Love and Marriage in China Girls' Time

Here I am to bitch and rant again, (I just don’t know what’s wrong with me!)

Once again, though I should know better, I am utterly confused, frustrated and well….angry at the unrelenting pressure my friends continue to have to simply do one thing:

Marry!

These are some of the words they’ve spoken to me:

“I am not very happy now, sometimes I feel confused.”

“My parents push me to marry this year.”

Another one told me,

“My mom pushes me everyday.”

What’s a single Chinese Girl to do?

What I’m speaking of course is the mentality of the Chinese Peasantry.   An institution whose mentality towards love and marriage has changed barely a whisper since Cain and Abel.   This would not bother me so if the consequences of a pressurized marriage were not so readily available for all to see today。 

Mom and dad marry young.

Both marry first BF or GF.

Zero sexual experience.

Couple does as told.  Immediately have child.

A few years go by.  Realization “we are not compatible” sets in.

Quickly followed by “I can’t stand you”.

Even today this is pretty much the drill in China’s countryside. Rinse and repeat.

China’s peasants are the backbone of China’s economic revitalization.  While the urban elites are the one’s sitting in an AC office reading emails, it’s the peasants in the damn heat and cold digging the holes, building the skyscrapers, etc.

The peasants continue to remain conservative.   While the divorce rate in China’s cities nearly equal America’s, divorce in the countryside is still rare enough.  Instead, many of the peasants simply stop living together, and wind up in separate bedrooms.    Husbands’ affairs running rampant.

I knew one “migrant” (this is probably the wrong word here, as I knew her in Shenzhen and well, isn’t everyone in Shenzhen a migrant?)  mention to me how she and her husband maybe had sex once a month.   Was it a surprise to anyone this lady had an affair?  (With a laowai at that.)

I knew yet another, beautiful lady whose mother bore her before the age of twenty.  (During the birth of her child, the husband was off gambling.)  Mother divorced her husband while she was in junior high.  The daughter is in her mid twenties, more interested in starting a business than anything else.

Meanwhile, none of this early age unhappiness keeps the mom from pressuring her daughter to hurry the hell up and get married!

I guess what I’m trying to say is I remain stunned at the many unhappy experiences Peasant Mom and Dad have had with their own respective marriage.   Yet none of this motivates them to pass their wisdom and hard earned experience on to their children.

Rather, Chinese Culture rules the day. 

I just don’t get it…

This goes back to the Chinese phrase I hate the most.

中国就是这样。 “That’s just the way China is.”

The Chinese peasantry still cannot, despite their own unhappy experiences in love and marriage, bring themselves to warn their own children of what awaits them if they too, in turn marry too soon.  

I can understand the pressure more so from a male standpoint.  There is a great shortage of females, and well, he may have to take what he can get.  After all, he may very well find himself cut out of the supply chain should he find a job in the city.   Because then he will be competing against Chinese City Males.

But the women, in particular a beautiful woman, has a choice.  And she can go to the city (not that the parents of a city born man would approve of their son marrying a girl from the countryside). Still, I find many of them continuing to have this great unbearable pressure to “hurry up!”.

In my view, the bonds between daughter and mother are so strong; it precludes the daughter quite frequently from being able to form an independent decision.  From a very young age, it has been deeply internalized that “one must marry and have children”.

Well mom, did you ever possibly consider….

China Daughter is a lesbian? (Did you? It happens you know? More frequently than you think!)

My response to that:  Peasant Mom doesn’t care.  She doesn’t.  She absolutely will not give a shit as long as you tie the knot and have a kid.  That’s it.  (Just don’t go putting your lesbianism in your mothers face, ok?)

“You and your husband unhappy?”  Par for the course.  

 “You and he don’t frequently have sex?  That’s ok; I and your father didn’t either! “

What if China Daughter simply can’t have kids?  It happens, you know.  And if that is true, and it does happen, then pity to China Daughter should be sincere.  Unfortunately, crazy Peasant Mom looks at it more as a loss of face then anything.  China Daughter meanwhile is left to her own devices.   Suddenly she’s just not that important anymore.  Indeed, one can say her status drops.

One friend of mine has a younger sister that just got married.  They don’t look at all alike.  (But that’s a different conversation)  One would think that would greatly ease the burden on China Girl.  And it did, but only after Peasant Mom made damn sure China Sister had a child first!   Now, the pressure on Older China Girl returns.    

Problem is China Mom doesn’t have the bandwidth to fully understand what is happening in China.  China’s rural population has long since stopped just living in the village under their parents sway, their options thus limited.  Even calling them “peasants” today is uncouth and wildly out of context.  While the word for peasant is still universally used in Chinese, the context of the word is inappropriate for English use.  These are entrepreneurial, energetic folks that don’t spit every five seconds and have seen more their their share of skyscrapers and subways.  Not their grandmother’s “peasant”.  Infinitely more sophisticated.

Villagers simply no longer marry someone from their own village.  Once they leave for the city, with the encouragement of their parents, they don’t return to settle down.   They’ve basically left the dictatorial orbits of their parents.  Something Peasant Mom simply didn’t count on.

She can’t control who her daughter meets/sees/whatever.  She can’t control her romantic life or lack of.  When a girl has lived in Shenzhen for a year and experienced the thrill of the adventure how can she return to the village and Peasant Mom’s way of doing things? 

Not gonna happen.

And as I’ve said in an earlier post, there is a downside.  China Girl, if pretty, has the city at her fingertips. (You guys know the post, it’s my post popular one)   Why marry when so many men are throwing attention at her?  (Nevermind they are married themselves.) 

We can blame Peasant Mom all we want, and I have above just done that.  But at the end of the day, if you are a beautiful woman, as this particular lady is, it just might be fair enough to say “this one is on you”.   You are constantly going “hiking” with groups of suitors.  You enjoy the attention.  Playing them off one another.  You enjoy the thrill of the chase.  And maybe just a bit too much.   In this situation you are in the same boat with all the other beautiful China Girl’s out there. 

You suffer not from a lack of options, but from the false belief all these options give you TIME.  

They don’t.   Your beauty makes you forget the years are indeed ticking against you.   Once you are past 25, superstitions reimpose themselves on those China Boys.  They stop calling because well, their peasant parents wouldn’t approve of them marrying somebody “so old”.   

It is a fine line you walk, China Girl.