by Roseann Lake
Today, Maxim’s is one of many foreign establishments where Beijing’s well heeled convene for fine wining and dining. Pierre Cardin—the now octogenarian couturier whose idea it was to bring the restaurant to China back in the early ’80s, is largely credited as a visionary, and enjoys rock-star status in China. When he is in town, streets are closed for his cavalcade and dignitaries convene. At the opening of Maxim’s in Hefei—an emerging but otherwise unremarkable city in Eastern China—multiple Chinese heads of state were present for the occasion.
Over time, however, Maxim’s has become famed in China for more than its signature French cuisine, meticulously adapted to the Chinese palate. “We have about four to five proposals a week,” says Daquin, supervising the small fleet of men who are hoisting the bouquet up the stairs, leaving a trail of shredded rose petals behind them. “We have a special book for keeping track of them all, and every request is more extravagant than the last,” he explains, rattling off a list of proposals that includes a man who booked the entire restaurant, requiring that every table be arranged in a heart shape around the area where he and his girlfriend would be seated.
“It’s expensive, and it’s a lot of work,” he says, having a sniff at the oversized bouquet, which has now made its way to the second floor. “These are real roses,” he adds approvingly. “Red and fragrant—must have cost a fortune.”
As a tall, strapping Frenchman (a quality that, in the eyes of the Chinese, automatically makes him exude romance), Daquin is occasionally asked to bring the ring to the table—sometimes disguised in a cake, looped around a napkin, or poised under a covered platter. “It can be moving,” he says. “Especially sometimes when the women begin to cry from the surprise or the emotion, but most of the proposals are disappointingly superficial.”
Two hours later, the man who bought the large bouquet and his soon-to-be wife arrive at the restaurant and are escorted to a table that can accommodate the floral apotheosis planned for the end of their meal. After their five courses are consumed, a violinist begins to play, the bouquet is ushered onto the scene, and a ring is presented. The bride-to-be, already covered in sparkles, smiles gently as two glittering carats are slipped onto her finger.
Moments later, the groom-to-be throws the keys to his Ferrari at a busboy and asks him to load up the bouquet. Since getting it into the two-passenger sports car is clearly not possible, the flowers are left in the parking lot, where they remain until night staff of the nearby shopping center take notice, and promptly begin to serve themselves.
Long before such extravagant proposals existed or could even be afforded in China, the Cultural Revolution continued to kill any manifestations of romance—real or synthetic—well into the ’70s. By the economic reforms of 1979, however, people were ready for some romance. A huge national controversy broke out when Popular Cinema magazine published a color photo of a kiss scene from an English film, The Slipper and the Rose, on its back cover. As reported by journalist Ginger Huang in The World of Chinese, the picture sparked a massive public debate after a propaganda officer in Xinjiang called the photo “decadent, capitalist, an act meant to poison our youths.” He then clarified: “It’s not that we don’t want love; the point is what kind of love we want—pure, proletariat love, or corrupted, capitalist love?” In the following two months, 11,000 letters flooded the magazine’s office, two-thirds of which condemned the attitude of the puritanical propaganda clerk.
Also in 1979, The Tremor of Life was screened; a film rumored to have a kissing scene. Before it premiered, people gossiped that the actors had been required to wear plastic wrappings on their lips while filming it. When the kiss scene came, spectators craned their necks and sharpened their eyes in an attempt to spot the plastic. Yet as the actors leaned in for the big moment, Huang reports, “the mother-in-law broke in with a bang and the lovers parted.”
As the Mao era came to a close and China began to undergo significant economic and political reforms, love emerged from the rubble as a way of resurrecting a repressed humanity. Perhaps the best proof that it had been missing during the preceding years of turmoil is the fact that it was addressed vigorously and effusively by numerous female writers.
