China Wife in our time....the telltale signs
(Holiday has kept me away....my apologies....I do have another post coming up right after this one)
Like probably most laowai lucky enough to have cornered a Chinese Woman into marriage, it is inevitable to have comparisons between your wife and perhaps one from your own country. These are my observations as to a few of the main differences I come across......
If your wife yearns for a luxury car….well, my only advice
is resistance is futile. If you remember I fought a rearguard action for two years. I lost. Practicality
goes out the window when FACE is involved.
For some reason, my wife, because she is married to a laowai, perhaps
feels she needs to compensate by having nicer things than other Chinese around
us do. Nevermind some of her Chinese
friends are divorced.
Is your wife a kleptomaniac?
Mine is.
Somehow despite having found the cash to buy that luxury car, one
still just never has the money for other things. My wife likes to steal those little
plastic bags one uses for putting vegetables into when shopping at Wal-Mart…by
the complete roll. She uses them for wastebags. (Let me let that
sink in for a moment.) No she doesn’t
hesitate when she plunks down the deposit for a nice luxury vehicle, but heaven
help us if she has to actually pay for tiny plastic wastebags.
Is your wife happy with her station in life? Can she cope with the reality that sooner or later her upper trajectory will level off? Mine can't. But she wouldn't be Chinese if she was to just slow down and smell the roses, now would she? There is no philosophical context to life in China, amongst Chinese. It's all about attaining THINGS, and letting others see that you have them.
If your Chinese wife ever mutters the phrase
“my life needs progress”, no it doesn’t mean she needs a promotion. Rather, she’s talking and thinking about
“bigger and better”. A bigger house, another way to let the local Chinese
Community “Know” she is “doing alright!”
Keeping up with the Joneses is a big thing. Face is alive in the 21st Century.
Her big thing now is the “million dollar house”. With age
comes the need to scratch the urge of Symbolism. It can't be 950k. Won't do. Needs to be the big Million.
Disdains oral sex….I hate this one. Any man that must live without oral sex
deserves a fair opportunity blow job from somewhere else. It’s a competitive world. If your wife just says “NO”, you have
permission from me to go grab the nearest 25 year old at the club. You know, the one that loves your blue eyes
and white skin, decent Chinese and will fuck you like a porn star, well….just
because she’s never fucked a laowai before.
She got the German luxury car…you got the 25 yr old. Fair tradeoff.
Needs a night light….I remember I stopped using night lights
in the 4th grade. But I
still have to get out of bed and turn the damn thing on when she makes the
request. I’ve solved this problem by
simply going to bed before she does. (turn
it on yourself)
Drives 25 miles to music lessons for the kids…just because
the teacher is Chinese….(please don’t applaud her “dedication”….there are a
dozen equally good quality music teachers, coincidentally none of whom are Chinese,
within a 3 mile radius of our house).
Somehow all these “other” music teachers are inferior. (Even
the Russians!) Haven’t figured that one
out yet. To their credit, these Chinese
teachers do have one thing in common:
they are cheap! And they teach
music strictly from dead composers. I’m
sure our music teacher has never heard of Lady Gaga and I’m equally damn sure
our violin teacher has never heard of the fiddle.
I showed my daughter “the fiddle” on youtube the other day,
and she reacted as if she’d seen an alien.
Yes, I realize a Chinese playing the fiddle is akin to an American
singing Beijing Opera.
I actually brought up the logistical issues of our kids' music lessons to my wife once and her quick
retort was quick and to the point:
“Don’t be so involved”!
WTF?
I guess I’m supposed to just shut the fuck up, and let China
Wife decide how the kids are raised, how much it costs, etc. (And be happy if I can get laid once a week or so.)
Does your wife still have that long sexy, stereotypical Asian
Hair? Not mine. My
wife looks less like Joan Baez and Cher ala the 60’s and more like Octavian
Augustus cum 40 BC. Call me Old School, but I unashamedly loved China Wife's hair before she discovered scissors. I miss the hair flowing over and across my face during sex....alot.
Such is life with China Wife today.
Hey Thanks for the update.
ReplyDeleteI'm quite curious how common divorce among 'China wives' considering face seems like such an important concept the choice to become a single parent and potentially poorer would make it a difficult choice no?
Also I realise this might be very private but culturally after marriage to a Chinese woman, did sex and fun immediately stop or was it a gradual movement into car and house demands and limited sex?
Ok, let's be clear: culturally speaking, Chinese argue with each other ALOT. I find many of them, despite their 5000 year old civilization, to be rather immature on an individual basis. Petty, easily aggrieved, thin skinned..quick to feel offense at something. Alot like myself! So arguing comes natural, and is very public. I recall my neighbor arguing with her husband for an entire day, with the door open the entire time. In China, arguing is so embedded with the culture that the police are never called, and a domestic dispute is no one's business. Which in my view is why domestic violence is so prevalent. The concept of "chivalry", in the masochistic East, is not that well developed.
ReplyDeleteI do realize I am painting with a very wide brush above, and I certainly do not wish to do that. The same issues one finds above are certainly common in the West, ie America as well.
Still, how does one reconcile Face with Divorce? Simple: Modernization. Further, the willingness to sacrifice other things, such as SEX. Companionship prevails is my point. The Divorce rate in China I believe has tripled over the past couple of decades. That is only the tip of the iceberg. Another few decades it may even surpass America's. In Shanghai, it is already equal to America's. For all the cityfolk that call it quits, you have ten couples in the countryside or 2nd and 3rd tier cities that "endure". Most likely to the wife's detriment.
That's why Sex is nil, and hookups on line and in clubs are so readily available. And why in my view sexual pleasure drops.
My wife grew up with a privileged mentality. Simple as that. She will always have it. Not all Chinese in our community are this way. The middle aged Chinese mostly are not. My wife is an exception. Indeed, if she had met them twenty years ago, she wouldn't have given them the time of day. Of course today, their all her friends.
Please write another post on Laowai-Chinese marriage. If you can, please tailor your advice for us laowai folks in their 20s who have careers (non-teaching) in China and speak Chinese. I know that you did one or two posts of comparison in the past, but I somewhat feel that the topic has more to it.
ReplyDeleteBasically I could see 4 options for myself:
1) ABCs/BBCs etc. - asian body with western mindset. Could easily be screwed over like any Western woman is able to.
2) Rich Chinese girl in China - well, probably there will be a house bought by her parents, but of course it won't bear my name! I will be always compared to her friends etc. Whole life of comparisons and "keeping up with Smiths".
3) Poor girl from small China city. Well this will make me a wallet for her whole family. Baba, mama, didi, all will want a new fridge, new house or renovations. She will have all the countryside mindset with good and bad things about it. Will I ever win an argument? Things like everyday handwashing underwear in a small plastic basin drive me crazy... Every Chinese bathroom is full of that shit. Why do that when there's a washing machine? I'll even let her split the underwear from socks! Just please don't do it every fucking evening in the small plastic basin... urhhh gross! And time wasting!
4) Chinese that was education and/or worked abroad... Well it's a mixed bag. Some of the Chinese students never really get into cultural fit because they spend their undergraduate hanging out with other Chinese and speaking the Chinese and eating in the Chinese restaurants and singing in Chinese KTVs. Clever ones stay on to get work experience or PHD etc.
Many of them go back to BJ/SH/SZ etc. Seems like a wife material that would be able to at least try to understand the Western concepts. Of course from the whole bunch of them one would need to substract white-worshiping slugs.
Could you share your overview of the situation? Is it even worth it? As Chinese get more rich the relationships go into "China way or no way"... By no means I would let a woman stump on my head, but is the constant fight worth it all?