Look beyond the dazzle of foreigners

To have a foreign boyfriend or not may be a question for many Chinese girls, especially on occasions such as "Single's Day", Nov 11.

I have met many Chinese women besotted with foreigners. Most of them were in smaller cities where people have limited experience of foreigners. Such women find foreigners alluring - and by "foreigners" I mean Westerners primarily - for various reasons. But in large measure, Chinese women, again outside major cities, seem infatuated with Western men because they think Westerners are wealthier, more resourceful, plain-speaking and straight-forward and, hence, easier to handle than "complex" Chinese men.

The idea that all, or even most, foreigners are wealthy is of course a fallacy. Everywhere in the world, most people struggle to make ends meet, and only a small minority are wealthy. While foreigners on short-term visits to China, or on an expatriate salary package, might appear wealthy, the majority of foreigners, whether they live in China or in their own countries, are like you and me: angst-ridden, burdened with problems, worried about mortgage and children's expenses and other costs that seem to keep rising. Yet the wider story is that some Western men's perceived sense of exaltedness drives them into losing their sense of proportion once they find themselves at the center of attention, perhaps for the first time in their adult life. Some of these men take to womanizing. I've seen such men regularly prowling through bars and clubs. Many of them visit China for "the adventure", unconstrained as they are by community reputation or bonds in an alien land, and once the novelty wears off, they flee leaving no trace of their deeds behind.