He'll leave your ass for a white girl

I'm working for an expat entertainment and lifestyle magazine in Tianjin now. I was recently assigned to rewrite an interview with one of Tianjin's leading steel development expats for the Japanese version of the magazine.

The source decided we should do it over dinner.

I checked with my American editor first to see if this was kosher behavior, and found that he and the rest of the staff already RSVP'd. At dinner, I took the wine offered me, but kept pace with what my editor was drinking until he started doing shots with our source. When the source started asking me, "Elizabeth, who's the most attractive man at the table?" I tried to keep my grace and abstain from answering.

But none of this decorum saved me when Jessica, whom I had been introduced to as my source's Chinese personal assistant, began screaming at her boss, my source. You've been talking to her all night, you like white women better, the foreigner better watch out, she yelled.

I crawled into a cab to escape with a coworker, but the source joined us. "She knows it's just a contract, I don't love her and she knows I do prefer white women," said the source, an American scoundrel in the greatest.

Jealousy between white, foreign women and Asian women is common. In just one Google search I found a blog titled White Women Suck. One post addressed why white women tend to look down on interracial relationships between white men and Asian women. It's an inflammatory read, check it out here.

I had heard of tensions going the other way, Chinese women confronting foreign women, but this was my first introduction. It's not unlike the Black women White women issues I saw growing up in Gary, Ind. Once, a white girl friend faced a group of black women threatening to beat her up if she didn't split with "the brother" she was dating.

It's all very interesting, but there's one more detail to this story that really takes the cake.

Jessica, the Chinese personal assistant and my source's vigilante mistress, is technically dead in Latvia. Apparently she married the last man she worked for and had to die to escape.