Leftover in China

by Roseann Lake

  “Well, then that’s love,” said Ivy, with a complicit twinkle in her left eye.

  Before June could get in another question, Ivy picked up her handbag, clicked open the doors to her white Porsche, and sped off into the night.

  Long after the lights of Ivy’s car had disappeared, June and I remained chatting outside the café. I could see she was furiously processing all of the new information she had learned. Because she didn’t have a car of her own, I offered her a ride on my hot-orange electric scooter, which is essentially a Chinese manufacturer’s take on a Vespa. Though lovely to look at, it has about as much power as a midrange hedge clipper when it’s not fully charged (as was the case that night), so we don’t exactly get off to a roaring start. As we finally picked up speed and braced ourselves against the wind—it was early March, and the northerlies from Siberia were still blowing in full force—we burst into uncontrollable laughter. “The mistress speeds home in a luxury sports car, and the two galoots with graduate degrees teeter home on an e-bike in the middle of a tempest,” said June, still laughing in decibels that far exceed anything her mother would approve of. “So much for Yale!”

  5

  CHICKENS AND DUCKS

  It is a misfortune to be unhappily married, but it comes near to being a disgrace not to be married at all.

  —LEON H. VINCENT, A SUCCESSFUL BACHELOR, 1898

  On June 21, at 7:47 p.m., user Snow Flower types:

  “I think you’re the missing half I’ve been looking for this whole time. I want to learn from you and be inspired by your courage; work with you, help you, and allow for the melting of our hearts together. I want to be your left hand and your right shoulder. You have moved me deeply from within. My dream is to have a happy life and family with you.”

  She continues, after waiting shortly, but receiving no response:

  “Even though we are very far from one another, I put my faith in the wisdom of our elders. I have come to know and be charmed by you through my parents’ descriptions. Our future together pulls on their heartstrings, and I think we should honor them by being together. We’re both from the same region of China, so our personalities and customs will be similar, allowing us to happily fulfill our duties together. I don’t know what your feelings are about all of this, but I eagerly await your answer.

  Three hours, five minutes, and twenty-seven seconds later, user PhoenixPhoenix responds:

  “I think this is taking things a little too far, as we have never even met each other in person. I understand your parents’ feelings and I sympathize that time has a different meaning for women, but I hope you can realize that the love that must lead up to marriage is something that must develop naturally.”

  Snow Flower is Christy’s ID on QQ, an instant-messaging platform that serves as China’s equivalent to AOL Messenger. PhoenixPhoenix is the QQ id of a man living in the US whom she has never met, but whose contact information was given to her by her mother. Christy began chatting with him at her mother’s behest, after a very elaborate series of afternoons in which the respective families of each singleton examined their compatibility—everything from their educational levels to their star signs to their blood types—and determined they were a heavenly match.

  At first, their chats didn’t yield much, as might be expected from two strangers on opposite sides of the world who were forced to chat online by their families. Sensing little chemistry or compatibility between the two, Christy tapered off the conversation, which is when her mother, in a cunning last attempt to have her daughter married to this well-to-do man with a green card, snuck into Christy’s QQ account and sent the treacly messages reproduced above.

  Three weeks later, Christy discovered what happened and became irate. She immediately messaged PhoenixPhoenix to apologize, but when trying to get a hold of her mother to let her know that she was wise to her online hijinks, Christy discovered that she was visiting PhoenixPhoenix’s parents and delivering a box of candied fruits on her daughter’s behalf.

  “It’s like a generation of chickens has given birth to a generation of ducks,” explains Christy. “We’re on completely different pages,” she says. “They’re the cog in the system that simply won’t budge.”

  It’s critical to understand that, like Christy’s mother, parents with children who are now of marriage age were young adults during the Cultural Revolution, a time during which romance was reviled as a bourgeois sentiment and a selfish, dishonorable reason to marry. As was expected of them, many invested their lives in the revolution and were swept up in propaganda and proletarian love, only to become “unthinking and unfeeling body parts of the nation-building machine.” They repressed their emotional and spiritual needs for national progress and wealth; a process that significantly distorted their values. Older now, they are disenchanted with idealistic notions of society and no longer believe in slogans or politics. Instead, they’ve thrust all of their hopes into money, property, status, and other perceived sources of stability because they’ve experienced life without any of these things. Striving for a materially comfortable life, they project their desires onto their children, often irrespective of their children’s emotional needs.

  For instance, Christy and her cohort, unlike their mothers, generally have enough education and financial independence that money, or the security it provides, is no longer their primary motivation for marriage. More self-reliant and assertive of their individuality than their mothers were ever allowed to be, they have a different set of priorities for seeking a partner, and are less willing to get married out of a sense of social duty or for material needs. Instead of a provider-cum-housemate with whom they happen to have a child, they want to marry someone they love. A concept that, for one of the oldest civilizations of the world—it appears—is actually quite new.

