http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhiteyAndMellowYellow

Alden Pyle, The Quiet American "Let's just look at Phuong... mistress of an older European man. Well, that pretty well describes the whole country, doesnt it?"

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The stereotypical relationship of a white male with a disadvantaged, or submissive, Asian woman.

Interracial relationships in general are still a touchy subject. There still exists the notion that the women of a social category somehow "belong" to the men of that category and vice-versa. Those who stray are often considered some kind of traitor to 'their people'. Asiatic-European pairings are also plagued by the shadow of Orientalism , and a long history of stories about "pink men rescuing brown women from evil brown men". Though 'Orientalism' was originally defined by European attitudes to the Middle East, European eyes went on to view the Far East through the same paradigm. In any case, the modern stereotype of Asian women is that they're charmingly exotic, uber-domestic, unquestioningly-subservient nymphomaniacs... or, at the other extreme, an uneducated, ditzy moron. Thus, her white lover will arrive and be somehow "better" than her Asian peers, often to the point of her complete devotion.

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Sometimes, this trope is a simple Race Fetish, but at other times, expect one or both partners to be something of a Flat Character. The Asian woman may exhibit Asian Speekee Engrish, may be a sex worker, may be an immigrant struggling to fit in, or otherwise show some sort of social disadvantage. The white male, however, will either be a a wealthy, successful, exotic and handsome hunk-angel who will win the hearts of frustrated Asian women or an Everyman that audiences can identify with. The former is popular in Glurgey Asian romance novels and is a direct counterpart to the eponymous Greek/Spanish Millionares of trashy romance novel fame.

In Real Life, it should be noted that white male-Asian female is the second-most common interracial pairing in the United States . Back in The Golden Age of Hollywood, Chinese-American star Anna May Wong was treated this way in the press for dating white men - as she found that Asian men looked down on her for being an actress. But we won't get into the psychology or implications of real people here.

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See also Asian Babymama, where this type of relationship doesn't end well.

Compare Where Da White Women At?, which is about African-European male-female pairings, and contrast Black Gal on White Guy Drama, for the African-European female-male pairing.

Contrast Like Goes with Like, where an Asian courts another Asian (though predominantly as it occurs in European media).

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Comedy

This trope gets referenced in several of Margaret Cho's routines. In talking about how limited acting roles are for Asian women, she joked that as a little girl she thought to herself "Someday, I could be one of Fonzie's girlfriends on Happy Days! Or I could be a prostitute on M*A*S*H!"

Comic Books

Wolverine from X-Men was engaged to Mariko Yashida, a Japanese woman, when he became a samurai. The wedding was canceled at the last moment, however, thanks to villain Mastermind's manipulations. He did marry the Japanese Itsu, with whom he had a son, Daken. He also had a romance with free-spirited Yukio. The 90s 'toon mixes Lady Deathstrike (Yuriko Oyama) with Mariko to create this trope again (Granted, she wants him dead now). Played with in Corto Maltese: Corto and Shanghai Li develop feelings for each other, but don't act on them as Li turns out to already be married to a Chinese man whom she describes as a Nice Guy, parting ways amicably with Corto. This was also shown in The Movie. Charisma Man, a comic book produced for English-speaking expatriates in Japan. The title character was a dorky Canadian unsuccessful with women in his own country - until he arrives in Japan where he instantly becomes suave and supercool, admired by all the locals and able to pick up any girl he wants. His mortal enemy is "Western Woman", the only one aware of what a loser he really is.

Inverted in Gene Yang's American Born Chinese. Chinese-American Jin develops a crush on his schoolmate Amelia, who's white. This eventually causes him to reject his Asian heritage outright.

In the graphic novel Skim the half-Japanese protagonist's father was formerly married to her Japanese mother and is now dating another Asian woman. The creators identify him as someone who dates exclusively Asian women in an interview. Played to an extreme in Watchmen where the Comedian gets himself a Vietnamese girlfriend during the war but eventually dumps her, despite her being pregnant with his child, and shoots her dead when she scars him with a broken glass.

