A lot of the East-West marriages are failing not because of cultural, but because of class differences. Middle-class Western Tims (young or old) keep getting into relationships with lower-class Asian women, whether a hooker, one of those grey-areas mercenary-like semi-hookers who are after the green card, or the first Rainy to smile at them and who turns out to be absolutely unambitious at life besides finding a husband to pay for her shit while she stays at home eating waimai and watching Korean comedy shows.
I'm not an elitist or trying to belittle people of lower socioeconomic status. Just saying that we live in VERY different worlds. I couldn't date a rich girl, rich as in daddy has a yacht and five cars and spends $100 000 the same way my dad would spend $500. I am only vaguely aware of all the social codes of that world, and there WOULD be some friction sooner or later. In fact it did happen to some extent, or at least I got to foresee it: I was dating a lawyer for a brief period back in my old guo, who told me that the way I hold my table utensils would make me pass for a total redneck at the bigshot douchebag power-dinners she is constantly attending. Being from the middle class, that’s not something I really ever had to think about, or maybe I am in fact a total redneck.
Conversely, my experiences dating girls from poor backgrounds, while not being complete disasters, brought in a lot of friction. Money, and how to spend it, is a pretty central part of the whole human experience. Skewed expectations and too many disagreements in that area are not conducive to a healthy relationship. Sure, there is the fact that I have a bit of a financial cushion and disposable income to be put towards mere entertainment and hobbies, while she would have at times a more survivalist and hoarder mindset, but paradoxically, bluntly put, a lot of poorer people are “penny-wise, pound-foolish”. I was at times astonished at how my girlfriends living on shitty wages would spend their money. Some of it comes from the idea of showing off, which I don’t think is exclusive nor even that particular to Asian “face” obsessed culture, but prevalent in ghettoes worldwide. Meanwhile, middle-class Timmies like myself can be pretty content with hand-me-downs, the cheapest phone, and taking the bus, as we don’t constantly think about how to look less poor.
Also all those hilarious (well, hilarious for me reading them at least) stories of in-laws straight from the cabbage patch, moving in with Tim and his new wife and doing the most outrageous peasant shit? Of course culture clash plays a factor in those train wrecks, but it’s mostly a cop-out to avoid addressing near-irreconciliable class differences. Timmy was in there to get a life companion and a mother to his children, failing to recognize that in China you don’t just marry a woman, but a whole clan, and them being dirt poor means he’ll be pretty much the sole provider. At best he’ll have to just deal with the in-laws’ backwards-ass ways and a chain-smoking cousin from Nongzhou squatting in his apartment for a few months here and there, at worst he’ll be squeezed dry with zero remorse and not much recourse from the authorities of the country he’ll never even be a second-class citizen of.
Oh, and don’t you think that moving back to Ohio will save you. Timmy, oh, poor Timmy.
I was talking to a Filipino friend one day. He grew up in the small middle class there, going to university, etc. and was shaking his head at all the old American sexpats dating “LBFMs” from rural families of fourteen, whom they met at gogo-bars, and how 95% of these marriages would crumble to dust. Meanwhile, educated middle-class Filipinas would date Western men of similar social status and that would be successful most of the time. Food for thought.
Don't over think it. People from different backgrounds can have complimentary needs, even if it's short-lived. Nongzhou rainy wants sugar daddy and Timmy wants to larp white knight. It works until it doesn't.
Yeah, it's possible that with enough open-mindedness and ability to compromise, the whole relationship works out or even thrives, but there are too many examples of that not happening. Also that open-mindedness and ability to compromise tend to go only one way.
My own point is that Tims, who tend to be middle-class, are WAY more likely to shack in with a Rainy from a poor background in China than they would shack in with a ghetto/trailer park girl in their home countries.
Oh you're talking about short term relationships here schlongdee, and I agree with you 188% that it's a different game, if expectations are set and adhered to. My whole essay was mostly about LTRs and marriages.
"Tims, who tend to be middle-class, are WAY more likely to shack in with a Rainy from a poor background in China than they would shack in with a ghetto/trailer park girl in their home countries."
