Chinese netizens are well known for their knack for linguistic contortions. For a stretch in the early 2010s, online forum goers had taken aim at their country’s rampant chicken-fart problem. The Chicken Fart Crisis, as it came to be known, happened at a time when the double-digit growth of China’s gross domestic product was driving up housing and food prices far faster than wages. The result was the average Chinese person felt significantly poorer, despite a consistent wage.
People flocked to online forums to air their complaints about the rising GDP. Before long, GDP became a red flag for China’s censors who were attempting to limit public discourse on contentious topics. How do you write about GDP without using the term? The Chinese language is ripe for punning, and when discussing hot-button social issues Chinese netizens have become especially adept at finding words that sound the same (have the same phonetic base) but are pronounced with different tones.* They do this to evade the word-searching government censors.
So people began writing about chicken farts. In Chinese “chicken farts” is written out as 鸡的屁，jī de pì, a close homophone to GDP. “The rapid rise in chicken farts in China’s major cities is ruining the quality of life!” people wrote angrily.
If chicken farts could plague the country, why not parent eaters? While I was living in Chengdu, I took a private lesson twice a week with Tina, my lighthearted, joke-loving teacher of Chinese. I sent her an article about parent eaters with a laughing emoticon. The next day when I went into class, Tina had a printout of the article on her desk. It was covered in red ink, bold arrows, and hard, decisive characters. Tina shot me a cold look and pointed at the article. “What is funny here?” she asked.
It turned out the parent eater phenomenon in China was no joke. A parent eater is a young adult who continues to rely on his parents for financial support past the age deemed socially acceptable. In his well-distributed essay, the Chinese sociologist Chen Hui explained that China’s parent eaters are young adults who have reached employment age but lack financial stability and so undergo what he terms “delayed social weaning.”2
What Chen describes is a symptom of the changing way of life in China, friction between a traditional way of thinking and the realities of a rapidly shifting country.
Few shifts were as tectonic in scale as the exodus from farmland to city center. Starting in the late 1980s, a population roughly the size of that of the entire European Union moved from China’s countryside to its city centers.
The government’s push to urbanize was designed, in part, to stimulate consumption, and it worked. Food, water, heating, clothing, experiences—the trappings of city life—all are expenses that can be minimal in the more self-sufficient countryside. In the city the very definition of need was changing. What makes life in the city good? An iPhone? An apartment? A car? For the government, more consumption means hitting GDP growth targets. For people, especially young people, it means a tremendous new pressure to buy, to have, and to own.
“Parent eating began in the West,” Tina informed me. “It is probably another example of the negatives of more interaction with Western culture, like fast food, pornography, materialism…”—and then, as we often did, we argued for the rest of my lesson period.
Tina is correct that the phenomenon of adult children who rely on their parents is a global one, but she is wrong about the causes. In the West the biggest reason behind our own parent-eater problem was the global recession, followed by technology, which killed even white-collar jobs such as office support, and high levels of student debt. In the United Kingdom, the number of people aged sixteen to twenty-four who are not in education, employment, or training (and known by the acronym NEET) was high even before the recession and continues to be higher than the unemployment rate for the labor force in general. In the United States, “boomerang kids” continue to return home to live with their parents after graduating from college. A 2014 New York Times article claimed that one in five Americans in their twenties and early thirties was living with parents, while 60 percent of young adults received parental financial support.3 The same was true in Germany, which has Nesthockers; Italy, which has bamboccioni, meaning big babies; France, which has la generation kangourou; and even Taiwan, which has nítè zú, a transliteration of NEET.4 Tina was right in that parent eating is now prevalent in the West, but China has been doing it for centuries—and was less affected by, and recovered faster from, the Great Recession.5
Traditionally China had always had a bit of parent eating in its family system. China’s pioneering sociologist Fei Xiaotong described the Confucian system of intergenerational relationships as 反哺模式, fǎnbǔ móshì, a “return and feed” model.6 The first generation takes care of the second generation, and then, later in life, the second generation is expected to return and take care of the first generation.
In layman’s terms, the Chinese system was one of “I eat you, you eat me later.” Parent eating was a tradeoff, not just tolerated but also expected. In China families rarely split until new families were created; a young man and a young woman would rarely leave their family home until they married and started their own family together. Their new home would be part of the severance package. In many Western countries a twenty-five-year-old still living at home risks being called a slacker. In China a twenty-five-year-old man still living at home is called a bachelor.
The return-and-feed model was never built to support kids for so long in an environment so costly as China’s modern cities. Couples used to have children soon after they married, and parents’ lives were short. A child’s reliance on parents would end when the child married at eighteen and moved next door, where costs of living were reasonable. When parents subsequently had to lean on their children—the back half of the return-and-feed model—their dependence would not last long because parents would, on average, die before turning forty. A culture within which living was inexpensive, life expectancy was short, and people married young mitigated the stress on both the parents and the children.
