Leftover in China Read online

  Listening to her speak, I am reminded of how China has grown to become the world’s largest economy. For all of its flaws, it is a country that has had the foresight to actively include women in its objectives for economic expansion. Young Chinese “Factory Girls” are the reason the plan worked so well, as they flocked to assemble the Nike sneakers and iPods that put China on the worldwide manufacturing map. Known as “golden turtles,” they used their earnings to support their parents, to help pay for the weddings of their brothers or the educations of their younger sisters (in cases of families with more than one child), and to have a small taste of disposable income before returning home and dutifully getting married. Today, while they continue to be a powerful economic motor, they’re increasingly trading smokestacks for syllabi and migrating for college—an experience after which it’s much harder to fit back into a traditional box.

  Further complicating matters is that many of China’s young migrant women find pink-collar jobs in environments with few eligible men. “The only men I ever really interact with are married ones,” says Zhang Mei, referring to the middle-aged base of Korean and Japanese male professionals who represent the bulk of her students. All of her colleagues are young women, many of them in a situation similar to her own. She often socializes with them on weekends, most often for hotpot and a movie, or a bit of karaoke. They begin their evening early, have dinner at around five thirty or six p.m., and are home by eleven at the latest, in order to be able to catch the last rounds of public transportation back to their respective living quarters.

  Because none of this is very conducive to meeting eligible mates, one of Zhang Mei’s colleagues decided to take a leap and try online dating. She took a selfie, her bangs partially covering her eyes and her lips pursed in a playful pout. She held up two fingers next to her face in the classic Asian-girl V sign, and uploaded the picture with the following text: “I’m on this site because I spend most of my day around married men.” A few days later, she got a message back from a young gentleman wearing black-rimmed frames (which appeared to have no lenses), spiky hair, and a similarly playful pouty face. “I’m on this site because I spend most of my day around married women,” he wrote. She was intrigued. They began to chat online, and she soon discovered that he was a photographer specializing in children’s snapshots. His days were filled with bouncing babies and beaming mamas. This revelation produced a communal swoon among the girls in the office. The pair went on a few dates, but nothing materialized. Soon, each went back to days filled with married members of the opposite sex.

  Zhang Mei tried online dating too, but was much more mum about the results. “I messaged a few men, but nobody interesting wrote back,” she said, and that was the end of that.

  Over the course of my lessons with Zhang Mei, I took endless pleasure in the quiddities of the Chinese language. That an avocado is referred to as e li, or “alligator pear,” is just one example of the magically visual nature of the language. (A more comic example is pi yan, which translates as “the eye of the butt,” or how the Chinese say “anus.”) Likewise, expressions such as qi lü zhao ma were also the source of colorful gateways to conversations with locals. This particular expression means “ride the donkey while looking for a horse,” and I found it exponentially more entertaining upon discovering that it is used in reference to both jobs and boyfriends. Mou gu and mu gou are examples of words I’ve struggled to get straight. The former means “mushroom” the latter means “(female) dog,” which I’ve tried to order on multiple occasions. Fortunately, the consumption of dog is illegal in most parts of China—despite being a winter delicacy in regions like Guangdong—and since only a handful of Beijing restaurants carry it, my request for fungi was almost always eventually understood.

  Then there were those three little words—wo ai ni, that were impossible to mistake or confuse. Their English equivalent, “I love you,” is probably the third phrase Chinese students learn in English class after “hello” and “nice to meet you.” In China, I’ve seen it written liberally on everything from notebooks to bedsheets, wall stickers to breakfast treats. My dentist once even gave me a promotional keychain that said “I love you” on it after I had a cleaning. It was touching, though a toothbrush would have been preferable.

  While “I love you” seemed ubiquitous in China, never having been privy to a Chinese world of close romantic attachment, I had more or less assumed that wo ai ni was used more seriously, much like its English equivalent. “No,” explained Zhang Mei. “For us, ‘I love you’ is beautiful in its brevity, universality, and vagueness in another language, but wo ai ni is still very unchartered territory.”

