This is the second week where a Wednesday has gone wrong. This time it was a telecommunications upgrade in our estate. So apologies for yesterday and here’s the post ….

In one of my less recent posts, I related the story of the young Indian checkout lady, looking for a Western man to marry. I ended with a rhetorical question regarding orang putih:

Only, you and I know that they’re not always all they’re cracked up to be either, don’t we?

The problem is this. When people see J and I together, they jump to a particular conclusion. This conclusion isn’t limited to people who live in south-east Asia. I’ve found it in every country I’ve lived in. And the conclusion is this: white man with an Asian woman, huh? Wow, he must really be a control freak. Probably couldn’t hack marrying another white woman because he has some kind of inferiority complex, so he went for a more docile Asian chick.

Now, anybody with that notion, if they ever care to speak to us, will be disabused of it quite smartly within — oh — about three nanoseconds. But, if they don’t, they’ll continue to think that. Even my friend Parvathy’s husband, Ramesh, confided the same to me during a characteristic Malaysian bout of offhand candour that still takes me by surprise from time to time.

“I looked at your husband,” Ramesh told me, “and I thought he was like all the other Western men. He looks so serious, I thought — for sure — he was a very arrogant and controlling man. Then I met him, and he is completely different to what I expected. He’s very friendly and gracious and I like him very much. He’s very different to the kind of Western man I usually meet.” Now Ramesh has had a lot to do with all kinds of — literally, thousands of — people for decades, being a senior public servant associated with immigration matters, so I found it an interesting vindication of my own personal observations of how Western men are perceived in south-east Asia.

Bear with me while I attempt to pull some threads together. (Fair warning: I may not succeed.) First, there are a lot of independently-minded Asian women out there. Second, there are, by sheer geographical circumstance, fewer single Western men available. Using the law of supply and demand, supply thus significantly outstrips demand. And, just as with house-buying, where a seller’s market means the vendor can ask for more money, a supply overbalance means the Western men can be as arrogant as they want and still score the women. Just keep your eyes open on a Friday night around Singapore’s inner-city streets and you’ll see what I mean.

Secondly, it requires a certain amount of courage to approach somebody and a tad more than that again to approach somebody not of your default cultural group. So, it’s the more aggressive people who are going to score first. And where you have people with those bigger risk-taking characteristics, I believe you have a greater propensity to, shall we say, a certain brashness in their approach.

Thirdly, within this narrow context, who are the orang putih men who move to s-e Asia? For a start, they are not the staid types, content to potter around their little corner of England, or wherever, till the day they die. They are usually open to adventure, to the exotic, to the lure of money and prestige. And they are either young … or getting on in middle age.

What do you get when you put all these together? They are not so much relationships as business transactions, to my mind. Each party has certain social and mercantile expectations that they believe only the other can satisfy, whether it be the lure of a slim, exotic-looking woman who gazes adoringly at you while you drop a couple of thousand dollars at the nearest Isetan store, or a White Man you can flaunt to your local friends who isn’t as sensitive to Saving Face or appearances. In fact, the white man is focused almost entirely on appearances, but it’s just that his idea of them meshes with the woman’s rather better than a local man’s.

Within this seething milieu of money, cachet and smooth, submissive skin up for grabs, how many genuine relationships do you think get forged? So I can certainly understand the scepticism with which my own marriage is viewed, although that’s becoming less obvious and more tinged with respect now that we’re getting older and it’s obvious J isn’t with me because of my svelte figure, teetering heels or perky breasts. (Ah gravity, thou art a bitch!*)

Still, in such an environment, it’s difficult to separate the mercantile from the genuine and it colours (oops, sorry, bad pun) all views of Asian-other couples. I’m sorry to say, even mine.

(I know I have quite a few Singaporeans reading this blog. Any of you like to weigh in?)

(*) Quote from Sheldon Cooper, “Big Bang Theory”.