There’s nothing wrong with writing a piece about the plight of being a single white woman in China. What is wrong, though, is publishing a piece of Daily Mail click-bait full of borderline racism, unfounded claims and outright untruths – which is what self-proclaimed journalist and Xinhua employee Nikki Aaron did this weekend.
The lame wordplay of the headline (granted, not her fault) to enforce a lame stereotype – it’s funny because Chinese eat sweet-and-sour pork! – is bad enough but to be expected. It quickly becomes evident, though, that the sub-editor was right on the money. “The streets of [Beijing] are filled with smug-looking Western guys holding hands with their pint-sized Chinese princesses,” Aaron claims. “Petite and eager to please, these girls are so cute I don’t blame the guys.”
It’s not just the broad brushstrokes about Chinese women being small and “eager to please” (ha!) – although that is, I imagine, quite annoying to read if you are a Chinese woman. They are clichés, of course, which is the Mail’s stock in trade, but even Aaron’s clichés are hopelessly out of date. Beijing in 2013 has all sort of racial pairings. There are people from all over the world here, of all ages, shapes and sizes. Something for everyone you could say. To suggest dating in Beijing is a dichotomy between “below-average [Western] men” and “traditional, overly effeminate” Chinese men is ridiculous. When Aaron says she is “either scraping the bottom of a metaphorical barrel of Western men, or dating local guys, with all the challenges that entail,” one has to wonder what kind of dives she is hanging out in. Has she spent the last six years exclusively in The Den?
The wince-inducing China clichés are duly paraded for the gratification of Mail readers. Orientalism? “[Chinese men] represented adventure, rebellion and a whole new way to escape the status quo.” China expertise? “I understand what really makes Chinese people tick” (plus this) “the quickest way to impress someone is to ask whether they have eaten.” After several paragraphs of this bilge, the nub: Aaron has reached a verdict based on a study sample of two Chinese men. “My romantic endeavors will always be severely tested while I remain in China,” she warns us. But why has this glamorous Daily Mail singleton thrown in the towel, and to such a fate (the Mail relishes a bit of Bridget Jones whenever it can)? The bloody men, that’s why!
“It was an accumulation of things I found increasingly hard to ignore, such as his criticism of Western women (who he would condemn for being overweight, aggressive and too easy) and my deteriorating patience with his personal habits,” she writes of her ex, adding some personal detail for the record: “the stomach-churning sound he made as he spat in the bathroom sink – a daily habit of most locals – or his insistence on wearing the same unwashed clothes for several days in a row.”
Hold the front page, Mr Dacre – we have a blonde in distress! Aaron reckons Chinese men are patriarchal and spit too much. One can picture the editorial process: “Yah, hi Nikki, love the piece, it’s a great fit for us. Beijing sounds like a bloody nightmare! But look, we need more stuff that our readers can empathize with. Like, aren’t all Chinese men mummy’s boys or something? I read that somewhere. What’s that? Little Emperors? Yes, that’s perfect, Nikki, stick that under the bit about how they don’t wash.”
Beijing being a small place in some ways, it wasn’t too hard to track down the phlegmatic villain of the piece: the hapless-sounding ex-boyfriend. Unsurprisingly, friends say he’s none too happy about being portrayed as a male chauvinist pig.
“It seems to be just a lazy and offensive composite of all the bad stereotypes associated with Chinese men,” one complained. “The irony is, he’s not in any way like that – he couldn’t be further from the truth. He’s more Westernized than most expats.”
And the overbearing mother? “No different to anyone’s relationship with their parents – Western or Chinese. It’s just bizarre, that someone who has lived out here for so long, has such prejudicial views. It must be very hurtful to have all your dirty laundry aired in public, in a national newspaper no less.”
Readers can believe who or what they like, of course. Throwing friends (and former friends) under a bus for a pay cheque and printing stock FeMail gibberish is pretty much the Mail’s entire business model, so even why bother with a rebuttal?
Aaron is clearly trying to parlay her time in China into becoming some kind of Asia/Asian dating “expert” back in England – just think of the potential appearance fees on Trisha!
[Image via Daily Mail, Flickr]
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