Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

  And a husband? “Women are entering into the business world because men are less and less reliable,” Lulu told me. “Every day in the news is another story about people cheating on their spouses, about 小三, xiǎo sān.” Xiǎo sān translates to English as “little third” and typically refers to a woman involved with a man already in a relationship. “In this day and age, you can rely on only yourself.”

  The young women at the table, all agents and managers who work for Lulu, nodded emphatically. Lulu was at the top of an organization hundreds of women strong. Yet almost all these women were married. “Raise your hand if you have a husband,” Lulu said.

  Seven of the nine women did so.

  “Keep your hand raised if you have a child.”

  One woman put her hand down. The women laughed. The belly of the woman who had lowered her hand bulged beneath the table. Her first baby was due in three months.

  “Keep your hand raised if you make more than your husband.”

  Five of the seven women did so.

  Turning to me, Lulu raised her well-plucked eyebrows. “See?”

  Most of Lulu’s agents held up more than half of their family’s sky. They had subscribed to the idea of marriage but not to the notion that they should simply play the role of housewife.

  In fact, Lulu wanted badly to start her own family. “I don’t want to just play the role of son, taking care of my parents when they’re older. I want to be a daughter too,” she said. “My little dream is to get married, to have kids, to live out our little lives happily.”

  In a way, she was emblematic of the three highs. She was well educated, well remunerated, and held a position of power within the brand of cosmetics she and her team sold. Her standards for herself were mercilessly high. Her standards for a partner were equally high. Her representatives believed that was why she remained single.

  “Chinese men are intimidated by her,” one agent said. Lulu herself had trained this agent, who became a star saleswoman. Her monthly income had already surpassed that of her husband. She did her business entirely from home. Boxes of products were stacked up in their living room and package slips covered their coffee table. “Men like to feel powerful in the relationship. They like to feel like they are providing, like they are the patriarchs,” the agent told me. “Lulu is very feminine—we sell beauty products, after all. But she is a shrewd businesswoman.”

  As in many cultures around the world, Chinese masculinity has proven to be somewhat fragile. During all the years I asked Chinese men what they were looking for in a woman, the men’s replies consistently revealed they were intimidated by women who outearned, outsmarted, or outclassed the men. The men’s ideal continued to be traditional gender roles, a Confucian household where men occupy the dominant role. By all measures by which men are valued, Lulu ought to have been the most sought-after person in the marriage market. Instead, the national media have recast Lulu and women like her as rejects.

  Chinese society and the Party are sending these women mixed messages. As higher education has become essential to securing a job that can pay for city life in China, more and more women are delaying marriage. More than half of those enrolled in higher education in China are women. On one hand, they must get a college education to be competitive in the workplace. They work their entire childhoods for the opportunity to get into a good college. Then, a few years after they graduate, they are supposed to be ready to make their career a secondary priority and get married and form a traditional household. And their entire love life—from first boyfriend to marriage—should ideally take place between ages twenty-two and twenty-six.

  Stories like Lulu’s are common: a high-powered, high-earning woman refuses to settle, and Chinese society tries to push her into the box of what womanhood ought to mean. But stories like Wendy’s are common as well. She is not a winner in society and must deal with an overinvolved community that tells her she should shift her priorities. Like the many single Chinese women I’ve met who are in their late twenties, Wendy wants to get married. She has an idea of marriage that is foreign to her highly practical parents. She wants to love the person and to commit herself to that person for the rest of her life. Most women described for me a romance novel, movie, or TV show—for Wendy it was Hugh Grant in Love, Actually—and said they wanted to have a love like that, not a practical union. These women want love and happiness.

