Ready, Set...Marry?? Part II

Marriage. I don't think I've given the topic of marriage much serious thought as I have this past year. Granted, this is perhaps at least in part due the fact that more and more people I know from high school and college are getting engaged/ married and the age gap between those I know who are engaged/married has become increasing smaller, or in some cases, non-existent.

Taikang Lu, Shanghai

Not to mention that I've recently celebrated another birthday (hello, 23) and while I'm still very young, I have to admit it doesn't sound nearly as young as when you say you're 20/21/22.

But mostly, I think the real reason why this subject has really pestering me lately is largely due to the environment around me. As I mentioned in the blog post before this, "Ready, Set..Marry?" China has quite the obsession with young people getting married, particularly before the age of 30.

Even in the classroom setting, this mentality has wormed itself into the curriculum. I remember last semester, the topic of marriage was often used in examples explaining grammatical structures and concepts. For instance, when explaining the term 连 (lián), which grammatically is used similarly to the word "even" or "already," our teacher used the example of "她连45岁没有结婚, " （tā lián 45 suì hái méi jiéhūn） which translates to "She is 45 years old and still hasn't married."

Another time, while trying to explain the grammatical usage of the word 才(cái), which is roughly used similarly to the word "finally" in English, our text book stated, "她35岁才结婚" (tā 35 suì cái jiéhūn.), which translates to "She finally married at 35 years old." Why the teachers and the textbooks couldn't come up with different examples using time or meals or anything else is beyond me.

Ready, Set...Marry??

Some days here in China, I feel like I'm living in the midst of a Jane Austen novel. No, not in the nightly-balls-and-parties-and-touring-grand-English-estates sense, but more in the you-must-get-married-by-X-age sense. As much as I love reading a good Jane Austen novel occasionally, living in a what I like to call a marriage-obsessed culture is a different story altogether. 

To call China a marriage-obsessed culture is not far-fetched. There is a lot of emphasis here on finding the 'right' person, getting married and starting a family, particularly on females here. In fact, the term for an unmarried woman over the age of 27 is 剩女(shèng nǚ) meaning leftover woman. No, I am not kidding, though I wish I was. (If you think 27 is rather young to be disparaging over a lack of husband, at least one of the articles I read on "sheng nu" alleged that a girl becomes a "sheng nu" at after the very young age of 25. Ack.)

The emphasis on marriage is so great that during the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, many parents and singles headed to the temple fairs for the sole purpose of trying to find a potential marriage match. At the Beijing International Sculpture Park, an estimated 50,000+ people visited the park's love-matching event where parents and singles could consult relationship experts, find potential matches and look at the estimated 5,000 personal advertisements posted by other people looking for a potential partner.

Across town, a similar event at Ditan Park averaged 150,000 visitors per day to it's seven-day match-making event. Outside of the event, more desperate parents unwilling to pay the even entrance fee held signs touting their offspring's accomplishments in hopes of finding them a good match.

In Shanghai, the match-making fervor isn't limited to the Spring Festival. Every weekend, in People's Park in the center of Shanghai, parents gather craning their necks to look at papers posted on bushes touting a potential match's good attributes including background, education and physical traits, all in hopes that the next meeting they arrange for their son/daughter will lead to a good marriage.

The pressure to get married isn't just limited to the heterosexual set either. In Shanghai, in contrast to the open marriage market in People's Park, there is also a thriving fake-marriage market, in which lesbians and gays gather in hopes of finding someone to enter into a fake marriage with.