Asian Gal with White Guy

She is of Asian origin, he is of Western origin. This is a very common combination for interracial relationships in fiction (as well as in Real Life). A combination that is not only common, but also archetypal, for better or worse. Authors making this combination have a whole history of stereotypes and prejudices to use or avert.

Sadly, interracial relationships in general are still a touchy subject for many. Sometimes with notions that the women of a certain ethnic group or whatever "belong" to the men of that group, or that any woman or man who makes intimate alliances outside their group is a Race Traitor. When it comes to the particular case of Asian women with white men, we also have the whole issue of Orientalism, with its history of stereotypes about "white men rescuing brown women from brown men" and with Asian women being portrayed as exotic, submissive and hyper-sexualized.

So, back to our Asian Alice and our Western Bob. Why are these two characters together? Well, it's really a sliding scale. At the top of the sliding scale, the narrative treat both characters with respect. In the middle, both characters are treated with a respect that may feel objectifying and/or built on very outdated stereotypes. At the bottom, the narrative is condescending or openly hostile against the woman or the man or both. Six individual options along this sliding scale are as follows:

  1. Maybe they simply like each other as individuals, race not being a factor at all.
  2. Maybe race is a little factor – at least one of them have a preference for the other race without being obsessed or anything. They think that the other person, as an individual, looks nice and have a nice personality – and that the racial background contributes a bit to this.
  3. Maybe he's an awesome Mighty Whitey, or she's an exotic Mysterious Waif or something. Probably both. In other words, the story itself has been inspired by such classical stereotypes: some kind of fetishism is probably going on here, but the characters are fetishes rather then fetishists.
  4. Maybe one of them, usually the man, has a full-scale fetish for the other race.
  5. Maybe one of them is deluded, incorrectly believing the other to be a living stereotype. The difference between this and level three is that it's in the character's head rather then in the narrative itself.
  6. Finally, the whole thing could also be based on a negative stereotype or a few: she's poor and uneducated, possibly a prostitute. He's a loser who can't get a "real" (white) woman.

This trope is almost never inverted in Western fiction as the White Male Lead will often function as an Audience Surrogate. It is common wisdom in the Western entertainment industry that the white male audience cannot identify with a non-White male character, especially if said non-White lead hooks up with a white woman.

Compare Where Da White Women At?, which is about black guys and white girls hooking up, Black Gal on White Guy Drama which involves black girls and white guys, and Asian Baby Mama, where this type of relationship doesn't end well. If it's on the lower end of the sliding scale above, the gal in the relationship may use Asian Speekee Engrish.

Examples of Asian Gal with White Guy include:

Anime & Manga

  • In a strange version of this trope, the Japanese Konoka of Mahou Sensei Negima once mentions to the Welsh Negi that she has a thing for "foreigners" (i.e. Caucasians). Of course, it turns out that she likes her half-demon best friend even more... though really, can you get much more foreign than someone who is ethnically from another dimension on one parent's side without departing from one's own species entirely?
  • Barefoot Gen: A girl who has been raped by American soldiers decides to prostitute herself to them in order to support her younger sister.
  • Code Geass: The outrageously gorgeous Kallen Stadtfeld has a Japanese mother and a Britannian father. And her mother is the maid.
    • Also inverted in the first season, since Brittanian Princess Euphemia's boyfriend is none other than her personal knight, Suzaku Kururugi (Japanese). He is the lower status individual on pretty nearly every scale, but he kicks ass and likes being told what to do, and she's a total sweetheart, so it's actually pretty well balanced.
  • Considering that the nation-tans of Axis Powers Hetalia tend to have personalities based on National Stereotypes, this trope sometimes comes into effect when the fandom pairs an Asian nation with a non-Asian one. It occurs the most frequently with Japan, the most stereotypically Asian nation-tan whose most common partner in fanworks, Greece, happens to have a clear interest in his culture and language in canon. Even when he's paired up with another Western nation, there's usually an undercurrent of said Western nation being attracted to Japan's 'exotic'-ness.
    • Note, however, that this is not necessarily bad as it's usually implied that it works both ways, with Japan being attracted to his Western love interest mainly because of their very Western/nation-based bluntness or easygoing nature, and their focus is often on personality dynamics as opposed to, say, specific Asian fetishes. Plus, many fanworks depict the other Asian nations as Japan's family (even if "family" is relative for nations), so it's not like he has a lot of romantic prospects outside of Western nations in them.
    • Also frequently happens with Hong Kong and England, usually taking place between the Opium Wars and the return of Hong Kong to China. Russia and China might also count; while Russia is not western, he's still European and the dominant member of that relationship, whereas China is the strange, exotic but disadvantaged one who ends up strongly influenced by Russia, i.e. China becoming communist.
  • The Fullmetal Alchemist manga has Mei from Xing (a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of China) who dreams about meeting a tall, handsome white gentleman and is very eager to meet Ed from Amestris (a nation based largely on a mish-mash of 20's-era Europe) for this reason. Unfortunately, it turns out that Ed doesn't fit her expectations of him...but luckily for her, his brother Al does fit her ideal (although you have to take his word for it at that point in time) and they're implicitly paired together in the finale! Admittedly, this is more like the quasi-Asian girl having a specific preference that not all quasi-white men fit, instead of a general preference for white men, but it still kinda fits.
    • Extra points for Ed and Al being genetic artifacts of an extinct race on their father's side?
  • Gender inverted in Itazura na Kiss, where the Englishwoman Christine "Chris" Robbins has a thing for Japanese men and is Genre Savvy enough to go to Japan specifically to find one to date and marry. At first she's interested in male lead Naoki, but ends up marrying Kotoko's former Dogged Nice Guy Kinnosuke. They have three kids, with their dad's features and their mom's eye/hair color scheme.
  • Detective Conan features a case where an American man was injured and cared for by a Japanese woman, who he ended up falling for. Naturally, this ended badly: When he left, she asked if he loved her. He left her a note that said "shine" (as in, he hoped to find a shining bride). Unfortunately, the woman could not read English very well (and was already suffering from depression due to being scarred by her father and a lack of anyone who could actually do something about it) read it as "shi ne" ("Go kill yourself"). She did so. When the man comes back three years later, he ends up killing a guy who was badmouthing her and her father (who he believed drove her to it). When he learns the truth about why she did it, he basically loses all will to do... pretty much anything.
  • In Cardcaptor Sakura, Clow Reed's mother was Chinese, and his father was British...leading to Clow producing an interesting fusion of Eastern and Western magic.
  • Sorta genderflipped (in a PG manner) in Hamtaro. The transfer student from Brazil, a Dark-Skinned Blond soccer genius named Roberto, is very popular among the girls of Hiroko (Laura)'s school.
  • In Ouran High School Host Club Tamaki Suou's parents are a genderflip of this trope. Tamaki's father Yuzuru is Japanese and his mother Anne-Sophie is French. This is like the first of the six listed scenarios above where race has nothing to do with their interest in each other. It produced a blond kid who believed every single weird stereotype about Japan before he actually came to live there, and for a while afterward, but he gets away with being insane and half-foreign because he's richer than God. (And pretty. The Japanese love pretty foreigners and look down on the rest.)
  • Subverted in Haikara-san ga Tooru. The male lead Shinobu Iijyuin was born from a mixed marriage (Japanese father, German mother), and later one of his love interests is Larissa, a Russian noblewoman and local Broken Bird. He, however, ends up with his Bunny Ears Lawyer Japanese love interest, Benio Hanamura, due to Larissa's death in the series's Bittersweet Ending. It does help that he and Benio, despite having been in an Arranged Marriage, really liked each other.
    • Even further subverted when you look at Shinobu and see that he has Hair of Gold and Blue Eyes, having inherited his German mother's looks. Which were shared by Larissa's dead husband... his long-lost maternal half-brother Sasha, whose father was a Russian count.
  • Lilly in Rainbow Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin.
  • Amakusa 1637: Seika "Mariana" Akishima, one of the Time Travelers thrown in the Nagasaki of the XVIII century, catches the eye of Dutch man named Jan who saved her life when she arrived into the past. In a subversion, she doesn't necessarily reciprocate Jahn's feelings for her.


