YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SCORE MAKE YOUR TIME

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• Well, I can definitely agree that Nora's SO is not Joe White Guy (though he may be named Joseph).
  Joey, you and a very few other people truly understand how complicated my feelings about Asian men are. But my views on race aren't exactly typical of the American 29 year old chick. Meh, I don't know. Our couplehood has little to do with our races, though we are learning lots about each other's cultures. Being the opposite of the type of couple our friend Wesley's talking about, I don't really know how he feels. I don't much feel that the white boys are ignoring me. It just turns out that the boy I like best is Asian. I see him just fine. :)

• I remain completely baffled by this phenomena. Until I started reading your blog, I'll be honest: I thought the reason I couldn't find any Asian men to date was that they had all been snatched up already by smarter girls than me.
  Despite claims that we don't exist, I am one of those women with a thing for Asian men. Not that I'm willing to exclude anyone from my dating pool due to silly things like gender or race, but Asian guys rank very high in most of my desireable categories, including dark-haired, smart and - above all - sexy. Mmm. Granted, I greatly admire lean frames and a lack of chest foliage, but I find the concept of viewing Asian men as sexless to be pretty incomprehensible. Put simply, a high percentage of them are HOTT, at least in my world-view, and I know at least a couple of other girls who agree with me.
  Which always makes me wonder why I've dated so few of them. I don't seem to meet many (for some reason they skip the whole goth scene, for the most part, which is confusing, as goth chicks really dig guys with dark hair, "exotic" features and lean-to-skinny bodies - it's kind of the ruling aesthetic in the subculture), and the ones I meet are generally taken, or the type of personality I'd reject even if it was wrapped in a perfect physical package.
  I have to agree with the Redhead that it's a complicated issue, probably more so than I can accurately explore in a blogger comment. In which case, I'm willing to settle for some hints on where I might start meeting more of these interesting, 30-something Asian men who are apparently desperate for a girlfriend, because I'm failing utterly on my own. Hey, maybe it's a broken link in the supply-and-demand chain!
  - Stacy

• I had comments about the first graphic too, as well as with Karl's piece, but couldn't not formulate them as well as Karl did. I even thought about writing my comments in French before realizing that it's been 8 years since I spoke it at any length, the couple times in China (!) excluded.
  All I could come up with is "if you look closely, most Asian girls are dating Asian guys", although then you'd get into categorization like CBC (Canadian-Born Chinese) and ABC (American-Born Chinese). It's likely that the CBC or ABC women will think dating a white guy is less exotic and more normal than someone born and raised overseas.
  When I started blogging, I wrote a piece on attraction to Asian women, but I'm trying to distance myself from it (I stand by it as an accurate reflection of my thoughts at the time, however). I know a Korean woman who is dating white men more often than normal, and she felt the need to tell me, and I just shrugged. I no longer see why it's so controversial that race is one of the characteristics people look for in a partner? Look at any metropolitan city with a large Asian population (that phrase is a redundancy these days) and you'll see Asian women dating white guys but not the other way around. Without any numbers to back it up, I'd say that's changing, although I don't know a lot of Asian guys who would be interested in dating a white girl.
  If you like someone, and that person likes you, why should the reasons matter?

• As an Asian guy in the US, I definitely feel what this dude is saying. However, recently I heard that it's different in Canada, and that for white girls (or any girl for that matter), dating an Asian guy doesn't carry the same kind of stigma as it does in the US. Is that true?

• My first serious girlfriend - like, we cohabitated and everything - was Korean, and I remember once listening to her and her knockout younger sister complain about Korean guys, who they said they'd never be caught dating. ("They always have to work at their parents' store," was one notable criticism.)
  For awhile, I worked at a one-hour photo shop owned by my girlfriends' best friend's (Korean) parents. I once watched in awe as the mom chewed out her straight-A college student son - who'd just biked to the shop after classes in 98F high summer heat to help out, as he did every day - for sweating.
  Sweating. Poor guy.
  Asian guys get it from both sides - their parents and their female peers: That was the lesson I drew from the whole experience. No wonder dude with the rant is so pissed.

