Three Asian Ladies In Farangland

Introduction

The weekly columns written by Stick almost always get my mind kicked into high gear. Of course, it is always about my favorite place in the world. This is only loosely about Thailand, but about my experiences with foreign-born Asian girlfriends I’ve had in the Midwestern United States.

The area which I live and they lived is the Midwest with one of the larger and most famous universities in America. The university attracts students from all over the world and I used this to meet many Asian women during a time when not too many white men in America dated outside of their race. In a short period of time I met solid marriage material women and I never forgot about them. I will speak of my former girlfriends with their American names, not their given names. I always called them by their real names, but I guess they knew some American would write about them some day!

Linda

Back in early 2001, I met a girl from a suburb of Taipei. Her name was Linda. She was 23 and 8 years my junior. She was my first contact with an Asian girl and the experience was unreal. Most of you Stickman readers out there would had been attracted to her. She was a sweet and affectionate person, but physically she had a light tan, perfect unblemished skin, silky black hair, a somewhat curvy body, and breasts that I could only describe as the kind the inventor of breast implants looked to duplicate.  My relationship could not be dreamt, as my dreams a relationship could not measure up to my experiences with Linda. She is the one person that got me hooked on Asian women and since then, I have only dated non-Asians on the rare occasion.

Linda did not have any white friends. All of her friends were from Taiwan. I met many of her friends and they were very cordial. Linda did like to go to American bars occasionally. I remember one night I took her downtown and I noticed a bunch of fitness girls from the gym I go to and still do to this day. One in particular used to have the eye for me, but she saw Linda and I and since never laid an eye on me again.

At this point, I had already dumped all of my guy friends, but one guy, probably the lowest on the social scale and he wanted to meet her. He was a plumber and was into weightlifting and bodybuilding like me. He was living with a slightly older and slightly heavier (than himself) human resources manager. So we decided to meet up at one of those restaurant/bars/arcade establishments. As we ate, the HR manager was talking to Linda like she was a little girl and the plumber wouldn’t even acknowledge her. After we ate we all went to play games. After about 20 minutes I looked for the plumber and his woman and they had left. No good-byes, no nothing. A few weeks later I caught up with the plumber and said WTF. His response was something like she was dirty and they wanted to leave.

I few months later Linda broke up with me. Not because she did not love me, but because her mother said I had no money (I had been laid off my first IT job after the tech bubble), I was too old, and that if she did not break up with me, her mother would come to the U.S. and live with Linda so I would not come by. Today, I believe Linda lives in the Asian section of Los Angles in a condo with a man with a Chinese name.

Lydia

After 9/11 Linda’s mother forbid her to see me; so then after a few months I went on the hunt again. I probably should had taken a few years off as I was still madly in love with Linda, but I did not. I met a Chinese girl named Lydia. Lydia was from a medium-sized city in southwest China. As she said, “Near where the elephants roam.” Lydia was not the prettiest girl in the world, but she and I became very close. Not physically, but emotionally. She was in love with me, but I saw her as my sister.

When she first got off the airplane in our city, she was greeted at the gate by 3 Christian women that would help her get situated in the US. Lydia was a scientist and an atheist, but became friends with the women. Since the 3 ladies helped Lydia get situated, Lydia decided to go to church and social events involving bible studies with them. She began to believe in god, until the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Lydia was very shaken by the catastrophe and so was her faith. She questioned how God could allow such tragedies to occur. She continued to go to church and their weekly social gatherings. Many times she’d call me up afterwards and cry to me that no one liked her and she was being ignored. Her stubbornness, probably developed through the 60 per week she’d studied since 6 years old, kept her going back.

Eventually, Lydia said the hell with it and no longer attended the church or bible studies, but wanted to stay friends with the 3 Christian ladies she met at the airport. The results were that the Christian ladies wanted nothing to do with Lydia anymore. And besides those 3 and a couple of white boyfriends, Lydia has never been friends with a white woman. In fact, she has never been back to my city since and never wants to again. Besides me, she never had another friend that was not ethnically Chinese.

I saw Lydia as my sister and she was my best friend for 10 years. In fact, she is the best friend of my life and one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. She eventually obtained a PhD and moved out of the state to a very large, culturally diverse southern city where she as an Associate Professor. She met an ABC (American Born Chinese) and got married and now has 2 children with him. I had not heard from Lydia in nearly 9 years then out of the blue she sent me an email in July. She had hoped I was safe from the Covid virus and was living a happy life. That put a smile on my face in more than one way.

