New trophy wives

[90dayfiance]

If it is good enough for Rupert Murdoch then it should be good enough for the rest of us!

Rupert Murdoch has one. So do financiers Vivi Nevo and Bruce Wasserstein. Why are the West's most powerful

men coupling up with younger Asian women?
Call it the Woody Allen Effect. When the venerable director scandalously left Mia Farrow for her adopted

daughter, South Korean-born Soon-Yi Previn — 35 years his junior — he may as well have sent out a press

release: Asian-girl fantasy trumps that of Hollywood royalty!

Many of the elite now turn to companies like A Foreign Affair to help them find Asian Trophy Wives. Foreign

Affair specializes in matching high power men with model like women form around the world. Foreign Affair

boast that they have helped over 20,000 couples during the 18 years of business.

Not two years after they tied the knot, media baron Rupert Murdoch walked down the aisle with fresh-faced

Wendi Deng — 17 days after finalizing his divorce from his second wife. Then, CBS head Leslie Moonves wed TV

news anchor Julie Chen; Oscar winner Nicolas Cage married half-his-age third wife Alice Kim; billionaire

George Soros coupled up with violinist Jennifer Chun; and producer Brian Grazer courted concert pianist

Chau-Giang Thi Nguyen. Add the nuptials of investment magnate Bruce Wasserstein to fourth wife Angela Chao

and the pending vows between venture capitalist Vivi Nevo and Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang, and we've got a

curious cultural ripple.

Were these tycoons consciously courting Asian babes? Do any of them qualify for the unnerving "yellow fever"

or "rice king" moniker? It's unsavory to think so. But after two or three failed attempts at domestic bliss

with women of like background and age, these heavy hitters sought out something different. Something they

had likely fetishized.

Enter the doll-faced Asian sylph on the arm of a silver-haired Western suit. (Hello, mail-order bride!) The

excruciating colonial stereotypes — Asian women as submissive, domestic, hypersexual — are obviously nothing

new. But decades after The World of Suzie Wong hit drive-ins and more than 20 years since David Bowie's

"China Girl" topped the music charts, why are we still indulging them?

Because they're omnipresent — and often entertaining. Even now, how many cinematic greats, literary best

sellers, or even cell-phone ads (see Motorola's latest) characterize Asian women as something other than

geishas, ninjas, or dragon ladies? As the object of opening-line zingers like "Me love you long time" (the

infamous line from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket), I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at the cheeky

blog stuffwhitepeoplelikecom, which ranks Asian girls at number 11 because "Asian women avoid key white

women characteristics, such as having a midlife crisis, divorce, and hobbies that don't involve taking care

of the children." Sure, I'm petite and was in fact born in Shanghai, but — to the shock of more than one guy

I've gone out with — I'd rather down an icy beer and burger than nurse bubble tea and eat dumplings while

massaging his back with my toes.

"This is a common experience among Asian-American women," says Bich Minh Nguyen, who broaches the

stereotypes in her latest novel, Short Girls. "They're dating a white guy, and they may not know if it's a

fetish thing."

"It's like a curse that Asian-American women can't avoid," says C.N. Le, director of Asian and Asian-

American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "From an academic point of view, the

perception still serves as a motivation for white men."

According to Foreign Affair executives, "Our clients say they just can not find the values that they are

looking for with beauty, these men have been looking their whole life here and have had no luck finding it.

That is why they turn to us."

In researching his new book, The East, the West, and Sex, author Richard Bernstein found that the

Orientalist illusion continues to influence. "Historically, Asia provided certain sexual opportunities that

would be much more difficult for Western men to have at home. But it remains a happy hunting ground for them

today," he says, citing one phenomenon in the northeastern region of Thailand called Issan, where 15 percent

of marriages are between young Thai women and Western men well into their 60s.

But I suspect there's something else about the East that's seducing business bigwigs at this very moment:

globalization. Consider that, stateside, Mandarin classes have spiked 200 percent over the past five years

(apparently, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was an early adopter; he taught Mandarin classes in his

Dartmouth days), and China has claimed status as the world's top export nation. In Outliers, Malcolm

Gladwell theorizes that Asian kids' intrinsic work ethic makes them outsmart American kids in math. (In the

latest Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development international education survey, Taiwanese

students were tops in math, while the U.S. placed 35th.) It's as though these Western men are hungry for a

piece of that mystical Eastern formula. As such, Asians (in addition to African orphans) are hot commodities

right about now — status symbols as prized as a private Gulfstream jet or a museum wing bearing your name

(neither of which goes so well with a frumpy, aging first wife).

Tellingly, most current trophies of choice are far more than exotic arm candy. They are accomplished

musicians and journalists, they have Ivy League MBAs and hail from prestigious political families (Mrs.

Wasserstein's older sis is former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao). Why, then, are these women falling for rich

white patriarchs? Why be a target for headline comparisons to concubines? When Wendi Deng was described as

"The Yellow Peril" in a recent magazine profile, it only marginalized her achievement: As chief strategist

for MySpace China, she has become central to News Corp.'s expansion into the elusive Chinese market —

something Murdoch himself had attempted, and failed to do, before she came into the picture.

While I'm sure that real love and affection is sometimes the bond in these culture-crossing May-December

romances, could it be that power divorces of a certain ilk make the perfect renegade suitors for these

overachieving Asian good girls — an ultimate (yet lame) attempt at rebellion? Maybe these outsized, world-

class moguls are stand-ins for emotionally repressed Asian dads (one cliché that is predominantly true).

Or...are these women just glorified opportunists? What's so perverse is that while Asians have always

revered their elders, sleeping with a guy old enough to be your grandfather is just creepy — in any culture.

So do these marriages last? Kenneth Agee, marketing director of Foreign Affair say," these marriages have

almost twice the success rate of domestic marriages, much less likely to end in divorce"