably similar to one another. They shop at the same stores, listen to the same music, and have the same opinions. They are, unfortunately, pretty much interchangeable in terms of outward traits! And I say that as a Chinese girl, although one who has stepped outside the norm a little bit. There will be some variation based on what region from China she’s from, or what socioeconomic stratum she’s from, but the variation is so small. You might think that makes Chinese girls boring. Maybe. I’ve talked to both Chinese and foreign guys who say that they want to date non-Chinese girls because Chinese girls are all so identical to one another. But you should appreciate and use the positive (for you) side of this: know one well, know them all well. What about girls not from China? I think that it’s true that the farther you are from China geographically, the farther you are in terms of the girls being all the same. I know a lot of ethnically Chinese girls in the United States whose parents or grandparents emigrated from China, and they are definitely not all the same. Well, they share some traits of Chinese culture, especially when dealing with their families, but they’re not uniform in the way that Chinese girls from China are. As a footnote, this homogeneity is becoming less true in China now as the society becomes more polarized and unequal, between rich and poor and urban and rural -- but when I was growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, Chinese society was pretty homogenous. But if you’re interested in Chinese girls who were born in the 1990s or later, those
socioeconomic distinctions to start to come into play more.
Chinese girls, Chinese beauty standards I’m lucky by Chinese standards. I’m about 5’6” tall (167 cm), which is quite tall for Chinese, fair-skinned, and have big eyes. I have long, slim legs. My nipples are pink, my belly button is vertical-shaped, and I don’t have too many birthmarks. Those are all Chinese standards of beauty. By these traits, I am hot stuff in just about any Chinese community. But Chinese beauty standards are not the same as others’ beauty standards. One of those standards stands out above all others: fair (white) skin. It’s the trump card of Chinese beauty. Girls from China like to sometimes describe themselves proudly as “white girls.” That doesn’t mean what you might think it means. It simply means that they’re fair skinned. And one of the greatest compliments you can pay a Chinese girl is “you’re so white!” Which again doesn’t mean what Westerners might think it means. Sometimes you might see a couple in China: the guy is very desirable, but the girl much less so, except for having white skin, almost paper white (in fact, “paper white” is one of the beauty standard terms common in China, especially when describing models and advertising beauty products). In my high school there was one very overweight, dumpy-looking, shrill-voiced, boring and unremarkable girl whom several popular guys were very interested in -- because despite her flaws (by the way, she also had bad breath), her skin was paper white! She was the envy of us all. And yet someone who doesn’t know about the obsession for white skin would never understand why this girl was so in demand. Caucasians who like Chinese women often like a different look: shorter stature, small (“slanty”) eyes, and, importantly, dark skin. And they don’t place the importance that Chinese men do on vertical belly buttons and pink nipples. The Chinese women that are considered hot in the West are usually considered ugly, or even scary-looking, in Chinese
societies. Chinese people’s favorite example of this in the celebrity world is actress Bai Ling. To Chinese tastes, she is monstrous-looking, and would rate as below-average in looks. Chinese people are constantly in wonderment at how she can be considered a beautiful actress in the US. The other favorite example is American actress Lucy Liu. Her small slanty eyes and weird, angular face are a turnoff to Chinese people, and she lacks the fair skin that is pretty much mandatory for being a celebrity in the Chinese world. But you don’t need to look at celebrities. If you travel to a country such as China or Taiwan, take a look at the Chinese women who are with desirable Chinese men, and then take a look at the Chinese women who are with desirable white men. (What makes a man desirable in a Chinese culture? We’ll discuss that soon.) You will see a big difference! Chinese people do like to disparagingly talk about white men dating the “leftovers” that Chinese men don’t want, but is it really leftovers when darker skin and slanty eyes are what white men want in the first place? Why don’t they say that Chinese men are getting the leftovers that white men don’t want, because that’s equally (un)true. So what I’m saying is that the tastes are different. That creates a situation where each team thinks the other team is getting the leftovers. But that’s all for the best, right? And don't let the gossip and media reports about gender ratios fool you. There's no big gender imbalance in China. Some people say that in China it's now something like 2 girls for every 3 boys, but that is utterly ridiculous. No serious authority has ever placed the gender imbalance at more than 96 girls for every 100 boys. That creates a bit of an imbalance, but I doubt whether it really makes a difference in dating or marriage lives, or whether it has anything to do with Chinese guys needing to buy iphones for attractive girls. I think it's just an explanation people like to fish up, maybe because it explains womens' growing power in Chinese society. But even with this slight gender imbalance, it's tough being a single girl in China. Chinese beauty standards are demanding and
unyielding. Think you'll use makeup? Every other Chinese girl does it too. You'll need heavy makeup and eye-enlarging contact lenses just to keep up with every other girl. Think you'll get plastic surgery? Yeah, every other Chinese girl has gotten it too, so you need it just to keep up with them. Maybe that's the typical experience of life in China: trying to run hard just to keep up with everyone else! And it's true in the world of dating and beauty standards just as in the workplace and many other spheres. It's competitive out there. Knowing Chinese men’s beauty standards, and also knowing your own beauty standards, is going to be a crucial tool that you can potentially use to your advantage. What's a "type" that you find attractive but Chinese guys aren't into? If your beauty standards are quite different from the Chinese ones, you will have quite a lot of opportunity with women you consider attractive that Chinese men don’t consider attractive. On the other hand, if your goal is to impress your Chinese friends or colleagues or clients with your date, you should realize that bringing a 150 cm tall dark-skinned farm girl will not impress them, no matter how many good qualities you can see in her! And remember how I said I’m lucky by Chinese standards? Lucky in one sphere can mean unlucky in the other sphere. I’ve had some white boyfriends, who miraculously appreciated my looks (usually guys who have spent enough time in Asia to acquire similar standards of beauty to Asian guys’ standards), but I’ve been unlucky enough to fail to garner significant interest from a few white guys I’ve been into here in the US. Some of them picked “busty blondes” over me. And others picked Asian girls who were shorter, darker skinned, the usual type that “Westerners are supposed to like,” rather than me. My relatives in China would say these guys are completely insane -- playing into the Chinese stereotype of foreigners being crazy -- but don’t relatives always think that their girl is the world’s most beautiful? Well, in this case, I really am considered very beautiful by Chinese standards, but not really for foreigners’ standards. Had I stayed
living in China, I would’ve had it easy as far as guys. The guy-world was being handed to me on a platter in China. I started out as an awkward teenager with no contact with boys, but by the time I was finishing high school, I was already being “prospected” by rich older guys. But coming to America was a wake-up call that I would no longer be the most beautiful girl in the room.
What Chinese people want, and how you can take advantage of it Are you one of those Western guys who want to go to China because all the white American girls care about is money? Well, I have an answer for you: ha ha ha, HA! Because if you think white American girls care about money, you don’t know much about Chinese girls. Chinese girls care about money (or its closely related alloys, such as job prospects and socioeconomic standing) much, much more than even the most insane gold-digger white girl. Ok, let me define that a little more specifically. I would say that the average girl in China cares about money about as much as the world’s most money-hungry absolutely gold-digger white American girl. (No, I haven’t met the latter… or maybe I have, one of my coworkers in New York; topic for another book!) The only reason many white guys think that Asian girls don’t care about money is that those white guys don't see it overtly. They're less attuned to it. Just like they don't understand when Asian girls talk about them in their Asian native languages. And many girls in Asia assume that all white guys are rich, and in many Asian countries, the white guys do tend to be richer than the local Asian guys. So a white guy who was always rejected back in the US because of his lack of money is popular with women in Asia, and thinks "oh, women in Asia don’t care about money!" But the truth is exactly the opposite of this. The reason he is popular in Asia is exactly the same reason he wasn’t popular in his home country: money! It’s just that in Asia, a poor white guy is either assumed to be rich because of his skin color, or while he's not rich by US standards, is rich by the local standards. There are always stories of retirees going to live in the Philippines or Thailand or Cambodia on their pensions of $2,000 a month or so -- definitely not rich in the first world, but kind of rich in rural Asia! In China, that used to be rich, but now you'd have to go pretty far into the hinterlands for that to be considered rich in any sense. I think the best you can do, if you go into rural China,
with $2,000 a month is "kind of above average." So you won't have much status. But in the US your status would be "below average," so still, you'd be doing better in China than in the US. And then, as I said, you might conclude that "Chinese girls don't care about money" -- you'd be wrong, because they care a lot about money, just that $2,000 is good money to them! Am I saying that Chinese girls care a lot about money? Yes, I am. They care about money and all the things that come along with it. If you don't have actual cash in your pocket, they want you to have a nice house or car. Or an education that can easily produce money. Or connections that can easily produce money (important in China). Or anything like that. That is really what's most important. And it's a practical view, perhaps nurtured by centuries of Chinese people struggling to just get by and grab any advantage on their many, many countrymen. To explore what girls want, it’s very instructive to look at men’s online dating profiles, or any kind of dating-oriented profile, in the US as compared to China. What men present in those profiles is what they think is relevant for women to know about them. (And for now, we’ll just pretend the US is one homogenous culture, which of course it isn’t.) A US dating profile might talk about a man’s hobbies and interests, and how he likes to spend his free time -- he collects stamps, he watches horror movies, he restores old cars, whatever. And it might talk about things like his excellent singing voice and his capacity to make friends laugh and how great his golf swing is. To a Chinese female reader, the answer is, so what! A Chinese man’s dating profile is about one thing: his money and social and economic status. If there are mentions of his hobbies, it is only to demonstrate his money and his social status. "I'm a rich guy who plays golf, not mahjong." Or "I'm a rich guy who drinks champagne, not bubble milk tea." It is not unusual to list a salary in very specific terms, and even project how much that salary will rise. Yes, all in an online dating ad. There will often be a summary of the man’s investment portfolio. Yes, in