Comic Books

  • Wolverine from X-Men was engaged to Mariko Yashida, a Japanese woman, when he became a samurai. The wedding was canceled at the last moment, however, thanks to villain Mastermind's manipulations. He did marry the Japanese Itsu, with whom he had a son, Daken. He also had a romance with free-spirited Yukio. The 90s 'toon mixes Lady Deathstrike (Yuriko Oyama) with Mariko to create this trope again.(Granted, she wants him dead now)
  • Reed Richards' former fianceé Alyssa Moy.
  • Played with in Corto Maltese: Corto and Shanghai Li develop feelings for each other, but don't act on them as Li turns out to already be married to a Chinese man whom she describes as basically a Nice Guy. This was also shown in The Movie.
  • The Official Couple in Les Innommables is Mac, an American, and Alix, a Chinese girl.
  • Two French-Belgian graphic novels that play the trope straight are Love Hotel and Tokyo Est Mon Jardin. In the first one, a clueless Westerner moves to Japan hoping to start a romantic relationship with his teen-aged pen pal, who turns out to be a contestant in a reality-TV game; he does eventually seduce a Japanese woman. In the second one, the same character settles down with yet another Japanese woman and marries her.
    • In real life, Frédéric Boilet, the author, lives with a Sino-Khmer woman, who is herself a graphic novelist and has depicted their relationship in the sexually explicit Fraise Et Chocolat.
  • Joel Kent and Mei-Lai in the DC Comics Elseworld Superman/Batman Generations.
  • Gender-inverted with Ryan Choi and his white girlfriend, Giganta.
  • Inverted with the Mandarin (major Iron Man villain) and Shang-Chi (Master of Kung Fu and hero): both have Chinese fathers and white mothers.
    • Additionally, Shang-Chi is in love with Tarantula, a Hispanic woman.
  • Doubly inverted with Karate Kid from the Legion of Super-Heroes; he has a Japanese father and a white American mother, and his girlfriend/wife/widow was Princess Projectra (later Sensor Girl) who's a Caucasian White-Haired Pretty Girl.
  • Charisma Man, a comic book Charisma Man, produced for English-speaking expatriates in Japan. The title character was a dorky Canadian unsuccessful with women in his own country - until he arrives in Japan where he instantly becomes suave and supercool, admired by all the locals and able to pick up any girl he wants. His mortal enemy is "Western Woman", the only one aware of what a loser he really is.
  • Inverted in Gene Yang's American Born Chinese. Chinese-American Jin develops a crush on his schoolmate Amelia, who's Caucasian. This eventually causes him to reject his Asian heritage outright.
  • Completely Subverted Trope in Scott Pilgrim. He does have a Chinese girlfriend at the start of the first volume, but dumps her as soon as Ramona Flowers enters the scene. Knives Chau does try to get him back (and was supposedly to end up with him in The Movie) but nothing else really comes of it.
  • In the graphic novel Skim the half-Japanese protagonist's father was formerly married to her Japanese mother and is now dating another Asian woman. The creators identify him as someone who dates exclusively Asian women in an interview.
  • Utterly smashed to pieces in Watchmen where the Comedian gets himself a Vietnamese girlfriend during the war but eventually dumps her and shoots her dead as she was pregnant with his child.
  • In season 8 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer the American Oz is in a steady relationship with the Tibetan Bayarmaa. Race is not shown to a be a factor at all; they have instead bonded over other things.


