Another money-spinning website idea

If you are a laowai (foreigner) at large in China, you tend to get treated as if you were a celebrity most places you go. Really. Chinese tourists will queue up to have their picture taken with you.... or just to take your picture. It's not quite as outlandishly over-the-top and ubiquitous as it was a few years ago, but it still happens a lot.

It happens to you even more if you are a woman, especially an attractive woman. And if you are as uncommonly tall and as uncompromisingly blonde as my artist pal, H, then you get asked for a picture all the time - mostly by goofy young men who are obviously looking for an opportunity to kid their pals back home that they managed to pull a foreign chick.

Many of us foreigners in China have joked from time to time about how we ought to try to charge a fee for consenting to these photo ops. But it's usually just idle chatter - or, at most, we're only thinking in terms of trying to discourage the constant intrusiveness of such requests.

But I really do think there could be some serious moolah to be made from this phenomenon. Most of these goofy young men are only thinking about a snapshot they can carry around in their wallet, or a low-res digital pic they can display on their mobile phone. But how many people can you impress that way??? How does that even begin to compare to the grand ego festival that is displaying your prestigious 'conquest' to the world at large via the Internet?!

And so, I give you - www.myforeigngirlfriend.com, a website where dopey Chinese boys can try to convince the great web-surfing public (and delude themselves) that they really do have a glamorous foreign lover.

I think women like H could make a tidy living off something like this.

Any far-sighted venture capitalists reading out there??