a personals ad! And of course there will be reassurances of his intelligence and education -- not because that’s cool, but because intelligence and education bring social standing and money. He makes nice origami, or is good with dogs, or can run a marathon? Who cares, says Chinese society! So things are pretty simple to figure out in the Chinese dating world. I mean, there’s no mystery about “what do women want?” -- that is a ridiculous question in the Chinese context. And while in first-world white American society, a woman being interested primarily in the man’s money is considered crass, shameful, manipulative, and whatever else, a Chinese woman would say “of course I’m looking at the man’s money -what else do you expect me to look for?!” So does that make things easy or difficult for you in China? Of course it depends where you sit on the totem pole, and what kinds of girls you’re after. Despite all the economic growth in China, average salaries are still markedly lower than in the US. However, there is a huge contingent of people, mostly men, making money in huge amounts, with incomes in large multiples of the average. Speaking for China and only China, you can forget about competing on the money scale for the most desirable big-city girls unless you are really doing well in terms of money, and I mean let’s say $100,000/year absolute minimum income, even in China. Even that won't get you that far. $1 million a year, and now you're talking. I know that these days in Shanghai, it is common for a guy to give a girl he doesn’t know well an Iphone 5 (well, nowadays I guess Iphone 6) just to say “hey, I’m interested in you, can we have a meal sometime?” Yes, a guy will throw a $1,000 gift at a girl just to say “I am worthy of a dinner date with you.” At the dinner date, of course he’s expected to bring her another gift, maybe an LV handbag. And that guarantees him that after dinner, he’ll have a hot, steamy, passionate night of… masturbating and wondering whether he’ll be good enough to have a second date with her. That’s how it goes. What if you don’t make $100,000 a year, or don’t want to spend
that money just to get a dinner date with some woman you don’t know? Don’t stop reading or throw down this book in frustration! I’ve only described one segment of girls: big-city girls who are considered highly desirable by Chinese society. That is maybe 5-10% of the women in China. Foreigners usually don’t interact with those girls, because the girls are too busy managing their pool of Chinese boyfriends, and they don’t have much use for foreigners anyway. They're definitely not the girls you'd meet on English-language dating sites or in foreigner-oriented social venues. And I’m not sure whether these are the girls foreigners would most be interested in anyway, since foreigners’ criteria tend to be different from Chinese guys’ criteria. Actually, I have a cousin who is one of those in-demand Shanghai 5% girls. She’s very white-skinned (you know how great that is in China!) and she attended a university in the UK (which just gives her a badge of status -- no one in China cares about what she learned there), and she was a virgin until marriage (this is important for Chinese guys!). She ended up marrying a white American guy, a mutual fund manager who lives in Shanghai, soon after she graduated from university. And when she told her friends and relatives, who knew that she was the highest of the high-value girls, that she’s marrying a white guy, she would say, “he’s a foreigner who lives here in Shanghai… but don't worry, because he drives a Ferrari!” Meaning: China’s urban elite pretty much assume foreigners living in China are penniless English teachers, but this one is different. So how to reconcile that disdain for foreign English teachers with the stories you must’ve heard about Chinese girls eager to jump on any white cock, even a poor one, just for the chance of a green card? Those girls jumping on any available white cock aren’t the same girls I’ve talked about. The white-man-desperate “undesirable” girls, the 95% of regular girls who are not in that desirable 5%, are interested in money and its correlates just as much as those more desirable girls are. It is absolutely not true that a Chinese woman who goes out with a penniless
English teacher is not interested in money. She’s interested in money, but she knows what her limits are. Regular girls, or below-average girls (in Chinese desirability terms) know that they usually have no chance with rich Chinese guys, and maybe not even with middle class Chinese guys, so their options are more limited, and they take what they can get. We’ve talked about the top 5% of girls, and what kinds of girls are available only to guys who are willing to give an Iphone 6 as an introductory gift. Let’s talk about the other end of the spectrum: the “bottom end” girls, who will willingly run off with most any foreigner. These are the girls that you hear about who are so eager to meet foreign men, especially white foreign men. Are these girls really so terrible? I really don’t think so, at least if you don’t share Chinese society’s particular hangups. But remember that my mentality is not typical Chinese. To a typical Chinese guy or girl, these girls are indeed complete trash. That brings us to the next, important point. We talked about what girls want. Now let's talk about what Chinese guys want. Remember how I said Chinese people, especially girls, are culturally so remarkably homogenous and similar to one another? What Chinese guys want in a girl is really also so similar. Approximately speaking, they want a whiteskinned girl, tall-ish (5'6"-5'7"; any taller is too tall), with big eyes (sometimes Chinese girls have special contact lenses to simulate this), long, slim legs, a bit of education but not too much education (college degree is good; graduate school is kind of pushing it), from a "respectable" family, either a virgin or "almost" a virgin, of course no tattoos, gangster ex-boyfriends, extensive sexual history, past kids or pregnancies or marriages. Remember my discussion of Chinese beauty standards? This is pretty much the same list, only expanded to social traits that pretty much add up to "marriageability." Here are some specific traits that will make a Chinese girl pretty much “worthless” or "unmarriageable" to Chinese guys: divorced, single mother, over thirty years old, didn’t finish high school, works/worked in
prostitution or a profession associated with prostitution (massage, karaoke, hostess bar, etc), has had an extensive sexual history before marriage (say sex with more than 2 men… not necessarily at once!), has a relative in prison, parents are destitute, has a tattoo. Add to that the physical no-nos, such as being dark-skinned, under 160 cm in height, or having any kind of visible congenital disease or disability. Any of those (although in China those traits usually appear in groups, not one at a time; many girls can check every box on that list), and the best a girl can do is maybe a very low-status guy who has even less money than she has, or maybe no Chinese guy at all. Or a foreign guy, who most likely doesn’t care about most of those traits. A girl with those traits is going to pretty much jump at any foreign guy she can find. I’m not defending Chinese guys’ standards. But I’m telling you what they are. Yes, they create a cruel world, but is it any more cruel than Western guys who only want girls with big natural breasts?! I don’t know! I’ve lived outside of China long enough to think those are pretty ridiculous standards. And maybe I’m not exactly the most typical Chinese girl, because even when I lived in China, I had my doubts about those standards. I have one good friend in China who considers herself “unfit to marry a Chinese guy." She is white-skinned, tall, pretty, big-eyed, college-educated, and so on, but… she was born with psoriasis, a congenital skin condition that gives her red peeling skin on her back and arms sometimes. I know. To my US readers, it would be “hot girl with psoriasis, who cares about the psoriasis!” but in China, she’s considered defective, and not fit to marry any desirable guy. So she dates foreigners, who don’t care about psoriasis, and feel lucky to be dating a hot 10/10 Chinese girl. She only learned this because she met a foreign guy (living in China) online, and they really hit it off. They had many coffee dates and movies and so on. But whenever he tried to do anything physical, even holding hands in a dark movie theatre, she swatted him away. He thought she's inexperienced or sexually conservative or a prude or not
attracted to him or some such. The truth is just that she didn't want to lose him. She thought that once the clothes come off and he saw her psoriasis outbreaks, he'd drop her, as every Chinese guy had done to her. And she enjoyed his company so much that she didn't want to lose him. One day she finally told him why she didn't want to get physical. She said she has a big secret to tell him that is the reason why she doesn't want to get physical with him. He, as an American, guessed only one thing -- she must be really a man! He was horrified that he'd been pining after a transsexual all this time. After all, if an American woman tells you "before I take my clothes off, there's something you have to know," there's quite likely to be a six-inch surprise popping out of "her" pants. But in this case, all my friend wanted to tell him is that she has a skin rash sometimes. "That's IT?!" he asked her? He thought that maybe she really did have some other more sinister secret, and made up the skin rash story just to provide a cover. That really was it, her whole secret. She was taken aback when he said he doesn't mind her skin rash. He doesn't consider her defective. They had amazing sex and a great relationship. He ended up going back to the United States and parting ways with her, but she knew from then on that she'd have a much easier time with foreign guys than Chinese guys. There's a strain in American culture that believes that all people are inherently equal, and physical disabilities are minor genetic mishaps that should be accommodated. That's not Chinese culture at all. Have you ever heard about how in a nest of baby birds, if one baby bird is weak, the mother kicks it out of the nest and onto the ground? That's how Chinese society is. Any physical "imperfection," and you're branded a "cripple," and more or less no one wants you, not for dating, not for marriage, not for education, not even for friendship. In China, a wheelchair-bound person enjoying an evening out with family and friends is unthinkable; their family would be ashamed of being seen with a "cripple," and they would be unlikely to have any friends, perhaps other than other "cripples." It's a cruel world out there. And that cruelty extends not only
to people in wheelchairs, but people with any kind of minor physical anomaly, such as, say psoriasis or a missing toe or some such thing. The weak bird gets kicked out of the nest. Have you heard about China's respect for age and older people? There's a little bit of truth to that, but it mostly applies to respecting one's own parents and one's work superiors or political superiors -- that is, people you are respecting because of their position, not strictly for their age. As for dating, a woman over thirty, or outside the big cities even over twenty-five, is "too old." Remember these standards were set when humans were used to reproducing in their early twenties. And to this kind of survival mentality, a thirty-year-old prospective wife is too old to make healthy offspring. Chinese guys would be ashamed to be seen with a girl over thirty. Even if they're over thirty themselves! I know a few Chinese guys in their forties who are a loose-knit association of family, business, and university friends, some divorced, some single, and some married but still looking for more girlfriends -- and none of them would ever have anything to do with a woman over thirty. Some of them would only grudgingly speak to a girl who's 25. The prime age for them is maybe 2225. And a thirty-year-old, which is about fifteen years younger than them, is old, too old. Even though in this group of guys, the minimum age is 42 and the maximum age is 49. On the other hand, I had a chance to meet one foreign (Canadian) guy in China who has a secret. Well, we know these guys in the US as "cougar hunters" or "milf hunters." I guess I've said enough right there and you know what this guy is into. He's just an English teacher, by no means a rich guy. But he's always got a lot of hot girlfriends on his arm. His secret? He's 31. He seeks out women over thirty, sometimes even in their early forties. And they go wild at the chance to be with him. No Chinese guy under maybe sixty or seventy would ever want such an "undesirable" Chinese woman -- whose only "undesirable" trait is her age being 35 or so.
So that’s exactly the dynamic that I’m talking about here: the most natural match between a Chinese girl and a foreign guy is a girl who is considered “defective” by Chinese standards, but not by foreigners’ standards. Foreigners get what they like but the local Chinese guys don’t like. It’s like value investing, finding a stock that you think is good that others don’t like. (I told you I have an MBA, right?)