Film

  • The Forbidden Kingdom: The female lead falls for the only white man in Ancient China.
  • An early film example is The Wrath of the Gods made in 1914, starring Japanese-American silent film idol Sessue Hayakawa (as the dad; not the romantic lead this time, 'natch).
  • Dragonball Evolution, with a white male lead and Asian love interest.
  • House Of Bamboo: An American military policeman in Japan convinces the widow of a murder victim to pose as his girlfriend, and she eventually falls in love with him.
  • The World Of Suzie Wong: The title character is a Hong Kong Hooker with a Heart of Gold who becomes a visiting British artist's girlfriend.
  • The Barbarian And The Geisha starring John Wayne as the first American Consul-General in Japan. His Japanese hosts give him a geisha to help make him feel more comfortable, as well as to keep tabs on him.
  • Similarly with Glenn Ford in The Teahouse of the August Moon as a captain of the occupation forces, tasked with Americanizing a Japanese village and ending up romancing the geisha Lotus Blossom, played by Machiko Kyou.
  • The Sand Pebbles: Richard Attenborough saves a Chinese woman from prostitution by buying her debts and marrying her.
  • The Karate Kid (The second one.): First time, but not the last, a character played by Tamlyn Tomita falls in love with a Westerner. Then again, her Japanese suitor Chozen is a Ax Crazy Jerkass.
    • In the remake featuring Jackie Chan as a Chinese counterpart to Mr. Miyagi, it was Asian Gal With "Black" Guy.
  • In The Day After Tomorrow, Tamlyn Tomita has a budding relationship with a white man that is devoid of overtly racial overtones.
  • Year Of The Dragon: Stanley White (Mickey Rourke) aggressively courts Tracy Tzu (Ariane Koizumi), and his sexual attraction to her is implied to be a byproduct of a blend of attraction/repulsion towards Asians which he picked up in Vietnam.
  • Inverted in Big Trouble in Little China with the Beta Couple, Eddie and Margo.
  • A pattern in several novels/scripts/etc. by James Clavell:
    • Tai-Pan (as well as the original novel), where protagonist Dirk Struan has a fiery mistress named Mei-Mei. The film also reverses it, with a poverty-stricken young Englishwoman who makes an extremely good living by prostituting herself to an exclusively Chinese clientèle.
    • Shogun, where John "Anjin-san" Blackthorne falls in love with his Japanese language mentor Mariko.
      • In fairness, William Adams, the Real Life inspiration for Blackthorne, did marry a Japanese woman, but possibly for social reasons and not love.
    • Noble House, where a visiting American businessman in Hong Kong falls in love with a Chinese-Portuguese woman sent by British businessman to seduce him.
    • King Rat, where flashbacks reveal that the protagonist had been hiding from the Japanese in an Indonesian village for a long time, where he had a native wife. He is also tempted by the daughter of the village elder with whom prisoners do black market deals.
  • Almost averted in Good Morning Vietnam: Adrian Cronauer tries to get a relationship started with a local Vietnamese girl, but while the latter eventually warms to him, the relationship remains platonic.Also note that the girl he goes after is the third (fourth?) one he sees wearing identical white robes and straw hat, and (probably jokingly) thinking she's "following" him, he obsessively goes after her; "Asian Fever" seems oddly appropriate for how he was acting (blaming it on being surrounded by Grecian women, who he claims are hairy).
  • The Tom Selleck vehicle Mr Baseball is a particularly sad example - their love scene is said to have more or less cost the actress her career.
  • Rising Sun with Sean Connery and Tia Carrere.
  • Lucky Number Slevin with Josh Hartnett and Lucy Liu.
  • Heaven And Earth: A GI in Vietnam comes home to the US with a war bride.
  • Gender inverted in The Pillow Book: Vivian Wu, despite living in Hong Kong, picks up Ewan McGregor as a boyfriend. Granted, she had ulterior motives, namely using him to get closer to her late father's publisher.
  • Chinese Box: Gong Li has a relationship with Jeremy Irons.
  • Red Corner: Richard Gere, charged with murder while in China, has his beautiful assigned lawyer Bai Ling fall in love with him. Similar to the Mr Baseball example above as Bai Ling reportedly lost her citizenship over it.
  • The Breed with Bai Ling.
  • Art Of War starring Wesley Snipes.
  • Bangkok Dangerous (the remake with Nicholas Cage)
  • Snow Falling On Cedars: Averted, as while the Japanese girl Hatsue is very much in love with the Western guy Ishmael, circumstances force her to marry a fellow Japanese. In the book, however, the relationship between Ishmael and Hatsue wasn't quite that simple.
    • More likely it was because she could never contemplate a life with a person who couldn't correctly pronounce her name. It's ha-TSU-e, not HAT-sue....
  • Three Seasons: Harvey Keitel is a Vietnam War veteran who had a child with a local girl during his tour of duty, and comes looking for her 30 years later.
    • The trope is averted with another character in the movie: a Vietnamese prostitute looking for a potential husband among her Western customers eventually settles with a fellow Vietnamese man.
  • Come See The Paradise: Dennis Quaid marries a Japanese woman in the late 1930s, only to see her sent to a detention camp along with other Japanese immigrants to the US in the wake of Pearl Harbor.
  • The Transporter: Jason Statham rescues Shu Qi from abduction, and she thanks him with sexual favors.
  • Flypaper with Lucy Liu
  • Face with Bai Ling
  • Stealth the black character (portrayed by Jamie Foxx) has a Thai girlfriend.
  • One Night Stand has Wesley Snipes married to Ming-Na Wen.
  • The Big Hit
  • The Quiet American (as well as the original novel by Graham Greene): Michael Caine is an aging British journalist in 1950s Saigon, who, although having a wife back home, has hooked up with a much younger local girl. When Brendan Fraser shows up, he competes with Caine for the girl's attention, but neither man is really interested to know how she feels about the whole thing.
  • Messed around with in Balls of Fury.
  • The Last Samurai: A wounded Tom Cruise is cared for by the widow of a samurai he killed, hinting at a budding relationship between them.
  • Charlie's Angels: Lucy Liu's father and boyfriend are played by is played by John Cleese and Matt LeBlanc, respectively, indicating something of a family tradition for this trope.
  • Miami Vice: Gong Li is the mistress of a (white-looking) Latin American drug lord, and has a tryst with Colin Farrell.
  • The Hunted: Christopher Lambert has a one-night stand with Joan Chen.
  • The Home Song Stories: Hong Kong bar girl Joan Chen marries an Australian sailor and moves with him to Melbourne.
  • Sayonara (as well as the original novel by James Michener): Marlon Brando, as a member of the US Air Force deployed in Japan, has a buddy who marries a Japanese woman, and he himself falls in love with one.
    • This one is sort of arguable on the buddy's part- the buddy definitely went native, and he and his wife were shown to have an extremely loving relationship. A lot of American men did marry Japanese girls at the end of WWII, and there aren't many Asian men to be seen. Except of course the inversion, the Brando character breaks things off with his white fiancée to be with his Japanese love, which causes her to confess her feelings to the Japanese Kabuki actor she had fallen in love with. This is inverted again, because the Kabuki actor is obviously a white guy in make-up. White guys and Asian women are good, and white girls and Asian men are fine, as long as you can tell that he's really white.
  • The French movie Augustin Roi Du Kung Fu (the title character has a platonic relationship with a Chinese immigrant played by Maggie Cheung, and eventually moves to Beijing where he marries a local woman)
  • Another French movie, Tanguy (the title character, a doctorate student in Chinese civilization, uses his language skills to pick up Asian girls and eventually, yes, moves to Beijing where he marries a local woman)
    • The premise of the movie was that Tanguy, aged 30 something, still lived with his parents and couldn't be moved to ... well move out. When he marries the Chinese girl, he moves in with her family and gets them to care for him.
  • Yet another French movie, Indochine, about a love triangle in colonial Indochina. The young Vietnamese orphan is seduced by the dashing French navy officer, who had also scored her French adoptive mother.
  • However, inverted in a fifth French movie, L'Amant (The Lover, adapted from the eponymous novel by Marguerite Duras): the heroine is a French teenage girl, also in colonial Indochina, who sleeps for money with an older Idle Rich Chinese man. And she realizes after leaving back to France that she really loved him.
    • Also in a sixth French film, Hiroshima Mon Amour.
  • Interestingly, avoided in Lost in Translation, in which the protagonist, despite having the obvious profile for it (Westerner in Japan, middle-aged, away from his wife), enters a (platonic) relationship with a younger Western girl, and sleeps with a Western woman of his own age, rather than picking up a local girl. He even, at one point, turns down a Japanese call girl that his producer sent to his hotel room to help him unwind. Granted, she seemed particularly clueless about what turns Western men on.
  • Averted in The Children of Huang Shi, where the white, male main character goes for the other Western character rather than Michelle Yeoh.
  • Also averted in Doctor Akagi, but the film does play with the idea:

Tomiko: Here's some food for the prisoner.
Sonoko: So much?
Tomiko: Dutchmen are tall, they eat a lot.
Sonoko: Oh, he isn't that tall. But he does have a big one.
Tomiko: He's a Dutchman all right.