  Love Meets Marriage

  As noted by Stephanie Coontz, an academic whose work is on the history of marriage, “Until the late eighteenth century, most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved, especially if they were going to base their decision on something as unreasoning and as transitory as love.” In other words, romantic marriage is a relatively new concept of the last three centuries. From Renaissance Venice to colonial Mexico, marriage was, above all, a contract: an agreement about as romantic as a car lease. It was a communally decided system of social organization in which wealth, resources, status, rank, and class could be reproduced across generations.

  According to Coontz, the two seismic social changes that instigated the evolution of marriage norms were the spread of wage labor, which made young people less dependent on their parents, and the freedoms of the market economy, which resulted in social relationships being based on reason and justice, instead of force. The combination of these two factors allowed the institution of marriage to transition from being a fundamental unit of work, politics, and social obligation to a refuge from work, politics, and social obligation. As a result, the ideal of a marriage based on love—unexplainable, unintentional, romantic love—gained wider acceptance. Less of a contract, marriage eventually came to be seen in most Western countries as a private arrangement between two individuals who themselves desired and chose to spend their lives together.

  This was not, however, the case in China, an especially late bloomer on the love front. Arranged marriage was legal and widely practiced in China until 1950, and Confucian ideals nixed any stomach flutters and sonnets between spouses by instead emphasizing relationships between men. As per Confucian philosophy, the two strongest family relationships were between father and son, elder brother and younger brother. Any man who deviated from the norm and appeared openly affectionate with his wife was seen as someone of weak character.

  Confucian ideals were so effective in cracking down on sentiments between a husband and his wife that until the 1920s, notes Coontz, there wasn’t even a Chinese word to describe romantic love be
tween spouses. Seeing the need to develop a word for this idea, a group of intellectuals coined the term en nai, or . Literally translated, it means “gratitude love,” and refers to the affections that a man exhibits toward his wife in gratitude for the sacrifices she makes for him. At this point in time, the Chinese word for the romantic notion of love, , was still only being used to describe an illicit, socially disapproved relationship.

  More than romance, en nai was about respect between spouses and represented the traditional gender roles that each was tasked with upholding. A woman was expected to treat her husband with great reverence. Her husband, in turn, was to be a reliable provider for her and their children. Any “gratitude love” that grew between them was acknowledged in society as a pleasant by-product of their union, much like whey is a pleasant by-product of cheese. It sweetened the deal, but was certainly not the point. Furthermore, polygamy was still legal and liberally practiced, so a man could easily exhibit “gratitude love” with more than one wife.

  Then, in 1950 (right around the time Christy’s mother was born), something radical happened. The newly empowered Communist Party passed a law that abolished the practice of arranged marriage. It specified that marriage was to be based on the “freedom of choice” between one man and one woman. The law was hailed as an effort to protect the interests and rights of women, and above all, to limit the self-interested intervention of parents.

  Women, who had previously been the pawns by which families secured their own socio-economic and political advantage through strategic betrothal, were now legally free to choose their own life partners. And if things didn’t work out, they could file for divorce. In the event of widowhood, they were freed from servitude to their in-laws and could remarry. And whatever the course their marriage took, women would retain rights to the property owned prior to the marriage, plus half of anything jointly acquired.

  As described in Elisabeth Croll’s The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China, a nationwide campaign to familiarize people with the details of the new law was launched and became the ideal “marriage model” that all citizens were encouraged to follow. By 1953, there was a family-by-family, street-by-street guerrilla campaign aimed at educating people about “free-choice” marriage, praising young citizens who held the “correct viewpoint in choosing life’s companions.”

  This “correct viewpoint,” as defined by the government, was outlined as follows:

  The relationship between husband and wife is first of all comradeship and the feelings between them are revolutionary. By revolutionary it is meant that politically he should take her as a new comrade-in-arms . . . he should take her as a class sister and they should labor together.

  Unless the word “labor” was code for something sexy, it’s safe to assume that the “correct viewpoint” for a relationship between a man and his wife was more ideological than physical or emotional. The government dismissed romantic love as “bourgeois sentiment.” As warned by a 1964 article in the People’s Daily, young people who become man and wife “on the impulse of the moment and on the basis of good looks and love at first sight, disregarding compatibility based on identical political ideas and mutual understanding,” were doomed to “quarrel and suffer greatly.” By contrast, those who were not attractive in their looks but shared “revolutionary feelings” would experience a love that is “forever green.”

  Young couples who pursued revolutionary love and dared to “fight against the old thinking” were reassured that, should they be met with parental resistance, the government would support them, writes Croll. Political associations like the Central Committee of the Movement for the Thorough Implementation of the Marriage Law (I wish I were making that name up) were set up to champion the “free-will” marriages of young couples, and even to defend them against the couple’s parents in cases of discord. Educational materials continued to be published, and instances of young couples triumphing in their pursuit of free-choice marriage were widely publicized in an effort to encourage others to do the same.

