by Roseann Lake
The second man in the search results was from Guizhou. He was shirtless in his photos, flashing a tanned, rippled torso and a pair of stonewashed jeans. In another picture, he sat behind an oversized wooden desk wearing a suit made of iridescent gray fabric, clutching what appeared to be a large marble globe. He claimed to have a master’s degree and to speak four languages.
The third man we came across had several reviews from women he had already accompanied home. One referred to him as “very lovely and discreet.” Another said “trustworthy and reliable,” and a third said, “large face, but otherwise handsome.”
We looked into his rates. He was charging 700 RMB ($100) per day during non-peak seasons, and 1,000 RMB ($145) during Chinese New Year. Those rates increased to 1,000 RMB and 1,500 RMB ($220), respectively, if he was required to travel to more remote provinces, like Tibet, Xinjiang, or Inner Mongolia. Unlike some of the men advertising their services, his offering was pricier, but all-inclusive. He didn’t request additional fees for smoking cigarettes (usually billed at 10 RMB or $1.50 per cigarette), giving kisses (5 RMB or 75 cents per kiss on the forehead), holding hands (20 RMB or US $3, flat rate), and drinking rice wine (10 RMB per shot).
“What do you think?” I asked Zhang Mei.
“It can’t hurt to call,” she said.
* For those well versed in philosophical concepts, yuan fen is sometimes likened to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity.
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DOORS AND WINDOWS
One man is best suited to four women, as a teapot is best suited to four cups.
—XINRAN, THE GOOD WOMEN OF CHINA
Although many Chinese parents name their daughters after things found in nature (like Fragrant Mountain and Flowering Lotus), Ivy earned her English name from the first married, moneyed man she ever slept with. “He was mesmerized by the length of my legs,” she said, “and since I think the name suits me, I’ve kept it.”
Indeed, Ivy’s legs are veritable trellises upon which any plant would be challenged to climb, though it’s doubtful they would have brought her such spectacular returns if it hadn’t been for her masterful mind and her determination to end life on a far more stratospheric notch of the social ladder than the one she started on.
“Chinese men want a wife who is four things,” she explained with an authoritative puff of a cigarette.
1.Beautiful
2.Doting and wifely
3.Hardworking
4.Willing to turn a blind eye when they cheat.
“Basically, they want a fairy tale,” she said. “It’s no wonder they must look elsewhere to have all of their desires fulfilled.”
One good look at Ivy reveals that she is beautiful, though probably not considered “wifely,” or “doting” by Chinese standards. She smokes with a vigor unlike any I’ve ever seen before. Just after exhaling smoke, she re-inhales it with the force I imagine a dragon might have in its nostrils. She rarely smiles, though she listens carefully and with a quiet intensity. She speaks with candor and confidence about her choice to complete someone else’s fairy tale in exchange for her own version of a happy ending.
Originally from a middle-class family in the second-tier city of Chengdu, Ivy relied on her striking good looks, determination, and her talent for the arts to gain admission into one of China’s most legendary drama schools—a hotbed of extremely gifted but also devastatingly attractive actresses and emerging movie stars. Despite being talented, Ivy could sense that she would never outshine her more politically and socially connected peers, so after a careful appraisal of her most marketable talents, she estimated that her legs presented the greatest opportunity for advancement. Shortly after this realization, she met a man at a business school networking event that a friend had invited her to. Upon seeing him arrive in an Aston Martin, she used her spindles to catch his eye, and soon after had found her new calling as a mistress.
For context, it’s worth recalling that extramarital activity has been a driving force of China’s history for dynasties. The country’s most powerful leader—Wu Zetian—served as a Forbidden City concubine during the Tang dynasty. By ruthlessly pitting the reigning emperor against his son and pinning the murder of her one-week-old daughter on a rival consort, she eventually became empress and supreme ruler of China. By 700 CE, she had amassed a huge fortune and to this day is still ranked as the wealthiest woman of all time. In its five thousand years of history, she is also the only woman to have officially ruled China as emperor.
Though current methods for seeking wealth and power through affairs and marriage are presumably more subdued, the practice is still flourishing in China, where the transition to a market economy has presented fortune-seekers with a glittering new world of possibilities. Making this transition all the more fascinating is the fact that China went from being a country with essentially no “old money” to having its own full-blown Gilded Age. Thirty years ago—barring exceptional government connections—there were very small differences between classes. Urban professionals all lived in the same cement block housing provided by their danwei (work unit), ate in their largely uniform work unit cafeterias, and married within a similar socioeconomic bracket—often as arranged by a work superior. Life was routine and heavily regimented; couples couldn’t even divorce without the approval of their employer, and requests to do so were rarely granted.
Marriage was so deeply ingrained and enforced as a prerequisite for adulthood that even the process for giving wedding gifts was standardized. In the 1980s, it was customary for a groom’s family to provide their new daughter-in-law with “three rounds and a sound” : a bicycle, a watch, and a sewing machine, plus a radio or an alarm clock. By the 1990s, these three objects were upgraded to include a TV, a fridge, and a washing machine, but since China’s economic boom, the sky has become the limit.* Between 2000 and 2015 alone, China’s middle class grew from 5 million to 225 million households, and 50 million more are expected to join their ranks by 2020. In parallel, following the establishment of China’s private real estate market in 1998—prior to this time, all property belonged to the government—housing prices have skyrocketed, producing Freakonomics-worthy repercussions on the market for status symbols like apartments and cars.
