8 Asians

By “Cleanchino” Cho Although I am not a proud lurker on Facebook, I still continue to browse the ever-so revealing News Feed on a regular basis. It’s part of my ritual during my daily commute home from work. Facebook is not only just a social media profile page, but it is a marketplace for sharing information. While scrolling down, I find an interesting image posted on an acquaintance’s posting. I was profoundly confused after reading [...] Continue »

It’s the last week that the Asian Art Museum is exhibiting its Terracotta Warrior exhibit. Be part of a special group event organized by Datepress, which includes a private showing for a small group followed by dinner arranged for each couple / pair afterwards. Grab your partner and travel to the Qin-era where you will enjoy wine and appetizers before a guided tour of the Warrior’s exhibit and then finish the evening with a customized [...] Continue »

Being gay and Asian means hiding a part of yourself from many in your life, and this is especially true in Asian countries compared with those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the United States or Canada. Times have changed, and it’s probably easier now in the United States than it’s ever been before to be both gay and Asian (the way to be a truly bad Asian). But in countries like [...] Continue »

Today I realized that five years ago, my mother-in-law valued me at $10,000.00. Louisa Lim’s piece on NPR, For Chinese Women, Marriage Depends On Right Bride Price, sheds light on that seemingly arbitrary check I received before my wedding day. Can’t really fault the Chinese. It’s evolutionary survival in its purest form. Today it isn’t about finding the biggest, strongest man who can hunt lions for you. It’s about finding the richest man who can [...] Continue »

As I had blogged about when reviewing Seeking Asian Female, Director Debbie Lum had hundreds of hours of footage for her documentary that she did not use. Her original intent prior to focusing on the story of Steven and Sandy was to explore “yellow fever” – or the strong preference of non-Asian men, predominately white men, who have a fetish for Asian or Asian American women. Lum is a guest on This American Life on [...] Continue »

Boystown is the working title for a proposed web series about 3 gay men, with the lead character being an Asian Canadian. The three lead actors are Richard Lee, Adamo Ruggiero, and Ben Lewis and the footage is from a short film called “Gaysian,” which is a comedy about a gay Asian man dealing with different forms of racism in the gay world, and even in himself. Says Director/Writer Austin Wong: There is an epidemic [...] Continue »

It is a truth universally acknowledged that [those who assume] a man in good fortune must be in want of a wife. Bullshit, I say, as I try to purge my mind from the insidious exposure I have had to the online charlatan presenting herself as a paragon of women’s equality, Joy Chen. Her pedantic bi-lingual blog and book Do Not Marry Before Age 30, which has been available worldwide in Chinese, are both an [...] Continue »

Chris Phan, a newly elected Councilman for the city of Garden Grove, had a unique way to celebrate being sworn in – making a very public wedding proposal to his girlfriend Cindy Pham!  According to this interview, he checked first with the City Clerk and the City Attorney to make sure that there were no rules and laws that would prohibit him from proposing.   Pham and Phan first met three years ago. Phan has [...] Continue »

by Leeland Lee In a piece published online last Thursday in The New York Times entitled “A Messy Relationship,” Titi Nguyen describes her mother’s pivotal role in introducing her to her future significant other, a man by the name of Douglas. The narrative takes an intriguing turn because Nguyen’s parents both work as housekeepers for Douglas’s parents. Also discussed at great lengths is their age difference: Douglas is 16 years older than Nguyen, who is [...] Continue »

It’s not uncommon for single men and women to venture online to find love, but in Shanghai, some aging parents have been taking the initiative for their adult children with the “Marriage Market” in the People’s Square. Every weekend, these mothers and fathers (armed with a piece of paper outlining their single child’s assets) meet in a corner of the park to find a suitable match–kind of like what a listing of online dating profiles [...] Continue »

How much is an Asian American spouse worth? Janis Spindel’s new Asian American matchmaking service will charge Asian American men a minimum of $5000 to match them with a prospective wife. What makes her think that men will pay that? She describes why in this press release.

We have talked about Asians and Jews a number of times at 8asians, from Jewish/Asian marriages, to building bonds between Asian and Jewish communities and comparing limits on Asian admissions to elite colleges to admission limits on Jews during the 20th century.  The recent marriage between Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan has heightened interest in this subject, so when couple Helen Kim and Noah Levitt published a paper about Jewish /Asian intermarriage, it made the [...] Continue »