  In essence, free-choice marriage represented an upheaval of Confucian order, in which parents reigned supreme. Under this new system, parents had to relinquish their power to strategically handpick their extended relatives and control how their family would be represented in future generations. Instead, children were expected to court or date, a process that, as Croll notes, was bound to trigger scandal, a maelstrom of wagging tongues, and invitations to impropriety. Naturally, in an attempt to avert such mayhem and preserve their gains from a child’s marriage, parents berated their freedom-seeking children and bribed local officials tasked with sustaining the new free-choice marriage law.

  It also didn’t help that young Chinese had no clue how to find a spouse, because there were no pre-established societal cues on how to date. The mandates of Confucianism had been so heavily ingrained in society that most young people feared the potential gossip, loss of dignity, and the disrespect they would bring on their families. Those who had free-choice marriages were disheartened by the lack of sympathy or support for their choice, argues Croll. And as for the government officials who were tasked with defending the free-marriage rights of Chinese youth? Their eyes were easily averted with a bit of cash from the elders.

  Although customs are changing, Chinese parents of the same generation as Christy’s mom still feel entitled to have a heavy hand in the personal lives of their children because it’s what they endured from their elders. China’s lack of a social safety net also makes children the nest eggs of their parents; they are expected to provide for and take care of them in old age. This means that ensuring a child marries by a certain age—and that he or she marries well—has become the guarantee of a comfortable retirement. Whether or not a couple is a good match from a social perspective still often matters more than how compatible they are as life partners, as long as they are married in a big, fanfare-filled wedding that gives face and peace of mind to the respective families of each. Keeping up appearances is still of paramount importance, and sex and sexuality are rarely discussed.

  Skeletons in the Closet

  In addition to being a mediocre brand of Japanese dairy sold widely in China, Suki is the name of Beijing’s most sought-after bikini waxer. She has become such a household name among the community of foreign females in Beijing that she often comes up in conversations at cocktail parties. When two women discover that the same hands are tending their topiary, something magical happens, whereby like sugar wax to the pubis, they instantly bond. Part of this has to do with the shared intimacy of knowing that the same woman is plucking their privates, but also, I suspect, because of Suki’s intriguing story.

  Before becoming the door-to-door wunderkind of bikini waxing, Suki worked in the spa of one of Beijing’s most upscale boutique hotels. (Beyoncé and Victoria Beckham stayed there when they were in town.) She had a solid following of regulars, but the working conditions at the hotel, despite its plush appearance, were deplorable. After one of her clients suggested she go solo and offer in-home beauty services at a fraction of the spa price, Suki handed in her notice at the spa and valiantly launched her own little waxing start-up.

  Fastidious in her work, Suki removes wax as if conducting an orchestra. With little more than a medium-sized champagne-colored knockoff Longchamp tote containing all of her supplies, she shuttles between the homes of her clients, leaving everyone she touches marvelously glabrous. The quality and convenience of her services have led her to rack up a small fortune—much more cash than her husband, a barber, is able to bring home. According to Suki, he is very supportive of her job, and even helps pack up her supply bag on his days off. The only complaint she has is the very transient nature of her clients—mostly female expats who are in Beijing for a limited period of time. Though she is always getting new clients through enthusiastic word-of-mouth referrals, with her daughter approaching middle school and the rising cost of her educational expenses, Suki began asking around for suggestions on how to build a steadier
client base. She was surprised to learn that many of her female clients had the same advice: expand waxing services to include men.

  Despite the rather progressive nature of her profession, Suki still teeters on the line toward conservatism. She’s from a small village in Shanxi province, and most of her life in Beijing is completely unfathomable to her family. “I tell my parents that I do facials,” she says, which she also does, although the lion’s share of her business comes from Brazilian waxes. Without getting too deep into the depilatory routines of Chinese women, I think it’s safe to say that Brazilians are far from the norm. I’ve been in gym locker rooms where women have been aiming blow dryers at their nether regions, and many men, I’ve had confirmed, do the same. But gay Chinese men—well, they might just be a gold mine for Suki, if she were up for the challenge.

  “Oh,” she says, perplexed, when I mention this to her. “But where to find them? I’ve never met one.”

  This surprises me, though it shouldn’t. The hotel where Suki was formerly employed occupies what may very well be among the gayest 500 square meters in Beijing. Its bar is the setting for a weekly gay happy hour that’s like The Wizard of Oz meets Madonna. In warmer months when the terrace is open, the often impeccably coiffed men who gather there emit such a strong mix of cologne onto the surrounding sidewalk, I’ve come to call it Beijing’s Duty-Free.

  “Maybe my husband could help me with this?” Suki asks cautiously, still unsure of the viability of this idea, though certainly interested in the monetary prospect of it.

  Suki is not the only person in China who doesn’t understand homosexuality. Yet despite common misconceptions that may stem from a dubious record with regard to human rights and personal freedoms, China is not—at least on the surface— especially hostile to gay people. Beijing, in particular (which, of course, is not representative of greater China) is home to several gay bars. Depending on the political climate of the times, a large-scale event (like the Mr. Gay Pride Pageant in Shanghai) might be shuttered by the government, but on the day-to-day club scene, the gay community appears to face minimal policing from the powers that be.