Alongside this lust for material goods obtained through marriage is the timeless adage that, prior to the Cultural Revolution, had guided the work of Chinese matchmakers for centuries: “men dang hu dui,” or “matching doors and matching windows.” Essentially, this idea implies that marriage partners should be from similar households and socioeconomic backgrounds, ideally with the man’s family being slightly better off so as to justify his position as the head of the family and its chief “provider.” Although this model is still generally considered ideal, the emergence of a suddenly very wealthy Chinese class, when combined with the continued existence of a very poor class and a quickly growing middle class with exposure to an exponentially larger catalogue of things to covet, has provoked a sharp change in the rules of the game. Unlike in India or other caste-heavy systems, in China a woman of any background can now take the express elevator to a better life by hitching herself to a wealthy man, and for those enterprising enough to shop around until they find the man with the most desirable set of doors and windows, great profits lie in store.
Changing Tides
“As the water rises, so does the boat,” says Dr. X. I had originally been connected with him as a source for a story I was writing about marriage in China, because as a former government official and executive vice chairman of a somewhat mysterious NGO promoting cultural exchange between China and the rest of the world, he had facilitated the work of two American marriage counselors in China. On our first meeting, he welcomed me in his Beijing office with a very fine pot of tea. After a few pleasantries and a bit of Chinese fortune-telling—which according to Dr. X’s interpretation revealed that we had been close friends in a previous life—our conversation surprisingly veered toward the topic of mistresses.
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In retrospect, this makes perfect sense. For a Chinese man of Dr. X’s standing—well off, well connected, well educated, and well into his fifties—a mistress (or two, or three) is practically a requirement. But when I first met him—still only in my salad days of understanding the dynamics of extramarital relations in China—his ideas and observations seemed extraordinary, if not completely farfetched. “If a man in China doesn’t have a mistress, it’s because his economic situation doesn’t allow for it,” he announced, as casually and assuredly as if he were reporting the latest figures for China’s GDP. “And if a very successful man doesn’t have a mistress, his wife will be puzzled as to why he doesn’t.”
Dr. X delivered his words with such ease and conviction that it was actually very easy to hear him out, despite my moral objections to what he was saying. When I asked him why he thought mistresses were so popular—especially among men of his stature—he taught me a new word: jingshen . According to Dr. X, this word, which translates roughly as “vitality,” represents the mix of spirit, energy, and invigoration that fuels men in an endless quest for the revitalizing company of women roughly half their age.
It would be simple to demonize Dr. X. He does, after all, represent the ruling class of Chinese men who philander from one plum government posting to another. From what I’m able to infer, his life is a revolving door of meetings (professional and recreational) in hotel lobbies, from the St. Regis, to the Ritz, to the Kunlun. Yet to his credit, he plays the part of a Lothario with far more zest than his contemporaries. He has style—something that seems to escape the majority of the high-ranking officials of the Communist Party. Though there is barely a gray hair among them (Chinese men don’t spend millions on facial creams and toners like their Japanese and Korean counterparts, but they certainly do not skimp when it comes to hair dye), most elite party members appear to dress in a similarly stultifying uniform. Dr. X is different. He is practically a dandy. In the dead of winter, I spotted him in a blue-and-white checkered blazer, playfully accented with a magenta-and-chartreuse silk paisley pocket square. He wears cologne, has a sense of humor, and delights in traveling abroad. After a trip to Barcelona, he explains that he fell so in love with jamón ibérico (Spanish ham) that he brought back an entire pig’s leg, as well as the jamonera required to slice it on. He spoke of this cured meat with more zeal than any Spaniard I’ve ever met, including my Iberian relatives who treat their consumption of jamón as a religious experience.
“I can have almost anything I want in this world,” he explains, just after telling me that two more Spanish hams will be arriving in the mail. “Except a wife.” He delivers these lines with a hint of regret and more than a dash of frustration. Only after getting a bit deeper into our conversation does it become apparent as to why.
Dr. X was married in his twenties, but only for a year. Now in his fifties, it appears that he has a strong desire to remarry, but the only problem, according to him, is that the types of women he would like to wed are not interested in marriage. “They have so many suitors, they’d rather remain free agents and benefit from the attention and assets of several men at once. They can get much more out of their relationships this way.”
I had a feeling Dr. X was not referring to jewelry, handbags, cars, or any of the other “gifts” commonly given to mistresses in exchange for their company. I was just about to request that he elaborate when Dr. X preempted my question and opened my eyes to a new level of mistressing. “These women already have all the accessories they need. They also already have their own cars and apartments,” he said. “Material possessions aren’t what they require—they’re after connections and capital.” In other words, they become mistresses in order to network.
