It’s Hard Out There For an Asian Playboy

In the latest issue of AsianWeek, the cover story is “It’s Hard Out There For an Asian Playboy” which profiles and reports on Jerry Tran, who is a self-described “Asian Hitch” and “hard ass drill sergeant of a pick-up artist instructor.”:

“Born in Texas as Jerry Tran — the Asian Playboy aka “APB,” or as he prefers to be called, “JT” — studied aerospace engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology before becoming a professional social swinger. “For me, it was graduating from college, and I go out to California and realize I just sucked [at my social skills],” Tran explained. “So, I decided to do something about it.”…On the Internet, Tran encountered the writings of Erik von Markovik, aka “Mystery,” a master pick-up artist featured in Strauss’ book and the VH1 series. He signed up for Mystery’s boot camp as a primer for becoming a pick-up artist…That was four years ago. Since then, he has emerged as a master pick-up artist and entrepreneur who has founded his own company, evolved a new pick-up system called the “ABCs of Attraction,” and now travels around the world running his own boot camps aimed toward Asian and ethnic men… Although he admits “the game” is no different for Asian men, Tran explained the need for an ethnic specific boot camp by stressing the recognition of societal influences from stereotypes and the media. “There will always be underlying perceptions that people have about Asian men — that we’re small, misogynistic, stable, effeminate, have small penises, asexual, etc.,” Tran said. …Tran wants to teach Asian American men to leverage their ethnicity in dating, instead of ignoring it…Asian pick-up artists seek to sexually empower themselves to balance the scales and serve as an antidote to the emasculated Asian male archetype.”

Interesting. I wonder if any of our readers have taken Tran’s class and what they thought of it? I think we can all agree that the general portrayal of Asian American men in the American mass media hasn’t always been flattering, to say the least – although I would have to say that this has been slowly changing for the positive.