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I’m waiting for lunch with the world’s most renowned Asian “pick-up artist”—a man whose specialty is charming women and teaching other men how to do the same—in a Manhattan café when a hefty, 5’5” 33-year-old gentleman with a Fu Manchu mustache sits down next to me. “My name is JT Tran,” he introduces himself, offering his hand.
Tran, a short Asian man, does not suit Western society’s stereotype of a ladies man. “I’ll never be tall, black, or attractive,” he acknowledges. “No one looks at me and immediately thinks, ‘He’s the one.'” Tran, on the other hand, has “game,” a term as broadly understood but undefinable as the Taoist “Dao.” It, like the “Dao,” may be learned with time, according to Tran.
Tran’s Facebook page is flooded with photographs of him kissing and embracing tall, attractive ladies in high-end clubs all around the world. He calls himself a “dating coach” and writes advice pieces for the Los Angeles Weekly, lectures at Ivy League institutions, and leads “Asian Dating Bootcamps.” These three-day retreats allow virginal Asian guys to learn Tran’s secret approach, “The ABCs of Attraction,” before being brought “into the field,” to clubs and shopping malls, to practice tactics under Tran’s supervision.
Tran wasn’t always this way. He recalls being the quiet middle child of a Vietnamese immigrant, unable to establish eye contact with people. “I was a late bloomer, like most Asian American boys,” he explains. “I didn’t kiss my first female or go on my first date until I was 20,” she says. I had no idea what I was doing or how to meet people, so I basically stayed at home and read books.”
JT Tran photo courtesy of Levan TK for LA Weekly
Tran earned a job as a rocket scientist at NASA after graduation. He had everything at the age of 26: a Mercedes, a six-figure job, a beachside condo on Hermosa Beach—and no one to share it with. Tran couldn’t find a girlfriend no matter what he tried. He recalls attending a speed dating event and saying ‘yes’ to all 60 women he met. “Not one person responded ‘yes’ back,” he claims. “At that point, I recognized that something wasn’t wrong with the 60 girls who turned me down, something was wrong with me. I wasn’t taught the same social skills as everyone else somewhere along the way, perhaps because of my Asian background.”
Tran, anxious to break free from his stereotype, enrolled in a pick-up “bootcamp” led by pick-up artist Mystery. He then spent the next five years entrenched in the shadow world of nightclubs and bars, applying his “systems engineering” mentality to his game, as he calls it. He developed a blog called “Asian Playboy Blog” to document his experiences. One of his readers was a Chinese-Canadian mother whose 16-year-old son had been bullied so badly that he refused to make friends and had never been on a date. She dialed Tran in desperation. “I told her, ‘Ma’am, this weekend I’m going to be the big brother he never had,” he recalls. As a result, the first “Asian dating bootcamp” was born.
I understand the challenge as a multiracial first-generation Taiwanese child from the Midwest. Among all demographics, an Asian man in America may expect to have the fewest total sexual partners, three, throughout his lifetime. At the age of 18, approximately 75% of Asian-American boys are virgins, compared to 43% of all boys.
The psychological ramifications of not having a partner, of not having anybody want you, may be terrible to anyone of any gender.
A variety of culprits may be blamed for Asian men’s emasculation, but the media, which frequently depicts Asian men as weak, effeminate foreigners who seldom “get the lady,” plays a significant role. Asian student Long Duk Dong’s amorous goals are portrayed as comedic relief in the 1984 coming-of-age picture Sixteen Candles, where every entry is heralded with a gong. Jet Li kissed Aaliyah near the conclusion of Romeo Must Die, a 2000 action adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet,” but the sequence was so unpopular with fans that the directors were compelled to cut it.
Racism emerges from the outside and, eventually, from inside. I accepted assumptions about who I was expected to be as a child: comedic relief, intellectual collaborator, but never an American Romeo. By seventh grade, I was weeping in the back of my father’s car, telling him that “no girl will ever like me because I’m Asian.”
