本帖最后由 满仓 于 2014-10-19 20:19 编辑
【中文标题】西方女人为什么不喜欢中国男人？
【原文标题】Why Won't Western Women Date Chinese Men?
【登载媒体】赫芬顿邮报
【原文作者】Jocelyn Eikenburg
【原文链接】http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jocelyn-eikenburg/why-wont-western-women-date-chinese-men_b_5827240.html?utm_hp_ref=china
为什么像我和丈夫这样的西方女人与中国男人的结合那么少？
1999年9月——我来中国的第一个月——我迷上了一个男人。
第一眼看到他那芝麻香油般褐色的大眼睛，我的心融化了。在和他接触的过程中，他从未让我失望。他总是为我开门，总是一直把我送到家门口。他帮我在二手市场买了一辆自行车，还用他自己的黑色自行车载着我到处去转。当我患感冒的时候，他陪我去意愿，给我读《心灵鸡汤》。他甚至还和我一起看《廊桥遗梦》这部催人泪下的影片，影片结束时，他也掉了几滴眼泪。他比我遇到的任何一个男人都更加绅士。
他是个中国人，名字叫“田”，来自郑州。
每当我想到自己对田一发不可收拾的感情，我觉得和我在西班牙度过的一个学期没有什么差别。我认识的所有美国女孩都主动和当地的西班牙人调情，为什么不呢？身处异邦在某种程度上把我们从美国传统上对男人和约会的期望中解放出来，我们可以尝试新鲜的事情，甚至可以彻底改变自己，改变自己对爱情的态度。
在中国也做同样的事情再正常不过了。我当时还不大了解中国，最初我只能借助字典和极大的耐心用中文沟通，所有对中国文化的知识都来自于那年夏天我从图书馆里搜集到的信息。但我想，有这种感觉的肯定不止我一个人，学校里其他那些外国女教师肯定也产生过同样的感情。
中国郑州的街道，我在这里和一个中国人一见钟情。
我本来是这样想的，直到有一天我与一位同事吃午饭。
我的一位白人女同事说：“每次我抵达美国的机场，第一眼看到的就是我们的男人，他们真是又高又帅。我可以盯着他们看一个小时，就好像我是一个从未见过外国男人的中国人。”
至少她还不像我另外一位更加直言不讳的同事。有一次我们在郑州的街道上骑自行车，在街边停下看着大部分由男人组成的人流在路口穿梭。她一副厌恶的表情。
“中国男人看起来不怎么吸引人。”
“你为什么这么说？”我问。
“我不知道……反正他们就是不吸引人。”她似乎轻易就否定了中国全部的男性居民。
这些女人凭什么说中国男人就不能约会？当我思考与田的一见钟情的过程时，这个问题困扰了我很久，但这不是我最后一次反对这种观点。我继续和当地人约会，最后和一个杭州同事结婚了，这时我才了解到，在中国的大部分外国女人都和我的杭州同事有同样的想法。有时候，这种厌恶的程度令人发指。我曾经共事过的一个欧洲女人在2001年对我说，尽管他觉得所有中国男人都令人厌恶，但她比较喜欢中国小孩。
我的丈夫和我的外甥，我觉得他们都很可爱。
但是，有关“中国男人不能约会”这个观点最神奇、最有教育意义的信息来自网络，我在那些外派到中国的外国人的博客和论坛上，直接看到了那些冰冷的、黑白分明的现实。
2010年，我看到了一个生活在上海的外国人写的一篇博客，这个博客现在已经没有了。她是一个白种美国女人，文章的标题是“约会是什么样子的？”文章还有一篇配图，是80年代美国电影《十六支蜡烛》中的剧照。Long Duk Dong，这个被认为是好莱坞塑造的最令人讨厌的亚洲男性角色，与一个比他高一头的女人笨拙地拥抱在一起，但这还不是最糟糕的。当她面带满意的表情把头和他靠在一起时，他把脸埋在她的胸部，淫邪地盯着双峰，似乎要把女孩从幸福的幻想拉回残酷的现实。
（译者配图）
于是我开始了解多年来美国电影、电视和媒体所塑造出来的亚洲男人的负面形象：娘娘气、软弱、迂腐，以及最糟糕的是性无能和无力胜任工作。写这些文章的女人从未具体提起过中国的男人具备以上那些特征，但这不重要，Long Duk Dong是个现成的例子。
在遍布中国的那些崇尚言论自由的外国人论坛中，我发现她的文章引领了时尚潮流。我曾经尝试在这些论坛中搜索与中国男人约会的经历，希望能有所发现，但我很快就放弃了。每当有人敢于触碰这个话题，很快就有一批人跳出来，用一大堆幼稚的语言评论中国男人，就像电影对Long Duk Dong的偏见一样。论坛的风向逐渐转化成低俗的、脏话连篇的咒骂，就像厕所门背后的那些语言。