  * * *

  A few weeks before Spring Festival, I was struck with a mean, high fever. Wendy still had not moved out, and neither of us brought up the landlord’s request for her to leave. Outside it was below zero. For three days I hid beneath two blankets sipping hot water (“Cold water is bad for your stomach!” Wendy reminded me) and watched daytime Chinese TV, a smattering of reality dating shows, singing competitions, and a ridiculously high concentration of anti-Japanese made-for-TV war-of-resistance-against-Japanese-aggression movies.* The dating shows were filled with couples but little romance, not like the Hugh Grant films Wendy liked to watch. I slipped outside when I needed to eat. Twice Wendy brought me rice porridge.

  My room was dark; it had one bulb hanging from the ceiling. Some ambient light filtered over the brick wall outside my full-length window. My TV was bulky, a middle-market leftover from the era before flat screens. The floors were a varnished dark wood. Although Wendy insisted that the wood was fake, those varnished floors were my favorite part of the apartment, offering a welcome sense of warmth compared with the hard linoleum and tile in the rest of the place. I slept on strips of processed plant material that were tightly woven together and attached to a sturdy wooden frame, somewhat like a taut hammock or a stiff trampoline. This type of bed was traditional and an inexpensive alternative to a mattress. It was comfortable enough and a level up from my previous mattress, which was nothing more than slats of wood. The old-school style of the bed was another anachronism in what would otherwise be a sort of rundown apartment. The TV was connected to a karaoke machine that came with the apartment. Of the ten apartments I looked at before taking this one, three had these machines included for free.

  On the advice of one of my colleagues from school, I peeled, sliced, and boiled the hell out of a bunch of ginger and drank the water slowly until I fell asleep. It was a traditional method for breaking a fever, and my colleague had guaranteed it would break it with force.

  Hours later, sweating, shaking, freezing, and burning, I received an urgent text from Wendy that woke me from my fever dream: I’m in jail. Sure I was hallucinating, I drifted off again.

  When my fever finally broke hours later, I took a look at the text again and panicked. I got up, wrapped myself in one of the quilts, and walked the six paces through our linoleum dining room to Wendy’s door. Light leaked out from under her doorway. I knocked, and after a moment I heard, “Come in.”

  That night Wendy had gone to see a man she had dated several times. All I knew about this guy was what Wendy had told me: “He is rich and appears on TV from time to time.” She called him Boss Guo.

  It turned out that for the past seven years, Boss Guo, who was married, twenty-five years Wendy’s senior, with a son the same age as Wendy, had been seeing her on the side, making Wendy not only a leftover woman but also a little third. Boss Guo had bought Wendy a small place in the Chinese countryside in lieu of having to house, feed, and raise the two fetuses that Wendy had aborted. (Terminating a pregnancy is easy in a nonreligious country with a family planning program.) She had tried life in the countryside, which in China lacks whatever charm the word might connote in the West. Rural China represents the past, the undeveloped, and the poor. For Wendy it represented banishment. That was how she had come to rent my extra room for $86 a month.

  Now Wendy was pregnant again. For the past three weeks, Wendy had tried to get in touch with her lover, sending texts and making calls to no avail. Boss Guo had told her he would be away for three weeks on business in Sanya, Hainan, a tropical island in the South China Sea. Wendy smelled a rat, and her situation—she
was then two months pregnant—had demanded decisive action. She told all this to me just after being released from jail.

  Earlier, while I was sick in bed, Wendy had told me, “I’m setting out to search for him.” No one at his workplace would say where he was. She went to the police and asked for his home address, which they for some reason supplied, a detail I do not fully understand to this day. Wendy then went to his home but, “not wanting to disturb him or his family,” waited outside by the gate. Sure enough, Boss Guo was at home, not in Sanya. The family dutifully ignored the shadow milling by the gate, and Boss Guo did not come out for hours. When he did, it was to greet the police, whom he had summoned.

  The police took both Boss Guo and Wendy to the police station where Wendy told all. Smile, my landlord’s daughter, later explained to me, “What Wendy has done has stirred up a major crisis of face.”