  • Dolph Lundgren and Tia Carrere in Showdown in Little Tokyo.
  • Inverted in Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, as the Asian Hot Scientist sleeps with the female American Hot Scientist and doesn't even end up being eaten by a giant sea monster.
  • Highlander : Ramirez's backstory reveals that he once married a Japanese princess. He was originally Ancient Egyptian, but he IS played by Sean Connery.
  • Dirty Work: Jimmy and the Saigon whore who bit his nose off.
  • Air America: The character played by Mel Gibson, an American pilot in 1960s Laos, is married to a local woman.
  • Austin Powers parodies this in Goldmember, with twins. With Punny Names.
  • This is a subplot of Midway. As the main reason for making the girl Japanese is to present the lovers with "difficulties peculiar to 1942" it is more a case of Star-Crossed Lovers. It is also unclear whether they eventually do marry but implied that they do not.
  • Inverted in Stratosphere Girl, as the main reason the belgian girl becomes a club hostess in Tokyo is to find and hook up with a young Japanese DJ she met back home.
  • Gender-Inverted Trope in Bridge to the Sun, based on the autobiographic novel of the same name. Gwendolyn "Gwen" Harold (Carol Baker) marries the Japanese diplomat Hidenari "Terry" Terasaki (James Shigeta)... some years before World War Two. Needless to say, It Gets Worse for them.
  • Averted but discussed in Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, where the main character, a white American, is sent to Japan and somehow avoids ending up with a Japanese girl. (instead favoring the only caucasian female around) This is even alluded to by one of the Asian characters in the film.
  • Subverted in The Ramen Girl, in which the eponymous character falls in love with a Korean man, despite being in Japan.
  • In The Social Network, Brenda Song plays the Asian girl who jumps at the chance to hook up with Facebook co-creator Eduardo Savarin. Also played with by the characters who discuss why they are attracted to the Asian ladies at Harvard ("They're hot, they're smart, they're not Jewish,[1] and they can dance!")
  • Played with in Forrest Gump: at the end, Lieutenant Dan arrives at Forrest and Jenny's wedding with "new legs" and his fiancée, an Asian woman, suggesting he's beginning to get past his resentment and PTSD about the Vietnam War.
  • A rare non-human example occurs in the Hungarian animated film Cat City: both the hero Grabowski and his girlfriend Csino-san are anthropomorphic mice, but the former is clearly European or American, and the latter is Japanese.
  • Inverted in Mao's Last Dancer, where the Chinese main character falls in love with an American dancer.
  • Inverted again in The Replacement Killers, courtesy of Chow Yun-Fat and Mira Sorvino.
  • Seen in The Painted Veil, with the Fanes' neighbour Waddington and his Manchurian lover Wan Xi.
  • Son Of The Dragon is precisely about getting a husband for a beautiful asian princess. The main character, the only occidental and a foreigner (since he's not Asian), enters the competition for marrying her in order to infiltrate and steal part of the treasure. Of course he ends up falling in love with her and fighting against the other main competitor to defend the castle when that competitor with his army to get the treasure, revealing he was Evil All Along and didn't care about the princess.
  • Attempted by a character in Final Destination 5. When company sleazeball Isaac enters an Asian massage parlor, it's blatantly obvious that he tries to invoke this in the douchebaggiest way possible by harassing the receptionist, complete with inquiring if there will be a "happy ending". When the girl makes it clear that the place isn't a brothel, he still doesn't take the hint. He gets duly rewarded when the girl sets him up for an exceptionally rough massage performed by her much older mother.
  • In Flowers Of War, Christian Bale plays a funeral director in Nanking during the Nanking Massacre. He helps Chinese girls hide from Japanese soldiers and has an affair with a Chinese prostitute. This is likely why Bale's character was made into a funeral director posing as a priest rather than an actual priest, which would be more historically accurate.
  • Gender-inverted in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, though the Asian guy is played by a white guy in Yellowface.
  • Inverted in the Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle films. Korean-American Harold's Love Interest is technically Colombian, but in the sequel, Kumar goes for a full inversion.
  • Pavilion of Women- the original novel depicts Madame Wu keeping her love for Father Andre to herself, but the film invokes this trope, along with Hot for Preacher.
  • Disney's Mulan was originally intended to be a film called China Doll, which would have been about a poor Chinese girl falling in love with a white British man and moving to the west with him.
  • In the film Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing, set in Hong Kong, white journalist Mark Elliot (William Holden) and Eurasian doctor Han Suyin (Jennifer Jones) fall in love. Aside from the racial difference, he's married (though estranged from his wife). It is subtly implied that her career will be jeopardized if the relationship continues. They do so anyway, only for him to be killed while on assignment in Korea.


