She is of Asian origin, he is of Western origin. This is a very common combination for interracial relationships in fiction (as well as in Real Life). A combination that is not only common, but also archetypal, for better or worse. Authors making this combination have a whole history of stereotypes and prejudices to use or avert.

Sadly, interracial relationships in general are still a touchy subject for many. Sometimes with notions that the women of a certain ethnic group or whatever "belong" to the men of that group, or that any woman or man who makes intimate alliances outside their group is a Race Traitor. When it comes to the particular case of Asian women with white men, we also have the whole issue of Orientalism, with its history of stereotypes about "white men rescuing brown women from brown men" and with Asian women being portrayed as exotic, submissive and hyper-sexualized.

So, back to our Asian Alice and our Western Bob. Why are these two characters together? Well, it's really a sliding scale. At the top of the sliding scale, the narrative treat both characters with respect. In the middle, both characters are treated with a respect that may feel objectifying and/or built on very outdated stereotypes. At the bottom, the narrative is condescending or openly hostile against the woman or the man or both. Six individual options along this sliding scale are as follows:

Maybe they simply like each other as individuals, race not being a factor at all. Maybe race is a little factor – at least one of them have a preference for the other race without being obsessed or anything. They think that the other person, as an individual, looks nice and have a nice personality – and that the racial background contributes a bit to this. Maybe he's an awesome Mighty Whitey, or she's an exotic Mysterious Waif or something. Probably both. In other words, the story itself has been inspired by such classical stereotypes: some kind of fetishism is probably going on here, but the characters are fetishes rather then fetishists. Maybe one of them, usually the man, has a full-scale fetish for the other race. Maybe one of them is deluded, incorrectly believing the other to be a living stereotype. The difference between this and level three is that it's in the character's head rather then in the narrative itself. Finally, the whole thing could also be based on a negative stereotype or a few: she's poor and uneducated, possibly a prostitute. He's a loser who can't get a "real" (white) woman.

This trope is almost never inverted in Western fiction as the White Male Lead will often function as an Audience Surrogate. It is common wisdom in the Western entertainment industry that the white male audience cannot identify with a non-White male character, especially if said non-White lead hooks up with a white woman.

Compare Where Da White Women At?, which is about black guys and white girls hooking up, Black Gal on White Guy Drama which involves black girls and white guys, and Asian Baby Mama, where this type of relationship doesn't end well. If it's on the lower end of the sliding scale above, the gal in the relationship may use Asian Speekee Engrish.

Examples of Asian Gal with White Guy include:





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Anime & Manga









Film

Tomiko: Here's some food for the prisoner.



Sonoko: So much?



Tomiko: Dutchmen are tall, they eat a lot.



Sonoko: Oh, he isn't that tall. But he does have a big one.



Tomiko: He's a Dutchman all right.





Literature





Live Action TV





Music

I've been searching for a man



All across Japan



Just to find, to find my samurai



Someone who is strong



But still a little shy



Yes I need, I need my samurai

Bruce Springsteen's hit "Born in the U.S.A.": "I had a brother at Khe Sanh [...] He had a woman he loved in Saigon. / I've got a picture of him in her arms now..."

Weezer's "Pinkerton".

"La Petite Tonkinoise" is a 1906 hit by French singer Vincent Scotto, about a soldier sent to Vietnam who picks up a local girlfriend.

Two words: "Yellow Fever", by the Bloodhound Gang (NSFW).

Parodied in the Vocaloid song "I Fell in Love With Geisha Girl".





Newspaper Comics

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

: The title character, a Hong Kong Chinese woman, is married to a wimpy American expatriate. Mike Doonesbury, who marries the much younger Vietnam-war orphan Kim. Same comic: white mercenary, conman and ambassador "Uncle" Duke has a quite fucked up relation with his secretary/translator/sex slave Honey Huan (chinese).







Professional Wrestling

Inverted when it came to Tajiri and Torrie Wilson, and four years later another inversion came when Kenzo Suzuki fell for Torrie.

Daniel Bryan spurned the advances of the Bella Twins (Latinas) in favour of Asian-Canadian Gail Kim. It's interesting to note that this doesn't pop up as much in WWE as you might think given that they love pairing Superstars and Divas as couples. The main reason is Gail Kim has been the only Asian diva on the roster for years. She was the only Asian diva in her first run back in 2003/2004 and is also again now since 2009.