Vivian

In 2006 I met a Vietnamese refugee from Saigon named Vivian. Her mother had just gotten pregnant with her during the fall of Saigon, but did not come to the US. In the early 90’s, Vivian’s family had discovered a loophole in getting into the US. The loophole was they had a cousin that was half American. It was a lie, but like most immigrants, they saw an opportunity to make high wages, freedom, free schooling, healthcare, and receive a pension. Plus Vivian and her mother, who was once a nun, were Catholics and did not believe in communism and hated the Vietnamese government.

Vivian was a pretty girl. She had a quarter Cambodian mixed with her so she was a Vietnamese with a tan. A very exotic looking girl; in fact she’d get eye-balled by men constantly while we were out and about. We were together, on and off for 6 and half years. She is also an intelligent and very social woman. I was her first white boyfriend, but as she got more acclimated away from her Vietnamese community, she entered this empty area. As she explained, she felt that she was not American, but also losing her Vietnamese identity; a so called Identity Trap. Vivian was on antidepressants for many years and could not quit them. She was not happy and did not know how to find happiness.

The one thing Vivian really enjoyed were her friends. They’d all go out dancing and having a good time. This went on until my relationship ended with her when she was 35. Many times on Saturday night, Vivian would want to see me before her friends came over to pick her up. You know, take care of me. And many times I met her friends. She was friends with a ton of Vietnamese girls, but never from the North. She had a couple of friend from Burma and she even had black girl friends, but never a white girl.

During my time with Vivian, she earned a bachelor’s degree, but wanted to be a middle school math teacher. Thus, she decided to enter the graduate program at the famous university, instead of a lesser university. She had never had any white girl friends and really wanted to. She tried to befriend some of the white girls in the program, but they would ridicule her and were extremely competitive with her. It got to the point where she had a nervous breakdown because of it and the professor found out and failed Vivian from the course, even though Vivian had done all the work. This expelled her from university, left her with 60K in debt, and the final demise of our relationship. And to the last days I spoke to Vivian, she never had any white female friends. The last I heard she was a medical interpreter; hence, she was always with foreign girls and probably always will be.

And I Almost Forgot About Annie

Just before Lydia and right after Linda, was Annie. Annie is from Solo, Indonesia. Not much to say about her, but she was the first Muslim girl I dated and we dated for about 6 weeks. I ended it with her because my heart was still deeply with Linda. Annie was a very nice girl and something I will always remember she said to me is, “It doesn’t matter how much you make, it’s what you do with it.” Annie was in fact rich and at the time, I was essentially bankrupt. I always thought Annie would be a fine girl to marry. As far as I knew, she had no white friends. After university, I believe she went home. A couple of years ago I decided to look her up and I found her Facebook page. I did a right click on the image and noticed the geographical metadata was attached from her camera. I plugged in the lat/longs and she’s back in Surakarta with a husband and child. She is where she belongs with the family she deserves and I imagine cherishes.

My Thoughts

In this era of diversity and inclusion, many of the people pushing for it are the ones creating the division. When I was in my teens and 20s I hung around with the jocks and face guys because that is what I was. We complemented each other and had a similar background and upbringing. At the same time, I was in university and was told by an adjunct, I should find another major. All I could come up with was jocks are not computer scientists. I guess, he didn’t bother checking that my GPA which was near 3.5 and junior standing. And then eventually I’d go on to earn a MS with an even higher GPA.

In regards to western women, I don’t think that many of the obese, sun-damage-skinned white women want to hang around a slender woman half their size, with straight beautiful hair and the natural tan they can only dream of. Instead, they shame them and the men they are with. As with most people that are ridiculed, it is because others are jealous of them.

We are all in a particular social class; like it or not. The people who we are friends with, befriend at work, even the females we have relationships with. You can even break that down to the areas of town we live in, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, and the hairstyles we keep. As I have learned, when you delve away from that, you are endangering your social class.

As I conclude, I am thinking of work as I need to wake up in 4.5 hours and log in remotely. I do not miss driving into work, but I think of a couple of people I miss. First is a black lady who I still speak with weekly on the phone and I like to tease her by calling her Kamala because she has the same skin tone as a more famous Kamala. And then there’s a 74-year-old Cambodian refugee who was imprisoned for 3 years during the Khmer Rouge. He was a custodian at work that would stop by my office daily and make jokes to me about Thai women and buffalos.

So how does this submission relate to Thais? We’ll if you connect Lydia’s hometown with Annie’s hometown, Bangkok is exactly in the middle. Well, that does say a lot and Vivian, the longest relationship of my life came from a place very close to Bangkok and with a similar culture. Actually, after my third trip to Thailand I had gotten home late on a Sunday night and showed up to the office early the next morning. By 8 AM I was in HR being interrogated by investigators. They wanted to know why I was in Thailand.