By Shirley Lew
Valentine’s Day is well over, but the #MySexyAsianMan challenge on Facebook continued for weeks to come.
On Valentines’ Day morning, Vincent Yee of Boston put out a challenge for contestants to submit a description of their Asian male partner with the hashtag, “#MySexyAsianMan.” The challenge was open to all ethnicities.
Yee wanted to do this “In light of all the negative perceptions out there about Asian men and especially following what TV host Steve Harvey said and then more recently what Chloe Bennet said about Asian men, I wanted to do something positive for my Asian brothers, ” he said in our interview last month.
The prize for the best submission was initially a donation of $200 by Yee to a non-profit selected by the winner. The prize doubled to $400 when Kelly Hu saw the challenge on Facebook and put in an additional $200 to match Yee’s donation.
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“I thought it was a great idea,” said Hu. “It’s about time we show some love and support for our Asian men. I hoped the challenge would attract many submissions.”
Hu’s description of a sexy man is “a confident man that radiates from within and shines from his eloquence. A gentleman who is chivalrous and kind. An honest man who’s comfortable in his own skin. He should also be intelligent, funny, confident, good-hearted and treat his woman well.”
Yee declared the winner on Facebook .
“#MySexyAsianMan Winner! Today, I donated $400 to Cure SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy) as the charity of choice for Thy Nguyen Liu who I selected as this year’s winner for the first #MySexyAsianMan writing contest. It wasn’t an easy choice as there were some really moving submissions. But Thy’s tribute to her sexy husband was creative and whimsical and after telling her that she won, she was ecstatic. When I asked her what charity she wanted me to donate to, she chose CureSMA to help benefit a friend’s five year-old daughter who was diagnosed with SMA. The FDA just approved a cure and five year-old Tamara is on her way to hopefully a normal life and many years to come.
Thank you to everyone who entered and showed that Asian men are sexy to women and know that if I could, I would have given an award to everyone. A big thank you goes to Kelly Hu who generously matched my donation and for Shirley N. Lew of AsAmNews for spreading the news of the contest. Below is the winning submission! Thank you!”
All around loving soul
Satisfying from inside out
Intensely pure of sweetness
All about giving love
Never expects handouts
Hardworker who wants to give his family everything and never asks for anything himself
Unequivocally “Once you go Asian, you don’t go back!”
Sees only the good in people
Beyond grateful for the family unit he has created
Amazing example to his son
Never ending adventurer
Damn proud he’s my Asian man
The first letter of each sentence spells out “ASIAN HUSBAND”
Here is Liu’s reaction on Facebook when she learned she won the challenge.
Yee said the challenge only yielded nine responses, but one of the factors could be that some of the posts were not made public for Yee to find with the #MySexyAsianMan hashtag.
We hope there’ll be more submissions next year!
Congratulations to Thy Nguyen Liu on her winning submission, and t0 Yee for starting an internet movement supporting Asian men and Hu for the additional support.
What kind of challenge or movement would you like to see created to support Asian men?
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RE: #MySexyAsianMan Chosen: Awesome that Kelly Hu supported this. How about asking Ali Wong and Constance Wu and Grace Kim , Lucy Liu etc.
RE: #MySexyAsianMan Chosen: Omg, I can’t believe this contest got picked up and written about. I did it to support my friend Vincent’s contest. Never thought I would win. Still in shock but very honored!