“Những điều bạn chưa biết về trai Tây” – Introduction, part the first
Let’s put the question in basic terms. Why do Western boys find Asian women in general and Vietnamese women in particular so attractive?
For starters, take the answer you get in this “interview” with the owner of a Thai dating agency in Houellebecq’s novel Platform:
“There seems to be a near-perfect match between the Western men, who are unappreciated and get no respect in their own countries, and the Thai women, who would be happy to find someone who simply does his job and hopes to come home to a pleasant family life after work. Most Western women do not want such a boring husband. . . One way to see this is to look at any publication containing ‘personal’ ads. The Western woman wants someone who looks a certain way, and who has certain ‘social skills’, such as dancing and conversation, someone who is interesting and exciting and seductive. Now go to my catalogue, and look at what the girls say they want. It’s all pretty simple really. Over and over they state that they are happy to settle down FOREVER with a man who is willing to hold down a steady job and be a loving and understanding HUSBAND and FATHER. That will get you exactly nowhere with an American girl. . . As Western women do not appreciate men, as they do not value traditional family life, marriage is not the right thing for them. I’m helping modern Western women to avoid what they despise.”
The reason Houllebecq is a good place to start? Because he, or his Thai matchmaker, is right about one thing. The attraction between Asian women and Western men has something to do with the air of sexual sourness that in some ways pervades relations between the sexes in Western countries nowadays.
Western women feel that Western men are JUST NOT UP TO THE JOB OF LOVING THEM. Or that at least is what quite a few Western men have concluded.
Are Western women more demanding than they once were? Probably some of them are. All in all, you could say there’s a greater number of Western women out there nowadays who want a relationship to be a UNIQUELY INTERESTING PERSONAL EXPERIENCE – not just something consistently entertaining, but REGULARLY UPLIFTING, and certainly not just a routine means to marriage and kids.
Do Western women expect men to be interesting and seductive? Probably.
Do they expect men to have dancing and conversation skills? Some of them do maybe, though surely it’s not asking too much to expect a date-able male to be capable of a meaningful exchange in words.
Do they despise men who just want to be good husbands and fathers and have very little going for them apart from that? Probably some of them do, probably many of them don’t.
This honestly wasn’t one of the biggest complaints that I heard from women during my years being single in various Western countries.
It’s true some Western women are put off by men who seem rigidly conventional. Many, many more though lament something completely different: lack of commitment to long-term relationships. From Western women’s perspective, the problem with the world is that it’s teeming – not with charmless plodders, but with immature boy-men who think of relationships one-dimensionally in terms of women satisfying their boyfriends’ or husbands’ needs.
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Dig a little deeper and you’ll find some rather different issues that propel Western men into the arms of Thai and Vietnamese girls.
The first and probably the most credible of them is that Western women, in the process of becoming relatively equal with Western men over the past half-century, have increasingly become THE SAME as Western men. And this sameness, while in some ways satisfying from a moral and social point of view, is at the personal level DEEPLY UNSEXY.
Back in the olden days, Western women had something that was a perennial source of attraction to Western men. It was called the feminine mystique.
In the heyday of the feminine mystique, you could say, the role of women was to be charming, demur and conventionally beautiful, to make an impression on men by playing their cards pretty close to their chests.
Then however it was discovered that the feminine mystique actually reflected a certain sort of very masculine contempt for women. It was based (or so the theory went) on the sense that women needed the world explained to them by men, that they should strive throughout their lives to gain men’s affection, be ready at all times to give men their love and care.
Instead of dressing how they liked, saying what they thought and in general making up their own lives, women should spend their lives making themselves pleasing to men.
So it seems what Western men in the olden days were actually attracted to (unbeknownst to them) was NOT women themselves or their mystique, but a kind of nasty and unfair MYSTIQUE BEHIND THE MYSTIQUE – the mystique of the power that men themselves held over women’s attention and ideas and lives.
What was the solution?
Too simple: Out with the feminine mystique!
If men talked bullshit (or just went on a bit too much) – women should call them on their bullshit, instead of sitting back and dutifully listening.
If men assumed rather too easily that they should be paid more for their work, have more exciting jobs and in general play the leading role in society, then – again they should be called on this (all of it bullshit). Women should challenge them directly for the authority and status that they’d always granted themselves.
If men also assumed that they had the sole right to smoke and drink and crack wise (in particular to make loud tasteless jokes about the opposite sex), to compete for public adulation on the sports field, in the workplace, at clubs and bars and on the stage of social life generally, then women should boldly challenge men’s double standards. They should actively assert their right to do everything men did.
