ANNE

Anne Ishii has translated over 15 books, subtitled over 20 hours of film footage, interpreted over 50 hours of interviews, and is under 5′ 3″ tall. You can check out her blog at Ill Iterate.

Ten days in a foreign country is no way to assess an entire race, but my horse-trek through the Terelj region of Mongolia left one prescient impression on me. And that is this: aside from the fact that some of them really hate the Chinese, all of them are outnumbered 14 to 1 by animals, and the fact that I’d get pregnant with a yeast infection if one so much as fingered me with their dirt-caked horse-weilding mitt-like hands, Mongolian men are the most amazing people in Asia.

Let me backtrack a little with a simple question we’ve all asked ourselves: what does it mean to be an Asian man in the 21st century? The question of manhood is certainly not exclusive to Asians; there’s been a misguided sense of a need to return to manly principles permeating the world over. Between man camps, gentlemen fetishes (read: obsessions with the show Mad Men, Ketel One’s ad campaign, the return of the moustache) and girls outnumbering boys at gifted-and-talented-schools, men have had to become more self-obsessed, self-important, self-reflexive… in other words, more feminist. And by Jove, why shouldn’t they. If I call it misguided, it’s only because often men are whining that they deserve some entitlements THEY ALREADY HAVE.

C’mon boo, you still make more money than us, permanently outnumber us in executive business positions and never have to suffer nine months of weight gain that ends with your taint getting torn in half to make way for a baby half of you are statistically going to abandon.

Asian men live an added dimension of this meta-masculinity because of misgivings (both self-imposed and unfairly attributed by others) about their masculinity vis-à-vis other men. We are a beautiful people, but few meatheads understand how a CRX is infinitely better to ride than a friggin’ Hummer. Asian men have to suffer emasculating stereotypes and hypersexualized women. If some white man in America complains he has to apologize for his masculinity, another Asian man in America is tired of proving his.

And to the brothers, I say:

GO TO MONGOL.

It isn’t that Mongolian men are more masculine than most Asians—which, well… they are—but they are a whole lot less self-reflexive, and that seems to be the biggest difference. Much of man’s nature is taken at face value there, and I’ll surmise a large part of it is tied into their proximity to nature itself. And yet even in Ulan Bator, a gay twink at the bar just looks more comfortable leaning into his daddy. The sunbeaten construction worker is not worried when he hands cinder blocks to the woman working to his left (yes, female construction workers abound in Ulan Bator!).

In the steppes, the men hunt and herd because they have to, and not because it is a rite of passage. They wrestle on their lunch breaks and no one calls them gay. Their skin is sunbeaten and their eyes sunbleached. They pluck their facial hair with brass tweezers, and if you ask their ethnicity (don’t ask why I bothered asking) will reply, “I am the son of Ghengis Khan.”

Uh… hot.

It’s the work of a thousand kungfu flicks and the therapist you refuse to see, this trip to Mongolia. I say go there and find your peace.

(You can read Anne’s previous guest blogs here and here.)