  Curious to know more, I fired off an email to thirty of my closest Chinese friends. About twenty-five of them got back to me. While I’m fully aware that this is hardly a representative or scientific sample, I found the results to be more illuminating than expected. For starters, few of my contacts born in the ’70s or before admitted to ever saying “wo ai ni.” One told me a story about an afternoon she spent watching a film with her husband, whom she married at age thirty-eight. The film was based on a story written by John Keats, and was full of effusive expressions of emotion. After the film was over, her husband said he didn’t think the man really loved the woman in the film, because he just said a lot of things, but there was very little he actually did to make the woman happy. “Love is not a matter of words,” she wrote in response to my email. “If you love someone, you care for him/her and do everything possible to make him/her happy.” How could I argue with that?

  My friends born in the ’80s were of a slightly different school of thought. They seemed more tortured about how and when to say those three little words, and most admitted to having done so either to disastrous or comical effects. Zhang Mei reported that she loved her cat more than she had ever loved any man since her middle school crush. A married friend of hers dismissed the words “wo ai ni” as “the silly talk that leads to marriage, but stops right after the wedding.” Of those who had yet to say “wo ai ni,” or hadn’t said it in a long time, many ladies, especially, expressed wanting to one day feel the desire to say it. Christy described it as “something very private and difficult to say,” adding with a series of smileys and assorted winking emoji that the kind of “soul mate” she was looking for (a corpse groom) wouldn’t be able to speak anyway.

  Over drinks one evening, my dear friend Guang—a dashing Australian-born Chinese with a penchant for velvet blazers and classic literature—lamented in an uncharacteristically layman’s fashion: “Love is like a double cheeseburger. When you have it in your hands, there is nothing better in the world. But if you have it every day and for too long, it will destroy you.” To be fair, when I asked Guang this question, his ticker was on the mend. “Broads and burgers,” he said, gazing wistfully into his wineglass, “can only lead to heartbreak and bypass surgery.” He then paused for dramatic effect, knowing well that I was enjoying the spectacle.

  Other Chinese gentlemen who responded to my inquiry were more tight-lipped, and quickly resorted to Taoism. They played down the emotional significance of wo ai ni, instead insisting that China is still a place where feelings are conveyed indirectly, or more through actions than words. (Those must be the men who always take out the garbage, I reasoned, but when I ran this logic by a recently married Chinese friend, she responded with a hiss.)

  As for the ’90s cohort, these young devils were the most radical of the generations. For them, wo ai ni is neither positively nor negatively charged, but something that just comes up—in text messages, in a dark corner of science class, or while smushed in closely on the subway ride home.

  Despite the relatively small age gaps, I was surprised by how each generation seemed to have its own distinct relationship with the words “wo ai ni.” In fact, the only common thread that emerged across generations turned out to be parents. Of my two dozen friends, none had ever heard their parents say “wo ai ni” to each other, or to their children. This disco
very caught me off guard, and I wondered if I should take it as evidence of Zhang Mei’s utilitarian description of marriage.

  For as much as she seemed disinterested in romance, Zhang Mei—like just about everyone I’ve met in China—responded with great reverence to a rather romantic concept known as , or yuan fen.* Loosely defined, it’s the affinity or binding force that links two people together in a relationship—be it fraternal or romantic. On a daily basis, yuan fen can be defined as coincidence. For example, if you’re scheduled to meet a friend for dinner one evening but happen to bump into him earlier in the day at a coffee shop, you could say that your yuan fen is very strong. Two passengers who sit next to each other on a train and end up having a meaningful exchange are also said to have yuan fen, as it is assumed that the serendipity of their meeting and hitting it off at that precise moment in time is something special, given the otherwise small odds of that happening in such a large universe. By the same logic, lovers are said to have yuan fen. It’s the fate that brings them to meet, but it can also be the feeling that they’ve known one another a very long time (perhaps because they’ve met in a previous life).

