Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

  We dug in. I asked Li if he was worried that his wife had married him because of the apartment.

  He looked at me blankly before shaking his head. “You’re missing the point. My wife loves me,” Li said. “I love her. We fell in love and then began dating in college. This isn’t the era of arranged marriages anymore.

  “But—and this is a big but—her parents’ approval of me was an enormous factor in the decision,” Li continued. His normally dispassionate features were tinged with a pinkish-red glow from the alcohol. “They demanded that I have an apartment. ‘How is this person going to provide for you if he can’t guarantee a roof over your and your children’s heads?’ they said.”

  A committed host, he pincered a choice piece of pork and put it into my bowl. “And my parents, also of that generation, understand that logic all too well. They said, ‘No one will marry our son if he can’t even guarantee a roof over our grandchild’s head!’”

  “So what ends up happening?” I asked. He put his chopsticks down and formed his hands into a bridge, as if counseling someone at the bank. Leaning in, he spoke in an urgent whisper, “My parents got their savings together. My grandparents got some too. We got three generations together, took out most of our savings, and spent it on that one apartment upstairs.”

  Li sounded pained when he talked about the money his family has spent on him. He heaped more fish-sauce eggplant into my bowl. “There was nothing else to do. My wife’s family wouldn’t let me marry her without one.”

  * * *

  Few people have a better understanding of the tangible social pressures of marriage in China than Xu Rong Su, a matchmaker at the marriage market in Shanghai’s People’s Park. China’s new online matchmaking industry racks up hundreds of millions of dollars annually, but Xu’s operation was old-school low tech. She sat at a foldout table in a row of other matchmakers with a thick binder in front of her. The binder was full of laminated sheets of paper, the sort of setup kids use to store their favorite baseball cards. The binder, though, was full of people.

  Each page was a different advertisement in identical format. The upper left-hand corner featured a big picture; all the necessary statistics took up the rest of the page: age, height, profession, income, and property.

  Zhu Geliang

  Age: 26

  Height: 180 cm

  Profession: Bank Manager

  Income: 9,000/month

  Apartment: Owns

  Behind Xu, the park had wrapped hundreds of yards of clothesline around trees and lampposts. Each line was crammed with more laminated ads numbering in the many hundreds, maybe thousands. “My job is to curate these ads. If you want to wade through these thousands of ads, be my guest. If you want to find your wife this month, sit down.”

  For women, Xu says, the first two stats, age and height, plus the picture in the corner, matter the most, particularly age. The last two, income and property, especially the latter, are most important for men.

  Xu explained the basis for the simple universal statistics set out in each ad. To her, especially in a city like Shanghai, some stats stood out more than others. “Owning an apartment is the most basic prerequisite for finding a good match in this day and age. If you don’t own an apartment, you’re making my job much more difficult. How can you provide security in these tumultuous times without an apartment?”

  Like so much involving Chinese relationships and marriage, it came back to 安全感, ānquángǎn, the sense of safety or security. My friend Mei, a twenty-two-year-old student at Wuhan University whom I met at Outside Island, a hostel in Chengdu, was about to marry her college boyfriend. Her parents wouldn’t agree to it until he bought an apartment. Mei told me, “In China things change so fast and plans can’t keep up with the changes.* In a night your business could evaporate. In half a decade your whole sector can be rendered obsolete. Owning an apartment gives you a feeling of security, something that can’t get stripped from you at a moment’s notice.”† They had considered eloping first—they loved each other—but doing so would tear her family apart. Finally, her husband’s family bought a small apartment in a third-tier city outside Wuhan.

