What Dating App Korean Use In Usa

Last year, a billboard advertising a dating app for Asian-Americans called EastMeetEast went up in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. 'Asian4Asian,' the billboard read, in an oversized font: 'That's not Racist.'

One user on Reddit posted a photo of the sign with the single-word rejoinder, 'Kinda,' and the sixty-something comments that followed teased apart the the moral subtleties of dating within or outside of one's own ethnicity or race. Reading through the thread feels like opening a Pandora's Box, the air suddenly alive with questions that are impossible to meaningfully answer. 'It's like this bag of jackfruit chips I got in a Thai grocery store that read 'Ecoli = 0' on the nutritional information,' one user wrote. 'I wasn't thinking about it, but now I am.'

Korean internet dating apps or websites are utilized worldwide to get to know new-people. Whether it is only for fun or even for a long lasting connection in the course of time resulting in relationship with an intimate Southern Korea vacation. KoreanCupid also has an Korean Dating App available on Google Play, which you can download and use it on your smart phone after becoming a member. All and all, Korean Cupid is one of the best Korean dating sites in existence. You’ll find lots of real local women hoping to meet a foreign gentleman. As the leading dating site in this niche, we successfully bring together singles from Korea and around the world. Thousands of happy men and women have met their soul mates on KoreanCupid and have shared their stories with us. Check out the many success stories here. For a fun, safe and uniquely Korean dating experience, join free today.

Dating sites and services tailored to race, religion, and ethnicity are not new, of course. JDate, the matchmaking site for Jewish singles, has been around since 1997. There's BlackPeopleMeet, for African-American dating, and Minder, which bills itself as a Muslim Tinder. If you are ethnically Japanese, looking to meet ethnically Japanese singles, there is JapaneseCupid. If you are ethnically Chinese and looking for other ethnic Chinese, there's TwoRedBeans. (Take a small half turn in the wrong direction, and there are dark places on the Internet like WASP Love, a website tagged with terms like 'trump dating,' 'alt-right,' 'confederate,' and 'white nationalism.') All of these dating sites skirt around questions of identity—what does it mean to be 'Jewish'?—but EastMeetEast's mission to serve a unified Asian-America is especially tangled, given that the term 'Asian-American' assumes unity amongst a minority group that covers a wide diversity of religions and ethnic backgrounds. As if to underscore just how contradictory a belief in an Asian-American monolith is, South Asians are glaringly absent from the app's branding and advertisements, despite the fact that, well, they're Asian, too.

I met the app's publicist, a beautiful Korean-American woman from California, for a coffee, earlier this year. As we chatted about the app, she let me poke around her personal profile, which she had created recently after going through a breakup. The interface might have been one of any number of popular dating apps. (Swipe right to express interest, left to pass). I tapped on handsome faces and sent flirtatious messages and, for a few minutes, felt as though she and I could have been any other girlfriends taking a coffee break on a Monday afternoon, analyzing the faces and biographies of men, who just happened to appear Asian. I had been interested in dating more Asian-American men, in fact—wouldn't it be easier, I thought, to partner with someone who is also familiar with growing up between cultures? But while I set up my own profile, my skepticism returned, as soon as I marked my ethnicity as 'Chinese.' I imagined my own face in a sea of Asian faces, lumped together because of what is essentially a meaningless distinction. Wasn't that exactly the kind of racial reduction that I'd spent my entire life working to avoid?

EastMeetEast's headquarters is located near Bryant Park, in a sleek coworking office with white walls, lots of glass, and little clutter. You can practically shoot a West Elm catalog here. A range of startups, from design agencies to burgeoning social media platforms share the space, and the relationships between members of the small staff are collegial and warm. I'd originally asked for a visit, because I wanted to know who was behind the 'That's not Racist' billboard and why, but I quickly learned that the billboard was just one corner of a peculiar and inscrutable (at least to me) branding universe.

