think of it as kind of like an alley: part 3 (of 3)

I did not have these statistics handy over lunch that day, but I did in a roundabout way suggest that maybe these days many Taiwanese women are less interested than many Taiwanese men in arrangements that only a couple of decades ago would have been considered quite desirable, like the cook-for-my-mom, have-my-kids, take-my-money one offered by my decent-incomed, decent-looking friend. Maybe what foreign men have to offer is a different style of marriage and dating that is more to the taste of these only recently emerging female types. (I was also recalling a different conversation that might not be totally appropriate for text-body retelling, so I’m putting it in a footnote.)[i]

“No, it’s not like that,” My Current Object responded. Taiwan, he explained, and in fact Chinese society as a whole, has a several hundred year history of 崇洋媚外 chongyang meiwai, cravenly adoring the Western and foreign. The fact that these girls are into foreign guys is just another manifestation of that phenomenon. These girls are not the normal kinds of girls that we know; most girls we know don’t go out to bars by themselves looking for guys, looking for one-night stands. But these girls, instead of going home after work, they get all dressed up and go out looking for men, in bars, alone. These girls are like that.

“Wait a minute," I said, "I thought we were talking about Taiwanese girls who are interested in foreign guys. That doesn’t necessarily mean they go out to bars looking for one-night stands. I know several such couples and I don’t think any of them met that way. And if it’s just a manifestation of craven-adoration-of-the-West, then why is it only girls? Taiwanese men don’t seem particularly interested in foreign women. Are they?” He agreed with that: Taiwanese men are indeed not interested in foreign women. But these girls, you see, it’s an ego boost to them, it’s a way for them to feel like they have some value. They know that the society around them looks down on this behavior, this going out to bars by yourself, this looking for men, this one-night-standishness, this wildness. So they go to these bars where people make them feel wanted, make them feel like it’s okay to be that way. That’s why they do it.

I kind of felt like I was watching a Presidential debate—wait, what was the question again? So I let up and went back to nodding and smiling. I figured anyway that the fact that Taiwanese men are with utter predictability not interested in me was nothing I needed to highlight any further. But it’s not quite true that Taiwanese men are not interested in non-Taiwanese women: “Last year 25 percent of marriages involving a Taiwanese male…were to a foreign woman,” wrote the Asia Times in 2003.[ii] As you can probably guess, these foreign women were for the most part not “foreign” in the sense of “white Euro-American” that I described a couple of days ago. Of the 280,000 non-Taiwanese women married to Taiwanese men and residing in Taiwan in 2003, almost 68% were from mainland China, around 14% were from Vietnam, and over 3% were from Indonesia. “To put that 280,000 into perspective, it is equivalent to the number of foreign workers in Taiwan or, even more significant, the number of non-ethnic Han Aborigines - the ethnic-Malay original inhabitants of the island.” I probably should have asked the architect about this interesting anthropological fact and the reason behind it.

In the absence of his explanation, I will start with the explanation given by that same Asia Times article: “availability and … low expectations.” Taiwan’s population has around a 6% bloat on the male side, so more men will be looking to get married in the first place. But aside from that, since foreign brides, as they are called, are usually more or less explicitly purchased from much poorer countries, they are known to be “loyal, considerate and obedient.” A rather bitter article (in Chinese) quotes one foreign-bebrided man explaining his choice to a journalist who sounds like just the sort of woman he wouldn’t want to marry: “Vietnamese women are hardworking and obedient: when my mother says ‘east,’ my wife doesn't go west. She doesn’t talk back, doesn’t give me any mother-in-law daughter-in-law headaches…Not at all like many a Taiwanese woman: doesn’t want to have kids, complains that you’re not romantic enough and don’t understand her heart, and if you tell her she has to live with your parents after you get married you’ll never hear the end of it.” And if that helps explain why so many Taiwanese men are marrying non-Taiwanese women, I wonder if it might also help explain why some Taiwanese women are interested in dating non-Taiwanese men. Next time I see the architect I’ll ask him what he thinks.



[i] I was walking around with a friend of mine, about the nicest guy I know here, who was telling me about a friend of his who had just gotten married. Before he got married he had this habit of going to prostitutes, mainly in Hong Kong—he’d fly over to Hong Kong just for the weekend and visit a brothel or two. And now that he’s married, it turns out he still does it! My friend was shocked, which I found pretty charming. I said maybe his friend found that it was less stressful that way. He said, “Oh, because they can’t refuse?” I said, well, maybe that, and maybe also that his friend doesn’t feel anything is demanded of him, like making sure the girl has a good time too. “Oh, really!” my friend responded, apparently at a loss. “Oh!”

[ii] There are slightly differing statistics on this floating around and I can’t find on the web any of the government statistics that everyone is always quoting. An alternate phrasing I have seen says that in 2002, foreign brides accounted for 11.63% “of the people who registered their marriages during the year.” I’ve seen 11.6ish cited as the percentage of marriages, as well(though I can’t recall where). But presumably there are two people registering for every one marriage, which would place the percentage of marriages involving foreign brides by this statistic at 23.26%, not quite 25% but close enough, I guess.