My first boyfriend I’m going to tell you about my first boyfriend. Maybe you care about my love life or maybe you don’t, but whether or not you care about my personal travails, the important thing here is how very typical my story is. As I told you, Chinese girls’ lives and backgrounds are remarkably similar. And my story here is the typical “girl meets boy” of China. His name was Hong. I first noticed him when we were lining up for the morning attendance check in high school. We were both 15. I just thought he looked cute, with his spiky hair, biggish nose, and huge open eyes. I’d never talked to him, and as far as I knew, he’d never noticed me. Does this sound like typical teenage high school stuff, and are you thinking that Chinese dating isn’t so different from, say, American dating? Sounds similar. But here’s the key difference: the first time I actually talked to him was two years later! For two years, in my mind he was “mine,” even though I’d never talked with him. And I’m not an unusually shy girl. But in China, boys and girls are so strongly separated in schools and in social groups. Just talking to a boy is a big deal, a big step. And what did I dream about when I thought Hong was mine? Never once did I think about kissing or touching him. I wasn’t that kind of girl! What my deepest, darkest fantasies about Hong involved was us living in a nice condo in Shanghai and raising a baby boy together. How did we get that baby boy? Immaculate conception, probably, because babymaking of any sort did not figure into my fantasies, nor into the fantasies of any of my classmates. That's usually how it happens. We see men as providers and fathers and husbands. We don't really explicitly imagine sex. Or it's even a little bit scary, thinking that in order to get past the marriage and wedding bit, there will actually be penetration of our vaginas. I had never even touched a boy’s hand. I don’t think I even really
knew that a boy had a cock. Or maybe I knew that he had something down there, but the whole subject was yucky and squirmy. That would sound normal for, say, preteen girls in the Western world. But remember -- I was 16, 17, 18! And so were my classmates! There was no sex ed, other than the implicit “don’t even think about getting close to a boy.” And boys were off-limits and yucky and squirmy in their physicality, but maybe worthwhile for raising babies (immaculately conceived) and living together in Shanghai condo bliss. Here's the shocker: Chinese girls don't masturbate. It's very uncommon for a girl who's sexually inexperienced to masturbate. We're taught, if anything at all about those parts of our bodies, just that they're dirty and not supposed to be touched. And we're certainly not supposed to be giving ourselves pleasure through them. Chinese boys masturbate like all teenage boys, but it's still considered dirty and shameful. You don't find Chinese high school boys talking in the lunchroom about the great wank they had. There might be some awkward mentions and giggles and tacit acknowledgement on the subject of male masturbation. The Chinese slang term for male masturbation is "da fei ji," literally "hitting the airplane," because it's like shooting an anti-aircraft gun. Female masturbation isn't talked about much. There are some slang terms like "going fishing" or "using a fish hook" to describe a woman fingering herself, but it's not commonly used, nor commonly talked about. And your average twentysomething Chinese girl has never, ever touched herself in that way. That means that a Chinese girl who hasn't had a boyfriend isn't accustomed to sexual feelings or sexual touch of any sort. A usual American girl has had either boyfriends or masturbatory self-education about sexual touch by the time she's in her late teens, but not so for Chinese girls. That also has something to do with her not being used to foreplay. The first time you touch your girlfriend, she might not be so used to someone arousing her nipples, her neck, and all her sensitive spots. In the Western world, even if a woman doesn't have experience
with a man touching her clit or tweaking her nipples, she's done it for herself enough. Not so in China. Back now to my story. I was afraid to talk to Hong for those two years when I "liked him," but keep in mind, he was also afraid to talk to me! In Chinese society -- a little bit more so ten years ago than now, but this still remains true -- a teenage boy, until the age of 16 or 17 or 18 or so, who goes to talk to girls is not a stud or a popular guy, but a deviant and a pervert. The usual Chinese slang term for such a person is "selong," meaning a colorful (se) wolf (long). Why a colorful wolf? A wolf is considered an especially sexual animal in Chinese culture, kind of like a "horny goat" or a "horny dog" in American culture. And "colorful" meaning not full of beauty, but full of dangerous passions rising up to the surface -- as opposed to the ideal behavioral standard of keeping your passions, or your "colors" deep inside and never showing them (or better yet, not even having them in the first place). So is there no courting or eyeing in those teenage years? Sure, there’s some. Hormones are hormones, even in China, and boys and girls do look at each other, but it’s rarely more than looking -- and then going back to your same-sex friends to embarrassedly giggle (yes, boys do this too, not only girls). There is, however, a hotbed of courting and eyeing all through the teenage years and right into the twenties and sometimes thirties -- not among young people, but among their parents! You might have seen in movies or TV an official “marriage market” or “matchmaker” -- well, that’s out there, but that’s not how parents usually search for spouses (not mates or partners -- spouses) for their children. Chinese people have a strong distrust of strangers, and prefer for all contacts -- including marrying off the children -- to be with friends and relatives. In fact, that is one key cultural perspective that you need to become familiar with to understand Chinese girls and Chinese society. In Western culture, people pride themselves on treating all others equally, and on being friendly to strangers. Chinese culture is completely the opposite. Strangers are distrusted, even hated. Ever heard of “stranger
danger” taught to US schoolkids? Well “stranger danger” is how all of Chinese society operates! This also explains the common observation from foreigners that it’s amazing how warm and friendly Chinese people are to their close friends and family, compared with how heartless they are to strangers. It’s all part of the culture. And since in China you wouldn’t trust a stranger with asking the time of day (lest they use the opportunity to gain some advantage against you), you definitely don’t trust an unknown stranger to date or marry your offspring! So existing family and friendship and workplace connections are the hunting grounds for making romantic matches for one’s kids and nieces and nephews. And yes, relatives who are deemed to be distant enough to make things non-incestuous are often prodded to match their offspring with one’s own offspring. Won’t you marry your beautiful cousin? And as for friends, most any social gathering of Chinese adults over 30 consists mostly of attempting to pair off one another’s children! Or if over 50, bragging about how well you’ve married off your offspring. Such parental matchmaking takes place without the children’s presence, but usually with iphones full of photographs of their children -- and in the case of a boy’s parents, photographs of his car, his apartment, his workplace, his foreign travels, blah blah. I’ve sometimes dreamed of persuading an auntie to ask such a relative touting those photos to show a photo of his, well, you know, but I don’t think anyone would make such a request even as a joke -- as it would condemn them as the parent of a very naughty girl! And so we Chinese people are sometimes called “irrational” in Western culture. But our mate selection process is of the most rational kind. We look at who has the most money, who has the best car, who has the most earning prospects, and who has the whitest skin, who has the shapeliest legs, who has the most prestigious educational background. It’s all quantifiable. There’s no notion of romance or chemistry. Does a pair matched because of her white skin and his Mercedes like each other? Well, how could they not, in Chinese parents’ eyes! What
more could you want from a partner? Maybe the guy wishes for a girl with skin a little bit whiter, and maybe the girl wishes for a guy with a Bentley instead of a Mercedes, but the parents tried and did their best, and this was the best they could find! So back to Hong. Hong and I were somewhat unusual as a “couple” in China (if you can even call it that), because our parents didn’t know each other at all. Usually couples in China are guided toward one another by relatives, or at the very least by relatives’ friends or colleagues. It’s like matchmaking anywhere in the world, the difference being that in China most dating comes about through matchmaking, not through people independently finding each other. One night in my final year of high school, I confessed to my mother that there’s a boy I like. My mother acted as if I’d just confessed to having invited the Harlem Globetrotters over to my bedroom for a gangbang. At that time, the “farthest I’ve gone with him” was sometimes studying together at a table. And sometimes his shirtsleeve would brush against mine and it was electrifying and terrifying all at once, and I think the feelings I got from that were the same feelings that a girl of similar age in the US might get from her boyfriend hungrily licking her clit! Just the feel of Hong’s pants sometimes brushing up against my legs when we were sitting on the same sofa was electrifying. And what did my mom do? She more or less told me I'm a dirty slut, and I shouldn't think about boys until I'm at least 20. And to forget about the topic. And that's it. Oh, before she actually said to forget about the topic, she did ask me what Hong's parents do for a living, and "what kind of family they are." I said they didn't know. I knew something vague and unremarkable -- his parents weren't bigshots, which is all that would've mattered to my mom anyway. So I said I don't know what his parents do, and I don't think it's anything special, and that pretty much sealed Hong's fate with my mother, and the discussion's fate with my mother as well. She told me not to think about boys and never to bring up Hong again. For most Chinese girls, that is likely to really be the end of the
discussion. But I was always kind of rebellious. Maybe this is where my story is not typical. Up to this point, up to and including my mom's prohibition, it was strictly typical. And my mom's refusal to accept my very real interest in Hong made me want him all the more. I hatched a plan. Hong and I were in the same English class. We were both among the best students in that class, although not the absolute best. That pride of place belonged to a guy named Dong. (Don't laugh. Dong is a common Chinese first name.) In every class, the teacher said Dong this, Dong that. How great Dong was at English. Well, I wanted to use that situation, and Hong's natural pride, to my own romantic advantage. One day, when Hong and I happened to be the only students in a hallway, I approached him. One-on-one, not the usual Chinese style of approaching through friends and relatives. I approached him and casually explained to him that I'd like to improve my learning of English and I'm tired of Dong getting all the acclaim in our class. And that I have heard of some coffeeshops in the Pudong area where foreigners like to hang out. (Hey, in Chinese teenagers' mindsets, all foreigners are fluent English speakers!) And -- this is the part that took monumental bravery on my part -- would he like to maybe go to those coffeeshops with me on Sunday, of course, strictly for the purpose of meeting foreigners and improving our English? This is really, really forward behavior for a Chinese girl! Maybe it would even be forward behavior for an American girl. The good news is that Hong accepted. We agreed to meet at a bus stop close to the area of these coffeeshops. We'd both bring enough of our lunch money to be able to buy some coffee or tea or whatever other exotic drinks were on offer to foreigners (traditionally, Chinese people don't drink coffee). Like any teenage girl, all I could think about until that Sunday was my "date" (ha ha) with Hong. I even went on a three-day crash diet to make myself slimmer and therefore more beautiful. Crazy, right? Well, I
was a teenager! Understand me! That fateful Sunday, we met at the bus stop. And we went off in search of a coffeeshop. We found one. We ordered our drinks and sat down. And we both even had our notebooks and pens with us, because after all, this was a study meeting. I don't know to what degree either of us really believed it to be a study meeting or saw it all as pretextual and plausible deniability. But we definitely had our notebooks and pens with us. So the next step: let's approach some foreigners! Oh, this is where we stumbled. Because as brave as I had been in approaching Hong in the school hallway, there is no way I was going to talk to any of these foreigners sitting there. And there were some. All were white, all were male, all appeared to be about three times our age, in their forties or fifties. Not that we could tell foreigners' ages, really -- we considered all of them to be around "uncle" age, so who knows if any of these "uncles" were in actuality twentysomethings! At that point, neither one of us had actually ever met or talked to a real foreigner. Seen walking by on the street, sure. But not actually interacted with. Hong commented to me how this was a great idea, but that he was too nervous to actually talk to any of the foreigners. I concurred. As nervous as he was, I was probably nervous-er. We just sat there with our iced teas, trying to sneak peeks at foreigners out of the corners of our eyes. Actually, that was already exotic enough. Not only was I on a "date," but there were foreigners within eyeballing distance of me! And Hong and I were sharing the moment together. Which, more importantly than the foreigners, naturally gave us the start of something like a relationship. And here's where I came up with an even more brilliant idea. We don't need foreigners to speak English. Let's practice English with each other! And we made a rule: whenever we're in these coffee shops, we only speak English! We would speak English even to the ladies taking our order and to the cashiers, and even if we bumped into our Chinese friends
