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3 QAs About TEN
Why TEN exist?
Despite Canada’s multicultural landscape and the growing visibility of Asian Canadians in media, discussions around love, intimacy, and sexual identity from an East Asian perspective remain limited, often stereotyped, or absent entirely.
How Does It Feel Being A “Strange Mashup”?
This is simply the gut reaction of East Asian parents, and also exactly the typical intergenerational problem among East Asian Family. East Asians lack the education of emotional communication, and talking about love and feeling can be seen as fragility. When facing something they don’t agree with or understand within family, they either strongly oppose, or try hard to avoid. They just don’t know how to react, like a button of emotion being shut down. This trait significantly shapes the behavior of many East Asians in dating and relationship.
‘Undateable’ & ‘Acculturation’
In Eastern Asian culture or mindset, the individual is actually relatively much less important than the collective or than the mass, than the idea of a greater power that rules us all. That’s why showing personality has not been encouraged culturally.
Dating or relationship or intimacy, is the most delicate and complicate interpersonal relationship practice, compared with kinship, friendship, colleague relationship. You may play your role well in your family, your friend groups, your company, but those are just a part of you. Only when you are with your other half, you are the whole of yourself, both the good and the bad parts. So, carrying out an intimate relationship may be the best way to know yourself.
AI & East Asian Canadians’ Dating
AI can actually be trained or tailored or personalized or even tamed in whatever way the user wants. So those are very distinct characteristics of AI as a new species, which is very different from an actual human being.
Some people might disagree – from my observation, indulging in AI chatbot is actually not real dating, but to ease someone’s loneliness. Even in the lowest standard, dating means you got to exchange the emotion and feeling mutually, rather than expressing yourself to an emotionally stable robot all day long. Moreover, the essential parts of dating are meeting each other in person, emotionally and physically know each other step by step.
Small Poll, Big Findings: EAC’s Dating
The cultural gap shows up reliably—communication styles and gender-role expectations sit at the top of friction. Many of you also feel under-represented or stereotyped in dating media. And a majority see gendered differences in the challenges East Asian Canadian men and women face. All of this matches previous research and the stories we’ve covered on the show.
Dating preference by race wasn’t binary. A strong 71% had no strong preference, while 29% preferred within-culture—and no one said they preferred dating outside the culture. That nuance pushes past the usual “date inside vs. outside” debate.
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A Little Bit About Me
I’m Will Wen, a Chinese Canadian, living in Newfoundland, the easternmost corner of North America. I’m a brand and PR professional, copywriter. Outside of work, I’m also an amateur novelist, photographer and trumpet player.
THE EASTERNMOST NORTH 