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And I as I came to know him better, he didn't disappoint me. He always opened doors for me and wouldn't leave my side until he escorted me all the way to the entrance to my apartment. He helped me buy a bicycle at the secondhand market and even gave me a ride there on the back of his black metal bike. When I came down with the flu, he accompanied me to my therapy at the clinic and read to me from Chicken Soup for the Soul. He even watched The Bridges of Madison County with me -- one of the weepiest chick flicks ever made -- and actually shed a few tears when it ended.
He was more of a gentleman toward me than any other man I had ever known. When I thought about my burgeoning crush for Tian, I figured it was no different from that college semester when I studied in Spain. All the American girls I knew liked flirting with the local Spaniards, and why not? The experience of being in a foreign country and culture somehow liberated us from our usual American expectations for men and dating itself. We could try new things. We could even reinvent ourselves and what it meant to be in love with someone.
It seemed natural and normal to do the same in China. I didn't know much about China back then -- a time when I could only communicate in Mandarin with a dictionary and lots of patience, and where my entire cultural knowledge was amassed from the library books on China I borrowed during the summer. But I figured surely I wasn't alone in my feelings.
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Surely the other female foreign teachers at my college had secret crushes of their own. On the streets of Zhengzhou, China, the city where I first had a crush on a Chinese guy.
Why millions of Chinese men are staying single
At least that woman wasn't as blunt as another colleague, who used to bicycle with me through the streets of Zhengzhou. As we stopped on the corner of a side street and watched the mostly-male populous pedaling past us through the intersection, she grimaced. How could these women just write off all Chinese men as undateable?
The question haunted me as I pondered my crush on Tian. But it wouldn't be the last time I would find myself up against these ideas. As I continued to date the locals in China and eventually married a fellow from Hangzhou, I would come to realize that most expat women in China agreed with my Zhengzhou colleagues. And sometimes, their dislike was just shocking.
A European woman I worked with in famously told me that, while she found all Chinese men completely repulsive, she considered Chinese children so adorable. My husband posing with our nephew. I think they're both adorable. But some of my most fascinating and educative encounters with this idea of "Chinese men as undateable" happened online, when I came face-to-face with these opinions distilled into the cold, black-and-white reality of blog posts and expat forums.
Back in , I discovered a post on a now-defunct blog authored by expats in Shanghai. The post was written by a white American woman based in Shanghai and titled, "So, how's the dating scene? In the still, he's locked in an awkward slow-dance embrace with a girl an entire head taller than him, but that's not even the worst of it. While she leans her head on his in perfect contentment, he has his cheek buried in her bosom while staring at it with a prurient curiosity that surely would have snapped the girl out of her reverie. At the time I was only beginning to learn about negative stereotypes of Asian men that American TV, movies and the media had perpetuated over the years: The woman who wrote that post never specifically said any of these things about local men in China, but she didn't have to.
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Long Duk Dong took care of that. Then again, her post appears downright classy in comparison to what I've read in the free-for-all world of anonymous expat forums across China. There was a brief time when I tried combing these forums in search of discussions about dating Chinese men, hoping to gain some insights, but I soon gave that up. Whenever anyone dared to broach the subject, usually someone would quickly pounce on the thread and sully it with some juvenile comment about Chinese men that wasn't all that different from that Long Duk Dong movie still.
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The worst of these threads generally devolved into a low-brow, expletive-laden conversation more appropriate for a bathroom stall. Other men are turning to psychologists and stylists to make themselves more appealing. View image of Modern dating leaves more options for women in China Credit: The problems for men in finding a partner are most acute in poorer rural areas, made worse by long-held traditions that the husband must be able to offer a decent level of financial security before he can secure a wife. But this financial burden on men is also making it harder for many women to find a partner.
That adds to the issue, with large numbers of men, partly because of the financial costs of marriage, are opting to marry later. And when they do settle down they are often looking for younger women.
BBC - Capital - Why millions of Chinese men are staying single
Age gaps of 10 to 20 years or more are common in Chinese marriages. Of course, the reverse can also be true.
Parents are a big source of pressure to find a partner, pronto. View image of Parents scouting the competition at the marriage market wall in Shanghai Credit: Then there are the outdoor marriage markets. Some parents have been known to visit the market every week for years with no success. The shift in how people meet and how men woo partners, is, above all, putting a greater emphasis on love rather than on practical considerations such as financial security.
For decades, the policy restricted couples to having only one child. A long history of preference for sons led to large numbers of girls being abandoned, placed in orphanages, sex-selective abortions or even cases of female infanticide.