I’d always liked the idea of finding a Japanese wife. Two trips to Japan while the Yen was weak made me think that Japanese ladies were some of the loveliest ladies on the planet. Especially as many of them dressed in thigh highs and micro-skirts! I’ve never seen such feminine ladies in all my life.
So I joined a Japanese marriage agency specialising in finding husbands for single Japanese women.
Well surprise surprise, no thigh high clad ladies were interested in me. And none of the ladies on their books seemed to be the supermodel types that we men are initially attracted to, so the whole idea seemed a non-starter.
So I was surfing the web late one night when I made the breakthrough discovery that according to what I saw on Foreign Ladies.com, Chinese women seemed pretty much identical to Japanese women. What’s more is that there seemed to be many thousands of single Chinese girls seeking Western husbands. Chinese mail order brides? I had no idea such a thing existed!
So I joined a Chinese dating site called Chnlove. It was free to join, and you only needed to pay to send emails to the ladies. Fair enough I thought – my Mandarin skills were non existent, so I’d happily pay somebody a few dollars to translate my emails into Mandarin!
And here my learning curve started. In 2009 there were 8000+ ladies Chinese single ladies on the Chnlove dating site. Yikes. How do you find your future wife in amongst that lot? Especially when so many ladies are extremely beautiful. In fact there are maybe half a dozen ladies on the whole site who you’d class as being significantly overweight.
So I sent emails to a few, and read their responses. I talked to a few very beautiful ladies my mom didn’t approve of. I tried to attract some Shanghai princesses, but naturally they weren’t interested in me. Finally I went for a couple of girl next door types. Success!
One girl sounded nice. She was a factory worker and spoke no English. We exchanged a few emails but then she sent one that made me think she was just not going to be interested in me.
I chatted to another girl. She seemed different to all the other girls on the site. She was an only child. She lived with her mom and pop in a smaller city in Hubei Province. I had to look it up in my atlas.
We chatted for a month, then I made a crazy plan to visit her. I spoke no Mandarin. I’d never been to China. And yet… if we can put a man on a moon then how difficult can it be to find a wife in a different country? Well I was about to find out just how difficult it is!
I had major travel nightmares arranging the trip. For one thing her English was pretty average, and one particular problem is that using the Google Translator to translate English into Chinese is pretty bad when it comes to tenses. So I told her I was going to do something, and she thought I had already done it. One good thing is that because I met her through Chnlove we had an English translator to fall back on, although it was costing plenty of cash to send translated letters back and forth. At this point I’ll say that we couldn’t meet at her marriage agencies offices (like most men do) because for some reason her marriage agency was in a city over 1000 miles from her home town.
Eventually we settled on a rendez-vous in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province. I found an Air China flight to Beijing on Expedia, then a connecting flight out to Wuhan.
Landing at Wuhan and passing through immigration, I first encountered the chaos that was China. It seemed that 150 people wanted to offer me a taxi ride, but thankfully having read up on what to expect, I managed to find an official taxi stand. I arrived in a thunderstorm. I got in a clapped out Renault, and we made our way, in the evening rush hour, into the centre of Wuhan. It was and still is one of the most exhilarating journeys of my life!
Some ladies will want to meet you as soon as you step off the plane. It’s often best to wait 1 or 2 days if you can so that you can get over a little of the culture shock and jetlag.
Anyway, my lady made it to my hotel, and after reading about so many fake profiles on Chnlove I was overjoyed when I found out she was real, and she had actually turned up to meet me.
Well what can I say? I’d never met a Chinese girl before, and I don’t think she’d met a Western man either. When we met in the hotel lobby we didn’t know whether to kiss, hug, shake hands or bow. Her hands were shaking as she desperately tried to tap out a greeting on her handheld Chinese to English translator.
So we spent a couple of days in Wuhan together, and I’ll admit that we had a great time together, but the relationship didn’t blossom. Most guys who date Asian ladies have usually been through a marriage and divorce to a Western woman. The good thing is if you’ve done this, you’ll be a lot better at reading the signals. Not that it’s hard to read Chinese girls – on later trips I would find out that the signals are pretty darned obvious.
So where to begin on what went wrong? Well I spent a good few months thinking about it. The trouble with ladies who don’t speak or write good English is that you’ll probably never get to the bottom of why a relationship didn’t work out. As I found out to my cost, the best thing is simply to move on. I once heard some fabulous advice – if you’re a man then the hole in your heart is woman shaped. Any woman can fill this hole, not just one woman. Yeah, I did really love the girl I met, but as I later found out she wasn’t the only girl in Asia, and she wasn’t even the best girl I would eventually go on to meet.
