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Originally Posted by MRM

In my experience, Chinese women are much like any other women. There's 7 or 8 hundred million of them just in Mainland China, plus untold millions in various states of emigration or Chinese ancestory, so one out of every 5 or 6 women in the world is Chinese. If you don't have one yet, your son probably will. There's a bit of variation in that mix. I got mine at college, about 15 miles from the tiny southwestern Wisconsin farmhouse house I grew up in. Like a lot of people, I dated and ended up marrying someone I met in class. The girl who sat next to me and got assigned to my small group in a senior business class come over as an exchange student from Beijing.

Biggest differences? Chinese women smell and taste a little differently than American or European women. They speak Chinese as a first langauge instead of English. They tend to like Chinese food instead of ground beef with a big pile of melted cheese. But women are women, you know?

Mainland born Chinese carry different cultural experiences that have shaped their lives depending on wether they grew up in a city or the coutryside, how old they are and when they came to the US. Just like a 40 year old from Manhattan, Kansas has a different outlook on life than a babyboomer from Manhatten, NY. Anyone in their mid-40s and older will be defined by the Cultural Revolution, ration cards, the Red Guard, crushing poverty to the point of hunger, and the fear of being sent to the countryside. The younger they are the less they experienced it. But people just a short generation later will only remember Chou En-lai and the gradual easing of the government, culminating in the 1989 massacre. You'll know the older generation because they tend to talk about events by refering to the date, not what happened. And just a short generation after that people only remember the economic boom time that started in about 1993 and has carried on since.

You met someone you realy connected with. That's unusual and what we all hope for. go for it and don't look back. There's really nothing different about Chinese women that can't be explained by variations in all humans. Where we grew up and our life experiences shape us, but the cultural gap between me as an educated white Wisconsinite and my wife as a urban and educated Chinese exchange student was far less than the culture gap I experienced a few years earlier when my sister married a guy from Georgia. The new relatives were all very nice, but really different. That took some getting used to on both side.

If you absorb just one post on this topic, it should be this one. She a human being.