Some time ago, Giacomo Puccini transformed an American play into one of his many operatic masterpieces.  It was about an American man and his exotic, beautiful, tragic Japanese love.  The richness of its score and, more importantly, the intrigue of its plot made Madame Butterfly an epic success.

Asian men have been angry ever since.

I call it the WeGAG—WhiteGuyAsianGirl—syndrome.  And lest you think this is a recent phenomenon, Puccini composed Madame Butterfly one hundred and one years ago.

It’s not just jealousy.  It’s not just a dent in the ego, or an inferiority complex, or subtle racist tendencies.  It’s a bit of all of those, too, but it’s not just those.  It goes way, way deeper than that.  When those tousled-blonde-haired, blue-green-eyed, fair-skinned dudes saunter down the street with their pretty Asian woman in tow, the sneers from Asian men that inevitably follow are filled with a lot more than just superficial angst.

It is jealousy, only in that every man wants a woman, and men without women are jealous of men with women.  But we are not often jealous of that particular Asian woman with her hand on that particular Caucasian ass.  In fact, it is one of the few consolations that white guys seem to have a different—we like to say, poorer—taste in Asian women.

It is a dent in the ego and an inferiority complex only in that every man, no matter how feminist or respectful or in love, feels slightly belittled when it is not him who is sauntering down the street with a woman in tow.

And it is subtle racist tendencies in that most everyone has subtle racist tendencies.  Whether we like it or not, we all hold prejudices that lie deep within and if you’re honest, you’ll know you’ve caught yourself judging someone by the mere color of their skin on more than one occasion.

But in a strange way, the proliferation of WeGAG couples—and make no mistake, it is a proliferation—and the angry Asian men that follow is not really about race.  If it were, there would be just as many Asian men dating white women (and if you think there are, snap out of your color-blind fantasy).  Race is just a cover; a convenient, controversial tool that packs so much baggage it can be used to explain any complex relationship.  Race is the surface, underneath which lies an ocean of troubled histories and that lazy, lurking deep-sea creature called blissful ignorance.

Hong Kong, in fact, is the perfect setting to extrapolate the WeGAG couple into more than just racial tension.  It is hardly much of a metaphorical stretch to understand imperialism as a masculine power taking control of its feminine subjects.  In our case, Great Britain was the tousled-blonde-haired, blue-green-eyed, fair-skinned dude, and Hong Kong his pretty Asian woman in tow.  The same goes for Malaysia, Singapore, or the old International Settlement of Shanghai.  They are the rewards of a kind of capitalism even Hong Kong could not stomach, the prize for getting whole peoples high on drugs, then forcing them into mercantile submission.

This, then, is how an Asian man sizes up the Asian woman who happily ignores her own kind in favor of tracing her fingers up and down those hairy, fairy arms.  She is a trophy, something the white man wants not because he understands her but because she is fresh and mysterious and a great, Oriental story to show off to the blokes back home.  And like the colonies that came before her, her body is sometimes even the prize for getting her high.  The white dude isn’t necessarily a bad guy; he’s just been bequeathed an unconscious tradition of doing whatever the hell he wants.

Call it misogynistic.  Go back again to racism.  Or maybe you think it’s just too much of a metaphorical stretch.  But this is an explanation, not a justification.  There is nothing right in the way Asian men judge an Asian woman by the color of her suitor’s skin.  It is downright hypocritical, not to mention backwards, in a globalizing world of which Hong Kong wishes it was the center.

But it is how it is, and the only thing that makes Asian men angrier than the sight of a WeGAG couple is when their anger is dismissed without further thought as jealous and racist.  You don’t have to agree with the biases—deep down, I don’t agree—but you have to try and understand.  Because for centuries now, Asian guys, more than anything, more than wanting Asian girls to date only them, just want to be understood.

Keane Shum