  面子, mìanzi, or “face,” is a mixture of reputation, personal pride, and social standing. By revealing her participation in this illicit affair, Wendy had deliberately besmirched the reputation of this well-known local businessman. He lost face. But Wendy lost face too. Wendy had made public her affair with a man twenty-five years her senior, a successful businessman and the provider for his family. In an attempt to maintain face, the man denied any and all involvement with Wendy, claiming: “I have never laid a hand on her.… I have been involved in no pregnancies in the past.” Wendy did not budge.

  The police demanded an immediate but informal solution: Boss Guo was to give Wendy 500 RMB—about the amount of Wendy’s rent for a month—to “handle the immediate problem.” They wanted Wendy to abort the fetus she was carrying. But Wendy was having none of it—she was done with the years of silence, secrecy, and the steady abuse for being a leftover woman. Wendy wanted to talk—and she demanded to be heard by more than just a foreign roommate or a sympathetic friend.

  “The media told me they want to help me,” she told me the day after the altercation with Boss Guo and the police, as she washed her hair in a big ceramic bowl in our bathtub. (Our bathroom sink was not connected to pipes. We used it as a toilet paper holder.) “I need to speak. I cannot continue to hold my problem by myself.” She looked high-strung but relieved and determined. She had put on her nice red sweater and her pants had no wrinkles. With a final look around the apartment to see if she’d forgotten anything, she grabbed her keys and set off on her electronic bike for the police station. The next day more reporters came to our apartment. I was aware that if Smile’s parents thought Wendy’s living arrangement with me was strange, the local media would find her an especially easy target. I locked my door and pretended not to be home. An hour later they left, and I thought that was the end of it.

  Two days later I got a text from Smile, who asked: Did you know Wendy is pregnant??? My whole family just saw her on TV. My parents are very, very upset.

  Smile’s text confirmed that people had indeed heard Wendy. She had been busy these past few days. I had not seen her and knew she was around only because I saw a light under her door early in the morning and some half-eaten rice porridge she had left in the sink. I had also overheard her talking on the phone about Boss Guo to her close friend who owns a tea shop. Wendy often went there to listen to her friend play guqin, a classical Chinese stringed instrument, and to play with her friend’s daughter, who considered Wendy an aunt. Based on Wendy’s responses to the phone conversation, it was clear her friend was pleading with her to let the whole thing go. Wendy said that she would not and that she would stand up for what was right.

  But the media did not agree that Wendy was in the right. By Western measures she was, although she was complicit. Boss Guo had seduced Wendy with promises of loving her and wanting to elope with her. He had cheated on his wife, seriously harmed and maybe ruined his family, impregnated a lonely impressionable woman, and then denied it. This man was despicable.

  But none of the people I spoke with saw it that way, and that’s not how the media reported it. Confucius preached the importance of the family unit. Each member of the family plays an important role: The husband is the patriarch, the wife supports him, and the children obey and respect their parents. The most important part is that this unit is just that—a unit. It is a major cornerstone of Chinese society.

  Wendy’s going on local TV destroyed a family unit. Her motivations for doing so were not clear. The Western romantic in me says, “She did it for justice.” The Chinese pragmatist, however, might raise a few questions, particularly about the motivations of a poor woman with a rich lover.

  The media, along with everyone I talked to afterward, pointed to something more malicious in Wendy. They all pointed out that she didn’t need to go to the media to get a settlement from Boss Guo. Having a mistress is such a common occurrence that such settlements are almost a matter of course in China, especially when the man is wealthy. All Wendy accomplished by going on TV was to ensure the destruction of a man’s face and family. People felt Wendy deserved to suffer for what she had done.

  A week later the landlord asked me to move out. Smile explained that her family had been “uncomfortable” with the whole scandal. They came the next day to handle the contract, and Uncle Peng, Smile’s father, slipped me an envelope with the security deposit. “I am sorry for you,” he told me. His accent was thick, but he spoke slowly so I could understand. “In China, some people are good and some people are bad. I believe it is that way in America too, but I do not know.” He motioned toward Wendy’s suitcase with his head. “Here, you have found a bad person. We are not all that way.” Smile shrugged. Her mother looked at me unhappily. Spring Festival was right around the corner, and those few hundred RMB from me would have been useful.

