Seeking Western Men

Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5-billion-dollar global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes--younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men. Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese women who are primarily middle-aged, divorced, and proactively seeking spouses to fulfill their material and sexual needs. What they seek in their Western partners is tied to what they believe they've lost in the shifting global economy around them. The majority of these women do not speak English, and so rely on translators to help with, especially, the early stages of courtship: email correspondence. Ranging from multi-millionaire entrepreneurs or ex-wives and mistresses of wealthy Chinese businessmen, to contingent sector workers and struggling single mothers, these women,along with their translators and potential husbands from the U.S., Canada, and Australia, make up the actors in this multifaceted story. Set against the backdrop of China's global economic ascendance and a relative decline of the West, this book asks: How does China's rise reshape Chinese women's perception of Western masculinity? Moreover, how do the women's own divergent class positions within China shape the outcome of their marital trajectories differently? Through the unique window of global internet dating, this book reveals how China's rise on the world stage reshapes relationships of race, class, gender, sex, and intimacy across borders. More broadly, Seeking Western Men looks at how the people for whom late-stage capitalism has not provided its promised advantages have sought to take matters into their own hands. The global dating industry, for them, acts as a surrogate for recapturing their agency in a world that has left them behind--