Literature

  • Troublemaker and Other Saints has one of the daughters of a Chinese family married to a black man; another daughter has a preference for white men and not Asian men.
  • Midnight Sunshine a book by Kelvin Reed, has a Filipina marrying a black man.
  • Fah Lo Suee, daughter of Fu Manchu, falls in love with Sir Denis Nayland Smith and betrays her father for him.
  • Madame Chrysantheme by Pierre Loti.
  • As mentioned above, The Quiet American by Graham Greene.
  • As mentioned above, Sayonara by James Michener.
    • The ending of the novel read like the Marlon Brando character (I can't remember his name) went back to his American wife.
  • As mentioned above, Shogun and Tai-Pan from James Clavell's Asian Saga. Shogun provides some justification, as Mariko-san is the only available translator for Blackthorne (well, the only one who isn't a Jesuit. There's some hard feelings with Blackthorne, there), so the two end up spending all their time together. In fact, Blackthorne, all told, has four Japanese women: Fujiko, whom Toranaga orders to to run his household as a consort (with all that the word implies), Mariko his translator, and, in the end, he is married to Midori, in order to solidify his standing as samurai and to run his house once Fujiko commits Seppuku, and Kikuchiyo's contract is given to him for -- well, so she'll be attached to someone worthy of her, and so that he'll have someone to delight him for as long as he's imprisoned in Japan. Blackthorne's real-life inspiration actually did marry a Japanese woman (although a commoner of the merchant class, not a samurai or a geisha) and have two children by her, so the trope is somewhat Justified Trope. Mariko herself is something of an aversion: it's made clear that she finds most Westerners disgusting for their lack of hygiene and eating habits, and she only hooks up with Blackthorne when he has adopted Japanese ways and been declared an honorary samurai.
    • Also justified by the fact that there are literally no non-Asian women around. Anjin-san's only human.
    • Tai-Pan takes it much further. Several white men have Asian mistresses, or have kept them at one point, and all three either explicitly have or are implied to have had utterly disastrous marriages back home. Inverted with Mary, who whores herself out to Chinese men to enjoy some power and pleasure, and she confirms that there is strong attraction on both sides.
  • As mentioned above, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.
    • And brutally subverted at one point, where one of the wives catches her husband in flagrante delicto with a white woman. (Interestingly, despite stereotypes of white man/Asian woman relationships having a dominant man and submissive woman, it's strongly implied that the husband cheated because of his wife's spinelessness.)
  • In the Chinese novel Shanghai Baby by Zhou Weihui, the main character, a Shanghai woman in her 20s, is in a relationship with a caring but sexually impotent Chinese man, and has a steamy affair with a Western expatriate. The latter is depicted as a tall, blond, sexually aggressive German, which incidentally goes to show that the Chinese too think that Blond Guys Are Evil.
  • Inverted in The King and I.
  • Occurs in Gish Jen's novel Mona in the Promise Land, and lampshaded when the Caucasian man, Seth, impersonates a Chinese former romantic interest in order to attract the Chinese-American protagonist's attention. Inverted in a later novel by the same author, The Love Wife.
  • Averted in Snow Falling on Cedars when Hatsue decides to break up with Ishmael even before her family finds out about their affair. Though she is deeply fond of him, she's simply not in love with him, and ends up happily married to a Japanese man.
  • As already mentioned, Gwen and Hidenari from Bridge to the Sun gender inverted this.
  • In 1632, Frank Jackson, one of the uptime miners, came back from the Vietnam War with a wife.
  • Lynne Reid Banks' The Dungeon is a dark take on this. MacLennan, a Scottish laird embittered by the deaths of his wife and children, buys a Chinese girl named Peony from her parents on a strange impulse. While Peony is far too young to enter a relationship with him and MacLennan often treats her harshly as only a tea slave to him, there are signs that she's slowly becoming his Morality Pet by reviving the compassion that he's trying to squelch in his quest for revenge against the man who killed his family. Then MacLennan becomes incensed when he realizes how much Peony is affecting him, throws her in the dungeon and leaves her there to die, and realizes that he threw away the one thing that could have made him happy again only when it's far too late. In short, no one gets a happy ending here thanks to the white guy fucking up everything.
  • From Harry Potter, we have Cho Chang, who is in a Love Triangle with two white guys, Harry himself and Cedric Diggory.
  • Austin Coates' novel City of Broken Promises tells the true story of Martha, an orphaned Chinese girl in 18th century Macau who falls in love with Thomas Merop, an English trade official. Merop is initially hesitant about pursuing a relationship with Martha, but is won over and eventually marries her so she can inherit his business interests.
  • Mary Jo Putney's The China Bride features a half-Scottish, half Chinese woman, orphaned by her father in China and living as a male interpreter to survive, falling for a visiting (British?) viscount despite the fiercely segregated environment. The relationship is heavily influenced by the fact that both Troth and Kyle are outsiders; Troth because of her mixed race and Kyle as a foreigner.
  • Inverted in classic YA Australian novel Tomorrow When the War Began, where the Caucasian female lead falls in love with the Asian male lead.
  • Played straight in Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, where the first (Greek-Australian) point-of-view character's wife is an Indian-Australian woman.
  • Robert Lecter and Lady Murasaki, in Hannibal Rising.
  • Inverted in Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher stories, when Phryne becomes involved with Lin Chung. Their relationship continues even after his Arranged Marriage to another woman goes ahead.
  • In Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, the Englishman Phineas Fogg, marries a Parsi (Indian Zoroastrian) princess after rescuing her from a suttee (she was a widow of an Arranged Marriage with a Hindu noble which explains why someone would be enforcing suttee on a Parsi when it was mainly though not exclusively Hindu practice).