there, it was going to be all in English! Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. But it worked. It did improve our English to some extent. More importantly, though, it worked to give me an innocent activity to do with Hong. When I went to meet him, I told my parents I was "going studying," and took my pens and pencils and notebook. He did the same. And we didn't tell our classmates anything. They would have considered us a couple of wanton perverts for going on a boy-and-girl date meeting. Really. But we did have a plan that if somehow our classmates saw us, we would just say that we were practicing English, and their reactions shouldn't be too bad. Anyway, any risk of ridicule was still not enough to dissuade me from the adventure. I was indeed a pretty brave girl. And by that time, after two months of weekly "English practice" meetings with Hong, I had started realizing that there's something that men and women or boys and girls do together in private. I wasn't completely oblivious to sex, but pretty close to it. And I started having thoughts about what would happen if Hong and I tried to do whatever it is that boys and girls do. I'm sure Hong was thinking the same. Once I had worn jean shorts to our meeting, and I caught him staring at my long, white-skinned legs. And probably my teenage ass. It was on. At the time, I didn't really know what "it" was, but I knew it was on. I planned for the day well in advance, and it filled me with dread and fear. As we were starting that Sunday's 11 A.M. English practice meeting, I casually asked Hong if he wanted to end our usual two-hour session after one hour and go somewhere else for a bit. His face said "I hope this is what I hope this is, but I don't think it is." It turned out being that. I had found a small hotel just behind the coffee shop. Its name translated as "Lantern." The hotel was mostly used by mid-level office workers on business trips. It wasn't a fancy place, but it was clean and acceptable. And at the one-hour mark, I casually strolled with Hong toward that hotel. I even paid (I had been the one preparing for this whole adventure) in advance at the front desk (by the way, credit cards still
aren't in common use in China, and definitely not so when I was a teenager about ten years ago). We had our room key. In the elevator up, he looked ecstatic and bewildered. I gave him a big smile, like "we both know it." Once we got into the room, I can't say it was romantic. Hong started grabbing at me, obviously playing out what he'd wanted to do for a long time, grabbing and feeling every part of my body as he tugged my clothes off. He sighed and moaned as his hands reached for my butt, ran over my thighs, and slipped into my bra. Of course I had to help him undo the bra strap. He took off his shoes, socks, pants, and underwear, and continued to undress me. He looked at my naked body in front of him. It was heaven for him. I knew it. A slim, white-skinned, relatively tall, virgin high school girl, standing in front of him, near naked. And his erection was obvious. While still groping me, he pushed me down on the bed and he lay on top of me. And I felt something hot and wet suddenly squirt all over my thighs. I screamed and thought Hong had peed on me. Hong looked even more bewildered than before, as we both looked with shock at the gooey stuff spread all over my thighs. Yes, Hong came early. Way early. When we were just getting our clothes off. It was his first time, by far! He hadn't even touched a girl then. Please excuse and forgive him. I, of course, didn't have any chance of an orgasm. Not that day, and not on subsequent meetings. Were you hoping for cuddles after the act? Unfortunately not. Not only is it rare for Chinese guys to do that, but it's rare for a high school virgin boy of any nationality to do that! So after we toweled ourselves off, we awkwardly rushed downstairs, returned our room key (could it have been any more obvious to the desk staff what we'd been doing?), and rushed back to the bus stop, back to our respective waiting parents. But we had more meetings at the "Lantern." We called these meetings "Lantern." And while we did still go to coffeeshops, we did develop a Sunday routine of "Lanterning." Although the first time we
went there, I was overwhelmed by the excitement of the moment and didn't think about things like pregnancy, on subsequent times, I didn't like the idea of Hong finishing inside me. I made him promise to always finish outside. Somehow condoms hadn't crossed either of our minds -there is no safe sex education in China. He mostly managed to control himself, but sometimes, just for play, I would wriggle my body under him just a bit more while he was inside me, sliding under him skin-onskin, and I knew it would make him come unexpectedly. I was a naughty girl, right? Had anyone found out, I would've been kicked out of school, not to mention ostracized by our peers and our families. We might not even be accepted to university. Yes, that's how repressive these things are, or at least were, in China. But no one found out. It was just us at the coffee shop. And Lanterning. Every Sunday. In school, we made sure no one would suspect anything, so we treated each other as we'd always done -- slightly familiar but not too much so. And definitely not anything like "boyfriend and girlfriend" in the American definition! At the hotel, we mostly explored each other's bodies. We even studied kissing by watching foreign movies, and tried to imitate it, but it felt like funny tongue-wriggling to us. And so it went on until the end of high school, and until we were about to ship off to university. Actually, we were lucky to have been from Shanghai, because I think only in Shanghai would this Lanterning have gone unnoticed. In a smaller town in China, or even in Beijing, too many eyebrows would have been raised by two teenagers checking into a hotel room together on Sundays. Well, maybe it helped that Hong "made friends with" (paid small bribes to) the hotel desk employees, well concerned of our privacy. He was acting mature beyond his years, because every Chinese person knows the routine of having to slip someone a bribe in order not to be reported to the police -- the only slightly unusual thing about this bit of bribe-paying is that we were teenagers.
As the school term ended, both of our respective families had plans for us before our respective university educations began. Had this been an American movie, maybe you could think that the families had been talking behind the scenes, and plotting to surreptitiously split us up, rather than confront us about it directly. No way. Any Chinese parent would confront their child very directly, and with physical force, if they found out such a thing. So our families really didn't know, and they really just wanted us to spend the summers with our grandparents and relatives outside of Shanghai before the university term began. As for university, I went to study in Beijing and Hong went to Sanya (Hainan Island). I don't even remember the last time Hong and I saw each other in person. We half-heartedly communicated with each other by phone text messages (SMS) when we were university students, but we were both growing into our respective separate university lives.
Dating, China style As I've mentioned, most "dates" in China are initiated by friends and relatives of the couple-to-be. It is exceedingly rare for strangers to approach one another in China -- whether for dating or asking street directions or anything else. Stranger danger! That's at the top of all Chinese people's minds. And most often, the "first date" is not set up as a one-on-one meeting between the two. That would be too explicit and direct. Almost always, it is a group dinner party, usually held at a restaurant, by a group of friends of colleagues, and making sure to invite both parties of the couple-to-be. Most often, neither one of them will know that they're being set up by their friends, but it won't be a complete shock, as it's pretty expected that many dinner parties are held with the purpose of setting someone up. (By the way, dinner parties held in someone's home are very rare among Chinese people in China, aside from those who are very Westernized or those who have opulent homes with servants. Almost all dinner parties are held at restaurants. So please don't be offended when you're never invited to your Chinese friends' homes for dinner!) At that first-meeting dinner party, you usually place some pretext for the couple-to-be to have some interaction. Maybe you seat them next to each other. Or across from each other. And then maybe everyone agrees to start a conversation about, say, a common interest that both of the parties have, so that they have some chance to talk with each other directly. Do you see how much handholding is involved here? Doesn't it remind you of parents setting playdates for toddlers back in the west? Yes, to a large extent, Chinese people expect a lot of handholding and supervision when first venturing into dating. If the couple-to-be hits it off, they will be expected to, sometimes with the help of their friends, exchange QQ numbers and maybe phone numbers. (Do you know what QQ is? QQ is an instant messaging system where the user id's are numbers, similar to phone numbers. For most
Chinese people, their QQ number is a central part of their communication identity, while a phone number is pretty much disposable.) They'll be expected to be in touch on their own. What is being in touch on their own? The man contacting the woman to ask for a date, of course. Almost always an expensive dinner -for him to show her his ability to be a provider. And, as I've already told you, he has to bring to this expensive dinner an expensive gift. Maybe a phone or a handbag or something. And give it to her and tell her that it's really nothing (to emphasize how prosperous he is) and it's just a small gift for her (even though he just spent his whole monthly salary on it, often). And so what happens other than the gift-giving and the dinnereating? There's conversation that is usually centered on those wonderfully practical things. The man will detail his job prospects, salary history, and investment portfolio. I'm not joking. He will sometimes have pictures of real estate he owns or iphone screens of his stock portfolio to show on first dates. Really, I'm not joking. The woman will detail her virginity and innocence and desire to be a good wife. Both will speak in hagiographic tones of their parents -- not because they love their parents, and not because their parents are necessarily so great, but because the "quality" of the parents is a big part of the "quality" of the package deal of the spouse you're marrying. So while saying that your mom/dad/uncle/grandma is a jerk might be ok casual date conversation in the first world, in China, it brands you as defective merchandise, because your family line is part of what you're offering your prospective marriage partner. Did you notice that I just said "marriage partner," and not boyfriend/girlfriend? How did I get from there to here? The answer is that there's really no dating for dating's sake in China, not even in 2014. The goal is always going to be marriage. Saying that you want to date but don't plan on getting married is like saying that you... are cooking a meal but don't plan to eat it. (And that would mean you run a restaurant / are a
prostitute, right?) There's always an end goal in mind, even if it's not exactly marriage. Marriage is of course the most common one. But another common arrangement is "paid dating" or being a mistress. Men in China are known to pay $100,000 USD per month (yes, USD, and yes, per month) for a mistress, though a figure around $5,000 - $10,000 USD per month is more usual. That, to some women, is almost as good, or even better than, having that man as a husband. If you are a foreign man, saying that you're not interested in marriage will be even more of a death knell for you than it would be for a Chinese man. Remember how Chinese men value virginity, or at the very least, very limited sexual experience for their brides-to-be? Well, it's assumed that any Chinese woman who has dated a foreign man has had sex with him, and perhaps also his roommates, and perhaps also his dad. Yes, that's pretty much the assumption. So if a Chinese woman is going to be seriously dating a Western man and be seen with him, she had better be sure there is marriage coming, because it pretty much kills her chances with Chinese men. In fact, there are common stories of Chinese women being dumped by their Western boyfriends and completely changing cities and even circles of friends, just to erase their past "secret sin" of having dated a foreigner -- and therefore regain their chances with Chinese men. Well, these days, the internet knows all, but these women do try.