  To Zhang Mei, yuan fen was something to be heeded. “Kan kan yuan fen, ba” or “Let’s see what yuan fen brings,” is a phrase she often spoke, most frequently in reference to her search for a husband. I could sense she really believed that yuan fen “had her back,” or would somehow come through and provide for her, although this conviction seemed to waver around the Chinese New Year holiday.

  Home Sweet Home

  “My parents have been living in the same housing unit for over thirty years,” explained Zhang Mei to me one day, just a few weeks before the holiday. “Virtually none of our neighbors have changed over time—they’re all my father’s colleagues from his work unit at the bank. Twenty years ago, we all moved into a new building because the old one was razed, but none of the inhabitants changed; they’ve known me my entire life.”

  I thought it was sweet that Zhang Mei had grown up with what seemed to be a big extended family around her, but she quickly corrected my rosy assumption.

  “When I go home to spend Chinese New Year with my family,” says Zhang Mei, “I have two options. I can either fly to Harbin, or take the train. I can afford to fly and would much prefer to, but I always take the train instead, because it’s the only way of arriving in Harbin late at night. This is more complicated for my sister because it means she has to drive in the dark and on icy roads to pick me up at the train station, but arriving late gives me the great convenience of avoiding my neighbors. We live in the last apartment building in a row of six. In order to get to my front door, I need to pass the homes of five other neighbors on foot. If I do that during the day, at least one person from each building is bound to pop out and start asking me personal questions. I just can’t face that, so I tell my family that I’m scared to fly alone, and they accept that I take the train, instead.”

  Indeed, as was confirmed to me by Christy, for young Chinese men and women, Chinese New Year is the most stressful time of year for singles. “Some mothers literally start to whistle and steam,” she explains. “I play along because I know it means a lot to my mother, but sometimes I can’t help but feel like a generation of chickens has given birth to a generation of ducks,” she says, referencing the bouts of maternally induced seasonal man pressure she and her unmarried friends experience around the holidays. “Our mothers want the best for us, but what they think is best is totally different from what we want!”

  Yet while Beijing girls like Christy get their blind dates spread out over the course of the entire year—a young government official here, a male ballet dancer there, and a few academics in between—Zhang Mei’s case is different. Her mother has her in close proximity for only a few days each year, time that she fully expects to make the best of. As a result, she begins plotting her marriage offensive in the early fall.

  “My mother gets really crazy around the holidays, but honestly, I really don’t think she’s that stressed out about my lack of husband,” explains Zhang Mei. “It’s just that the neighbors give her social pressure, so out of desperation, she has to pass that pressure along to me.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I ask her. The answer dazzles me.

  China has a curiously nationalized heating system. In most households, heating is not controlled by individual residents, but by the government. In Beijing, for instance, the “public” heat comes on starting November 15, and lasts until March. While there are some apartments with “private” heat, which means their occupants can turn the heat on and off as they please, residents of apartments with “public” heat (the grand majority) have access to heat only during the time period that corresponds to their city. In Harbin, because it’s so cold, the public heat kicks on sooner—October 15. Since all of this heat is powered by burning coal, however, the beginning of each cold season is often accompanied by a great deal of pollution.

  “My mother didn’t say a peep about marriage for the entire month of November,” explained Zhang Mei. “The pollution was so thick, she wasn’t going outside to see her friends. Without them all flocking together to mingle and meddle, I seriously think she forgot all about my situation. I don’t need to check the Harbin weather report to know that the AQI (air quality index) levels have normalized. I can feel it in the tips of my ears—they’re starting to throb. The skies have cleared, and she’ll soon be out socializing. After getting wind of the latest engagements and births, she’ll be back on my tail.”

  As we’re walking down the street after the end of class, Zhang Mei’s phone rings. She and her mother speak every Wednesday evening after Zhang Mei’s last class, so the call was expected, though its content suspiciously strayed from the usual banter. I could overhear their conversation, which Zhang Mei rather graciously allowed me to reproduce here, as she said, “for the good of Chinese female kind.”

  ZHANG MEI’S MOM (ZMM): Lao er [a term of endearment], you’re on your way home now?

