Meet J.T. Tran, “The Asian Playboy” and America’s “#1 Dating Coach for Asian Men.” He makes a cameo in Wesley Yang’s New York magazine article about high-achieving Asian-American underdogs. As an aerospace engineer, J.T. spent his spare time studying from The Game pick-up artist Mystery. Soon, he became the Kumon math teacher of seduction.
Yang observed the Asian Playboy at a campus event hosted by (drumroll) Yale’s Asian-American Students Alliance. No, seriously, Yale AASA hosted him, and here is what happened:
“Creepy can be fixed,” Tran explains to the standing-room-only crowd. “Many guys just don’t realize how to project themselves.” These are the people whom Tran spends his days with, a new batch in a new city every week: nice guys, intelligent guys, motivated guys, who never figured out how to be successful with women. Their mothers had kept them at home to study rather than let them date or socialize. Now Tran’s company, ABCs of Attraction, offers a remedial education that consists of three four-hour seminars, followed by a supervised night out “in the field,” in which J. T., his assistant Gareth Jones, and a tall blonde wing-girl named Sarah force them to approach women. Tuition costs $1,450.
Seriously, Yale AASA? This is how you’re going to spend your power and resources? On a man whose motto is “To crush my enemies, to see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women—in my bed!”? (It’s a modified Genghis Khan quote. So Asian!)
According to Asian Playboy’s website, he has appeared at Harvard and U. Chicago, too. I can’t decide whether the appropriate reaction is blinding rage or profound sorrow.
The story he tells is one of Asian-American disadvantage in the sexual marketplace, a disadvantage that he has devoted his life to overturning. Yes, it is about picking up women. Yes, it is about picking up white women. Yes, it is about attracting those women whose hair is the color of the midday sun and eyes are the color of the ocean, and it is about having sex with them. He is not going to apologize for the images of blonde women plastered all over his website. This is what he prefers, what he stands for, and what he is selling: the courage to pursue anyone you want, and the skills to make the person you desire desire you back. White guys do what they want; he is going to do the same.
Just wait until J.T. meets a white guy with an Asian fetish. He’ll get sucked into an infinite vortex of imitation! How to Meet the Asian Girl of Your Dreams: An Asian Asian Fetishist Seminar for Asians, by an Asian.
Yang presents Asian Playboy as a reaction to a world where an Asian man is “an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it.” Which is ironic, because in Asian Playboy’s world women have invisible identities, barely distinguishable from a mass of blonde hair and supple breasts he so desperately wants to “crush… in my bed!”