"Bride price": the dowry is alive and well Did you think dowries were something that only happened in Victorian novels or in Bollywood movies? Well, China has them still, and does it ever. A "bride price," or dowry, is explicitly negotiated between the groom and the bride's family. While Westerners would be shocked at being so up-front about it, it is a common sight in China to see a groom begging a bride's parents to allow him to get away with paying only a certain dowry he can afford, while the parents remind him how desirable their daughter is, and how many rich men would empty their bank accounts for her, and that he must pay a much higher price. This sounds downright medieval to you, right? In fact, if the symbolism were not already too blatant for you, on the morning of the wedding, the groom and his party are expected to approach the bride's family's house and slip money through the front door, negotating an amount to open the door -- with the bride's family ritualistically complaining that (no matter how much is offered) it's very small and not enough money. How much is a typical dowry? These days Chinese society is so stratified that it's hard to talk about a middle range. Ten years ago, when I was graduating from high school, I know a pretty good dowry was 10,000 yuan, about $1,500 USD. These days, forget it! I don't think even the poorest of the poor would except "only" that much! I think an average dowry in China nowadays is around 100,000 yuan, about $15,000 USD. It's often the bulk of the groom's life savings. And dowries in the millions of USD are certainly not unheard of. There's some sense of economic rationality here (see, I really have an MBA), because once a woman has been married, she is pretty much used-up goods, and no other man will marry her. So the dowry is something like good-faith money or insurance that the man gives to show his true commitment. Or, put differently: have you ever heard the story of
how a car loses X percent of its value the moment you drive it off the dealership's lot? Well, in Chinese society, a woman loses about 80% of her value the moment she's been married! So the dowry is compensation for that. When is there no dowry? Sometimes a woman is considered so undesirable that there's no talk of a dowry. This is usually true if she's divorced (see above!) or has been a prostitute or for some other reason is "worthless" in terms of Chinese dowry calculations. Also, very very rarely (and I mean very) rarely, a couple may show how modern and international and Westernized they are by refusing the ritual of a dowry -although as far as I've heard, what that usually means is that the dowry is settled between the two sets of parents in private, without the couple's involvement.
Round the bases Americans know the baseball analogy about sex. Chinese people have also seen it in American movies and tv shows, and Chinese people (especially online) have developed their own version. First base - holding hands Second base - kissing Third base - groping with clothes on Home plate - sexual intercourse You can see how little foreplay there is. And you can be sure that most typically, each "base" is accompanied by the woman whining and crying that she doesn't want to do that because she's a good girl, and the man more or less forcing himself on her. Is it a "rape culture"? Maybe. That's how it's been for likely thousands of years. Don't kill the messenger.
All your man is belong to us How do we Chinese girls get men? Foreign men or Chinese men? Why do most married foreign men who come to China end up divorcing their non-Chinese wives? Is it some kind of natural allure Chinese women have? I dont think it's any kind of natural allure at all. I think it's just being more calculative and shameless in how we go about this business. Think about history. Even relatively recent history. Aside from a brief spurt of Maoist gender-equality rhetoric -- which was really just rhetoric, not put into practice -- China has had four thousand years of women not being able to get ahead by any way other than by luring a man. In all of China's history, it has been ruled by a woman for only one brief and historically questionable period (Empress Wu Ze Tian, 624-705 CE), and even that empress got to where she was only by luring a man. So when all you've got is one tool at your disposal, don't you learn to use it really well? We Chinese women have been honing that tool for all four thousand or so years of Han Chinese civlization. Western culture emphasizes being your true self, speaking your mind, and not being two-faced. Chinese culture would say that you'd be crazy to speak your mind and expose your true feelings to anyone you're trying to convince of anything. It is expected that a woman (and also a man) would put on her best "game face" right up until the moment of marriage and some kind of big financial benefit from a man. That's just the right way to live -- according to Chinese culture -- and not being sneaky or devious, as Western culture would have it. That's why foreign men always think Chinese women are so demure, so feminine, so sensitive to their needs, so selfless, so loving... and then after those Chinese women marry them, they are considered so selfish, so greedy, so inconsiderate, and so on. A Chinese man would say, "well of course! she can be herself now that she's got you on the hook!" but a Western man would be surprised at what he considers to be duplicity.
Chinese women are great at sensing what men want and shaping their behavior to it. Western women would most often be disgusted by the idea. What are some examples? Most Chinese women are studied at making their voices a few octaves higher when they are in the dating stage and trying to attract men! They also try to act "cute" or like innocent little girls. Chinese men know that this is an act, but they enjoy it, while Western men have no idea that it's all a game. This also comes down to personal appearance. Western women go to the gym for reasons of personal health and fitness and looking good and fitting into their newest dress. But few Western women would ever admit that their only (or even primary) reason to go to the gym is to attract men. I don't think I've ever met a Chinese woman in a gym in China who would be going there for any reason otherthan making her body more attractive to men! That is why almost all Chinese exercises for women are meant for specific goals of physical proportions and appearance -- such as having leaner legs -- and not more Western goals such as increasing muscle tone or lowering blood pressure. And it also comes down to daily interactions. A Chinese girl knows exactly what to say to a man. That even includes always telling Western men that she only likes Western men and Chinese men are no good (and likely telling Chinese men the reverse). What's her opinion on an issue? Whatever your opinion is, of course! Some girls really do have opinions but know to hide them, while other girls don't care to form an opinion, because there's no practical advantage to having one, when all the practical advantage is in pretending to have the same opinion as the man she's pursuing.
Sex, China style, and how to please a Chinese girl in bed What’s it like inside the bedroom in China when we actually do have sex? Do we have some kind of ancient kung-fu positions? Or is it all prim-and-proper missionary position? I think one big difference is how long it takes from initial meeting to actual sex, and how coy girls will be about admitting that they actually want to get fucked. Those are more differences in the lead-up to sex than in the actual sex. A Chinese guy has to spend at least a few weeks, sometimes a few months, courting a girl before he can even feel her up. And some girls, those who are supremely confident of their ability to keep a guy reeled in without providing him too much in the physical department, will abstain from sexual intercourse until marriage. No, we're not living in storybook China where premarital sex is a myth. But premarital sex is still frowned upon, and many girls, even well-educated urban girls, prefer to be virgins until marriage -- not because they have a religious or moral belief, but usually because they know that being a virgin can be a very attractive thing to a guy. But I think the main difference between Chinese and American sex, once we’re actually down and doing it, is oral. Chinese guys, the same Chinese guys who will buy an Iphone for a girl just to ask her out, don’t eat pussy. They don’t want to pollute their virgin mouths with the taste of a girl’s vagina. They think it’s disgusting and dirty, on the same level as ass-eating. If you’re an expert pussy-eater, you can wow your Chinese girlfriend in bed -- if she lets you do that horrid dirty thing in the first place, and once you teach her to enjoy it! Actually, these days, thanks to Sex and the City and similar outposts of Western culture, most Chinese girls know that Western women expect cunnilingus to start any sex session. Think this is good news, and you’re booking the next flight to China? Well, not so fast, tongueboy. Because not only do Chinese guys
not eat pussy, but Chinese girls don’t suck cock. Sorry. It’s considered whorish. In fact, in China, there are specific brothels, officially called “barber shops,” that married men go to for blowjobs. Vaginal sex is not the main attraction there, because married men can get that from their wives, but blowjobs are, because most Chinese wives don’t like to suck johnson. Anal sex? Unheard of. Sorry. I can't guarantee that no Chinese girl will ever be into it, but I just don't imagine it happening. There are always vicious rumors circulating in China about whatever girl happens to be hot stuff with guys at the moment that the way she preserves her "virginity" is by only having anal sex with all her boyfriends. But those are vicious rumors, meant to defame, because anyone having anal sex would be very much castigated by society. I don't think anal sex has any acceptance in Chinese society. In fact, anything other than vaginal intercourse, including foreplay, in general is not a big thing for Chinese men, nor women. Traditionally, Chinese sex is just vaginal intercourse, missionary style. “Having sex” usually means the man pulling the woman’s clothes off, and the woman protesting, but not so much as to actually stop him, and then the man sticking his penis in the woman’s vagina and pumping until he orgasms. She's unlikely to orgasm. The man might grab the woman’s breasts a bit or feel her butt, and that’s about it for sensuous foreplay. Of course, that is traditional sex in China, and what you would find for most Chinese people; younger people (say, born after 1990) and those with more exposure and acceptance of foreign ways have some different ideas. One disturbing aspect of Chinese sexual culture is that rape is considered "the man being strong" and is not really condemned if it's done by a boyfriend or husband, not a stranger. Yes, "she wanted it" or "look at how she's dressed" or "she looks like a slut, so she deserved it" is still current in China. And on the flip side, don't be surprised if a Chinese girlfriend tells you "I want you to rape me." That's outside the bounds of regular everyday sexual behavior for most first-worlders, but in China,
rape is just a man asserting himself and being strong and masculine, and a woman might like some kind of "rape" sex play. And I know rape is morally wrong. I'm not defending it. Don't kill the messenger, because just as with everything else in this book, I'm telling you how it is. I can't change the culture, even if I'm Chinese. So you know that once they're in bed -- and after they've done perhaps weeks or months or even years of buying the girl everything she wants and holding her handbag in the shopping mall -- Chinese men for the most part don't do much foreplay and like to just "stick it in" like a horny American eighth-grader. That means that a Chinese man doesn't place much attention on the woman's vagina. He is very, very unlikely to eat her out. That's considered disgusting and dirty. Put it like this: asking a Chinese guy to eat your vagina is like asking a white guy to eat your ass. Same kind of reaction. And same likelihood of acceptance. Meaning that, there are some guys who are into it, but it's uncommon. And because their vaginas are unlikely to have their boyfriends' close oral inspection, Chinese girls don't pay much attention to keeping their vaginas clean and beautiful. Shaving is rare. Yes, most Chinese girls have forests, or at leasts bushes, "down there." We Chinese aren't as hairy as Westerners, but still, the public hair might grow quite a bit, and Chinese girls almost never, ever shave or trim their pubic hair. In traditional Chinese culture, shaved pubic hair was the mark of a prostitute. Nowadays, it's considered the mark of a very sexually active or "naughty" girl -- and in reality, the only girls who shave or trim their pubic hair are girls who have had (or maybe who want to have) foreign boyfriends. Some foreign guy has likely persuaded her to shave that mess. But without that foreign guy's persuasion, it's unlikely that a Chinese girl would ever shave her snatch. My guess (although I've never inspected myself) is that even prostitutes don't shave their pubic hair, because even a hooker doesn't want to look like a hooker! So there's the bushy pubic hair. And, especially for rural girls, there's going to be leg hair and underarm hair. Sorry. Traditionally