A salient example is Yu Luojin’s Dongtian de Tonghua, or A Winter’s Tale—a story drafted in 1974 and published in the fall of 1980. Like so many others in the “wounds literature” genre that was popular in those days, Yu’s story details the horrors suffered by her family during the Cultural Revolution. Because of her father’s chronic unemployment that resulted from his politics, Yu’s mother had to work in a factory (at partial pay, because of her “rightist” label) to support her husband and their three children. Then there was Yu herself, who for some off-color comments on official literary policies made in her (confiscated) diary, was banished to a labor camp. As reported by Ming-Yan Lai, an assistant professor of intercultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Yu was then sent to an impoverished village, where she was immediately told by the party secretary of her agricultural brigade to find herself a husband.
Because an unmarried woman in a labor camp was not allowed to remain unwed, Lai writes that Yu was temporarily relegated to a peasant’s side room. Eventually, in order to relieve some of her mother’s burden of sustaining the family, Yu decided to “sell” herself to a man from a more prosperous region of the country. After describing the dark details of her marriage to a brutal and abusive husband, Yu describes how she realized the hubris in believing that she could repress her inner need for an emotionally and spiritually rich life in her pursuit of a materially comfortable one. She laments falling for what the state vision of national modernity encouraged its citizens to do: devalue their personal feelings and sentiments in favor of financial pursuits.
Yu’s recognition of her error generated a tremendous amount of public debate, notes Lai. Adding flames to the fire was the fact that as her story was being published, Yu was going through a second divorce, which she had filed for on the grounds of the absence of love. As per a 1980 amendment to the marriage law stipulating that lack of mutual affection was valid grounds for divorce, Yu’s reason for filing was completely legal, though whether it would actually hold up in practice was something many spectators were anxious to see.
But more than anything, the public was fascinated by Yu’s very frank revelation of the mercenary nature of her marriages, and what appeared to be her genuine desire to defend a woman’s right to satisfy her emotional needs. From informal conversations to popular magazines and newspapers, Lai reports that Yu’s admission generated groundbreaking discussions about the meaning of love in marriage and the morality of marriage and divorce. She describes Yu’s life as “a public text through which the Chinese people tried to map out changing possibilities for personal lives and the relation between the personal and the public under the new post-Mao regime.”
To be fair, when the Maoist era ended in the late ’70s, the following regime, anxious to disassociate itself from the extremes imposed by its predecessor, reintroduced the official discourse on marriage and love that was developed in the 1950s. But by the ’80s there were yet again official agencies in charge of disseminating the “correct” attitudes toward personal matters, including relationships.
Seen in this light, it would appear that more than a personal struggle for love and self-fulfillment, Yu’s writings were about “a public struggle for the general acceptance of women as persons with their own values and rights for happiness.” The right to have marital freedom, in other words, is not the quest for a fairy-tale wedding, eternal butterflies, or even daily exchanges of those relatively new words “wo ai ni” (I love you). It is, first and foremost, a form of social justice—a form of social justice that, it would seem, has been largely debated and denied in China for the last hundred years.
Small Treasures
My colleague Yanyan had a sheepish giggle and a penchant for round-tipped kitten heels, which she often shuffled around in, reminding me a bit of Minni
e Mouse. She smiled often, spoke little, and spent most of her time at the office shopping online or tending to her e-farm. The day I got my first glance of her e-farm—literally, a colorfully animated electronic farm with blossoming crops that required tilling and watering—I couldn’t understand how she could possibly find it so engaging. “Everyone has one,” she protested, challenging me to take a good look around the office. Sure enough, the office of the media company where we both spent roughly eight hours a day was filled with fields of thriving pumpkin, corn, and red-pepper crops. It all seemed so deliciously ironic. Wasn’t China doing everything possible to urbanize? Why, then, were its hardworking rural transplants still tending to virtual cornfields?
While I never fully understood the intrigue of QQ Farm, as the game was called, having a desk right behind Yanyan’s was a constant source of entertainment. Piled high with all sorts of electronic appliances, it resembled a miniature space station. One winter morning I arrived to find her desk tricked out with a set of electric mittens chargeable by a USB port so her fingers wouldn’t freeze at the keyboard. Below these were heatable slippers that looked like moon boots designed for Baby Spice and a desk humidifier in the shape of a large rubber ducky who artfully released steam from his bottom.