  Sohu, one of China’s biggest media platforms, ran an article titled “Why Are Chinese Obsessed with Buying Apartments?” The piece likens the ability to buy an apartment to being a good hunter in a tribe: the good hunter harvests resources for his family. The article continues, “In China’s collective unconscious there is a serious phobia of ‘shortage,’ passed on generationally. In recent memory, the vast majority of people remember lacking the most basic of food and clothes.” The article, published in 2016, went so far as to say that apartments have the symbolic value of a nurturing womb.13

  A friend of mine from the University of Hong Kong who was working in Shanghai had agreed to let me try to find him a match at the Shanghai marriage market. He was thirty, had graduated from a top European university, and worked at an international bank. As soon as I listed his stats—financial analyst, nearly six feet tall, high-income apartment owner—people’s eyes lit up. I left with a pocketful of phone numbers and flyers, and for weeks I continued to get inquiries about my friend’s availability.

  While I was chatting with all the parents who were passing out flyers for their sons and daughters or sitting in front of a billboard with their child’s relevant statistics, it became clear that women’s families were being asked to shoulder some of the financial load of a new apartment in expensive cities like Shanghai.

  Just outside the Shanghai marriage market, I met Old Shu, who was packing away the flyers he had made to give to other parents who were seeking a spouse for their child. He handed me one of the sheets. His daughter was twenty-nine, had studied abroad, and had a job in finance. Old Shu believed she was a catch. He asked to hear about my friend. When he heard my friend is in finance, he said, “See, common interests!” When he heard about my friend’s age, however, his face dropped. “Your friend could not be interested in my daughter.”

  Old Shu had been coming to the marriage market for two and a half years. He had stopped telling his daughter about his efforts, but occasionally introduced her to one of the other people’s sons and told his daughter the young man was a friend of a friend.

  I asked Old Shu why he thought his daughter had not paired off yet. “If you ask her, it is because she hasn’t found the one,” he said. “But I see the way people look at me when they ask if she has an apartment. If we aren’t willing to put up half [the purchase price] for an apartment, we won’t even be considered.”

  Her age was the other limiting factor. The expectation that men will have an apartment before marriage and marry before age thirty is crushing for many young men. Similarly, the expectation that women will graduate from college but marry and get pregnant before they’re twenty-seven feels completely unfair to young women. Clearly Chinese society is sending mixed messages. China’s young people are caught between cultural expectation and modern reality.

  “My daughter is exceptional. She’s a good person. But all we do here is talk about money, apartments, and wages. It’s like haggling over meat at the market,” Shu said. “It’s dehumanizing.”

  * * *

  The automotive factory, a state-owned enterprise that employed the father of my teacher, Tina, had issued her parents their first apartment. But the Communist Party stopped allocating apartments through work units in 1998.

  After 1998 the Party allowed citizens to start owning real estate … sort of. In China you buy the apartment, not the land underneath it. Contracts for residential real estate expire after seventy years. In effect, the apartment you’ve bought is only a long-term rental.

  This was how the government gave birth to the private real estate sector in China. Real estate also serves the practical purpose of establishing the buyer as a resident of that city; it gives them that city’s hùkǒu, or internal passport. The hùkǒu system has been in place in China for millennia in one form or another, effectively controlling mig
ration within the country by limiting government services, most notably education, to residents of a specific location. A worker from Li’s home province would have a huge amount of trouble sending his kids to school in Suzhou without a hùkǒu. Buying an apartment is the easiest fix. In Beijing people can buy apartment spaces called “study spots” that are just big enough to establish residency so a child can attend local schools.

  According to Qin Shuo, author and the editor in chief of China Business News, the Chinese economy has been hijacked by the real estate sector, which relies to an unhealthy degree on high housing prices and continued urbanization.

  “For many, the extremely high housing prices lie at the intersection of the success or failure of countless average Chinese’s ‘China Dream,’” Qin writes. “The melancholy is difficult to describe.”14

  When Li’s family bought the apartment, they did so on the basis of a picture in a magazine and a concrete skeleton. The location was right—“Bijie is expanding in the direction of my apartment, so it ought to gain steadily in value”—and the price fit their budget. They paid in full, and Li moved in as soon as the apartment was completed. It took another week after he moved in for the building to turn on the water. Li’s family bought his apartment outright with cash; 80 percent of Chinese buy their homes without a mortgage, compared with half of American homebuyers. Chinese don’t like to rent; 90 percent of Chinese own the home they live in.15 (Ninety percent probably does not include in the vast number of migrant workers who go largely uncounted in Chinese cities.)