Chinese girls don't shave their legs and their underarms. My guess is that if you gently get her to like oral sex, she might also get to trim her vagina for you, if you can connect the two. See, we Chinese people are all about calculating the benefits. Don't take this to mean that you have to follow the Chinese script when having sex with a Chinese girl. I'm just telling you what the usual script is. You're a foreign guy, so you're expected to be a bit different. You can show her something new. You can teach her to learn to like you eating her out -- start slowly and don't tongue her clit right away, and you'll be ok. And maybe you can get her to like sucking your cock too. Remember that all oral sex is considered "dirty" in Chinese culture, so it will help if your cock is pristinely clean and smells good and all that stuff, to make her not associate it with "dirty." She might be scared to let you lick her vagina. I suggest you start by kissing her breasts and nipples. Chinese guys do do that, well to the extent that they do foreplay at all, so she might be culturally more accustomed to it than she would be to cunnilingus. But more importantly, Chinese girls tend to have smaller breasts and therefore more sensitive breasts and nipples than white girls -- so you might open her up to a world of intense pleasure by pleasuring her breasts. I know I like it. (Oops, am I revealing too much?) In an atypically frank conversation with a fellow Chinese girl who emigrated to the US, she told me how she can orgasm just from her boyfriend sucking and licking her breasts. No vaginal stimulation required. That's maybe slightly unusual, but it still gives you a good tip on what to do. Make sure you comment positively on all aspects of her body. Remember how unforgiving Chinese culture is to any "defects." Any girl will be mortally embarrassed about a bit of flab she has somewhere, or a birthmark, or a surgical scar, or anything like that -- in fact, she might keep that part of her body covered up as much as she can, even during the sex act. If the girl is indeed covering up a part of her body like that, or refuses to remove some part of clothing, that's probably what's going on.
You have to gently reassure her that her whole body, including that part she's embarrassed about (more like ashamed of) is beautiful and perfect in her eyes. And gently kiss and touch her body -- kisses and touches that she might not be so used to from Chinese guys, who are not so into foreplay. Once you've warmed her up by slowly kissing and appreciating her body, the actual vaginal penetration happens, you're going to be in for a bit of a surprise. If you take out a condom, the girl might be offended. You see, condoms are rarely used by Chinese couples. They are associated with protecting yourself from disease when you're with a hooker, or maybe for a one-night stand. Almost all Chinese couples go bareback. Abortion is plentifully available in China, so that's the usual mode of "birth control." As I said, I'm only telling you what the culture is, not defending it. And don't think STDs are unknown in China, because they're rampant. Gonorrhea and herpes are absolutely rampant, though HIV is rare. And people don't really know what herpes is. They think it's "just a rash" or something. So be careful out there. If you're into bareback sex and creaming inside your girlfriend, China is the right place for you. But just be careful.
About chinese hookers I thought I'd give this section an obvious title. Unfortunately, in the US, many people associate Chinese women with prostitution. Well, there's some truth to that. Recent immigrants do go into prostitution. And for whatever reason, many of the Chinese women who come to the US do become prostitutes. And more than that -- prostitution is more common in China than in the West. In China, if a single man checks into any hotel that's not a high-security five-star hotel, he will soon receive many phone calls and business cards offering him prostitutes; that is rare, if not unheard of, in the Western first world. So what's the deal with Chinese culture and hookers? First off: visiting prostitutes is, for Chinese men, a fun social activity, not something shameful or secretive or deviant. It's maybe even more acceptable in Chinese culture than visiting strip clubs is acceptable in American culture. I would guess that if you talk to middle-aged male office workers, a bigger fraction of the Chinese guys regularly see prostitutes, than the fraction of the white American guys who go to strip clubs. And that partly goes back to my point about Chinese people being pretty homogenous. If something is a "popular" or "common" behavior in China, it's usually not 50% or 60% of people (in this case, men) who do it; it's more like 95%. And the ones who don't do it are considered deviant. In America, there's an idea that visiting prostitutes is something done by a lone pervert wearing a trenchcoat and sneaking around alleys, performing a shameful act. Well, in Chinese culture, it's more like groups of guys going out to have a good time, to visit some prostitutes. It's pretty similar to, in American culture, groups of guys going to a strip club or Las Vegas or something like that. In fact, there are cities in China that are primarily known for their prostitution, and groups of male tourists go there exclusively to visit prostitutes. Dongguan is one such city; prostitution is almost the only viable industry there. Outside mainland
China, Hong Kong and Macau draw mainlander men who want "higher class" prostitutes. In fact, many travel agents in China that target Chinese people (not the ones for foreigners) sell "all inclusive" travel packages -including airfare, hotel, and prostitutes! That's how normal "going for hookers" is. And you know how it's said in America that most of the internet is for porn? There's a lot of porn on the Chinese internet, but the most popular activity for most Chinese men online -- other than playing shooting games -- is discussing and reviewing prostitutes. One popular form is sex141.com, which you can browse to see what I'm talking about, and you can find many, many others. Remember how American culture stigmatizes going to see prostitutes, while Chinese culture doesn't? Well, there's something of a reversal for the prostitutes themselves. Most Americans see prostitutes as women who are in bad situations, addicted to drugs, abused by pimps, and so on, and trying to get by. There is something of an undercurrent of condemnation, but I think it's not that strong. Well -- in China, it's the opposite. Prostitutes are seen as the worst kind of bad girls. Usually law enforcement activity in the Chinese world is focused on exposing the "evil" prostitutes, and not at all on the men who visit them. Every Chinese prostitute most fears being recognized and publicly shamed as a prostitute -- that's why the Chinese police love to take photos of prostitutes during busts, and then send them to newspapers (of course, those photos can be "lost" if the prostitute pays the proper "fee"). So, selling prostitution is a lot more shamed and stigmatized in Chinese culture than in American culture. I'm not telling you that because I want to lecture you about Chinese culture or make dinner-party conversation. I'm telling you that for a very real reason: foreign men tend to have a lot of contact with Chinese prostitutes. And here's the key difference. Chinese men visit prostitutes, but would never, ever, ever knowingly date or marry prostitutes. White American men would. One of the stereotypes of foreign men among Chinese people is that they would go on dates with
hookers, take hookers home to them, bring hookers to meet their family, and marry and have kids with hookers. There's the American idea of "everyone is equal, and some people are just down on their luck." There's the idea of "saving her." And of course there's that movie "Pretty Woman." All of these Western cultural tropes would be seen as utterly incomprehensible in Chinese culture. There's a Chinese saying about this: "You can drink milk, but don't bring the cow home with you." And what I'm telling you is that if your Chinese girlfriend or wife has ever been involved in prostitution, Chinese people will never, ever stop snickering at you and considering you ridiculous and very foolish, and being tricked by her. And Chinese people, unlike foreigners, are very, very good at identifying prostitutes or ex-prostitutes. In fact, there are many stories in China of foreigners bringing their "girlfriend" to a dinner gathering or business function, and then after that gathering or function noticing that their Chinese friends or colleagues don't invite them to any more gatherings. The foreigners wonder why. And I'll tell you why right away: it's because everyone knows you brought a hooker to their gathering, and in Chinese culture, that's a big no-no. I'm not telling you what to do. As far as I'm concerned, you can marry a hooker and be happy with it. Just don't expect Chinese society to be ok with it. If your wife or girlfriend is a prostitute, you must be prepared to always be looked down upon and shunned by Chinese society, much the same way your wife or girlfriend herself is. Sure, I know it's hypocritical. The same society that encourages men to visit prostitutes condemns the women selling the service. I know. As I said before, I don't make the rules. I'm only telling you about them. What are the tip-offs Chinese people use to identify prostitutes or ex-prostitutes? A tattoo is a big one. Any Chinese woman with a tattoo is or has been a prostitute. There's just no exception to this rule. Smoking cigarettes, especially for a woman from a rural background, is another big tipoff. (Somehow city girls are more likely to take up smoking even if
they're not prostitutes. For country girls, that's unlikely.) Living in China and knowing and casually using colloquial English terms for sex acts ("blowjob" or "tits" or "dick") might be another tipoff. (Well, there's girls like me who always liked to watch American movies... but even if we know those words, we'd never be casually using them around our boyfriends.) And remember how I said Chinese girls usually don't give or receive oral sex? Well, if you go into the bedroom with a Chinese girl you just met, and she starts off by sucking your cock -- you have to ask yourself where she learned that, because normally, that doesn't happen outside of paid sex in China. The other funny thing is that if a Chinese girl knows a lot about safe sex, it is likely she's been involved with prostitution. Chinese girls just don't learn about safe sex normally, as there's almost no sex education in school, and condom use is very rare outside the world of prostitution. Most condom use in China is between customers and prostitutes. Now suppose you're reading all this and waiting for me to get to the good part. I've rambled enough about Chinese culture and stigmatization of prostitutes and so on. Now what if you came to this part of the book wanting information on how to actually get some Chinese prostitutes? The answer is the same in the US as in China: visit a Chinese karaoke or massage sauna shop. In China, almost all karaoke and massage shops involve prostitution. In the US, not all Chinese-run/owned karaoke and massage shops have prostitution, but a good many do. But if you visit China, as I said before, just checking in to your hotel as a single man sends enough of a signal that you are a ripe customer for hookers. You will get many offers right in your hotel room. If you want to ask for a hooker, you can ask for "xiaojie" in Chinese. That literally means "girl" (well, most literally, it means "younger big sister"), but in mainland China, the word is only used for prostitutes. (Outside of mainland China, it's normal to address any woman as "xiaojie." Don't do that in China! You might get slapped!) The
word is pretty neutral, although any word referring to prostitutes is already necessarily kind of negatively loaded in Chinese culture. The more vulgar term is "ji," literally meaning "chicken." It would be pretty rude to call an actual prostitute "ji," (just like in English, you wouldn't tell a prostitute "I would like a whore"), but it's the word guys might use when talking about prostitutes (just like in English, guys might say "I got a whore last night."). And, maybe most importantly, "ji" is the term Chinese people will snidely use to make fun of your girlfriend or wife if they suspect of her being a prostitute or ex-prostitute.