Yanyan had purchased all of her gadgets on Taobao, which has been one of the leading forces behind the commercialization of November 11; what is now popularly known as an unofficial holiday called , or Singles’ Day. Celebrated across the country, it was allegedly created by a group of bachelor students at Nanjing University in the ’90s. Given the four ones in the date (11/11), the students decided it would be a fitting antidote to Valentine’s Day—a holiday that would instead celebrate their singlehood and curb some of the negativity commonly associated with it.
Today, Singles’ Day has become the largest online shopping day in the world, largely thanks to Alibaba portals like Taobao and Tmall, a B2C platform for official stores featuring a wide range of several foreign brands, from Tom Ford to Target. As a result of clever marketing, heavy commercialization, and improved payment methods, Singles’ Day sales on the sites have climbed steadily from $5.8 billion in 2013 to $17.8 billion in 2016. A bit like Cyber Monday, the holiday offers deep discounts to everyone, though there are special products marketed to singles. These include low-calorie instant noodles (for lonely urbanites who can’t face cooking for one) and human-sized pillows with arms and legs (for those longing for something to spoon with). In 2016, Ma took the holiday to a new level by prefacing it with a star-studded gala countdown. A-listers such as retired basketball star Kobe Bryant (known in China as Peter Pan for his ability to “fly”) as well as David and Victoria Beckham were in attendance. Pop sensation Katy Perry (endearingly referred to by Chinese fans as “Fruit Sister” for her produce-inspired costumes) was supposed to perform, but ended up canceling at the last minute. Some Chinese netizens speculated that Perry was too distressed over the results of the US presidential election to attend.
I knew that many of my female colleagues spent a healthy part of their workday browsing for wares on Taobao, which in Chinese is formally known as , or the “treasure-searching network.” I learned this not from leering at their computer screens but from the daily interruptions of kuaidi (express delivery). To young working girls in office buildings across China, the arrival of kuaidi is a daily yet still much anticipated event. From what I was able to observe, as the kuaidi delivery service person arrives at the office door, blips of QQ are momentarily suspended, as are heartbeats. Even the hot-water machine stops humming and gurgling, almost as if in momentary reverence. The women then often flash inquisitive glances at one another—is anyone else expecting a package? Whose might it be? The suspense continues until the deliveryman announces a name. If the woman in question is not in the office at the moment, one of her colleagues will rush up, accept the package for her, and store it safely at her desk, in a bold gesture of e-shopping solidarity.
“You must write about Taobao in your book,” Yanyan once told me sternly. “It has changed the lives of so many young Chinese women. It makes us less reliant on boyfriends, because now we can easily and cheaply buy things for ourselves.”
What she failed to mention at the time, however, was exactly how much it had changed hers.
“I’m going to give myself a present this year,” she confided softly to me one day.
“What’s that?” I asked, trying to imagine which kind of electrical heating apparatus she could possibly be lacking.
“A baby,” she said.
“Ahhh,” I said, wondering if Taobao had a subsection called Tao-baober (baober is Chinese slang for “doll” or “baby”). “Well, if you want one of those blond, blue-eyed ones, shipping costs are going to be astronomical!”
But then when she pointed to the middle of her tiny frame, I knew she had other delivery options in mind.
Later that afternoon, I went to lunch with Yanyan and Ryan, an American colleague from Alaska, with whom we were both very close. Over a meal of spicy cabbage, spicy green beans, black-pepper beef, and pickled radishes, she told us all about her pounding ovaries.
Her brother and sister-in-law had just had a baby, and she adored him. (Yanyan’s brother was born before the one-child policy was in force, and she was born on the cusp of it.) She had asked Ryan and me to give her nephew an English name—we went with Jack—and she made the trek to the suburbs to see him every weekend. On a regular basis, she showed us pictures of chubby little Jack disguised in elaborate one-pieces—dressed as a dragon, a tiger, a caterpillar, or a donkey. He appeared to spend so much of his life swaddled in layers of fuzzy microfiber that Ryan and I wondered if Jack’s parents weren’t secretly using him to polish their floors.
But Yanyan was enraptured—she desperately wanted a baby Swiffer of her own!
“Who do you plan to have this baby with?” asked Ryan, noting that there had been no mention of a man.