Perhaps you can see the problem. Actually several problems.
On the one hand, there were quite a few men who in the olden days had quite enjoyed behaving obnoxiously towards women and who saw a genuine threat in this vigorous new assault on their privileges.
On the other hand, some of the male forms of behaviour which women were starting to take up, sometimes even outdo men in, were pretty obnoxious to begin with.
Within 3 or 4 decades, the world became a place in which half the intelligent, pretty women were going in for the same sort of loud, competitive, charmless and quintessentially male behaviour that the women of the past had had no taste for. To some men it seemed like a world with fewer attractive women than before.
However, the more they looked around, the more these men realised it was also a world in which Asian women were pushing past the limits of the feminine mystique in a very different, much sexier way.
So the first thing Asian girls have going for them in the eyes of Western boys is in a nutshell that THEY AREN’T WESTERN GIRLS.
Vietnamese girls, for example, know increasingly how to assert themselves in wider society, but they’re not openly competitive in the ways Western women are. To compete with men in the social arena, they haven’t turned themselves into men or become like men. Many of them indeed seem to have found a way of retaining a degree of mystery and femininity while avoiding the standard forms of male behaviour that many Western men themselves find obnoxious. Loud, boozy social lives that revolve around sport, sarcasm and public bragging are something no sane Vietnamese girl would go in for.
Vietnamese girls nowadays know how to express themselves, but in person they also know how not to give the game away. They have their own low-key forms of humour, but they’re still far from thinking that an ability to take someone else down in a maximally funny way is a sign of special intelligence. From a Western perspective, they have a certain calm about them – something that inoculates them against Western-style cynicism and stops them from mouthing off about everything that annoys them in life.
And this, I would say, is part of the pulling power they have over Western men.
Not for Vietnamese girls the sort of sexual equality whose finest flower is an ability to swear like a trooper, drink your friends under the table, throw a punch in a bar-fight or pick yourself up and get home on your own steam “like a real woman” if everything goes horribly wrong…
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The second thing Vietnamese girls have going for them in the eyes of Western men is not mentioned by Houellebecq or his dating agent at all. Actually it’s a pretty obvious factor: eye-searing natural beauty.
There’s a whole chapter about this in the book you’re about to read. Its basic message is that Vietnamese women are often attractive for reasons they themselves find it difficult to get their heads around.
Western men not only don’t mind the fact that Vietnamese girls are on average shorter, not as fair-skinned or long-nosed as Western women, they POSITIVELY LOVE it.
Having spent most of their lives in a world full of girls with full figures, pinky-grey skin and high noses, they’re ready to feel the pull of women who have none of these things.
They are mesmerised by long shiny black hair.
They get drunk on fine yellow-toned skin.
Long, narrow eyes, even eyes with only one lid, make their heads spin.
Round, flattish faces with high cheekbones (and without a fashionable Korean-style V-line chin) make them smile and take notice.
Western men are also very open to the compact elegance that petite figures and a low centre of gravity bring with them.
In fact you might say, they are open to most of the things that Vietnamese women grow up being told are physically unattractive and declassé.
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That leaves one more thing that makes Vietnamese girls attractive to Western guys, this one a little less tangible: the dynamic position they stand in between the past and the future.
Let me explain.
Actually, first let me introduce you to one Western guy who is a bit better informed on the subject of Vietnamese women’s attractiveness than the fictional owner of the Thai dating agency in Platform. His name is Joe Ruelle.
Joe Ruelle, known in Vietnam as Dâu Tây, is a very nice, very perceptive Canadian boy who speaks and writes very good Vietnamese and has a range of interesting things to say about Vietnam from a Western point of view. Sadly, a few years ago Google made Joe a job offer he couldn’t refuse, so his career as a commentator on Vietnamese social life seems to have come to a premature end. If you’re still interested in reading him, then the collection of his blog pieces called Zig-zagging against traffic (Ngược Chiều Vun Vút) is the place to start.
Now Joe has a theory about Vietnamese women that directly relates to the main idea of the book you’re about to read. (The main idea of the book by the way is that there’s an affinity between Western boys and Vietnamese girls that makes mutual attraction not only possible, but potentially a really fun and beautiful thing.)
Joe’s main idea in a nutshell is that young Vietnamese women are “moving faster” than young Vietnamese men; they’re growing up faster and so they’re rapidly becoming more sophisticated than their male contemporaries and this is making it difficult for them to meet Vietnamese men who are interesting enough for them to love, respect and get into relationships with.