  Li’s parents had been stashing money away for years, diligently saving about a third of their income in preparation for their son’s marriage. “My parents like the idea of investing in land,” Li explained. “They don’t trust banks. They hand in the money and they get a receipt, a number on a piece of paper. An apartment they can feel. An apartment can’t disappear overnight.”

  Despite both the push for consumption from the government and the inevitable increase in consumerism after Chinese began moving to cities, they are still among the best savers in the world. They have a gross savings rate equivalent to half of China’s GDP.16

  * * *

  Parent eaters are the result of the friction between this security-oriented cultural imperative and reality; an apartment is essential for marriage, but the cost of an apartment can cripple a family financially. Like two tectonic plates, tradition and modern reality grind against each other in a socially evolving China. Li and the other members of his generation are stuck in the fault line between the two shifting masses.

  It all comes back to expectations, Li believes. “A Chinese man’s life trajectory boils down to this: ‘Buy an apartment, buy a car, have kids, then die.’” He took another swig of beer. It was a line I’d once read on the Internet. It had been floating around Internet chat rooms and office water coolers for several years. One article titled “Buying Marriage Apartment: Helplessly Becoming a Parent Eater,” reflects the basic predicament: buying an apartment to be seen as an eligible bachelor means relying on your parents to do so. The phrase carries a weariness from the constant constriction of social expectation.

  “It sounds dark, doesn’t it? But it’s true. The first three [apartment, car, kids] you’re supposed to get before you turn thirty,” Li said. “Then you just sort of wait for the last one.”

  Perhaps the most stressful aspect of the apartment-car-kids-death formula is its dogged pace. The whole “grow-up-and-settle-down” process was meant to happen before you turned thirty, and even that has been relaxed from the more traditional age of twenty-seven.

  When it came to expectations, Li was on track. “I’ve got an apartment that my parents bought for me,” he assured me. “I bought a car a month ago.” He lifted his hand and pulled down two fingers as he listed each item, check and check. He lifted a third finger and put it halfway down. “I’m married, so I’m halfway to a kid. And after an apartment and a car, kids seem pretty damn easy.”

  Li pauses. “But I watch TV, and I can’t help but feel behind. It never feels like we have enough.”

  The disconnect between the lives lived on TV and those in reality was everywhere. And Western TV shows are not the worst—Chinese TV shows are. They show these perfect Beijing lives: attractive couples, nice cars, and impossibly expensive apartments. I told Li about an article I’d read that explains how Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel from the TV show Friends, Li’s favorite American TV show, could never have afforded their amazing apartment in the West Village of Manhattan.

  Li motioned toward the window of the restaurant. “This is an issue of scale,” he said. “We’re still a developing country. My wife was just looking at the chic lifestyle from A Beijing Love Story. Does Bijie look anything like Beijing?” Being in the process of modernization means places in China are separated not only by distance but also by time. “We live ten or fifteen years behind them in wages,” Li said. “But that is the lifestyle we’re shown on TV.”*

  “Why doesn’t the government just control the price of housing?” I asked Li.

  “The housing market is too important to the government for money making,” Li explained. “The industries supporting infrastructure and housing development help keep China’s economy growing, plus the land sales bring in money for the government. That’s not changing.”

  “At this point we know it is dumb,” Li said. “When the Chinese real-estate market was pretty much guaranteed to improve dramatically over time, it was a solid investment.” Predictions of bursting real estate bubbles had reached all corners of China. Still, many believe that the government’s reliance on the stability of the housing market to bring in tax money means the bubble will never burst, although it could inflate and deflate.