• Hey there, Silly G!
  You're absolutely right: if you like someone and that person likes you, the reasons why shouldn't matter. In fact, many people don't know why they have that certain chemistry; they just know that they do.
  The hurdle for Asian guys is being considered a candidate in the first place. It's a problem that's reinforced by popular culture.
  Consider action movies produced in Hollywood: the white action gets the girl; the black action hero gets the girl; but how 'bout the Asian action hero? Not in any Jackie Chan movie I can recall. Rumble in the Bronx? The girl remained the reformed bad guy's girlfriend. How 'bout Chow Yun-Fat in The Replacement Killers? I think the most he got was a hug from Mira Sorvino. Same for Jet Li: he got a hug from Aaliyah in Romeo Must Die (a film I loved) and from hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Bridget Fonda in Kiss of the Dragon (which I also loved).
  Now consider popular music and especially music television -- say, MuchMusic (Canada's music video station). If you tally the number of live perfomances made by Asian musicians at the MuchMusic studios, I stand a good chance of being in the top 10 (I have three feature appearances on MucMusic) -- maybe even the top 5. Me! A busker, who only does it as a hobby, with no record contract. Just a guy with a little schmooze-fu, a little ambition and an accordion.
  I'm pretty comfortable where I am -- I'm currently seeing a lovely lady, and I've developed a pretty good dating style and have even harnessed the power of certain "free-reed assistive technologies" (when William Gibson said "The street finds its own uses for things", he wasn't kidding). However, even given the fact that I like to stack the odds in my favour and plain ol' dumb luck often goes my way, I sometimes feel that cold shoulder that a lot of Asian guys do complain about. I know it doesn't have to be this way, especially in this globalized age, and I hope that this blog illustrate that point and give my Asian homeboys hope.
  
  "Hail to the king, baby. Hail to the king."

• Next to an Asian mom's browbeating, even the notorious guilt-tripping of a Jewish mother is like a Sunday school picnic for Michael Bolton fans in comparison. Especially my Mom, who is the Chief of Cardiology at St. Joseph's Health Center, a major hospital here in Toronto. She could literally kill you and make it look like natural causes.
  Getting chewed out by Mom falls under "Avenging Death", which accordiong to Wesley's chart, takes up 10% of my active thinking.

• I can't prove it, but generally the mixed-race dating scene in Canada feels better. This country's enshrined multiculturalism -- despite its detractors among Canada's right wing (whom I like to teasingly call "crypto-Americans") -- seems to help create that atmosphere.
  Of course, locale counts -- for instance, there's a world of difference between a small town in Northern Ontario or Alberta and a large, cosmopolitan cities like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Just like the difference between Dayton, Ohio (where I have actual blonde-haired, blue-eyed blood kin!) and Manhattan.
  I will say that just from hanging out in bars, clubs and restaurants and living, working and busking here in downtown Toronto, I have noted an increase in Asian guy/white girl couples over the past couple of years.

• "the white action gets the girl; the black action hero gets the girl; but how 'bout the Asian action hero? Not in any Jackie Chan movie I can recall."
  I think maybe Wesley there is acting to much like Jackie Chan in Tuxedo, when he might have better luck with something more like Jackie Chan in Operation Condor. Seriously, I know a few guys of asian descent, and the ones that get the girls are the ones with personalities much like the white guys that get the girls. ie. they are confident, outgoing, and have a range of useful social skills.
  Any man with a distinguishing physical or cultural feature who isn't lucky with the ladies will automatically blame any perceived problems in that department on his race, height, weight, geekiness, lack of hair, third nostril, or whatever. I'm not saying those things are entirely without effect, of course... but many people, including you I think, tend to exaggerate it.
  It's not just asian guys that "occasionally feel that cold shoulder." It's pretty much anyone who isn't Elvis Presley.

• Are we talking Skinny Elvis or Fat Elvis? ;)