  ZHANG MEI (ZM): Yes.

  ZMM: Have you had dinner yet?

  ZM: I’ll just pick up some noodles on the way home.

  ZMM: Ai-yah, isn’t it lonely eating on your own?

  ZM: Meh, it’s fine, it’s late anyway.

  ZMM: But if you had a boyfriend, you’d have someone to eat dinner with.

  ZM: Ma, what are you getting at?

  ZMM: Nothing, I would just feel better if you had someone to look after you.

  ZM: [silence]

  ZMM: What will you do this weekend?

  ZM: Relax, do a bit of shopping, reading, see a few movies online.

  ZMM: Ai-yah, why don’t you go out for a walk? See, if you had a boyfriend, there would be someone to accompany you on walks—it would be good for your health and you wouldn’t have to spend your own money!

  ZM: Ma, what are you trying to say?

  ZMM: Why are you off work anyway? If you don’t work, how will you earn money?

  ZM: Ma, do you want me to work seven days a week? If I do that, how will I even have time to spend the money I earn?

  ZMM: Well, if you don’t have a boyfriend, you have nothing interesting to do during your free time, so you might as well work to save money!

  Sensing a conflict, Zhang Mei changes the subject.

  ZM: Are Dad’s allergies getting any better?

  ZMM: They’re better, no need to worry about him. We’re more concerned about you. We’d like you to bring a boyfriend back for Chinese New Year.

  ZM: Ma, Chinese New Year is in two months. Where am I supposed to find someone so quickly?

  ZMM: We don’t care where you find him, just bring someone home!

  ZM: Ma, you realize that if I bring home a random person and we get married, our relationship is unlikely to last very long?

  ZMM: Not necessarily.

  ZM: OK, but there’s definitely a greater chance of divorce if I marry a stranger. You’d rather increase my chances of getting a divorce?

&nbs
p; ZMM: At least you will have been married!

  After this doozy of a conversation, I ask Zhang Mei what her game plan is for finding a life partner in the next sixty days. “I have no idea,” she says. I offer up a few foreign male friends who might be willing to travel home with her and play the part, if it means they get a few free days to explore Harbin and its tiger park. “Nah,” she says. “I know a girl who did that. Her dad saw right through it. He said the guy was far too handsome to ever be attracted to his daughter. What if my dad does the same?”

  I took the evening to brainstorm about anything I might be able to do to help. Zhang Mei shot down most of my suggestions, until I brought up the idea of a rent-a-boyfriend. I had heard there were Chinese men who rented themselves out to single women at a daily rate over the holidays—it sounded risky and like far more trouble than it might be worth, but much to my surprise, Zhang Mei was willing to give it a shot.

  At our next class, we logged onto Taobao.com. The crown jewel of Jack Ma’s Alibaba (NYSE’s largest IPO, to date), Taobao is an online marketplace selling everything from fake hymens to porcelain claw-foot bathtubs and imported organic quinoa. It has the kind of traffic and selection that makes Amazon look like a lemonade stand, and as I soon discover, no shortage of young Chinese men who are willing to rent themselves out for a bit of extra cash over China’s biggest holiday.

  As I typed in the Chinese character for “rent” in the search bar—this was my lesson, after all, and Zhang Mei had no intention of letting me slack off—the predictive text followed up with , in that exact order. Neither of us could believe it. The site’s top rental hits were for: girlfriends, boyfriends, cars, lovers, girlfriend services (which further investigation revealed was for women to cuddle and watch movies with from time to time), and wedding clothes.

  We promptly homed in on the rental boyfriend section and found ourselves with a motley list of search results. The first specimen was from Beijing. His hair was bleached a blazing shade of pineapple, and in most of his pictures he wore variants of an oversized tee, saggy jeans, purple high-tops, and thick black frames which didn’t appear to have lenses in them, either. He seemed friendly, but didn’t quite exhibit the qualities Zhang Mei thought her parents would be impressed by—even if it was all just for show.