From their tidy desks, the team, almost all of whom identify as Asian-American, had long been deploying social media memes that riff off of a range of Asian-American stereotypes. An attractive East Asian woman in a bikini poses in front of a palm tree: 'When you meet an attractive Asian girl, no 'Sorry I only date white guys.' ' A selfie of another smiling East Asian woman in front of a lake is splashed with the words 'Just like Dim Sum...choose what you like.' A dapper Asian man leans into a wall, with the words 'Asian Dating app? Yes prease!' hovering above him. When I showed that last image to an informal range of non-Asian-American friends, many of them mirrored my shock and bemusement. When I showed my Asian-American pals, a brief pause of incredulousness was sometimes followed by a kind of ebullient recognition of the absurdity. 'That . . .is . . . awesome,' one Taiwanese-American friend said, before she threw her head back laughing, interpreting the ads, instead, as in-jokes. In other words: less Chinese-Exclusion Act and more Stuff Asian People Like.

I asked EastMeetEast's CEO Mariko Tokioka about the 'That's not Racist' billboard and she and Kenji Yamazaki, her cofounder, explained that it was meant to be a response to their online critics, whom they described as non-Asians who call the app racist, for catering exclusively to Asians. Yamazaki added that the feedback was especially aggressive when Asian women were featured in their advertisements. 'Like we have to share Asian women as if they are property,' Yamazaki said, rolling his eyes. 'Absolutely,' I nodded in agreement—Asian women are not property—before catching myself. How the hell are your critics supposed to find your rebuttal when it exists solely offline, in a single location, amid the gridlock of L.A.? My bafflement only increased: the app was clearly attempting to reach somebody, but whom?

'For us, it's about a much bigger community,' Tokioka responded, vaguely. I asked if the boundary-pushing memes were also part of this vision for reaching a greater community, and Yamazaki, who handles marketing, explained that their strategy was just to make a splash in order to reach Asian-Americans, even if they risked appearing offensive. 'Advertising that evokes emotions is the most effective,' he said, blithely. But maybe there's something to it—the app is the highest trafficked dating resource for Asian-Americans in North America, and, since it launched in December 2013, they've matched more than seventy-thousand singles. In April, they closed four million dollars in Series A funding.

Tokioka, a serial entrepreneur in her late thirties, started the company after she found that major dating sites like E-Harmony and Match were limited when it came to Asian candidates. She said it was difficult to find anyone at all who had the qualities she was looking for: someone whom she could relate to culturally, as a Japanese woman who immigrated to the States, someone who would able to communicate with her parents, who speak Japanese, and someone who shared similar 'restaurant habits' to her own. The dating sites kept suggesting Sri Lankan or Indian singles. 'I mean, I have a lot of Indian friends!' she said, as I tried to keep my face from contorting. 'It's just not my dating preference! But [the dating apps] all see 'Asian' as one category. If you're Asian, here's another Asian, right? But okay, so JDate talks about all different types of categories of Jewish people, you know religion and culture. Then there's Shaadi for Indians, they have like, different classes for Indians. So why isn't there one for Asians?' She channelled her frustration into a business plan for a dating app that could showcase the diverse range of the Asian-American community, and perhaps do something to empower it. (The service is free for women, $12 a month for men.) 'Asians are underrepresented in this country—can you think of any brand that is huge for Asians?' she asked me, rattling off J-Date and B.E.T. as examples of identity-centric brands that are more-or-less household names. 'There isn't any, right?' she said, throwing her hands up. 'That is very sad!'

On dating sites, Asian men can have it particularly sad. A frequently cited OKCupid study, from 2014, reported that Asian men were one of the least messaged demographics on their app. (Conversely, Asian women are the one of the most messaged demographics.) EastMeetEast is making a wager that correcting that particular race-based inequality will help Asian-American culture, at large. 'Representation is desirability, right? If you don't feel desirable, it really affects your confidence,' Yamazaki said. But on EastMeetEast, Asian men are able to feel as though ' 'I can be the main character in this movie.' Once you are confident here, you are confident in other things, too,' Yamazaki said. He paused and continued, smiling slyly: 'Of course [people] can reject you for other reasons—maybe you make less money or whatever, your job is not good, at least you aren't rejected for your ethnicity.' On the other hand, Asian women can perhaps can be assured, that they aren't being accepted solely because of theirs.