I ultimately had wonderful romantic and sexual experiences, but since they occurred so late in my life, I always felt like I was playing catch-up on love. Many of my Asian friends still believe they are doomed. There are only three possibilities for them: accept forced celibacy, embrace it, or—for those with money and a desire to engage with the dark arts—swallow the red pill and fall down the rabbit hole of pick-up artistry.
Tran asked me to one of his “Asian Dating Bootcamps” at the conclusion of our lunch, which generally cost a bit more than $1500. He was ready to extol its virtues. “On this bootcamp, I’ve had people have their first kisses, and I’ve had guys lose their virginities,” he adds. “In one weekend, people’s lives change.”
Let’s face it: there are worse things than not being able to find love. However, the psychological ramifications of never having a partner, of never having someone want you, may be terrible to anyone, regardless of gender. Every yin requires a yang—that is the core of “Dao,” which literally means “the proper method.” But for the time being, there was Tran.
Pick-up has been practiced for ages, if not forever. Seduction is a conundrum that all creatures share. Birds sing melodies, gorillas pound their chests, and hooded seals expel massive crimson air sacs from their nostrils. Ninon de Lenclos, the most famed French courtesan of the 17th century, urged a young Marquis to approach a specific countess with a “air of nonchalance” in order to create a “state of emotional uncertainty that is a ‘prerequisite for effective seduction,'” according to Robert Greene.
The current pick-up community for men may be traced back to Ross Jeffries, who published How To Get the Women You Want Into Bed in 1992. Jeffries noticed that the Sexual Revolution had emancipated a large group of unmarried heterosexual women for the first time in contemporary Western history. While men watched their local Schwarzenneger sleep with whoever he pleased, the “AFC” — average frustrated chump — was left in the dark about how to compete in this new dating market, where conventional indicators like religion and money were less and less important.
Jeffries identified attributes like confidence, mystery, and the capacity to make one feel comfortable as appealing to women, rather than merely being a “good guy,” and taught associated conversational trees and body language to express that. Pick-up training does, in fact, enhance men’s dating abilities, however the dominant, aggressive technique used by many current pick-up artists has been shown to perform better with conservative women.
The internet is a scorching jungle for subcultures, full of energy and shadow that frequently evolves them into something larger and more frightening. Much of today’s pick-up artist subculture is comprised of scumbag white males who, among other things, prey on Asian women’s documented predilection for white men, referring to them as a “cheat code.” Pick-up artists such as Julian Blanc have boasted that a white guy can do “anything he wants” with Asian women, and he tapes himself enticing them to cheat on their partners with him.
As an Asian man educating other Asian men, Tran is a unicorn in his industry. He’ll gladly criticize his peers while positioning himself as a more reasonable option. “Unfortunately, ethics is not a characteristic of our sector,” he continues. “However, I believe you can boost your confidence without upsetting anyone.”
I arrived one Friday afternoon to the Manhattan studio in which Tran would be conducting his three-day seminar. Each student was immediately given a thick, 300-page textbook: “The ABCs of Attraction by JT Tran.” In the book were jokes, conversation-starters, body-language diagrams, sine graphs illustrating the optimal flow of conversation when meeting a girl at the club, and so on.
The seven students stood up to introduce themselves. Mostly Asian, they ranged from 30-something entrepreneurs, to 20-something graduate students, to late-teens cooks. One was Will, a Chinese immigrant from Canada who had spiky hair, an eager face, and square-rimmed glasses that often flooded with fluorescent light. “God gave me so much talent in academics, but paralyzed me in social life,” he said in a heavy accent. The room murmured in solidarity.
The table became a sight to behold—five awkward Asian males surrounded by a group of chattering, attractive women in a club.
For the next six hours, Tran went through the ABCs, starting with “A” for attraction, “B” for banter, going all the way to “F.” He taught the importance of posture, good eye contact, asking interesting questions, touch, and so forth. The students practiced introductions with the help of “Katie,” Tran’s 6-foot-tall assistant, and Jeff Khan, Tran’s Taiwanese apprentice.
