How to meet an Asian woman.

Everyone in the world now is marrying Asian women, whether they want to or not. Yes, it’s true! But that doesn’t mean the experience of having kids with Asians is uniform across the globe. For instance, Sascha Matuszak of ChengduLiving.com (who actually lives in Shanghai, go figure) is wrangling with his parents over what his marriage to a Chinese woman means:

My parents were and probably to a much lesser extent still are convinced that Bean (the pet name by which I call my wife) got pregnant on purpose. Either to keep me in her life or to get a green card, but basically on purpose. I’m not exactly sure how she did it, but I guess she told her anti-sperm defenses to stand down and informed her egg that the first lil Sascha that staggered through the phelopian was to be gobbled up. Immediately.

It was my fault too I guess, but only for getting duped by the manipulative Asian woman desperately trying to leave her Third World Country for the golden fields of grain in the USA. This whole spiel is something we hear every so often from expats and perhaps also their families and it does exist, this Asian Woman using sex with a Western Man to improve her situation and my parents have heard it and seen it enough to assume that it could be the case with Bean and I.

For me, this is kind of fascinating, as his situation is almost directly the inverse of mine. Whereas my parents were totally accepting of Jean, her parents were (and to a much lesser extent still are) skeptical of me—an impoverished writer who happened not to be Taiwanese.

In fact (and here is where we get to the point of this pointless post), I wrote about this a year ago, for Saveur magazine, in “Taipei, Family Style,” an article that, I learned the other day, is now a finalist for a James Beard Award. So, when you’re done commiserating with Sascha in Shanghai, please send bribes—in the form of cash and black truffles—to any Beard judges you happen to meet at the local Mickey D’s.