Stand-up 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 Mash!"





Theatre





Video Games





Web Original





Webcomics

Lampshaded in Megatokyo : both male protagonists develop relationships with local Japanese girls, but suffer pangs of guilt (well, one of them, anyway) at the idea of playing out such a cliché. Piro seemed more freaked out by his initial attraction to the high schooler Yuki, as she fulfilled his fantasies of Japanese high school girls. Luckily, his conscience managed to point out that just because anime and manga have conditioned that fetish into him, that doesn't make the 9-year age gap any smaller.

: both male protagonists develop relationships with local Japanese girls, but suffer pangs of guilt (well, one of them, anyway) at the idea of playing out such a cliché. Inverted in Dreamless , the story of an American girl and a Japanese boy in the 1940s who are in telepathic contact with each other in their sleep, and eventually fall in love.

, the story of an American girl and a Japanese boy in the 1940s who are in telepathic contact with each other in their sleep, and eventually fall in love. Yuffie and Riku is a subversion of this trope in Ansem Retort: Yuffie has a thing for weak emo boys that don't have the balls to defend themselves, and Riku's starved enough for attention that isn't abusive beatings that he jumps at the chance with Yuffie. However, the trope name itself is invoked by Red XIII:

My water bowl is missing, and I know Little Miss Me-Love-You-Long-Time took it.





Western Animation

American Dragon Jake Long, Jake (a Chinese American hapa) pursues Rose (Blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl). With Jake bring a dragon and Rose a slayer, ethnicity wasn't much (if any) of a factor. Of course, Jake's father is a white dude married to a Chinese woman

(whose father's objections came from Jake's father's lack of magic)... His grandfather goes out with the high school principal who is white... and a mermaid.





Increasingly common in the United States. Asian-American women are by far the most likely group to marry outside their own ethnicity, with nearly 40% "marrying out" (compared to less than 20% of Asian-American men). The large majority of these interracial marriages are to caucasians.

Disgraced Deviant ART founder Scott Jarkoff constantly spoke of having a Japanese wife. Then again, he's been living in Japan since the 1990's doing work for the U.S. Navy (with DA being a side project), so it's not like he was in a great melting pot of cultures.

In England, there are many cases of men (white, obviously) going to Asian countries with great amounts of poverty, marrying an Asian girl, then coming back to England with them. However, the joke is on them; sometimes the "docile and obedient" wife will disappear with a citizenship through marriage. The same happens in Canada too, but most of the men choose Filipina women instead, forgetting that in the dominant Filipino culture men rule everything... outside the house. The home is the woman's domain and the man forgets that at his peril. So he can decide who's going to be Prime Minister, which team's going to win the Stanley Cup, etc. but she decides where and how they live, what they eat, where he works, how the money is spent to the penny... Many Filipina from the lower classes are Genre Savvy enough to invoke and count on this. Marrying a rich, white man (or just a white man, or even an African-American) is an easy way to escape poverty.

Trey Parker was married to a Japanese woman; they later divorced. He's also a noted Japanophile, doing all the Japanese voices for the show, as well as the pidgin Japanese song for fan-favorite, "Good Times With Weapons".

This Trope page! See evidence: "here." The Advertisement Server: THAT'S JUST BECAUSE I'VE HAD A CASE OF YELLOW FEVER EVER SINCE I MET SHODAN AND THE CHINESE A.M.

Happens, of all things, in the current edition of the New Practical Chinese Reader, a textbook put out by the Beijing Language and Culture University Press. Who gets a little romance subplot revealed through the dialogs? Ma DaWei, the blond American exchange student. Also used in Integrated Chinese , in which Gao Wenzhong (an English caucasian) expresses interest in Bai Ying'ai (a Korean). Gender inverted with Wang Peng and Li You, who are respectively Chinese and a red-haired Caucasian.

In Singapore, the phenomenon is referred to as Sarong Party Girl (SPG for short):

Usually decked out in black, the SPG is typically an attractive Asian girl who sports waist length jet black hair on her petite body, and maintains her brown skin by sun tanning on the beach during the weekends. In a nutshell, she is the complete opposite of a Caucasian woman. She despises local men, and will only go out with you if you are white, rich and well, just white. Many young and beautiful Asian girls have been spotted at pubs canoodling with white men. Never mind that the men are fat, balding, and openly leering. To put it simply, if you are white, you get lucky.