  Weeks later the media had lost interest. They had gotten their story and moved on to the next scintillating bit of local news.

  At the same time, the city announced the renovation of an old residential area as a tourist district. This turned out to include the apartment Wendy and I had just vacated. The government would be tearing down our old building and turning it into a tourist district. I ran into Uncle Peng at a local restaurant, and we ended up having a meal together. “I can only hope the government gives us a good amount for our apartment,” he told me. He barely touched the food.

  A bit shaken from the experience, I moved into an apartment by myself at the southern gate of the university. I was farther away from the canals and the student street I’d come to love in Suzhou.* Months later I would leave the city for good, heading west to Chengdu, the center of China’s “Develop the West” program and what I was told was one of China’s new boomtowns.

  A few weeks before I left, at about the time the apartments were to be torn down, a missionary from Texas led Smile, as she explained it to me, to “find the Lord in Heaven and to be saved by his good graces.” She began going on church outings and tried to convince her parents to join the faith. The next and last time I saw Uncle Peng he looked as if he’d aged ten years, his life made disastrously more complex by his few interactions with foreigners.

  The last time I spoke with Wendy, she had yet to reach a settlement with Boss Guo, and it was not clear that she would ever reach one. He had continued to deny her allegations, and Wendy’s lack of public and personal support seemed to have sapped her strength to continue her stand against him.

  With nowhere else to go, Wendy moved into a third-floor office in Boss Guo’s business. She did it partly out of protest, a statement that she would not simply disappear, and partly out of necessity. Boss Guo did it out of necessity: if she would not go to the countryside, he would have to provide someplace for her to live in the city. She had a simple cot and TV. But the place got more sunlight than our ground-floor apartment had, and there was a sink with running water. The best she could now hope for was monetary support to raise this child. Boss Guo had denied her the emotional support she had been looking for. He had made it clear that he did not want Wendy and that she would remain a leftover.

 
As the chill continued to bite the air in her converted office space–bedroom, Wendy sat wrapped in her coat at a small table with her laptop open. The glow from a British romance danced across her hardened features. Her habit of leaving the windows open had followed her. Her breath thickened and seemed to cloud the cramped room. A suitcase lay on the ground half open. This spring festival, she was unsure if she would go home and see her parents.

  7

  Double Eyelids for Double 11

  Conspicuous Consumption and the Biggest Consumer Holiday in the World

  On an early winter night, seven of us sat in plastic chairs around a large circular wooden table in the courtyard of a bustling Sichuanese restaurant. A hole the size of a watermelon had been cut out of the table’s center to make room for the gas burner visible just beneath the brim, suspended on a wooden shelf below the tabletop. The day had been pollution free, and a few stars twinkled in the night sky above Chengdu. No one at the table noticed. In the darkness, Xiao Qi and Yang’s friends sat still, elbows propped against their sides, hands lifted, and faces held inches away from their smartphones. The light from their phone screens washed over their facial features, giving them an ethereal glow.

  Xiao Qi sighed. He had invited everyone to join him for lamb stew, and, with the exception of his girlfriend, Yang, his friends had spent the entire night with their faces buried in their phones. Yang paid them no mind. Eyes closed, she nestled deeper into the crook of Xiao Qi’s arm in his padded winter jacket, her long raven hair falling down his chest. The couple did not often get this kind of privacy—the single-sex dorms at their university did not allow members of the opposite sex into the building. Even if Xiao Qi sneaked past the guard, a sixty-year-old auntie who bore a discomfiting resemblance to Yang’s imperious grandmother (“every time Xiao Qi walks me back, she stares at him like he’s a dog!”), the other three students in Yang’s cramped dorm room hardly made it a private space. Yang was taking advantage of the tech trance of the other diners to get some quality time with her boyfriend.