Are Chinese Men Really Wife-Beating Abusers? Listen to any white man who has or wants to have a Chinese girlfriend or wife, and you’ll hear one refrain: Chinese men are abusive wife-beaters, and white men are Chinese women’s saviors. Is this true? Yes and no. Or, more accurately: mostly no, but with a big dash of yes. There’s a few things at work here. The first is that often the Chinese women that seek out white men are the ones who have had bad experiences with Chinese men. That’s not only because they want something different, but also because white men are more accepting of a woman “with a past” than Chinese men are. There’s also the fact that Chinese women that are most interested in white men tend to be the ones who are less desirable in Chinese culture -- remember this lecture that we already had? They are less desirable, so they are expected to put up with more crap from men, and put up with crappier men. Yes, in that way, Chinese culture is quite unrelenting and merciless. “You’re ugly, so put up with abuse.” I know that’s shocking to Western sensibilities, but it is pretty much in line with “correct” Chinese thinking. Now, how do we reconcile all that with Chinese men giving an iphone 6 to a woman just to get a lunch date with her? (I’m sorry for repeatedly bringing up that example, but it’s really true, and it really correctly encapsulates so much about the Chinese dating world!) Well, one thing is the very Chinese distinction of maintaining the proper face for the proper situation. Westerners would call that being “two faced” as if it were a bad thing, but again, for Chinese culture, that is proper behavior. There’s a famous Chinese saying about women’s experience of men: “Before you marry him, every man is a mouse; after you marry him, every man is a general.” And rationally speaking, from the men’s perspective, why shouldn’t it be so? Once a woman is already married or otherwise committed to you (lost her virginity, bore children, etc), why should you continue groveling? That is also why in the initial stages, Chinese men are so willing to put in so much effort for so little
reward -- if they get to the later stages, the payoffs will be all theirs, kind of. So a Chinese guy who wants to “get in good” with a girl will indubitably get her iphones and handbags and all that stuff. And Chinese guys in dating mode are the sweetest, most romantic guys I have ever encountered. Do you hear that, American, Canadian, Cameroonian, Sri Lankan, and New Caledonian guys? Chinese guys have all of you beat, by about a thousand miles. In the dating stage. It’s pretty common to see a Chinese guy in a shopping mall in China, meekly following behind his girlfriend, carrying her handbag (Chinese guys always carry their girlfriends’ handbags), and taking out gobs of cash (always cash in China!) for whatever trinkets she might point to. It’s groveling, but it more or less stops, and to some degree reverses direction, after marriage. So what about the specific allegation of physical abuse? I do think that a man beating up his wife is less shocking in China than in the US. Things are changing, but there’s still a difference. There is condemnation in Chinese society, but not the utter shock and reprehension you'd find in first-world Western countries. Much of that, however, is just because physical violence in everyday life is more acceptable in China than in the US. When is the last time you have heard of a high-level corporate board of directors meeting, three-piece suits and all, in the US that suddenly becomes an unplanned MMA match, with dissenters being pinned to the ground under furniture? Or how often in the US do you punch someone square in the face because they cut in line in front of you? Fairly common in China. And physical "discipline," and beating kids until they sustain injuries, is the normal way to raise children in China, even among the urban, educated classes. Along with that, a man is -- not completely expected to, but maybe is excused for by Chinese society -for sometimes “scolding” and physically striking his wife or girlfriend. And being drunk, as Chinese men often are after “work meetings,” is seen as an excuse for physical violence, and not an aggravating factor. "Well,
she argued with him, and he was drunk, so what can you expect? He's a man!" -- that sounds ridiculous to Americans, but it would be a pretty typical reaction in China. Do their women stay with them? For the most part, yes. Maybe it’s our practical bent. But the way a Chinese woman evaluates her husband is more like a long-term average that doesn’t care about the extremes. I know that in Western society, a woman who says “but he’s usually good” about a physically abusive husband is seen as deluded or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. A transgression is a transgression, even if at all other times he's "a good husband." But in Chinese society, it’s just seen as being practical and cool-headed to consider his everyday ability to provide for the family, rather than focus on his occasional abusive outbursts. That long-term average is also why Chinese men, once their women are married or otherwise committed to them, are so unaccustomed to "romantic" gestures such as buying flowers or “romance” as we might know it in American culture. There are Chinese men who buy flowers for their wives, but they do so as an explicit nod to exotic Western culture, and it’s perhaps more about showing how worldly they are than about anything specifically to do with their wives. And it’s mostly because they are so focused on the long-term averages of the relationship, rather than on symbolic gestures such as flowers and chocolates. A Chinese wife will be very proud and happy of her husband having a bigger car or a bigger paycheck or a more prestigious title, but really will not care much about flowers or chocolates or romantic gestures. (An exception here is jewelry and high-end handbags, because those are seen as symbols of long-term wealth, akin to houses, cars, and job titles.)
Do Chinese guys really have small ones? I’m pretty interested in penises. I hope that by this point in the book, you’re not surprised by that admission. And I’ve researched penis size differences between races: in books, by talking with female friends, and, well, yes, by personal experience. And so, is it true that Asian guys suffer from an incurable, terminal case of a disease only known as smallcox? Yes and no. What all my oh-so-scientific findings point to is this: a penis is just like any other part of the body, and the bigger your overall body, the bigger the penis. In fact, I’m surprised that more people don’t realize this. Bigger men have bigger hands, bigger eyes, bigger livers even, so why wouldn’t they have bigger cocks? So Asian men, especially Asian men from Asia, tend to have small penises only as much as those men are on average overall smaller than white men. A scrawny 5’4” white or black guy will have a penis just as small as that of a scrawny 5’4” Chinese guy. The only difference is, there are (as a percentage) many more scrawny 5’4” Chinese guys than there are scrawny 5'4" white or black guys. And similarly, a 6’4” bigbuilt Chinese guy will have a penis every bit as big as that of a 6’4” bigbuilt white or black guy. But look, why are you so concerned about penis size anyway? Unless you dream about one sliding up your own rear entrance (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”), forget about who’s bigger. Because girls, especially Chinese girls, don’t really prefer big cocks. Not at all. Or at least not when it comes to taking that cock into our most intimate regions, and not just looking at it in awe. Because we Chinese girls tend to be small, our vaginas also tend to be small -- and both girth and length can be painful. Let me tell you a story. I have a Chinese-American friend in New York. Let’s call him Tiny. He’s a cool guy, and one of the smartest people I know. He has a math PhD. And he’s tiny. He’s about 5’4” and
probably weighs no more than a hundred pounds. But, more than that, he’s tiny. You know. Down there. How do I know? I’ve never seen it. But he’s told me that he’s tiny. Proudly. Is this story getting interesting yet? So here’s how Tiny operates. He hangs around places in New York where Chinese people gather, especially the grocery stores, bakeries, and yes, hair salons where Chinese wives of non-Chinese men gather on the weekends to catch up on Chinese gossip. He specifically targets Chinese women with non-Chinese husbands. And of course, the weekend at a Chinese market is usually when the woman can be found without her husband. And Tiny works his magic. Sure, he can offer women the cultural familiarity of being with a Chinese guy, and the cultural knowledge that either an Asian guy or someone who has read this book would have. He can offer them language: besides his native English, his Mandarin and Cantonese are good enough. But it’s the sex that gets them addicted. For whatever reason, Chinese women who date white guys tend to be attracted to physically big white guys. The physical size is part of the exotic attraction of the white men. These huge men are the opposite of Tiny. In every way. I haven’t run the statistics on this, but I would guess that the average white guy who is married to a Chinese girl is physically bigger, in every way (wink wink) than the average white guy married to a non-Chinese girl. And when it’s time for sex, the Chinese girls are at first thrilled by the gargantuan cock. It’s a novelty. It’s like, look at the big snake I just found. But then it becomes a chore and a pain. And as the husband gets used to the tight feeling of his “tight” wife, the wife becomes more and more uncomfortable with the sex. And so that’s where Tiny, um, comes in. I don’t know whether the women know it before inviting him for a nooner, or whether it’s a comfortable afterthought. I don’t think Chinese girls are so stupid, so they probably know that Tiny is going to feel different from their Long Dong Silver husbands. Maybe Tiny, with his math PhD, gives them a preflight briefing on circumference and length and volume or something.