无论是论坛还是博客，有关中国男人的负面评论与心理学家张结海的发现基本是一致的，他的调查报告《西方女人眼中的中国男人》在2010年发表于中国新华社（我在博客中贴出了一篇英文译文）。这位上海社会科学院的教授通过问卷的方式调查了100多位西方女性，包括法国人、德国人和美国人，之后还专门与20多位在上海参与调查的人面谈。尽管受访者们称赞中国男人的某些品质，比如“顾家”、“愿意为女人花钱”、“严肃对待男女关系”，但优点仅限于此。接下来是占更大比例的负面印象，中国男人“不那么绅士”、“糟糕的体型”、“不喜欢锻炼”、“没有个性”、“缺少主见”，甚至还有人批评他们不注意个人卫生。有一个美国受访者批评好莱坞，说它向全世界宣扬了中国男人的负面形象，我不禁怀疑她是不是在说《十六支蜡烛》。
张的研究——全世界的西方女人都对中国男人有一致的贬损态度——让我发现，这并不是一个单独存在于某一个外国人小圈子里的问题。
这个棘手的问题，曾经让我和我的丈夫试图放弃这段感情。
纵观整个东亚地区和西方国家，你会发现一个显而易见的亚洲跨种族通婚事实：很多亚洲女人和西方男人在一起，但绝少见到亚洲男人和西方女人在一起。一个朋友在他的一篇名为《亚洲男人与西方女人的跨种族婚姻真的那么稀少吗——香港的实地研究》的文章中，发现了一些有趣的事实。在十年时间里，他仔细观察亚洲人跨种族婚姻的状况。结果呢？他发现了114对西方男人与亚洲女人的结合，但只有4对亚洲男人与西方女人的结合（包括他自己和他的巴西妻子）。你可以把香港换成该地区或者世界上任何一个其它国家，我相信结果应当没有太大差别。即使是那些华裔美国男人，也无法感受到他的美国同胞们享受到的爱情，只能在类似《亚洲男人就不能约会吗？》的文章中发发牢骚。
至于为什么那么少的西方女人与中国男人约会的原因，一些在中国生活的外国人认为，文化差异是主要原因。我同意当你作为一个外国人，与当地人交往时，文化是一个重要因素。我也曾经经历过文化层面的误会，包括我自己的婚姻，还曾经撰文讲述在维系一段跨文化的关系过程中，忽视文化差异会造成大问题。
但是，当我想到这个现象在世界上的普遍性，以及华裔西方人要比本国其他人更难实现跨种族婚姻这个事实，我知道文化差异——至少在两性关系方面——不能完全解释为什么西方女人很少与中国男人约会这个现象。当我想到，好莱坞具有种族歧视意味的漫画作为中国男人的标志在外国人之间传来传去，以及西方人都对中国男人持有极为负面的印象，我知道这里面有一些极其黑暗的东西。
如果继续下去，这个话题就会令人尴尬了。在中国的外国人一谈到中国的种族歧视，通常会说中国人的种族态度（比如他们对待黑人的方式）。这当然是一个值得我们持续关注的问题，但是那些外国人自己的所作所为呢？他们与生俱来的那种陈腐观念和对亚洲人和中国人的偏见呢？我们这些外国人什么时候才能直面这些问题？这是我们在自己国家漫不经心收拾行囊准备前往中土帝国时曾经考虑过的问题吗？
更重要的是，我们知道，在任何一个国家和任何一种文化中，都存在着多样化的个体的特性。世界上任何一个国家都是如此，包括中国。一旦某个人说中国的整个男性群体都不可以成为约会的对象，那么他就是在否定这种多样性的存在。相信我，如果你打开你的眼界和心扉，会发现不可思议的多样性存在。
我向中国的爱情敞开了眼界和心扉，找到了我的丈夫。
在我的博客中，有很多人留言讲述西方女人与中国男人之间的爱情故事，让我有幸自己经历这种非凡的体验。有个风趣的西安人，说他自己是“外国留学生变成了花花公子”。一个身体健壮的河北男人被他的西方妻子称作“中国的阿诺德•施瓦辛格”。一位来自安徽的作家，目前在上海研究英语文学，回想他在美国与一位黑人女性难忘的爱情故事。
到今年秋天的时候，我来到中国已经整整15年了，也是我了解到西方女人拒绝与中国男人约会这个现象15年了。这么多年之后，我依然在思考这个问题。我不禁在想，究竟还要过多少个十年，外国人才不会再纠结于这个问题。
原文：
Why are couples of Western women and Chinese men -- such as me and my husband -- so rare?