Live Action TV

  • Torchwood has Toshiko Sato, who has a thing for Owen Harper. Unfortunately, he's more or less blind to her feelings.
    • Which is reversed in the episode "Adam". Owen's the one with the thing for Toshiko, which she doesn't notice because she's taken up with the title character. The title character isn't even a real person, and has been manipulating their memories to stay alive.
  • Glee: In Season 1, Artie and Tina begin a relationship. Subverted in Season 2 when Tina and Artie break up because Artie treats her poorly and Tina chooses the fellow Asian Mike Chang.
  • Shogun (as well as the original novel by James Clavell)
  • House of Harmony—not only does the Singaporean Chinese female fall in love with a visiting American businessman, but her half-Asian daughter (played by Maggie Q) later falls in love with the adopted son of said businessman.
  • Twin Peaks: Joan Chen is married to an older Westerner, and it is revealed he picked her up in Hong Kong. She also has affairs with other Westerners.
  • Quantum Leap has an episode where the man Sam is currently possessing has recently returned from war with a Japanese wife and dealing with the resulting prejudice.
  • Broken Trail is about two cowboys (Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church) rescuing five Chinese women from indentured prostitution; one of them ends up in a relationship with Church.
  • Subverted in Heroes when Hiro goes back in time to Ancient Japan and meets his hero Takezo Kensei, only to find out he's a drunken white man named Adam Monroe. In an attempt to preserve the timeline he recalls Hiro tries to turn Monroe into a hero and get him and Princess Yaeko ("the most beautiful girl in Japan") together. However despite - or arguably because of - Hiro's best efforts Yaeko finishes up drawn to him rather than Munroe.
  • Played straight and then averted in Regenesis: One of the main characters, Mayko Tran, is a Vietnam-born woman who has relationships with two Caucasian men in turn, one of them her boss. Said man, however, later goes to China and meets a pretty woman doctor without any romantic development resulting (then again, they were in the middle of an epidemic and had other things on their minds).
  • Scrubs has Dr. Kelso, a Korean War vet who has a serious thing for Asian females. Always goes to Asian massage parlors, sleeps with many Asian girls and even has an Asian Baby Mama.
    • A one-shot joke implied that he loved his long-time (no pun intended) mistress more than he did his own wife.
    • In his "His Story" episode, one of his Imagine Spots, when asked what he'd be doing if he was still in the military, was a parody of the ending of An Officer and a Gentleman with an Asian woman in the Debra Winger role, and "Up Where We Belong" being sung in Korean. Then he imagines what it would be like if he were a nurse, and the Asian woman appears in a navy uniform to carry him away.
    • He also reveals that his son has a penchant for Filippino boyfriends, so apparently it runs in the family.
  • Tommy Gavin's dad in Rescue Me marries a (rich) Korean woman younger than him (which is not saying much, considering he's 82) in season 2, apparently while in Ireland. This confuses Tommy more than anything else.
  • In The Next Generation and DS9 with Miles and Keiko O'Brien.
  • An episode of Lost flashes back to Jack traveling to Phuket, Thailand, where he enters into a relationship with a local woman. It didn't seem to last very long, though.
  • Lady Bar is a made-for-TV movie by Xavier Durringer about the romantic relationship between a French tourist and a Thai prostitute.
    • In the sequel, Lady Bar II, the characters (now married) set up a "matchmaking resort" for single Western men seeking committed relationships with Thai women.
  • A Saturday Night Live skit showed Thomas Jefferson chatting up Sally Hemming while his colleagues talk about them behind his back. They mention Benjamin Franklin likes Asians despite never meeting one.
  • Inverted in FlashForward, with Demetri (played by John Cho) and Zoey (played by Gabrielle Union), but played straight by Bryce and Keiko (she specifically rejects Japanese suitors in his favor).
  • Red Skies, a 2002 Pilot Movie set in Los Angeles, features a Chinese female police officer who teams up up with an FBI task-force. An unspoken but definite mutual attraction develops between her and the white alpha-male of the group.
  • Both referenced and averted in the Cold Case episode "Who's Your Daddy": An overseer blackmails a Cambodian refugee into providing him sexual favors and later tries to coerce another one, killing her in the process; but the consensual interracial relationship is between an Asian woman and an African-American man, who happens to be a Vietnam veteran. Said man is (wrongly) suspected of being a sugar daddy for a teenage Asian girl. One construction worker is heard calling out "Me love you long time" as the Cambodian woman walks past.
  • In Whose Line Is It Anyway, sole Asian player Karen Maruyama is assigned with the role of "A Call Girl" in Let's Make A Date - and the former Trope Namer was what she had in mind. Considering that it was a subversion...
  • Sid from Skins, ahem, reads a magazine called Asian Fanny Fun religiously. Note the use of "Asian" in the UK usually refers to people of South Asian descent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) rather than East or South-East Asian as this trope usually implies.
  • Supernatural has the running gag of Dean habitually reading the magazine Busty Asian Beauties. There's a website as well, much to Sam's annoyance.
  • There's an episode of It Ain't Half Hot Mum where Sergeant Major Williams wants to marry a local Chinese girl, only for Chinese mafiosi to try to kill him because the girl had previously been engaged to one of them. Sergeant Major eventually ends his relationship with her. In another episode, two of the men fall for Mrs Waddilove-Evans's Burmese maid.
  • Titus: Christopher's younger brother Dave repeatedly lauds the fact that his girlfriend is Asian. According to DVD commentary they got the idea to give him this character quirk because the actor's wife is Asian.
  • Appears to be played straight in the Benihana Christmas episode of The Office, where Michael and Andy ask out two attractive waitress and aren't shown being shut down, then somehow end up with two different attractive, college-aged Benihana waitresses at the party, but it turns out this was a casting problem. The second ones were supposed to be ugly, with the implication the attractive ones turned them down.
  • Unavoidable on Mash, considering that it is about a mostly male military unit in Korea. Every love interest who wasn't a nurse had to be Asian, as well as the war prostitutes.
  • Basil Fawlty sometimes alludes to having had an affair with a local woman while serving in the Korean War.
  • Nikita and Michael in the CW's show Nikita spend most of the first season flirting and refusing to kill each other before finally getting their Relationship Upgrade. Their love has nothing to do with skin color but rather having saved each others' lives on a consistent basis.
  • In Night Court, the black Mac Robinson is married to Vietnamese Quon Le.
  • Gender-Inverted Trope examples.
    • In Charmed, when one of the Halliwell sisters falls in love with a handsome Chinese guy. He turns to to be Dead All Along, though, and the girls have to help him pass on peacefully.
    • Glenn and Maggie from The Walking Dead. This rare gender-inverted version is made even more unusual because it is between two major characters.
    • New Girl in which the white Jess shows interest in an Asian guy. The guy stands her up after being put off by how clingy she was.
    • Castle when the white female Victim of the Week is revealed to have been in a relationship with the son of a tong leader.
    • Bonanza, when Asian cook Hop Sing gets engaged to a white woman.
    • Heroes: White waitress Charlie falls in love with the Asian Hiro.
    • In Two Broke Girls, Caroline will have a romance with an Asian male web designer.
    • In one episode of Mad TV, an Asian man brings home his white girlfriend to meet his adoptive parents, who are white but pretend to be Asian to help him fit into the family. They proceed to hypocritically berate their son for dating a white woman.
    • Inverted in Australian kids' drama Dance Academy, where the female lead develops a crush on Vietnamese-Australian Chris.
    • Goodness Gracious Me had a recurring sketch about a British Indian man and his white girlfriend. Played for Laughs when he and his Asian friends don't care what race she is, but she insists on pretending to be Indian in exaggeratedly stereotypical fashion.
    • One episode of Castle has a Victim of the Week with a Chinese boy she had been tutoring. The boy was in a mafia family, and they'd planned to flee to California to escape, but the boy's brother caught wind of it and killed her.
  • Seinfeld - Jerry is excited over the prospect of meeting and dating a Donna Chang, then is upset when he finds she's a caucasian girl who appropriated a Chinese name.
  • Bones has this with Angela, who's an American by birth but of Chinese background, and Hodgins.
  • Series three of Little Britain featured the white English Dudley and his Thai mail order bride, Ting Tong Macadangdang. Subverted when Ting Tong turns out to be "a ladyboy" and, it is implied, not really Thai.
  • NCIS had an episode with multiple incarnations. Several service men had married South Korean women and brought them back to the states. Turns out that they had used the trope to their advantage, as they were actually North Korean spies/terrorists. However, one really loved her husband (and their child) and killed the others in an attempt to negate the mission and not be detected.
    • There's another episode where service men attempted to sneak five or six asian women overseas in a shipping container, the plan being that one of the men would on the ship to help them. However, known of them were, and all but one woman died in transfer, and she was taking her revenge on the men one by one.


Music

I've been searching for a man
All across Japan
Just to find, to find my samurai
Someone who is strong
But still a little shy
Yes I need, I need my samurai

  • Bruce Springsteen's hit "Born in the U.S.A.": "I had a brother at Khe Sanh [...] He had a woman he loved in Saigon. / I've got a picture of him in her arms now..."
  • Weezer's "Pinkerton".
  • "La Petite Tonkinoise" is a 1906 hit by French singer Vincent Scotto, about a soldier sent to Vietnam who picks up a local girlfriend.
  • Two words: "Yellow Fever", by the Bloodhound Gang (NSFW).
  • Parodied in the Vocaloid song "I Fell in Love With Geisha Girl".


Newspaper Comics

  • Parodied in The World of Lily Wong: The title character, a Hong Kong Chinese woman, is married to a wimpy American expatriate.
  • Mike Doonesbury, who marries the much younger Vietnam-war orphan Kim.
    • Same comic: white mercenary, conman and ambassador "Uncle" Duke has a quite fucked up relation with his secretary/translator/sex slave Honey Huan (chinese).


Professional Wrestling

  • Inverted when it came to Tajiri and Torrie Wilson, and four years later another inversion came when Kenzo Suzuki fell for Torrie.
  • Daniel Bryan spurned the advances of the Bella Twins (Latinas) in favour of Asian-Canadian Gail Kim.
    • It's interesting to note that this doesn't pop up as much in WWE as you might think given that they love pairing Superstars and Divas as couples. The main reason is Gail Kim has been the only Asian diva on the roster for years. She was the only Asian diva in her first run back in 2003/2004 and is also again now since 2009.


Stand-up Comedy

  • This trope gets referenced in several of Margaret Cho's routines. In talking about how limited acting roles are for Asian women, she joked that as a little girl she thought to herself "Someday, I could be one of Fonzie's girlfriends on Happy Days! Or I could be a prostitute on Mash!"


