The Jason Hahn Files: Netflix Documentary The Tinder Swindler Makes A Good Case For The Need For A Matchmaker
My mother says she’ll never understand why kids today are on dating apps. And by kids, she means any unmarried person over the age of 10. She once told my sister it was Michelle’s fault she was still single, lonely and sad. This is what my mother considers to be a loving approach to raising children — emphasise the negative. It’s a miracle we didn’t all grow up into some Asian version of Norman Bates.
“Why, in my day, your parents hired a matchmaker and that was that!”, she, on another occasion, told her sobbing daughter who had come home early one afternoon to find her boyfriend of two-years in bed with her best friend, Esther. “Nobody in our families ever married for love! Your goong-goong and por-por didn’t even meet till the day of the wedding, and they were happily married for 70 years!”
Michelle looked up from her sodden handkerchief and frowned, her sobs temporarily stunned into silence. “You said Goong-goong had three mistresses!”
Mother looked perplexed. “What’s your point? I said they were happily married, not monogamous! You can have lots of mistresses and still be happily married. My mother says she was so relieved that Papa was able to satisfy his urges with someone else. After seven children, she was exhausted!”
Michelle later said to me she didn’t know what was more disturbing, Mother’s definition of a happy marriage or the idea of our grandfather having “urges” that needed three women to satisfy.
“Men are basically just pigs,” Amanda said grimly, a few days ago. Having just spent two hours transfixed in horror by The Tinder Swindler, she was not particularly disposed to having a favourable view of the opposite sex.
“Have you watched it?” she asked me. “It’s about this guy who meets all these women on Tinder. He tells them he’s the son of a diamond king but he’s actually super poor and after he’s taken them on holiday on a private jet, he tells them that his enemies are tracking him through his credit cards, so he has to borrow cash from them.”
I gave the synopsis some thought and pursed my lips. “It doesn’t sound like my cup of tea and besides, I really don’t have time,” I told her. “I’m still watching that Korean zombie show.” It says something that neither flatmate asked me which one, as I’d forgotten. These days, there are so many Korean zombie shows, I now don’t even bother remembering their names.
“Oh, Sharyn told me about The Tinder Swindler,” Saffy said, her magnificent bosom inflating on cue. “I don’t think I could watch it. Though I’m tempted to because she says the guy is really cute.”
Amanda stared at Saffy. “I really have no idea why you’re even friends with that woman,” she sighed. “The guy is a total sleaze bag! He was conning all these poor women. He told one woman to pawn her car and sell her house just so he could borrow the money off her! And then, he’d go spend it all on an expensive holiday with another Tinder girlfriend!”
When the girls later had dinner with Sharyn, it was all she could talk about. “Wah, he very han-some, leh! If he ask me to borrow money, I might give him fee-tee dollar!”
“He looks like a complete nerd, Sharyn!” Amanda said.
“No, lah! Quite cute!” Sharyn said, her Coke bottle-thick glasses steaming over with pre-menopausal lust. “Not as cute as Tom Daley, but still can lah!”
Amanda said the whole show has made her so terrified of dating anyone. Especially on a dating app. “You could be swiping right on a total creep who ends up cheating you of all your life savings!”
“Didn’t you say this woman borrowed $250,000 to give to him?” Saffy said. “Wow, he must have been really good in bed!”
“He was very convincing. He showed them pictures of his bodyguard with blood and cuts to his head after being attacked by his enemies!” Amanda said. “And the women got scared and rushed out to the banks to get the money!”
When I told my mother about The Tinder Swindler, she sniffed. “And this is why you need a matchmaker. Because men are pigs! If this sort of thing had happened in my day, the guy would have been snatched off the road, chopped up into bits and fed to the crocodiles! That’s what I miss from the old days — the triads. They’d have known how to deal with these pigs.”
And when I reported this conversation to Saffy, she sucked in her breath. “My God, beneath her pearls and tailored cheong-sams, your mother is a total gangster! I adore her! Seriously, why isn’t Netflix making a documentary about her!”
The Tinder Swindler is now on Netflix.