In September 1999 -- my first month in China -- I had a huge crush on a guy.
My heart melted at that first sight of his big sesame-oil brown eyes. And I as I came to know him better, he didn't disappoint me. He always opened doors for me and wouldn't leave my side until he escorted me all the way to the entrance to my apartment. He helped me buy a bicycle at the secondhand market and even gave me a ride there on the back of his black metal bike. When I came down with the flu, he accompanied me to my therapy at the clinic and read to me from Chicken Soup for the Soul. He even watched The Bridges of Madison County with me -- one of the weepiest chick flicks ever made -- and actually shed a few tears when it ended. He was more of a gentleman toward me than any other man I had ever known.
He was Chinese, a man named Tian who grew up in Zhengzhou.
When I thought about my burgeoning crush for Tian, I figured it was no different from that college semester when I studied in Spain. All the American girls I knew liked flirting with the local Spaniards, and why not? The experience of being in a foreign country and culture somehow liberated us from our usual American expectations for men and dating itself. We could try new things. We could even reinvent ourselves and what it meant to be in love with someone.
It seemed natural and normal to do the same in China. I didn't know much about China back then -- a time when I could only communicate in Mandarin with a dictionary and lots of patience, and where my entire cultural knowledge was amassed from the library books on China I borrowed during the summer. But I figured surely I wasn't alone in my feelings. Surely the other female foreign teachers at my college had secret crushes of their own.
On the streets of Zhengzhou, China, the city where I first had a crush on a Chinese
Or so I thought, until one day when I was sharing lunch with my colleagues.
"Whenever I arrive at the airport in America, the first thing I notice is our men, how handsome and how tall they are," one of my white female colleagues mentioned over lunch. "I'll just stare at them for hours, as if I was Chinese and had never seen a foreign man before in my life."
At least that woman wasn't as blunt as another colleague, who used to bicycle with me through the streets of Zhengzhou. As we stopped on the corner of a side street and watched the mostly-male populous pedaling past us through the intersection, she grimaced.
"Chinese men don't really seem that attractive."
"How can you say that?" I asked her.
"I don't know... they just aren't." She sounded too casual for a woman who just dismissed the entire male population in China.
How could these women just write off all Chinese men as undateable? The question haunted me as I pondered my crush on Tian. But it wouldn't be the last time I would find myself up against these ideas. As I continued to date the locals in China and eventually married a fellow from Hangzhou, I would come to realize that most expat women in China agreed with my Zhengzhou colleagues. And sometimes, their dislike was just shocking. A European woman I worked with in 2001 famously told me that, while she found all Chinese men completely repulsive, she considered Chinese children so adorable.
My husband posing with our nephew. I think they're both adorable.
But some of my most fascinating and educative encounters with this idea of "Chinese men as undateable" happened online, when I came face-to-face with these opinions distilled into the cold, black-and-white reality of blog posts and expat forums.
Back in 2010, I discovered a post on a now-defunct blog authored by expats in Shanghai. The post was written by a white American woman based in Shanghai and titled, "So, how's the dating scene?" The photo leading off the post was a still from the 1980s American movie Sixteen Candles featuring Long Duk Dong, considered one of Hollywood's most offensive Asian male stereotypes. In the still, he's locked in an awkward slow-dance embrace with a girl an entire head taller than him, but that's not even the worst of it. While she leans her head on his in perfect contentment, he has his cheek buried in her bosom while staring at it with a prurient curiosity that surely would have snapped the girl out of her reverie.
At the time I was only beginning to learn about negative stereotypes of Asian men that American TV, movies and the media had perpetuated over the years: effeminate, weak, nerdy and, worst of all, sexless and less endowed in a (ahem) certain department. The woman who wrote that post never specifically said any of these things about local men in China, but she didn't have to. Long Duk Dong took care of that.