Sex with Tiny, after however many months or years with their elephantine husbands, is just amazing for the Chinese girls in question. Not because he’s big, but because he’s small. His penis is a better fit for their vaginas than their husbands’ bigger penises. So you’ve heard stories about a guy who is too small to satisfy his girlfriend? Well, those white guys in question are too big to satisfy their girlfriends. And that’s when Tiny attacks. Most guys are so caught up in the big-penis competition between men that they don’t really care about what women actually. I’ve always thought that the big-cock talk between men was kind of homoerotic. It’s like they’re one step away from feeling each others’ cocks to verify the size. Anyway, the point is, women, actual women and not men bragging in a locker room, only like big cocks up to a point, and only if they themselves can accommodate them. I’m not a tiny girl, so the big cocks are good for me. But when these 6’4” 250 pound white guys are marrying these 5’0” 90 pound Chinese girls, there’s just going to be a gross genital mismatch. And it’s a novelty for a while, but when it’s become painful (all the while the husband is so excited about how tight she is), she might seek out -- a man with a small penis who can please her. Isn’t that the opposite of every porn movie plot? Well, welcome to reality, or Chinese girls’ reality. There are a few lessons you can learn here. Let’s make a list: 1. Chinese guys tend to have smaller cocks than white guys, but it’s only because their whole bodies are generally smaller. A big Chinese guy will have a big cock just like a big white guy. 2. Don’t feel so secure and great about yourself because of your big cock. Up to a certain size, Chinese girls will love it, especially if they’re not too small themselves. But if you’ve got King Cobra and your girlfriend is a pixie, well, she might not be as thrilled about your massive equipment as you might expect her to be. 3. Just when you think you should be secure is when you’re actually the least secure. Imagine all the white husbands who
might see their wives talking with Tiny. “Ha ha, she’d never be attracted to that pencil dick,” they might think. And what they think is their strength is actually their vulnerability. Hey am I getting too Art of War on you here? Anyway this is a useful lesson for dating Chinese girls, for dating any girls, and even for life in general.
How to attract a Chinese girlfriend Any white guy who chases after Chinese American or Asian American girls in the US knows one basic cardinal rule: don't ever say anything to her along the lines of "I love Chinese culture" or "I admire ancient China" or "I want to study Chinese language." That makes you a creepy fetishist and puts you on any Asian American girl's to-avoid list. But if you're interested in Chinese girls who are in China (or maybe who recently arrived from China), it's totally the opposite! "I love Chinese culture" and similar statements are the most appealing thing you can say to them. And if you sit at Starbucks in Manhattan with your Chinese textbook, Asian American girls might laugh at you as a loser with yellow fever, but Chinese girls fresh from China will love that you're interested in their culture. Of course, that's not without reasons. A Chinese American girl considers herself American, and rightly so, and is offended by the idea that you consider "her culture" to be something in a faraway land in Asia, or that you consider her to be different enough to comment on her ethnicity. But a Chinese girl in China, or recently from China, knows that she's different, and knows she's Chinese! Well of course she's Chinese! And whereas a Chinese American girl considers herself part of mainstream American culture, and bristles at the suggestion that she's not, a Chinese girl from China knows she's apart from mainstream American culture, and welcomes something she sees as reaching out to bridge the gap. Think of all the behaviors that would make you a "creepy Asian fetishist" in Asian American girls' eyes. That's more or less how to get in good with Chinese girls in China or fresh from China! While being into Asian culture is definitely not a negative, there's only one thing that's very much a negative -- being seen as a "playboy." Or basically, being seen as a man who will not make a serious investment in being a husband and provider to a woman. If on your college campus,
you're known as the guy who takes Chinese language and decorates his dorm room with Chinese art, that's fine. But if you're known as the guy who pumps-and-dumps lots of Chinese girls (or even a few Chinese girls), that's definitely not fine. That's the idea of reputation. It's important to all Chinese people. Once you have a bad reputation, you get blacklisted, and you might not even know it. There's one sure-fire way to meet a Chinese girl, in the Western world, in China, or online: language exchange. In the US, there are people genuinely interested in language exchange just for languages. But if you go to China, you will find a multitude of language exchange programs, meetings, and websites -- and it is very well known that the entire purpose of these things is for Chinese women to meet Western men. Remember how Hong and I went to "practice English" with foreigners, and the whole thing was just a pretext for us to get to know each other? Well that's how language exchange meetings work in China, except of course it's a pretext for Chinese girls to get to know Western guys. And by "girls" I mean anywhere from high-school age to grandma age, although the prime target is usually women in their twenties who are looking to get married to a Westerner. If you have any Chinese friends, or even acquaintances, they will be very eager to introduce you to Chinese girls they know, perhaps also with the pretext of "learning English," at least if they think you have potential to be good husband and provider material. That is just as true in China as in Chinese communities in the US. In fact, if you are a single guy and your Chinese friends and colleagues have never proposed their nieces or sisters for you to date, that might very well mean that they don't think very highly of you. If you're in the US, a great way to meet more Chinese girls is to get in with the Chinese community wherever you live -- and that would be the community of Chinese immigrants, not the Chinese Americans, who are usually totally different and separate. If you're a Christian, try joining a Chinese church. If you eat at a Chinese restaurant, try making
friends with the employees. If you're in a college town, put up signs offering cheap or free English teaching or language exchange. Bubble tea or milk tea shops are a famous meeting place for both Chinese from China and Chinese Americans. Go out and talk to people. Even if the people you meet aren't hot single Chinese women, they will know some hot Chinese women, and once you provide yourself as a decent guy, they will send them your way. That's how everything in Chinese society works. It's much better, and more acceptable, to approach things through existing social connections rather than by "cold calling" to strangers. Don't want to get married? Don't tell a Chinese girl or her relatives or matchmakers that. Every guy, in their eyes, is naturally destined to be a husband and father and provider. If you think otherwise, she'll think you're a freak. Or untrustworthy. Or maybe gay. In the Chinese world, "good" people, correctly thinking and acting people, contact the opposite gender only with the goal of meeting a lifelong marriage partner. Anyone doing any differently is called a "flower heart," a derogatory term for someone who just plays around for pleasure (imagine that!). We Chinese people are always thinking of the practical, long-term benefits to any situation. So if you announce to a woman that you want to be her language exchange partner, but you are not interested in marriage, or you already have a girlfriend or wife, or you don't have any money, she will either outright reject you (if she was only interested in finding a good husband), or she will use you only for language practice (if she did have a genuine interest in learning English) but not consider dating you. By the way, speaking of language practice, it's assumed in China that all foreigners speak English, well enough to teach it to Chinese people. So even if your English isn't that great, don't worry -- no one, other than those who studied abroad or are highly educated, will know or suspect. And English is the language people want to learn. Remember how homogenous I said Chinese girls are? It would be an unusual girl interested in some language other than English. (Unless it's Korean for
her K-dramas, or French because wine is now a hot thing in China.) Even if you're from Romania or Argentina or Switzerland -- just present yourself as the expert in English, and girls will eat it up. How else can you draw in the Chinese girls? Remember that in Chinese culture, outward appearances (what Chinese people sometimes incorrectly translate to English as "outlooks") are the reality. Your clothes and grooming are a part of that. Americans enjoy the story about the guy who walked into the Rolls Royce dealership in flip-flops and was scorned but ended up spending $300K USD on a car; to Chinese people, that would be a story about a very weird and very rude and perhaps very crazy guy, and a dealership that was acting correctly by rejecting a customer who didn't conform to the norm. So in China, or to girls from China, if you want to present yourself as a capable provider and husband, you have to be clean-cut and nicely dressed, with long pants and long sleeves and shiny shoes. Having "refined" interests such as golf or wine or sailing is good -- not because Chinese girls intrinsically enjoy those things, but because it's a signal to them that you are a capable and financially viable potential provider. There's a well-known Chinese phrase applied to desirable men that's "zuguo de tien" and is often translated as "rich," but what it really means is "has enough money." You meant to be seen as "zuguo de tien." That also means that your bedroom skills don't really matter. Of course, Chinese women can enjoy sexual pleasure. But a woman would be considered a pervert, and a self-destructive and crazy one at that, if she used a man's sexual ability as part of her marriage or dating criteria. Remember how practically minded we are. Unless she plans to pimp you out on the street, her sexual skills aren't really useful to her plans of economic well-being. And you will have to take the initiative as far as getting anything sexual to happen. I know that in my story about my Lanterning with Hong, I took the initiative. But that's not usually how things work. It's rare. It's a funny story because it's so rare. But don't expect other Chinese
girls to resemble me in that regard. Honestly, if I heard of a Chinese girl behaving as I behaved, I'd think she was a slut. I know it's hypocritical. I'm just telling you what to expect. Any Chinese girl will expect a good deal of initiative-taking and probably even physical initiative-taking from you in order to get to sex. I am not going to advocate that you force yourself on anybody, because I don't believe in it, but a Chinese guy who's interested in a girl would likely physically force himself on her at some point. And you have to combine that, verbally, not with promises of pleasure, but with promises of a solid, reliable, long-term, practically beneficial relationship to her. "I'm gonna make you come so many times baby" might work with some Western girls, but for a Chinese girl, it really has to be "We're gonna have so much money together and raise a powerful son," or some such thing. Really. And to keep her interested and staying in the relationship, you have to provide something like "growing together" -- but not in the psychological or self-fulfillment/self-actualization sense of Western pop psychology, but in very real material terms. You have to show her that her life is materially becoming better, month by month and year by year, by her staying with you. Better than what? Not just better than being alone, but also better than being with other guys available to her. That is the standard you have to fulfill. And Chinese girls, unlike perhaps American girls, won't be shy to tell you so. It won't be out of bounds for her to say "Had I married that other guy, I'd be living in a four-bedroom villa by now, but with you, I'm only living in a one-bedroom apartment!" Want to tell her about the great orgasms you've given her, or the fun times you've had together? Well, "that don't impress me much," as that song goes.
Final words That's the final story and confession from this Chinese girl. I've told you what I think is all there is to know about our take on love and sex. Of course, I only know what I know, even if I know the culture well - I hope you will make your own explorations and conclusions, whether it's only as a student of Chinese sex and love, or as an active participant. Maybe I've succeeded in answering your questions, and in dispelling some of the myths of Chinese girls. As you can see, things are not as obvious as they might seem. We're neither virgins nor sex maniacs, but things are definitely different in Chinese culture as compared to Western culture, and it's useful for you to know the specifics, as this book teaches you. Thanks for reading my confessions. I know I enjoyed writing them. I can only help they can be useful to you.