Theatre

  • Played straight in the opera Madame Butterfly (one of the quintessential examples of the trope), but subverted in M Butterfly, a play by David Henry Hwang later adapted onscreen by David Cronenberg, in which the stereotypically doll-like Asian woman turns out to be a male spy that deliberately played into the white man's stereotyped expectations of Asian women to make him fall in love with him. Complete with a scathing commentary on the Western concept of the 'Submissive, Feminine Asia' that will fall for the 'Big Gun, and Big Money Masculine West'. And it was Inspired By a true event: look up Bernard Boursicot and Shi Peipu for details.
  • Played painfully straight in Miss Saigon (which is Madame Butterfly IN THE VIETNAM WAR!). Sure, calling Chris a decent person would be wrong, but that still doesn't change the fact that he's a white person sweeping a Vietnamese girl off her feet pretty much the moment he meets her. Is it any wonder that Thuy's so upset? The producers apparently went to great pains to make him a Jerkass,[2] and he still garners some sympathy for being on the wrong side of this trope.
  • Played straight in South Pacific. A white American guy falls in love with and marries a Tonkinese girl... even though they don't have any language in common.
    • That's not what happens. He bangs her, falls in love with her, but when her mom suggests that they get married, he's too worried about what his racist family thinks to do anything.
  • This was a common theme in 19th-century colonial fiction. Young white man comes to colonial state, has torrid affair with local exotic beauty, but in the end returns back to Western "civilization", marrying a "proper" white woman. In addition to Madame Butterfly, opera also had Lakme, basically the same story set in India.
  • Gender-Inverted Trope in Thoroughly Modern Millie.


Video Games

  • Super Robot Wars Original Generation has the blonde, blue-eyed American Brooklyn "Bullet" Luckfield with his Japanese partner/girlfriend Kusuha Mizuha, as well as the German Elzam von Branstein and his late Japanese wife Cattleya Fujiwara (though according to the backstory, Elzam's around 1/4 Japanese). Interestingly, most interracial couples in the series actually invert this, with the very Japanese Kyosuke Nanbu, Masaki Andoh and Tasuku Shinguji pairing up with Excellen Browning, Lune Zoldark and Leona Garstein, respectively (not that you can really tell, mind you...)
    • It's never stated if any of them prefer foreigners, though. Kusuha was even Ryuseii's Unlucky Childhood Friend before she moved on to Bullet.
  • At the end of Resident Evil: Dead Aim, Fong Ling reveals her feelings for Bruce by kissing him.
  • In Wing Commander, one of your female Japanese pilots has a fiancé. Unfortunately, things don't turn out so well.
  • Inverted in Tokimeki Memorial Pocket : one of the winnable girls, Patricia McGrath, is an Eaglelander doing a study trip in Japan at the High School you, a Japanese boy, are studying at.
  • Also inverted in Mitsumete Knight, Tokimeki Memorial 's Spiritual Successor, but on a larger scale : you're playing as an Asian who come to a country located in the equivalent, in this universe, of the Europe Continent as a mercenary, and during your quest to help said country win its war against its neighbour country, you can score any of the local ladies, who are all from this Continent (most of them from the country you're fighting for, the only two exceptions coming from other countries of the Continent).
  • Yet another inversion in Sakura Taisen V. The hero is a Japanese male who travels to the United States. His potential love interests include a fellow Japanese person, a black woman, three white women, and a Mexican girl.
  • Sorta inverted in many Dating Sim-like games where one of the girls is often the token foreigner (with a good dose of Foreign Fanservice). She's hardly ever the main heroine role though, unless the events happen in her country where there are lots of foreigners who are technically not foreigners.
  • Possibly inverted in the Mass Effect series if you play a white female Shepard and romance Kaidan Alenko (born in Singapore).
  • The Sims:
    • Daniel and Mary-Sue Pleasant of The Sims 2. Subverted, as Daniel is having an affair with the (Ambiguously Brown) maid, and is scripted to get caught in the act when Mary-Sue gets fired from her job.
    • Also Hank Goddard and Pauline Wan in The Sims 3, who seem to be a somewhat stereotypical embodiment of this trope, in that their relationship is massively shallow (although their attraction is not explicitly based on race or appearance, with a few other superficial factors listed).
  • Kazuhira Miller is the offspring of an American GHQ officer and Japanese woman. However it also gets Inverted Trope as Mei Ling from the same series never gets in a relationship.
  • Gabriel Knight and Grace Nakimura - eventually subverted. Although Gabriel's (non-reciprocal) initial attraction to Grace follows the pattern of the same casual flirtation he has with just about every woman he meets, by the second instalment they obviously have a strong regard and affection for one another; and by the end of the third game it's heavily implied that they're in love, although due to an unfortunate misunderstanding Grace leaves before they get the chance to tell one another.


Web Original


Webcomics

  • Lampshaded in Megatokyo: both male protagonists develop relationships with local Japanese girls, but suffer pangs of guilt (well, one of them, anyway) at the idea of playing out such a cliché.
    • Piro seemed more freaked out by his initial attraction to the high schooler Yuki, as she fulfilled his fantasies of Japanese high school girls. Luckily, his conscience managed to point out that just because anime and manga have conditioned that fetish into him, that doesn't make the 9-year age gap any smaller.
  • Inverted in Dreamless [dead link] , the story of an American girl and a Japanese boy in the 1940s who are in telepathic contact with each other in their sleep, and eventually fall in love.
  • Yuffie and Riku is a subversion of this trope in Ansem Retort: Yuffie has a thing for weak emo boys that don't have the balls to defend themselves, and Riku's starved enough for attention that isn't abusive beatings that he jumps at the chance with Yuffie. However, the trope name itself is invoked by Red XIII:

My water bowl is missing, and I know Little Miss Me-Love-You-Long-Time took it.

  • Misfile: While Missi's Chinese ethnicity isn't an important part of her relationship with Ash (and everyone knows that Ash will end up with non-Asian Emily in the end, anyway), one strip has a thug leer at her and say, "Don't fret, baby. I can have me some yellow fever tonight."
  • Tune lampshades the trope in this strip.
  • Odori Park is about a Japanese woman married to a white American man. It is definately not autobiographical, even though the author is married to a Japanese woman, taught English in Japan and has a multi-racial child.
  • David and Ye Thuza Williams (Caucasian and Burmese) in Sandra and Woo. By extension, inverted with their son Cloud and Sandra.
  • In Ryan Armand's webcomic Great, the White Male Lead Lyle marries Yukiko, the daughter of the owner of a Japanese ramen restaurant.


Western Animation

  • American Dragon: Jake Long, Jake (a Chinese American hapa) pursues Rose (Blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl). With Jake bring a dragon and Rose a slayer, ethnicity wasn't much (if any) of a factor. Of course, Jake's father is a white dude married to a Chinese woman

(whose father's objections came from Jake's father's lack of magic)... His grandfather goes out with the high school principal who is white... and a mermaid.