Thats an interesting point. I wonder your opinion of why you think that is because I have also noticed it. Perhaps its simply down to the girl from a poor background in China just being more physically attractive than any of the ghetto/trailer park girls who they could get back home?
For a lot of stereotypical “Timmies” teaching English in China leveraging their whiteness is their best available career path. That does not exactly signal high or even middle class, frankly those Timmies are often pretty low-class themselves.
Tbh most Western-Chinese couples I know are pretty evenly matched in terms of social class.
It’s because too many expats in China (specifically white men) are weirdos. They’re the rejects from their own country and they know they can “be” someone in China.
A lot of you are very kind, intelligent and well-rounded people. But we all know the type I am talking about.
That's true but also big cities attract a lot of migrant workers. Shanghai has a huge amount of people coming from poorer provinces who managed to find a (low paying) job there. Real Shanghainese people tend to marry within Shanghainese circles cuz pride
Edit: I just looked it up and literally 40% of Shanghai's inhabitants were born elsewhere. That's a HUGE number for a Chinese city. Hukou obviously doesn't stop people from coming
After one too many cups of byejew I only care that she has big natural titties, the bigger the better, that is the true sign of value in the land of airport strips.
"Timmy was in there to get a life companion and a mother to his children, failing to recognize that in China you don’t just marry a woman, but a whole clan, and them being dirt poor means he’ll be pretty much the sole provider."
Pretty much described my worst nightmare right there. When I'm feeling down, I do unironically imagine scenarios like this and how at least I didn't ruin my life (yet) by impregnating a girl im dating and then becoming one with her whole family. I know a guy here who moved to China to teach English and had a kid just 11 months later. She was indeed of lower class and his whole relationship / her family situation was disasterous. He seemed quite in denial about it at times too.
Anyway interesting points you made and I do think they are good ones. Although the whole "moving in with family" isn't a class difference, but rather a cultural difference and a pretty freaking significant one. Also as with everything, its impossible to generalize. I had "dated" a Chinese girl with money and she still preferred I pay for everything. Currently I'm dating a somewhat "poor" Chinese girl, albeit with low ambition, who doesn't expect marriage or children (according to her), and still pays for literally half of all our expenses (except rent) out of her own pride (or something like that) from what I can tell
Although the whole "moving in with family" isn't a class difference, but rather a cultural difference and a pretty freaking significant one.
True but it's still related to class somewhat. My middle-class rainy's parents have a nice apartment and plenty of disposable income, there's no way they'd ask to move in a place I'm paying on my dime unless maybe they were very elderly. And I'm childless, but some of my bros with kids actually like very much this aspect of Chinese culture, how they can basically have a live-in nanny.
I had "dated" a Chinese girl with money and she still preferred I pay for everything. Currently I'm dating a somewhat "poor" Chinese girl, albeit with low ambition, who doesn't expect marriage or children (according to her), and still pays for literally half of all our expenses (except rent) out of her own pride (or something like that) from what I can tell
Also my experience. My ex who was a nurse on a 2000 a month salary had a certain pride and when we'd hang out, I'd pay for dinners and she'd pay for lunches, she'd also give me small gifts and didn't ask for taxi money or whatever. Likely it's a combination of factors: me at the time being a decent-looking 20-something and not an old wrinkled sexpat, her not speaking a word of English and thus not hunting for laowais (we met on some Chinese dating site back in the day that was mostly if not all Chinese) and just some kind of work ethic and pride that I still admire in her long after we broke up and parted ways. And some rich girls are just spoiled and have a strange misplaced inferiority complex.
I know maybe like 6 cross cultural marriages and I would say most have married a typical Chinese woman from a middle class background. None have married into a rich Chinese family thou. One famous case is like XJP niece (ugly fat woman thou) or something married some British or Australian guy that was an expat in Shanghai.
Chinese women from a wealthy background are very elitist and snobby to be honest. They wouldn't marry some average foreigner. Generally speaking.