Then again, her post appears downright classy in comparison to what I've read in the free-for-all world of anonymous expat forums across China. There was a brief time when I tried combing these forums in search of discussions about dating Chinese men, hoping to gain some insights, but I soon gave that up. Whenever anyone dared to broach the subject, usually someone would quickly pounce on the thread and sully it with some juvenile comment about Chinese men that wasn't all that different from that Long Duk Dong movie still. The worst of these threads generally devolved into a low-brow, expletive-laden conversation more appropriate for a bathroom stall.
Whether in forums or blogs, the negative online discourse about Chinese men is consistent with Psychologist Zhang Jiehai's findings from surveys on "Chinese Men in the Eyes of Western Women" as reported by China's Xinhua News Agency in 2010 (I provided an English translation on my blog). This Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences professor surveyed over 100 Western women from diverse countries including France, Germany and the USA via questionnaires, and then interviewed over 20 of them in a focus group in Shanghai. While respondents praised Chinese men for certain qualities -- "looking after one's family," "willing to spend money on women," and "relatively serious about relationships between men and women" -- the admiration ended there. Negative impressions ultimately dominated as the women criticized Chinese men as "not so gentlemanly," "poor physique, not enough exercise," "no personality, lacking unique opinions," even condemning them on perceived personal hygiene problems. One American participant in the study actually blamed Hollywood for projecting a poor image of Chinese men around the world, and I couldn't help but wonder if she was thinking of Sixteen Candles at the time.
Zhang's findings -- that Western women from around the world have consistently pejorative ideas about Chinese men -- remind me this isn't a problem confined to some insular expat circles in China.
It's a troubling problem, one that even gets me and my husband down.
Look across East Asia or, for that matter, any country in the Western world, and you'll notice a very revealing gap in the Asian interracial dating world: lots of Asian women and Western men together, and nary an Asian man with a Western woman in sight. A friend provided some astonishing anecdotal evidence in an article titled "Are Interracial Couples of Asian Men & Western Women Really that Rare? A Field Report from Hong Kong." During his entire 10-day trip, he decided to count the Asian interracial couples he spotted. The result? A total of 114 couples of Western men and Asian women versus only six couples of Asian men and Western women (including him and his Brazilian wife). You could substitute Hong Kong with the name of any country or region in the world and end up with comparable results. Even Chinese-American men don't feel the love from their fellow Americans, lamenting this in essays such as "Are Asian Men Undateable?"
In search of explanations for why so few Western women date Chinese men, some China expats have suggested cultural differences are the primary reason. I agree that culture plays a role when you're a foreigner in China dating the locals. I've experienced my share of cultural misunderstandings in my relationships in China, including my own marriage, and have even blogged about why it's actually harmful to ignore cultural differences in a cross-cultural relationship.
Yet when I think about the global reach of this problem, and the fact that it's even tough for Western-born Chinese to score a date outside of their own race, I know deep down that cultural differences -- as much as they matter in relationships -- cannot alone account for why few Western women date Chinese men. When I think about how a racist caricature from Hollywood gets tossed around among expats as a symbol of Chinese men -- and Westerners from around the world harbor consistently negative views of Chinese men -- I realize there's a dark side to this whole discussion.
So here's where the conversation gets a little uncomfortable. Whenever expats discuss racism in China, we usually focus on Chinese people and their racist attitudes (such as the experience of being black in China). These are very critical discussions that we need and should continue to have. But what about the conversations about expats themselves and their own homegrown stereotypes and prejudices about Asians and Chinese people? When will we as expats begin to confront these, our very own baggage that we inadvertently pack along with us in our overseas journeys to the Middle Kingdom?
More importantly, when we will learn that in any given country and culture, there exists a diversity of individuals and personalities? That's true anywhere in the world, including China. Whenever someone dismisses China's entire male population as undateable, they're essentially denying that diversity. And believe me, there is incredible diversity when you actually open your eyes and your heart to the possibility.
I opened my eyes and my heart to the possibility of love in China, and found it with my husband, John.
I'm reminded of the many love stories that Western women and Chinese men have submitted to my blog, giving me the honor and privilege to experience that on a personal level. There's the fun-loving fellow from Xi'an who described himself as a "foreign student turned party boy," the beefcake husband from Hebei she considered "China's answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger," the Shanghai-based writer from Anhui who studied English literature and mused about his unforgettable romances with black women in the US.
This fall marks 15 years since I first set foot in China. It's also 15 years since I first learned that most Western women in China refuse to date Chinese men. Yet a decade and a half later, I'm still pondering this issue. And I can't help but wonder how many decades it will take before it's no longer an issue for expats in China.
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