“Oh, that’s not really as important,” said Yanyan. “I’m supposed to get married this year anyway, so I’ll just find a husband to have one with.”
“Do you have any candidates lined up?” asked Ryan. Though we were both more than confident that Yanyan would be able to raise a child on her own, the penalties for having a child out of wedlock—which, as mentioned earlier, prohibit any child born of unwed parents from being legally recognized as a member of society—make it a rather joyless experience.
“No, but I’ll find someone. As long as he is kao pu”—a phrase that means “reliable” and is pronounced “cow poo”—“doesn’t drink too much, and has a steady job to help support our family, it should be OK.”
“But don’t you at least want to marry someone you love?” said Ryan. I listened quietly, half expecting she was going to tell us that she’d purchased a USB extension on Taobao that would impregnate her on command.
“No, I am too tired for that,” she said. “Don’t you know work is busy?”
There were a few seconds of awkward silence.
“Well, have you ever been in love?” asked Ryan, who is supremely gifted at breaking silences and asking invasive questions. He was my unfailing sidekick over the course of five years in China, and without him, this book would not exist.
“Mmmm . . . I don’t think so,” she said, with a blank expression. Yanyan was twenty-nine when we had this conversation, and Ryan and I had just automatically assumed she had been.
“How about crushes? Little stomach flutters, nervousness, giddiness, like hamsters running on a wheel in your stomach?” asked Ryan, as we both became increasingly baffled.
“Ham-bursters?” asked Yanyan, even more confused. Ryan probably could have chosen a more translation-friendly metaphor, because neither of us could remember how to say “hamster” in Chinese, but in the end, things worked out. Yanyan really liked ham, so much that she called David Beckham (whom she also really liked) “Bacon-Ham.” For her purposes, likening love to “ham-bursters” made perfect sense.
“Oh yes, I had them,” she said. “But that was in middle school. Those things are not appropriate anymore.”
In the early spring, I noticed that the nature of Yanyan’s Taobao purchases was beginning to vary. She would no longer open her packages as soon as they arrived, or chat animatedly about her latest knickknacks with the other women in the office. Instead, she seemed to take on a new affinity for eggs. She’d eat a hard-boiled one at her desk every morning, disposing of the shell in the same small plastic bag she ate it out of.
At lunch, we couldn’t get her to even taste the spicy vegetable dishes we so regularly enjoyed together. Cold things—like the shaved ice with mung bean or peanut slushies that we’d occasionally indulge in, were also off limits. It wasn’t long before she announced to Ryan and me: she was pregnant.
“How did this happen?” I asked, all at once very happy for her, but also concerned, since I had a vague idea what became of mothers who had babies out of wedlock in China.
“I think you probably know how it happened,” she said, somewhat abashedly. “It really wasn’t planned.”
Through the help of a friend, Yanyan had met a man, also from her home province of Anhui. He was four years her junior, and this made her uncomfortable. He also wasn’t very well educated and only had a mediocre job, but he was kind to her. As soon as she found out she was pregnant, he immediately suggested they marry.
At first, Yanyan was terrified to be pregnant. Though a baby was something she really wanted, it was coming in the wrong order, and from a father her family was bound to disapprove of. Still, since there was already a bun in the oven, she assumed responsibility and began preparing for motherhood.
Before even informing her family of the wedding, Yanyan and her fiancé spent 5,000 RMB, or nearly US $1,000 to take their wedding photos. Chinese wedding photos are unique in that they are usually taken weeks before the actual wedding, and generally consist of the bride and groom dressed up in a series of funhouse outfits. In the first photo I saw, Yanyan was standing in front of what appeared to be a saloon, wearing an extensively ruffled homage to Scarlett O’Hara. Her soon-to-be husband, dandied-out to the max with a three-piece suit and a fake parted mustache, stood valiantly next to her. In the next picture, they shared a hamburger in what appeared to be a ’50s soda-pop shop. Yanyan wore a poodle skirt, and her husband-to-be looked back at her adoringly, his back propped up against a jukebox. For this picture, they had him dressed up in a frilly lime suit trimmed with a lacy white collar, which made him look like a human margarita.