Dr. X then takes out his phone and flips through photos of several women. He rattles off a list of things they’ve acquired from different men. One got just under US $1 million in investment to put toward her own cosmetics line. Another obtained US $2 million to start her own advertising agency. Yet another, now based in Paris, used the money she’d accumulated from her paramours to launch her own fashion line. “And when they don’t need capital, they go after connections,” he explained. “I estimate that 80 percent of Chinese women with their own businesses are somebody’s mistress.”
Dr. X’s revelations were turning my preconceptions about gender dynamics in China on their head. In his version, women (mistresses, in this case) were coming out on top. They were exquisite profiteers, using men to their great advantage. While it was a mind-rattling discovery, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was symptomatic of gender inequalities in China even greater than I had considered. The women Dr. X was describing sounded resourceful, sharp, and extremely competent. From the pictures he had shown me, they were also significantly more beautiful than the men to whom they attached themselves. Why did they bother?
What if these women needed this sort of male “sponsorship” because the gender cards in Chinese society are so stacked that it was one of the only ways to get ahead? It seemed like a radical theory, but I wasn’t immediately willing to dismiss it. Despite all the fuss that has been made over the “women hold up half the sky” epithet that was proclaimed by Mao, I’d long suspected that the feminine half of the Chinese heavens was still somehow the less sunny of the two. I was well aware that many business deals in China are made over dinners accompanied with excessive amounts of baijiu (a famously strong rice wine) and followed up at karaoke places where “hostesses” serve as prostitutes. For these reasons, women aren’t usually involved, unless they’re part of the entertainment.
A Chinese media personality and businesswoman who is also among China’s strongest voices on feminism told me by phone that she must regularly pay some of her male employees to go drinking with her prospective clients after she has dinner with them because she knows that the best wheel-greasing opportunities happen in after-hours scenarios she can’t partake in. This sentiment was echoed to me by China scholar Gwendoline Debéthune, whose doctoral research examines the Chinese provinces where a woman can’t obtain micro-credit to start her own business, unless a man (presumably, her husband) signs off on it. Piecing these anecdotes together, I was starting to wonder if “making it” in the professional world could be especially challenging for a woman without the male connections that seemed necessary to get a business going. Was it challenging enough to warrant becoming a mistress?
Dr. X then told me about a Shanghai matchmaking event he’d recently taken part in. I already had a vague idea of how these events operated. Chinese men with cash to burn hand over several thousand RMB in order to be set up on dates with cherry-picked women who conform to an exacting list of requirements that the men may stipulate. These usually include some variant of very well proportioned body measurements and exceedingly fair skin. After attending with high hopes, Dr. X explained that the woman he was most interested in told him that she was currently seeing five other men. “I have no intentions of marrying any of them in the near future,” she told him squarely, in what must have been a sizable blow to his jingshen.
While I was struggling to process this information, to Dr. X, it was the most natural thing in the world. According to him, being a mistress was just a logical progression in a woman’s personal and professional trajectory. In fact, he argued, smart, savvy, hardworking women (in other words, the ones who I assumed were the least likely to become mistresses) were actually among the best paramours, because their educations and life experience made them even more enterprising.
But I wasn’t about to take his word for it.
The Mistress Slayer
Wei Wujun is China’s answer to Sherlock Holmes, but instead of a deerstalker, pipe, and magnifying glass, he’s known for smoking tarry Zhongnanhais (classic Chinese cigarettes) and his knack for imperceptibly tacking GPS tracking devices onto the underbellies of cars owned by cheating husbands. Commonly referred to as the er nai sha shou or “mistress slayer,” the sixty-year-old detective has made such a name for h
imself hunting down doxies that he recently had to announce his retirement on Shanghai TV, just so his phone would stop ringing.
“Most private detectives in China are in the mistress business,” he tells me. “This was my livelihood for twenty-one years. I made so much money, I ended up driving nicer cars than some of my clients.”
Wujun describes one of his more memorable cases—a Taiwanese businessman living in Guangdong who had eight mistresses. “This was in 1995,” he explains. “For the Taiwanese, having a mistress on the mainland was commonplace. The cost of living in China was so low, you could have a mistress for 3,000 RMB (US $430) a month.”
Why any man who already had a wife and two daughters would want to add eight more women to his life was bewildering to me, but according to Wujun, this was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, the gentleman in question (let’s call him Wild Oats) had an arrangement with his wife, who not only approved of his extramarital activities but often played mahjong—a Chinese tile game requiring an even number of players—with her husband’s lovers.
Things took an ugly turn when Wild Oats decided to get his younger brother—also a partner in the family business—a mistress of his own. Although the brother’s wife didn’t oppose her husband’s infidelity, she had failed to give birth to a son and feared that her husband (whom we’ll call Little Oats) might try to have one with his lady companion.
And so she called Detective Wujun.
“Cavorting is costly, but procreating is exorbitant,” says Wujun, explaining that Little Oats’s wife didn’t so much fear another child but a drain on the family finances. As it turns out, it’s a common scheme among mistresses to try to have a son for their men—and possibly abort if they become pregnant with a girl—because the act of providing a male heir means they’ll be entitled to financial support for a longer period of time, even once they’re too old to live off their looks alone.