8:00 am HKT Jul 31, 2014
By Maura Cunningham
“I thought I knew what I was getting into,” is what author Susan Blumberg-Kason told me about her marriage at the age of 24 to a Chinese doctoral student she met while living in Hong Kong. And she had every reason to feel confident: Competent in Mandarin and with multiple trips to China under her belt, she had about as good a grasp of the country as any Westerner could back in 1995, when few had the opportunity to travel widely there.
Over the next five years, however, she came to realize the vast difference between visiting China and trying to become part of a Chinese family.
Relationships between Western women and Chinese men are still rare, though less uncommon than many might think. According to data analyzed by scholars Elaine Jeffreys and Wang Pan, 49,000 marriages involving foreigners and mainland Chinese were registered in 2010. In roughly one quarter of those marriages, the groom was Chinese.