  “Do you think I wanted my family to shell out all that money for an apartment? To break the bank for an apartment that could actually lose value over the next ten years? No. That’s why I didn’t ask for it. But my parents wouldn’t hear of it. The only reason it doesn’t feel completely insane to me is because my friends all live in apartments their parents bought for them, and they’re married to women who wouldn’t have seriously considered them without an apartment. Call it a ‘China specialty,’ if you will, something that we only have here in China. We have a housing market propped up on marriage.”

  Li looked at my face and laughed. “Finish your rice,” he said, patting me on the back. He then used an old saying I’d heard Chinese grandparents repeat to their young grandsons: “Every grain of unfinished rice will one day be a pimple on your wife’s face.” With that the check came, and we were pleased to retreat from the unsavory topic into the pleasantries of bickering over who should pay.

  He treated on this occasion, as I had already learned was the correct thing to do. I was younger than he and a guest in his city. At twenty-four and twenty-six years old, respectively, observing rigid social formalities such as who treated whom might seem silly, but we did it nonetheless. When the check came, I reached for my wallet, ceremoniously. He pushed my arm down, ceremoniously. Several other tables of guests looked on approvingly, supportive of Li’s persistence in the matter and seemingly amused by mine. We argued a bit, some light physical jockeying for show, and we settled by agreeing that, when he comes to America, I will treat him. He and I both knew he probably won’t ever come to the United States, but it was the right thing to say. Etiquette was observed. The guest-host relationship remained intact, and both he and I left the table quite pleased with the interaction, and full.

  5

  Sex for Fun

  The Quiet Revolution

  When Xiao Guo and his girlfriend, Mei, walked into Outside Island Hostel in Chengdu, they were greeted by a fifteen-foot projection of two people having sex. It stopped them dead in their tracks, suitcases at their sides. Outside Island was a youth hostel built in a four-room apartment on the top floor of a thirty-four-story residential building just inside Chengdu’s third ring road. Xiao Guo and Mei had read about it on a travel forum
. On the projector screen in the hostel’s living room, which covered the entire back wall, a Chinese man was panting, his shirtless chest heaving with the effort of exertion. Fifteen young travelers were engrossed. Some sat on the edge of a bright red couch, others on green sheets laid over the tile floor, and a few stood leaning against the green walls at the back of the room. All hailed from different parts of China, including Tibet and Taiwan. Zizi, a rambunctious longtime tenant of the hostel, sat on a carpet with a few other guys smoking cigarettes; a guitar leaned on his leg. On the wall beneath the projector screen, someone had drawn a Buddhist nun with her skirt hitched up, tongue out, and fingers in the air as if she was at a Van Halen concert. On screen the man was propped atop a curvy woman in a bra in the backseat of a Mini Cooper. The room was quiet except for the up-down-up-down squeak-squeak-squeak as the Mini Cooper rocked back and forth.

  The people in the room were oblivious to Xiao Guo and Mei, who remained frozen in the doorway. Video sex was new in China, and rarely did people watch it in mixed company on a fifteen-foot screen. No gaze strayed an inch from the screen. The look on the faces of the two young women from Shanghai who had checked in the day before said, “I wish this would end.”

  Suddenly the heavy steel door behind Xiao Guo and Mei slammed shut and the spell broke. Fifteen travelers swung their heads to look at Xiao Guo and Mei. Thirty eyes widened, fifteen faces blanched, then burned red. Long seconds passed. Xiao Guo pulled Mei and their luggage closer to him, as if preparing to be attacked.

  Just as Xiao Guo looked ready to grab Mei and make a break for it, someone yelled, “It’s not what it looks like!” and the tension burst into peals of laughter, the hostelers rolling around on the couch, falling off chairs, and waving their arms as if in denial. Ye, the twenty-four-year-old owner of the hostel, rushed to explain to Xiao Guo and Mei that the man having sex on screen was the Chinese sketch comedian Da Peng. Xiao Guo and Mei exhaled with their whole bodies, finally recognizing the famous actor.