According to Joe’s estimate, for every 10 talented, fast-moving young Vietnamese women there are only 4 talented, fast-moving young Vietnamese guys. So the chances of the fast-moving women meeting and having a satisfying relationship with one of the guys is small. (And the chances get smaller as the girls get older, because talented fast-moving Vietnamese boys often share the general Vietnamese prejudice in favour of very young women, who are sometimes not that talented and are certainly not always that grown-up, no matter how beautiful they might be.)
According to Joe, Vietnamese girls nowadays are not just looking for men who can father children, earn money and chew every mouthful 32 times before swallowing.
More than that, according to Joe, Vietnamese women are not just looking for men who are their dynamic equals. They are aiming to define themselves in terms of many things other than relationships – setting out to achieve more and more in the wider world.
Vietnamese girls are moving faster than Vietnamese boys in the sense that they are studying harder, working smarter. They’re doing more off their own bats, developing more sophisticated images of themselves and the world, enjoying themselves in a variety of new ways. And they’re doing all this, we might add, without turning themselves into a species of chest-thumping men.
According to Joe, girls form the vast majority of advanced Vietnamese English students nowadays, and a clear majority of the 20 year olds who create a sensation on Vietnamese talent shows.
The same goes for the younger generation of Vietnamese making their way up through the ranks of international businesses. Most of the pace-setters are women.
Basically in Joe’s opinion, the majority of young Vietnamese people who are reacting with poise and wit and independent initiative and connected English sentences to the globalising world which is rapidly taking Vietnam away from where it was in the past – are almost all women.
Now what this book is going to argue is that, in doing all these things, in running faster than Vietnamese men, in reacting with poise and wit and independent initiative to the world around them, Vietnamese girls are in effect running TOWARDS WESTERN BOYS. Some of whom have what it takes to make them happy, now that they’re getting so far ahead of their male contemporaries.
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Compared to Vietnamese boys, Western boys are on average more likely to be curious about the opinions and inner lives Vietnamese girls are developing, as we’ll see in the chapter of this book on IDEAS; they’re more likely to positively appreciate it if you have an independent, genuinely critical view of people and the wider world around you.
Second, Western boys are more likely to engage, if your English allows it, in sophisticated conversation, working at a number of levels, taking in a range of topics, as we’ll see in the chapter of this book about CONVERSATION. Unlike the majority of Vietnamese boys, Western boys’ ideal of social interaction is NOT drinking large quantities of draught beer and shouting over the top of each other. Some of them indeed seem to genuinely enjoy talking in a thoughtful, polite way to the women who play a part in their lives.
As we’ll see in the chapter on BEAUTY, compared to Vietnamese guys, sophisticated Western boys are much less likely to care whether you’re tall or short, thin or chubby, light-skinned or dark-skinned; they’re altogether less focused on all those little things which Vietnamese girls are told make a decisive difference to whether they’re beautiful or not.
In spite of not liking some of the consequences of the move towards sexual equality in the Western world, Western boys are more likely than Vietnamese boys to treat a sophisticated Vietnamese girl as an equal, less likely, in the long run, to want a relationship in which you play the role of a glorified house-maid or an always unsatisfactory mother-substitute. All in all, Western men are much less likely than Vietnamese men to grant themselves liberties that they wouldn’t grant you. Such are the lessons of the chapter of this book on EQUALITY.
Next, they are unlikely to pay attention to age in the way that Vietnamese folk do; Western boys almost certain not to find you any less attractive because you’re nearing, or have already passed, 30, as we’ll see in the chapters on AGE and BEING ON THE SHELF.
If you end up going out with, or even marrying, one of them, then he’s less likely (a little less likely) to compromise his high regard for you, or let himself be led into cheap misadventures, by boozy mates, as we’ll see in the chapter on BEING FAITHFUL.
Plus if you DON’T end up going out with or marrying one of them, then he’s more likely to cultivate a grown-up long-term friendship with you, as we’ll see in the chapter on FRIENDSHIP.
To come back to our main topic, the specific affinity between Asian women and Western men going on in Vietnam, the situation looks basically like this.
Western men and Vietnamese girls are compatible for a number of reasons.
Partly it’s because Western men and Western women have their wires crossed.
Partly it’s because too many Vietnamese boys are too busy playing computer games or getting drunk with their mates to develop a cogent approach to all the hot, cute, fast-moving females they find themselves surrounded by in the current world. Partly too because too many Vietnamese men have clichéd and patently self-serving ideas about how Vietnamese girls should behave and what they should do with their lives.
But mainly it’s because Vietnam is itself moving quite fast in a Western direction and Vietnamese women, while retaining some of the beauty and the subtlety of the Vietnam of old, are leading the dash into the future.
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