She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides under China's Global Rise, and reported the following:
Seeking Western Men examines the phenomenon of global internet dating and cross-border marriage between Chinese women and men from English speaking Western countries. The couples do not speak each other’s language and rely on translators at commercial dating agencies to facilitate their email exchanges and face-to-face meetings. Page 99 of this book details a love triangle between Vivien, divorced Chinese woman, her American fiancé John, and her lover Kuan – a married Chinese businessman with whom she was having an extramarital affair while engaged to John. Although many couples in my study broke up over the Western men’s inability to provide for their Chinese brides, this was not the reason behind John and Vivien’s faltering relationship. Despite fulfilling all of Vivien’s financial demands, John still felt insecure, as if he was being interviewed for a job and could fail at any time.Learn more about Seeking Western Men at the Stanford University Press website.
Unlike John, who splurged thousands of dollars on Vivien, Kuan spent much less, paying only for food throughout their affair. Hence, I argue that Vivien’s attraction to Kuan was not based on an exchange of his wealth for her sexuality, but rather a feeling of sexual attraction toward money and power, which she could not replicate with John. Page 99 captures one of the key insights of the book: the rising significance of class distinction and the declining privilege associated with race, ethnicity, and nationality as an affluent capitalist class emerges in both Western and non-Western countries. Vivien’s attraction to Kuan was tied to his class position as a successful businessman and the masculinity he embodied, characterized by confidence, leadership, assertiveness, and extroversion. By contrast, John, the middle-class American who held a technical job and managed only a small team at work exhibited none of those traits.
Apart from her disinterest in John, Vivien also rejected Edmond, a white American fire fighter, whom she immediately flagged as provincial when they met in person. At the same time, she became infatuated with a British business executive of Pakistani descent. Clearly, Vivien desired men who were part of the global economic elite, and she was quick to reject nonelites, even if those men were whites from the Global North. Her experience challenges readers to rethink the relationship between race and class. In the U.S., race remains an important status marker independent of class, because ethnic minorities still hold significantly less economic, political, and social power than the white majority, despite their accomplishments at the individual level. In China however, the old racial hierarchy that once featured white men on top is crumbling, as a new capitalist class dominated by local business elites emerge, thereby making Asia home to the largest number of billionaires in the world. This book highlights how such macro-level changes in global political economy can manifest in people’s everyday decision-making in the intimate sphere, including who they choose to date and marry.
--Marshal Zeringue
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