Today young men and women need to go to college to get jobs, so the average age of marriage nationally has been pushed back to twenty-seven for men and twenty-five for women. In cities that number is much higher, breaking thirty for women in Shanghai in 2013.7
The result is that young people feel squeezed by tradition and necessity. Li told me, “We are told we need to get college degrees to succeed. Then, while we get college and lean on our parents for support, we’re labeled parent eaters. We can’t win.” The “delayed social weaning” is, in part, the necessity to earn a degree and save more for marriage.
The psychological stress from dependency on their parents is sizable. Sixty-two percent of China’s post-90s generation say their closest relationship in the world is with their parents.8 The massive migration to cities in China means that young people often live away from their parents for the first time in Chinese history. The National Bureau of Statistics estimated there were roughly 300 million people working outside their hometowns for at least six months in 2014. Li is one of them. The distance, though, does not mean parents and children are not as close, or that adult children want to be worse sons and daughters to their parents. “How am I supposed to feel?” Li asks, “A grown man needing to ask his parents for help.”
And while Chinese young people are having an existential crisis, their parents are going broke by footing the bill for their child’s urban existence in China.
The whole parent-eating phenomenon has sparked intense interest in how different cultures raise their children. The most common question I was asked was, “Is it true that American families cut their child off financially after the age of eighteen?”
Tina and Li shared one characteristic that distinguishes China’s parent eaters from others around the world: both were gainfully employed at well-paid jobs.
I began to subtly broach the topic with a number of my twenty- to thirty-year-old friends who had jobs: How much, if at all, are your parents helping to support you fi
nancially? Jing Jing, a yoga teacher at a ritzy studio in Chongqing, received significant financial support from her parents every month. Yang worked for the government, and he was living in an apartment his parents had bought for him. Xiao Ye ran a hostel, but her parents still wired money into her account every month. Dozens of friends and acquaintances and masses of bloggers and commenters airing their grievances online all confessed to being some version of a parent eater.
And these were not just recent college graduates. Most surprising was the number of young people in their late twenties and early thirties; all were making above-average wages, and a fair number were married apartment owners with kids of their own, yet they still depended heavily on financial support from their parents.
* * *
When I walked into Li’s apartment with him, the TV was on. His wife was watching A Beijing Love Story while tidying up. Their apartment was new. The flat screen TV was large—Li liked to watch European soccer leagues in high definition. They had an electric mahjong table that we’d play on later that night with his friends. At the end of a game, a round plate rises from the center of the table, revealing a space into which we’d push the 144 tiles from our last game, and a new set, organized in neat rows, would push out from the inner workings of the table in front of all four players. The two bedrooms were well furnished, and the couple had a stationary bike to the left of the TV. “Work has gotten Li a little belly,” his wife kidded. Clearly, they were doing well.
Li motioned to me that it was time to go eat. We walked down from his fifth-story apartment into the fourth-tier city of Bijie, in Guizhou Province. When I told a friend from Chengdu where I was headed, she responded, “I didn’t know China had fourth-tier cities.” It does, and, although it is relatively unknown outside the province, the mountainous, misty city of Bijie was packed with 6.5 million residents. With a population nearly twice the size of Berlin, Bijie’s population has doubled twice since 2000. Yet Bijie is only the fifty-fourth-largest city in China. The Chinese government’s separate efforts to develop western China and encourage urbanization sent people to Bijie and the surrounding areas to look for jobs and a life away from the countryside. Between 2011 and 2013, China used more cement than the United States had used during the twentieth century.9 Every inch of Bijie seemed to be covered with a film of yellow-gray dust from the perpetual construction.
“How much are apartments in your hometown?” Li asked me.
I shrugged and said I didn’t know.
He stopped on the sidewalk, leaning backward to counterbalance the incline of Bijie’s hilly roads.
“How do you not know?”
“I just don’t know,” I told him. Li raised his eyebrows.
I asked Li what apartment prices are like in Bijie. Li finally began to walk toward the restaurant again.
“Thirty-four hundred renminbi per square meter,” he replied without hesitation. That’s about US $47 per square foot.
“That seems expensive for a fourth-tier city,” I said.
Li shrugged. “Not bad. Suzhou is nearly six times that at nineteen thousand per square meter [US $260 per square foot]. Didn’t you used to live there?” Prices in Suzhou were skyrocketing as transportation to Shanghai became faster and faster.
“What about Beijing?” I asked.
“Forty-seven thousand five hundred RMB per square meter,” Li told me. (That’s roughly US$654 per square foot. Housing in San Francisco averages about US$900 per square foot; Berlin, about US$425 per square foot.)
“Shanghai?”
“Forty-three thousand RMB per square meter,” or about US$598 per square foot.
“Tianjin? Dalian? Sanya?”
“Nineteen thousand; ten thousand; seventeen thousand six hundred RMB,” Li replied. “I checked this morning.”
I took out my phone and checked one of the many housing apps. All of Li’s price quotes were accurate within 200 RMB.
Ask anyone in their twenties what current housing prices are in China’s major cities, and they will recite them with scientific accuracy and a touch of religious awe. A handful of friends have related to me nightmares they’d had about housing costs. When Suzhou’s housing prices rose by 44 percent in 2016, friends who had planned to live there mutinied; they picked up their things and left for neighboring cities that were less expensive. Other friends who had already bought a place to live in Suzhou celebrated their smart investment.