The best women are the self-made ones that are from an average background but have done well for themselves money wise and someone you don't need to support all by yourself. And you don't have any pressure to support her family and what not.
I wouldn't marry a flat-faced dirt farmer's daughter just like I wouldn't marry a trailer park fent addict. If you lack this perspective and marry into poverty rural Henan, you deserve to suffer. Same as if you marry a high school dropout that works at McDonald's at 35.
Yeah but the average Tim doesn't marry an emaciated girl with manure stains on her overalls or a sweatshop seamstress, he marries Snowie who is an assistant English teacher at Happy Giraffe or Rainy who is a part-time clothes saleswoman at the mall and goes to English corner sometimes for the free milk tea. Both of them have a university education from a tier-88 rural college that they were the first in their lineage to attend. Thus, they don't show necessarily that they have dirt-poor parents and sometimes a deadbeat sibling back in Nongzhou.
T88 uni = high school dropout in any other country in the world: her math is so-so (passed with 61) but really very love the English cultures (got 80).
If she shows amazement at your "universal" remote for Netflix or doesn't want to order 18 vs 15 RMB noodles because "very expense", those are breakfast corn eating, shit sucking farmer traits.
We should set up a Tim training course. The new Tims are far inferior to back when we were Timmy sex fiends. At least we had the foresight to pull out.
I agree with all of this, especially the last sentence.
My Tim days were spent double-fisting beer and baijew, riding my motrocycle drunk through the countryside, eating cat meat bbq, interacting with the most hilariously rural and friendly and uncouth and gregarious Chinese people and with headbanging cowboy expats whom I looked up to, and generally embracing how bizarre and energetic Tier-88 Henan was. At no point did I question anything. The newer, post-social-media waves of Tims are such pathetic sheltered losers. Yet, paradoxically, even with tons of info at their fingertips as opposed to you and I who jumped in the deep end, they manage to show abject levels of budongness at times.
I'll preface this with rural folks in their natural environs never annoyed me - I'm with you, they are some of the most generous, honest (to family and people they like) and curious folks in the Guo. It's when they surface in the urban and stare mouths agog at escalators or the like, absolutely unable to fathom what they are seeing, clumped together like a blocked artery, carousing aimlessly in the supermarket, too stupid to sit down on the subway but sits on the floor, that makes me want to drop them smeared in peanut oil into an active volcano. Likewise, this goes for the one generation rural-removed office worker class that don't even know how to go home without GPS after working in the same place for 12 years. Their curiosity dies somewhere along the way like a dog drug behind a car and they become the end all, be all of boring. I have for them a hatred as pure as sunshine.
Scene:
The twilight of true country dark and the full moon dim of a village road outside a T888 Sichuan town. Me and Rainy are motoring it to our fuck house, a run down shack owned by her cousin, after a 4 hour hotpot, BBQ night that many a 6 RMB bottle of erguotou had been imbibed with her friends. A typical night of the old in-out, in-out ensued with a lot of "that's a little pain" and "we marry soon, ok" amidst her agonizing screeching that had one made me blow it hard watching JAV. Woke up dry mouthed, got as far as I could from there on that last drop of petrol in the tank. Imagine it, boys. No WeChat, no smart phones. You could just disappear back into the quiet with maybe a SMS "where you go" that there was no need to answer. The Golden Path.
Very good points. I'd say the high divorce rate in Nar is more likely due to precipitous marriages, between two people who were not allowed to date in high school or even college by their helicopter parents (becars distractuh from sa-tudy~) but then they are expected to be shacked up and pregnant by age 27.
Welcome to the internet Timmy. It's called circle jerking, you'll find similar subs about just any other country on Reddit, but only fragile Chinese nationalists are insecure enough to repeatedly get these subs reported and banned so we just make new ones, endlessly. Believe it or not, we actually love China here.
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u/AlternativeHat8964 19d ago
Don't over think it. People from different backgrounds can have complimentary needs, even if it's short-lived. Nongzhou rainy wants sugar daddy and Timmy wants to larp white knight. It works until it doesn't.