Strategies For Promotion,Reflections Of Assimilation:An Analysis Of Self-Presenting Patterns Of Chinese American Males On A Dating Website

Dating websites, which came into light in the late 1990s in the United States, now have swept over the whole world, becoming crucial channels for people to contact their future dates or mates. Chinese American male daters have played an active role in promoting themselves on the mainstream dating websites such as Match.com and have also taken up a stable percentage there. Thus, the analyses of dating websites provide us a new perspective to examine the efforts that Chinese Americans have made to assimilate into the host country and culture.This paper, based on previous research on stereotypes of Chinese American males and the racial hierarchy that exists in marital market, will make a thorough analysis on daters' profiles by taking quantitative and qualitative methods. It intends to answer questions such as "what presenting pattern can be obtained from Chinese American males when compared with their White counterparts as a whole?", "how does income disparity influence Chinese American males' self-promoting strategies?", and "what factors contributes to all these similarities and differences?".The results indicate that Chinese American have taken similar self-promoting pattern as the Whites by presenting themselves in much the same way with their Caucasian counterparts in aspects such as personality, interests, and so on. Meanwhile, they still maintain some specific features which are frequently highlighted in Chinese culture, such as their emphasis on family values and social interaction. Moreover, income turns out to be an influential factor to define daters' presenting behaviors, and the disparity of income even surpasses that of ethnicity among daters. Finally, based on the data collected from the website and the findings of previous researches, it is also found that human capital, generational status, and mode of adaption of the host country have made a combined influence on immigrants' assimilation conditions, hence the multifaceted features in daters' self-portrayal patterns.The paper has two major contributions:firstly, the general pattern for Chinese American male daters reveals a continuous interaction between assimilation and ethnic culture endorsement; secondly, even among the same ethnic groups, the extent of assimilation differs due to different socioeconomic and generational conditions, which to some extent reveal the influence of racial disparity and social inequality in American society.