The Flash: Prior to the New 52, we have Wally West and Linda Park. However at the start, they were at odds at each other due Linda criticizing the Flash for the collateral damage. Then, they got married and had twins. Linda averts the stereotypical Asian submissive love interest because she has spunk and at one storyline, goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge when she watched Wally died in the hands of Kobra and requested Pied Piper to build weapons so she can put lead on Kobra despite not having any superpowers.

Comic Strips

Parodied in The World of Lily Wong: The title character, a Hong Kong Chinese woman, is married to a wimpy American expatriate.

Doonesbury: Mike Doonesbury, who marries the much younger Vietnam-war orphan Kim. White mercenary, conman and ambassador "Uncle" Duke has a quite fucked up relation with his secretary/translator/sex slave Honey Huan (chinese).

Defied with a comic strip produced by the government of China which warns Chinese women on dating foreigners, on the grounds that they could be undercover spies. No kidding .

Fan Works

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Troublemaker and Other Saints has one of the daughters of a Chinese family married to a black man; another daughter has a preference for white men and not Asian men. Fah Lo Suee, daughter of Fu Manchu, falls in love with Sir Denis Nayland Smith and betrays her father for him. James Clavell's Asian Saga. Shogun provides some justification, as Mariko-san is the only available translator for Blackthorne, so the two end up spending all their time together. Blackthorne, all told, has four Japanese women: Fujiko, whom Toranaga orders to to run his household as a consort (with all that the word implies), Mariko his translator, and, in the end, he is married to Midori, in order to solidify his standing as samurai and to run his house once Fujiko commits seppuku , and Kikuchiyo 's contract is given to him so she'll be attached to someone worthy of her, and so that he'll have someone to delight him for as long as he's imprisoned in Japan Mariko from Shogun is an aversion: it's made clear that she finds most Westerners disgusting for their lack of hygiene and eating habits, and she only hooks up with Blackthorne when he has adopted Japanese ways and been declared an honorary samurai. Tai-Pan takes it much further. Several white men have Asian mistresses, or have kept them at one point, and all three either explicitly have or are implied to have had utterly disastrous marriages back home. Inverted with Mary, who whores herself out to Chinese men to enjoy some power and pleasure, and she confirms that there is strong attraction on both sides.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan plays with this trope. One of the couples plays the stereotype of white man/Asian woman relationships having a dominant man and submissive woman perfectly straight, but it's strongly implied that the husband cheated because of his wife's spinelessness, when she catches her husband in flagrante delicto with a white woman.

The Ben Devereaux/Li-Xia couple in Red Lotus can come off as this, but while Ben is definitely a Mighty Whitey, Li-Xia is not a Mellow Yellow.

In the Chinese novel Shanghai Baby by Zhou Weihui, the main character, a Shanghai woman in her 20s, is in a relationship with a caring but sexually impotent Chinese man, and has a steamy affair with a Western expatriate. The latter is depicted as a tall, blond, sexually aggressive German. Occurs in Gish Jen's novel Mona in the Promise Land, and lampshaded when the white man, Seth, impersonates a Chinese former romantic interest in order to attract the Chinese-American protagonist's attention. Inverted in a later novel by the same author, The Love Wife.

Averted in Snow Falling on Cedars when Hatsue decides to break up with Ishmael even before her family finds out about their affair. Though she is deeply fond of him, she's simply not in love with him, and ends up happily married to a Japanese man.

Gwen and Hidenari from Bridge to the Sun gender inverted this.

In 1632, Frank Jackson, one of the uptime miners, came back from The Vietnam War with a wife.