Parent eating today is a strange mutation, an adaptation by young people to finance their costly urban lives. Liebig’s law of the minimum states that growth is limited by the necessity present in the least amount. Apartments are not exactly scarce in China. Despite the ongoing migration to many Chinese cities, China has thirteen million empty homes. China’s developers have been creating more supply than there is demand in many places. Cities that remain largely unpopulated are often called ghost towns. In part, they exist because urbanization is a relatively safe bet. Between 1990 and 2015, China’s urban population grew from 26 percent of the population to 56 percent, a difference of around 450 million people, or the entire US population plus two United Kingdoms.10 The government plans to have 70 percent of its population living in cities by 2030, another 250 million city dwellers.11 Bijie’s dusty buildings and quadrupled population fresh from the countryside testify to that. Developers seem to wager that the apartments will fill up over time.
Still, apartments are China’s scarce necessity because they are priced as if they are incredibly few. According to the International Monetary Fund’s price-to-wage ratio for housing, seven of the ten most expensive cities in the world for residential property are in China. As Forbes has reported, an apartment in a coastal second-tier city like Xiamen can cost US$300,000, whereas the average annual wage is about US$12,000.12
Why do Chinese continue to buy? Because, for young men especially, owning an apartment is viewed as the essential first step toward being eligible for marriage.
* * *
Li breathed deeply, appreciating the night. The mountain air in Bijie was cool and damp. When the wind stirred, it blew the pollution from factories out of the city. On the side of a bus, where you often find an ad, the government proclaimed this slogan in confident yellow type: STRIVE TOWARD THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A COMPREHENSIVE MIDDLE CLASS! Li flicked his cigarette to the curb, and we stepped into the restaurant he had chosen.
Northern Guizhou Province has excellent food, a mix of Sichuanese spices and techniques from the various minority cultures of China’s third-poorest province. Guizhou is a land filled with the lush green mountain ranges and winding rivers of classical Chinese painting, but what makes the province so beautiful also isolated it culturally and economically from the rest of China for centuries. Roads were difficult to build through mountains and across rivers, so pockets of minority cultures developed naturally in isolation from the main thread of Han culture in other parts of China. Limited access also meant inhibited economic potential. Without a link to the outside, Guizhou could not take part in China’s export-led economy.
Li seemed emotionally frayed. He had recently returned from a week of celebrating Chinese New Year in his hometown. He’d had to face the mythic question-asking task force known as 七姑八姨, qīgū bāyí, or the “seven aunts and eight uncles.”* Each year young Chinese avidly read the online strategies published for facing the thorough inquiries by their seven aunts and eight in-laws into their love life, finances, living conditions, exercise regime, the number of times they eat out each week, the consistency of their mealtimes, the average time at which they awaken each morning, their methodology for cleaning vegetables bought at local markets, and so on. On the pretext of being concerned family members, this high council of relatives asks unending questions and can issue harsh judgments.
“Going home, everyone asks the same three questions. ‘Are you married? How much money do you make? Do you own an apartment?’ And I mean everyone,” Li had said on the walk to the restaurant. He described the process of going
home the way people talk about body searches at the airport—invasive, uncomfortable, and, he felt, unwarranted. “My aunt took my wife aside and asked about the number of times we had sex per week now that we were married. She recommended every other day to optimize our chance of pregnancy.”
Li beckoned to the server, who gasped audibly at seeing me and Li seated together. “I’ve never seen a living foreigner before,” she said, using perhaps the most unsettling but locally common way of saying she’d seen Westerners only on TV. “He’s from Xinjiang,” Li said. She nodded that she understood. It was not the first time I had passed for a Uighur, the Muslim minority from Xinjiang Province, north of Tibet.
After politely asking what I’d like to eat, Li ordered too much food. Chinese etiquette demanded that he order half again as much as we could eat. Leftover food at the end of a meal is a sign of security and abundance, recognized in part as a reaction to social trauma during the hard years of the Cultural Revolution. Among business people and government officials, this excess had become such a problem in China that the government runs national ad campaigns to discourage the practice. Li, though, would not be deterred.
The server came by with six tall bottles of beer, and Li gratefully cracked one open. Unlike uneaten food, untouched bottles of beer at the end of the meal can be returned.
Li filled two small glasses, carefully pouring mine first. We toasted to family.
“What did you think of my apartment?” he asked, setting the beer down on the lacquered wooden table. I told him I liked it.
“Thank you,” he said, then laughed, an edge of sourness in his otherwise flat voice. “I will make sure to tell my parents. They bought it for me.”
Li took a big swig and mostly stayed quiet, watching a little girl at the table next to us play with an iPhone.
Four beers remained when our food arrived. A whole fish in a sizzling metal pan thunked down on the table. Stir-fried green beans and wood mushrooms, twice-cooked pork, and sweet-and-sour soup hit the table, with more on the way. When the table was completely full, the server stacked the new dishes on the intersections of the other dishes, creating a three-dimensional Chinese food tower. A boy at the table next to us commented on how much food we had. His father looked at Xiao Li, looked at me, and then called to the server to order more for his family.
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