  • Kim Possible has its cake and eats it too: Ron gets packed off to a Japanese ninja school for a week to hang out with a fawning schoolgirl/ethnic stereotype who very obviously likes him, his replacement in Middleton is Hirotaka, a male student from the same school, who is athletic, rides a cool motorcycle, and all the girls in Middleton fight over him. Including Kim and Monique.
  • Inverted in Clerks the Animated Series where Randal tried to get a mail order bride but ended up with a mail order husband and had to deal with said husband's rather old fashioned (read: sexist) demands. He seems to have enjoyed it, though, and expresses that he misses "Toshiro-san" after the husband transferred back to Japan without him.
  • Lampshaded on Family Guy; when 'Asian reporter Trisha Takanawa' meets David Bowie (see below), she starts dry humping his leg and offers to make him fishball soup, and "me love you long time!". Tom Tucker gets a rare moment of noticing the issue: "And thank you, Trisha, for setting your people back a thousand years."
  • Steve Smith from American Dad is attracted to Toshi's Sister Akiko. He got even more turned on when he saw that she was Chun-Li from Street Fighter for Halloween in the Halloween episode.
    • Most of the women pictured in his magazine collection are Asian... and pregnant.
    • Stan has also expressed interest in Francine's sister Gwen, who (while never seen) is apparently a very attractive Asian Airhead. Francine herself is a weird not-really-example, since she's white but was adopted by Chinese-American parents. (One episode calls her a reverse banana—white outside, yellow inside.)
    • Stan's boss, Avery Bullock, is an "Asian chubby chaser".
  • In Rugrats, Chaz ended up being Happily Married to a Japanese woman, from France, named Kira. No Unfortunate Implications, and it's rather cute.
    • An episode of All Grown Up! hints that Tommy has a thing for Kira's daughter aa Chuckie's stepsister, Kimi.
  • The animated series Sidekick features a Korean girl named Kitty Ko with an almost psychotic crush on geeky protagonist Eric Needles.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door has Wally Beatles/Numbuh 4, an Austrailian-American, who has a crush on his teammate Kuki Sanban/Numbuh 3, a Japanese-American Moe girl.
  • On Mission Hill, Andy and Kevin both fall for Tina, George's older sister - Kevin because she's a fellow sci-fi geek, and Andy because, well, she's hot.
  • Batman Beyond: Terry McGinnis's steady girlfriend and eventual fiancee Dana Tan is Asian American. He may have a thing for Asian girls; in one episode he flirts with Irene, an an Asian Bubble Girl. Dana is not amused.


Real Life

  • Increasingly common in the United States. Asian-American women are by far the most likely group to marry outside their own ethnicity, with nearly 40% "marrying out" (compared to less than 20% of Asian-American men). The large majority of these interracial marriages are to caucasians.
  • Disgraced Deviant ART founder Scott Jarkoff constantly spoke of having a Japanese wife. Then again, he's been living in Japan since the 1990's doing work for the U.S. Navy (with DA being a side project), so it's not like he was in a great melting pot of cultures.
  • In England, there are many cases of men (white, obviously) going to Asian countries with great amounts of poverty, marrying an Asian girl, then coming back to England with them. However, the joke is on them; sometimes the "docile and obedient" wife will disappear with a citizenship through marriage.
    • The same happens in Canada too, but most of the men choose Filipina women instead, forgetting that in the dominant Filipino culture men rule everything...outside the house. The home is the woman's domain and the man forgets that at his peril. So he can decide who's going to be Prime Minister, which team's going to win the Stanley Cup, etc. but she decides where and how they live, what they eat, where he works, how the money is spent to the penny...
    • Many Filipina from the lower classes are Genre Savvy enough to invoke and count on this. Marrying a rich, white man (or just a white man, or even an African-American) is an easy way to escape poverty.
  • Trey Parker was married to a Japanese woman; they later divorced. He's also a noted Japanophile, doing all the Japanese voices for the show, as well as the pidgin Japanese song for fan-favorite, "Good Times With Weapons".
  • Happens, of all things, in the current edition of the New Practical Chinese Reader, a textbook put out by the Beijing Language and Culture University Press. Who gets a little romance subplot revealed through the dialogs? Ma DaWei, the blond American exchange student.
    • Also used in Integrated Chinese, in which Gao Wenzhong (an English caucasian) expresses interest in Bai Ying'ai (a Korean). Gender inverted with Wang Peng and Li You, who are respectively Chinese and a red-haired Caucasian.
  • In Singapore, the phenomenon is referred to as Sarong Party Girl (SPG for short):

Usually decked out in black, the SPG is typically an attractive Asian girl who sports waist length jet black hair on her petite body, and maintains her brown skin by sun tanning on the beach during the weekends. In a nutshell, she is the complete opposite of a Caucasian woman. She despises local men, and will only go out with you if you are white, rich and well, just white. Many young and beautiful Asian girls have been spotted at pubs canoodling with white men. Never mind that the men are fat, balding, and openly leering. To put it simply, if you are white, you get lucky.

  • A lady journalist working in Thailand explained why men of White extraction, from Americans to East Europeans, are sought after by South Asian women who are not from the prostitution industry: despite the common stereotype of the guy who does not care for himself, drinks and has rough sex, most Whites even those from the uneducated classes have been raised from birth in the spirit of "being a gentleman or at least making people believe you are one", that is, treating the female partner with care and (the semblance of) good manners. While a lot of young South Asian men are by comparison rather careless, spiteful, gamblers, cheapskates - and those who are not are usually well-off and highly educated and seek girlfriends from the same social class as them, despising the poorer girls.
  • Azrael (of Gaijin Smash, now Gaijin Chronicles) discusses 'yellow fever' in the context of Japan. Part of the perception of this is that Japanese in general approach foreigners with fewer of the cultural constraints that come between them, and aggressively compared to how foreigners approach each other. So non-Japanese who don't necessarily have 'yellow fever' still find opportunities with Japanese far more prevalent than with other races living there.
    • Az himself eventually married a Japanese woman and, as of the time of this writing, has fathered one child with her.
  • Though commonly played straight in most adaptations, the actual mutineers of the Bounty did take a number of native Polynesian wives.
  • The remarks made in this video are supposedly based off the experiences of real Asian American women.
  • There's an interesting example related in William Dalrymple's "White Mughals", a chronicle of the British Raj. During the colonial period, there was a sort of Indian Romeo and Juliet tale about an English youth who fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a Hindu shopkeeper, and when he could not marry her, died of heartbreak. Interesting because in this scenario, instead of it being the colonial masters fantasizing about loving and leaving a Hindu girl, it's the Hindus casting an Englishman as the tragic romantic hero.
  • This trope is quite common in pornography.
  • John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
  • Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, known for this preference, married his longtime girlfriend, the Chinese-American Priscilla Chan, in May 2012. Priscilla was cut out of The Social Network, though other Asian women appeared (see the "Film" folder for more).
  1. ↑ These characters are themselves Jewish
  2. ↑ seriously, was the threatened infanticide really necessary? Declaring his intent to kill Tam also made him Too Dumb to Live in a sense - seriously, you do not make death threats to a child in the presence of his mother if you value your life...
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