Lynne Reid Banks' The Dungeon is a dark take on this. MacLennan, a Scottish laird embittered by the deaths of his wife and children, buys a Chinese girl named Peony from her parents on a strange impulse. While Peony is far too young to enter a relationship with him and MacLennan often treats her harshly as only a tea slave to him, there are signs that she's slowly becoming his Morality Pet by reviving the compassion that he's trying to squelch in his quest for revenge against the man who killed his family. Then MacLennan becomes incensed when he realizes how much Peony is affecting him, throws her in the dungeon and leaves her there to die, and realizes that he threw away the one thing that could have made him happy again only when it's far too late. In short, no one gets a happy ending here thanks to the white guy fucking up everything.

Austin Coates' novel City of Broken Promises tells the true story of Martha, an orphaned Chinese girl in 18th century Macau who falls in love with Thomas Merop, an English trade official. Merop is initially hesitant about pursuing a relationship with Martha, but is won over and eventually marries her so she can inherit his business interests.

Mary Jo Putney's The China Bride features a half-Scottish, half Chinese woman, orphaned by her father in China and living as a male interpreter to survive, falling for a visiting (British?) viscount despite the fiercely segregated environment. The relationship is heavily influenced by the fact that both Troth and Kyle are outsiders; Troth because of her mixed race and Kyle as a foreigner. In the Fablehaven books, the relationship between Patton and Lena zig-zags this trope really weirdly. Patton Burgess is definitely the kind of rugged Western adventurer you'd see in a Mighty Whitey narrative, and Lena is a vaguely East Asian-looking woman who leaves her home and gives up everything (including eternal youth) to be with him. (In fact, at one point, Lena reminisces about how Patton had a thing for Asian women.) On the other hand, Lena is anything but mellow, and even though she looks Asian, she's actually an American water spirit (giving the whole Patton/Lena subplot a sort of Little Mermaid vibe).

The Quiet American: An aging British journalist in 1950s Saigon, although having a wife back home, has hooked up with a much younger local girl. When a young American shows up, he competes with the older man for the girl's attention, but neither is really interested to know how she feels about the whole thing. (As the page quote notes, this is symbolic of the state of the world at the time, with the older European powers trying to hold on to their empires while the idealistic but naive Americans try to interfere, with neither side giving much thought to what the people of the third-world countries actually want.)

David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumnsof Jacob De Zoet has Dutch trader Jacob DeZoet traveling to Japan to earn money to propose to a wealthy girl in Holland. Instead in Nagasaki he falls for Orito, a disfigured midwife, who is spirited away by a cult in the mountains.

A tragic and awful subversion in My Lai, a character from The Kid.

Inverted in Sannikov Land. Annuir is an Onkilon woman (the Onkilons are related to the Chukchi ) who falls deeply in love with white explorer Ordin. However, he starts to like her back because she is anything but gentle and submissive: for example, their acquaintance begins when she demands to become his wife, and only the day after she announces Stay in the Kitchen is not for her and she intends to follow Ordin to war.

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Pro Wrestling

Inverted when it came to Yoshihiro Tajiri and Torrie Wilson. Tajiri wore the pants in the relationship, both literally and figuratively and became increasingly jealous and controlling of Wilson as it went on, forcing her to dress how he wanted and dressing her down for not loving him as a way to take out his frustrations on losing matches. Torrie, for her part, just took it, simply shaking her head when Tajiri questioned her loyalties.

Jade Chung with Roderick Strong and AJ Styles, as a result of the former sticking up for and ultimately saving her from her old boss, the nefarious Prince Nana, and his "crown jewel" Jimmy Rave, who literally walked all over her. In time Chung would develop as much fortitude as a pro wrestling manager can get away with having, even returning the favor to Rave.

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Web Original

This phenomenon is parodied in an Onion article: "Asian Teen Has Sweaty Middle-Aged Man Fetish ."

." Creepy White Guys : A (now defunct) Tumblr that was dedicated to mock white men with Asian fetishes on dating websites.

: A (now defunct) Tumblr that was dedicated to mock white men with Asian fetishes on dating websites. Doctor Nerd Love discussed CWG here .

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Western Animation