Over the years, a dating landscape with its own peculiarities and logic began to emerge within the walls of the EastMeetsEast app. There were patterns in the data scraped from the more than half a million users filling out the app's questionnaire, flirting with each other, and revising their details and photographs. For example, women on the app were more particular than their masculine counterparts when it came to level of education and type of employment. Cities with small populations of Asian-Americans, such as Denver, had much higher match-rates than big cities with many Asian-Americans, such as New York and L.A. (likely because there are fewer users, and thus fewer choices). Asian-American users love to chat about food: 'Ramen' was one of the most popular words used in chats between potential partners.

Data culled from the most unique metric offered by the app, in their questionnaire, was particularly revealing. Alongside dropdown menus for 'Ethnicity,' 'Occupation,' and 'Marital Status,' EastMeetEast encourages users to fill in their 'Age Arrived' in the United States, and allows its members to filter potential matches based on how long they have been in the country. Internally, the app's team refers to this metric as a user's 'fobbiness,' level. (A user's perceived 'fobbiness' increases with the age they arrived in the country, those who were born in the States designate their age as zero.) The adjective is derived from what was once primarily a pejorative acronym for those who haven't quite assimilated into dominant culture: F.O.B., pronounced like the key to a keyless car, short for 'fresh off the boat.' More recently, the term has been reclaimed as a celebration of immigrant culture, but EastMeetEast utilizes it in a way I hadn't quite encountered before: as a neutral quantity. It's neither bad or good to be fobby, the app seems to suggest, it's simply another reflection of who you are, no less fraught than your decision, say, to become a doctor rather than a lawyer.

Of course others can judge, and they do. On EastMeetEast, Asian-American women are particular about their partner's fobbiness—American-born Asian women are less inclined to match with partners who are fobbier than them. Asian-American men, on the other hand, are not at all picky about fobs—American-born men were just as likely to date a fully-assimilated American as they were a person who was still, essentially, culturally of her native country.

'I know Asian is an artificial concept in this country,' Yamazaki said. 'But looking at the data, there is more commonality than I expected.' He pointed to the common enthusiasm of Boba tea and food culture, as an example. As I listened skeptically to him boil down Asian-American identity to a love of pho, I realized how hard it was for any of us to say definitively what connected Asian-Americans, because we are still somewhere in the process of inventing and articulating what Asian-America is, exactly. And as unlikely as it might be, EastMeetEast has unwittingly created a direct line into observing those who identify as this diffuse, shifting identity and who are, moreover, interested in finding life-partners who identify similarly. EastMeetEast is a way of watching the concept of Asian-America develop in real time.

Best Korean Dating Sites

A few days later, the publicist texted me to say she'd gone on a date with one of the men we'd messaged together when we first met, and, a month-or-so-later, they were an item.

'He's the first person I told my family about,' she said. 'They've always wanted like a Korean and also religious person. So even if they were Asian, they weren't religious enough, and so I decided 'I'll wait until I have to tell them.' But she felt connected with her new partner in a way that she hadn't experience before. 'We're like mirror images of each other, except childhood-wise,' she said. 'I grew up very sheltered, he grew up very hood in Queens.' She was surprised that she connected so deeply with someone from the stereotypically rough-and-tumble borough, and I laughed at the irony of joining a dating app in order to avoid stereotyping, only to have the app dispel some stereotypes of your own.

I thought back to Yamazaki's insistence on boba being the connective tissue between Asian-America and it dawned on me that food preferences or jokes about switching 'L's' for 'R's,' reductive as they are, also act as signals by which like-minded children of the Asian diaspora can find each other and attempt to connect. It didn't matter where the stereotypes originated, it just mattered that it led back to the community.

Not too long afterward, a handsome Asian doctor messaged me on the app, and asked if I'd like to meet for boba.

Korean Match

Korean Dating Service

'Yes,' I wrote back. 'I'd love to.'