I’m sitting here at the Rooster Brewery in Da Nang, watching the humidity curl around the neon lights, and it hits me—the sheer, unvarnished weight of the optics.
I’m 6’4″. I’m a statue of a man with broad shoulders and a shirt that says I don’t need to look at the receipt when the bill comes. I walk through these streets and I can feel the eyes—not just looking, but wanting. Old ladies approach me not for a chat, but to offer up their daughters’ phone numbers like they’re presenting a sacrifice to a monument.
Let’s stop being polite for a second. There is an authoritarian air to being a Western man in a place like this. You feel superior because the entire infrastructure tells you that you are. It’s like moving from Southern California to the deepest, most backwards pocket of Alabama—you look around and realize the clocks are ticking differently.
Statistics don’t lie, even if they make the soft-hearted cry. In the digital meat market of Tinder, Asian men are the least swiped-on demographic in the West. Women aren’t flocking to the States with “Asian fever” looking for a husband. But the reverse? It’s a stampede. We come over here and we colonize the landscape. It’s in the DNA.
I watch them try to function in a bar, and it looks like an orchestra without a conductor. They’ve got the instruments, but they’re waiting for a Captain Cook to step into the middle and orchestrate the chaos. It’s a cultural mechanical failure. They aren’t making it happen; they’re waiting for us to allow it to happen.
Everything you see—the cars they drive, the IPAs we’re drinking, the shoes on their feet, the very sweaters on their backs—they didn’t invent any of it. We brought the fire, and they’re just warming their hands by it. It’s hard not to walk around feeling like a god when you realize you’re the source of the technology, the taste, and the currency.
They look at the “Big White Boy” and they see a VIP pass to a life they didn’t build. America is “nippalizing” itself, getting soft and small, but over here? I’m still first pick at the tap. I’m the tall glass of water in a desert of stunted expectations.
It’s not bias if it’s factual. It’s just the gravity of the situation.
You can’t help but feel it. The adrenaline of being the one who knows how the clock works in a room full of people who just watch the hands move. Their social skills are stalled, their infrastructure is a suggestion, and their sexual activity is a process that they’ve turned into a commodity because they don’t know how to own the room.
We are the lawyer class to their labor. We are the architects to their bricklayers. It sounds out of control because the truth usually is. We aren’t just tourists; we are the anchors holding the ship steady in their harbor.
