Today I want to make the review of one site which made a lot of buzz when it was active (it hasn’t been updated for about two years now). I am talking about infamous blog “Sex and Shanghai” created by Chinabounder. For those who are not familiar with it – this is a collection of diary-like posts written by an anonymous teacher of English language (who later revealed his identity) in one of Shanghai’s universities. In his blog Chinabounder described in juicy details how he seduced multiple Chinese girls most of whom were his former students. However, differently from other authors of similar content Chinabounder tended to mix the explicit pornography with philosophizing about characteristics of Chinese people, Chinese politics and other topics.
To say the truth I have written the initial draft of this post long time ago (immediately after stumbling upon “Sex in Shanghai” for the first time). But at that time I was too angry to be objective. And I didn’t want to follow the footsteps of Zhang Jiehai – professor of psychology – who wrote an open letter on his site calling for a human flesh search of Chinabounder (which very well might end up in lynch if he wouldn’t flee China in time). Also I am not interested in psychological analysis of Chinabounder’s personality.
Because I found few curious thoughts in his blog and they must be judged without any relation to their author’s morality or mental state.
First thing that caught my attention were Chinabounder’s revelations regarding the nature of attraction between Western men and Chinese girls. Without trying to describe it in my own words, let me quote the whole passage:
It is — perhaps most importantly – the fact that Chinese woman is not from our culture and does not, in general, understand all the nuances and subtleties of our language and our behavior.
Now, sure, true love, two hearts beating as one, perfect understanding, total communication and all that stuff. Fuck that; that is not what guys want. This is pure horror to us; we most emphatically do not want a woman sharing every aspect of our lives, seeing into us, knowing us.
Dating someone from another culture gives us a safety zone, a barrier, so that we can keep our lives, our sense of self, our secrecies. Chinese woman will never be able to read us like white woman and that is why we want her.
Now this is not purely cynical; for, yes, we can love Chinese woman, honor her and commit to her and even (some of us, at least) be faithful to her. But we still have that buffer, that exclusion zone of secrecy where she cannot enter. No matter how married we may be, how deeply we may love Chinese woman, we are still more single and more ourselves than we would be with white woman. And this is why white woman remains invisible to us. Why would we want her, with her big body and her perfect ability to see what we really are? And so our reasons for chasing Chinese woman have some depth to them.
No matter what your emotional reaction is after reading this, one can’t deny that this guy has a good writing style and sounds quite persuasive. At least I do believe that these were the reasons why HE was after Chinese girls. But I really want to know if he was right using the word “WE”? Is his reasoning true for other Western men? Are you indeed afraid to be too close and intimate with your woman and need the space and safety barrier?
Another statement which Chinabounder repeats multiple times throughout his blog is the dullness of Chinese men comparing them to cold fishes. Understandably these kinds of sentiments were the ones that made Professor Zhang Jiehai especially angry (in fact, some time later he published a book on this topic titled “I am angry”). Chinabounder constantly stressed the difference between the characteristics of Chinese women and Chinese men. He even claimed that every time when some of his students were finding him on MSN (which was easy since he was writing his e-mail on the class board in the end of a lesson), it didn’t take him long to guess if the student was male or female: according to him Chinese men were all alike without the slightest glimpse of individuality while every Chinese girl was special and different and just had to be “allowed” to open up.
And without hiding the selfishness of his motives, Chinabounder proudly saw himself as liberator of suppressed Chinese girls. A teacher of English language in daytime, he was switching his role to a teacher of sex on nights.
I believe that Chinese women are creatures of passion, eroticism and desire, of creativity and joy in bed. But they are taught to believe all this is wrong, that it is dirty, that they should just lie back, in the dark, for the two or three minutes it takes the average Chinese guy to come. They are taught it, I say, and try to live up to it; but such is their passionate nature that they never truly believe this lesson. And so one does not have to delve very deep to bring this true nature out. A few words, some tender care, a joyful, open attitude to sex and the woman will turn from a squib to firecracker.
If this is true – then dating Chinese girls is just an ego-boosting experience for men who are not interested in equal relationships. Should I wonder now why open-minded and educated Chinese girls become leftovers? Even Woody Allen who married his stepdaughter Soon-Yi Previn (oops – Asian girl – but it’s just coincidence, right?) upon being asked whether their age difference (he was 56 and she was 22) was conducive to “a healthy, equal relationship” answered that equality is not necessarily a requirement in a relationship and added: “The heart wants what it wants. There’s no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that.”
Well, here is one more lesson that Chinabounder willingly gives to his readers. It addresses Chinese girls who think that they have found their foreign prince.
I have various friends involved with foreign guys, and at the beginning of their relationships the woman has told me ‘This foreign guy is different.’ But he never is. We all lie and cheat and chase.
Trying not to be angry, Crystal Tao
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