After one particularly rough session in which Tran barked “Stop!” and proceeded to chew Will out on his total lack of a smile—“Don’t be creepy,” he admonished—he offered a story as encouragement to the group.
“I wasn’t always like this, guys,” Tran recalled. “Once, I was at the club, and I approached these four Asian girls and a blonde white girl. I thought that because she was with Asian girls, she would have liked Asian people, but as soon as I approached, she put her hand up. ‘Stop! We don’t like Asian guys,’ she said. So I walked away, whatever. Then I hit it off with this Latina girl. I brought her over to my friends, and my white friend puts his arm around me, looks at her and says: ‘What are you doing with this Asian guy! You know they have the smallest dicks in the world right!’ And, of course, it was all over from that.”
Tran paused. He wiped his forehead. “And you know what I did that night, guys? I went home and I cried. I cried and felt sorry for myself. But—and this is the important thing—I got up the next morning and I tried again.”
We met outside the club later that night and formed a huddle. Tran gave us last-minute advice: “Remember, we’re not here to get anyone drunk. You want to be sober, and you want them to be sober. And don’t form a sausage zone. Okay, go!” He yelled. As the group shuffled in, he remarked to me “When they clump together like that, I call it the Great Wall of Chinamen.”
At the club—a thumping, multicolored rooftop affair—I took a seat and watched Will approach a few women. The first girl forcefully rebuffed him. “Excuse me, can you give us some space,” she hissed, and turned back around. Will scratched his head and moved on. He walked up to another girl. “Hey, I’m Will. It’s really nice to meet you,” he spat out breathlessly, before she rolled her eyes and walked away.
Meanwhile, Tran was swaggering around in a fiery beige-and-scarlet suit. He walked up to a group of women walking in. “Hey, our table’s having a birthday today, why don’t you come and celebrate it with us?” He said. He lifted one of their hands, kissed it, and led them to our table.
The table became a sight to behold—five awkward Asian males surrounded by a group of chattering, attractive women in a club. Will put his arm around one of them, and she kissed him on the cheek. Another student was sloppily making out.
Tran came up to me. “Fobby power!” He declared, shaking his fist. “We’ve had bootcamps where there’ve been 10 Asian guys and 10 white girls at the table,” he said. “And literally, a circle of white guys will form and stare at us looking pissed off. Asian guys aren’t supposed to do this.”
It can be tempting to think of this as a story of revenge: Asian women have a 36 percent rate of out-marriage, the second-highest rate in the United States, mostly to white men. Asian men dating white women might satisfy a lust for evening the score, but it doesn’t end the karmically damned cycle of internalized racism. “I make it a point to tell my students to be open to women of color,” Tran tells me, and over the course of the night, he also brings Asian, Latina and black women to the table. “We Asian men hate being discriminated against because of our race, and we should not impose that on women ourselves.”
At the end of the night, we reconvened at a late-night Manhattan diner. The students swapped stories of first kisses, slow dances and trading digits—like high school boys after the bowling alley, fist-bumping for just getting a number.
“This is just the beginning,” Tran told me. The next day, the group would cover “Future”, the surprisingly placid “F” in ABCs of Attraction. Tran would talk about becoming a person that’s easy to fall in love with—having a fulfilling career, picking up interesting hobbies, continuing self-education. In short, becoming self-actualized. “You’re here to be in love,” he instructed. “To love a lot, or to love one.”
After the bootcamp, there is the option to go all the way down the rabbit hole—to continue paying Tran and become his apprentice, traveling the world with him, seducing women on an international level. “That takes, frankly and realistically,” he says, “a massive amount of discipline, persistence, and the ability to just push yourself physically and emotionally, day after day, night after night.”
But, Tran admits, “Most of my students grow into what would be considered ‘a decently successful white guy who has a few girlfriends in his life before he gets married.’ They’re no longer Asian guys who feel totally emasculated and like they’re going to die alone. They’re getting to the point, where they can say, ‘Hey, I’m just as cool, attractive and successful as my peers now. I no longer have this unfulfilling love and sex life. I’m finally in the norm of American society.’”
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