Recently I took a short vacation to Vietnam with my girlfriend in the hope of enjoying a brief period of rest away from China. Not that China is a bad place, but in some of the larger cities such as mine, they resemble a densely populated pressure cooker; in the same sense that my native home England is the host of a never-ending festival of rain. Although one grows up learning to accept it, you still find a need to get away from the place occasionally.
There was to be no such luck in regard to our intentions to escape; the increasingly wealth and changing taste of the Chinese tourist has led them to overseas in increasingly larger numbers; signs written in Chinese can be spotted everywhere and you will often find that some restaurant staff can speak Mandarin better than they can speak English. However, the skies were blue and facekini wearing ayis didn’t spit everywhere or let their kids defecate in places that aren’t officially designated as toilets.
Yet, it was not the lower class Chinese tourists, their stupid tour groups and the unsightly aspects of their behaviour that reminded me the most about China in the same sense that a trip to Benidorm, Spain would remind you a little too much about the worst parts of life in Britain. Being only a short distance away from China, Vietnam attracts ALL of those that live and work in China for short vacations, even those that aren’t actually Chinese.
While some like me may choose to indulge mainly in eating fantastic food and drinking cocktails all day, the fempat will mainly continue to behave exactly the same as they would back in China but they will be far more easy to identify. They will bring their Macbook Pros along to the excessively clean and fashionably decorated cafés that appeal mostly to Western tourists and still bitch to their fempat friends about their English teaching jobs in China. When one overhears them rather loudly talking about having to do regular visa runs on their ‘ten year visa,’ and making the normative practice of telling their training centre boss to eff off sound like something more profound and meaningful than an uncontrolled emotional outburst, one can’t help but feel irritated. They’re working in China illegally yet bizarrely consider themselves to have rights and fail to realise that the world does not quite revolve around them.
What’s more, they will complain extensively about the thing that they hate the most; men. A mean comment or two about this fat and not so handsome white man having a cute, petite Asian girl attached to his arm was overheard and to be honest; that was to even be expected. Yet other complaints were to be overheard about ‘those kinds of men’ using their female friends for sex, being sleazy because they sleep with local women etc. In their eyes, men are not allowed to do what men should reasonably be expected to do whilst still young enough to avoid marriage because they’re around to enforce their fempat rules. Even when venturing overseas, one cannot escape the fempat thought police.
There was just something special about this place which allowed the most stereotypical qualities of the fempat to stand out. The lack of a need to wear a work appropriate outfit possibly allowed them to ‘show off their curves;’ the lack of background noise in many a bar, café or restaurant allowed one to overhear a conversation regardless of the fact that you would rather that you couldn’t. Many a person will complain about Chinese tourists constantly talking loudly but these fempat whales were practically deafening me with their horrendous accents. Special dietary requests were often barked at young waitresses who can barely speak English in the most condescending of ways. Personally, I believe that a request for fresh milk rather than condensed milk in a coffee in Vietnam should be considered to be a criminal offence, but the manner in which they seemingly wished to put the waitresses in their place seemed rather off.
Vietnam does not really seem to allow China fempats to break away from their invisible chains of hating everything in the workplace, everything male and everything that doesn’t quite taste how they would like it to. It is probably still going to be a few more years until they open branches of Element Fresh in this wonderful country but there was another thing that made the fempats stand out even more; large numbers of foreign women from non-Anglophone countries. They were around at the backpacker bars in abundance; they were usually far more beautiful, feminine and friendly; one could casually chat with them without it being automatically assumed that there was an intention to sleep with them later on in the evening. It is they most of all, that reminded you that fempats are a very special breed of women who could benefit immensely from being more humble, smiling more and being tolerant of differences when in a foreign land.
Regardless, travelling as a couple allowed us to escape the obligations to constantly mix with other foreign tourists and mostly keep ourselves to ourselves. The fact that one could witness fempats so clearly in their full glory, further increased my girlfriend’s belief that Western women in Asia often behave in a rude and unfriendly manner; especially when their sense of self-entitlement is boosted by the fact that they stand out from the crowd. I feel a great sense for the sympathy for the poor soyboys that actually end up having to marry such awful examples of humanity.
