On Westerners and Easterners
This is kind of a weird post, a response to a long, recent article in The Irish Times about Westerners in Asia during Covid-19.
“There’s always a sense of having to leave [Ireland] to actually grow. It’d be nice to just grow at home,” says one credentialed source in the article.
I think there is a strong sense in East Asia that cross-cultural intermingling is dangerous. One of the best-known dating websites seems to prohibit (or the countries may do) Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian women from talking to Western men. I think it has to do with concern about suicide pacts. China, Vietnam, and Thailand seem more relaxed.
I have said this before and may be getting boring. But Covid-19 seems like a largely imaginary problem in much of the world, even though it was serious in China for a while.