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When June Ding goes on a date with a Chinese man, she hikes up the virgin factor. Instead of wearing a low-cut top and necklace, she stows away her cleavage and dons a demure sweater and scarf. During the course of the evening she is careful to let the man do most of the talking, to appear interested in everything he says and to react with sufficient wonder to ensure that he is comfortably marinating in his own ego at all times.
This proves somewhat challenging for the 27-year-old Beijinger, who is no shrinking violet. Animated, affable and razor sharp, she graduated at the top of her high-school class and then left China to study at Yale, where she earned a BA and a graduate qualification in law. She worked briefly at a New York City law firm before feeling the pull of home – like most Chinese her age she is an only child – and moved back to be closer to her parents. That has allowed them to focus on what they see as June's next obligation to the family: marriage.
"Pay attention to your laugh!" warns her mother as June gets ready for a date one evening. Her mother constantly reminds her to tame any expression of amusement when in the company of a Chinese gentleman. June's father, a university scholar who seems just as invested in his daughter's future, suggests that she mute her laugh altogether and instead encourages her to "smile like the Mona Lisa". Anything more exuberant might convince a prospective suitor that she is assertive, worldly, charismatic – not a good wife, in other words.
June's love life offers a prime example of the obstacles Chinese women with advanced degrees can encounter when seeking a marriage partner. Most men she is set up with don't seem interested in casual dating. They are looking for wives – blushing, tender, baby-making wives. June's education, exposure to a foreign dating culture and emotional expectations all make her something of an anomaly in modern China where the propriety and practicality of traditional courtship often dominate. She is determined to avoid finding a husband of the shake-and-bake variety – the kind who, shortly after shaking his hand, you have married and begun baking children for. In this she is running against cultural expectations: though China's economic and physical landscape have changed beyond recognition in recent decades, social mores lag far behind.
Financial compromises
The desire to marry off a child is a source of perpetual angst for parents. Relatives talk about it constantly; neighbours relentlessly enquire. Many young Chinese say their parents grill them about potential mates almost every day. Some, such as June's mother, set them up on endless blind dates. A few threaten disinheritance or even rush their children into a precipitous marriage because they believe it better to divorce than not to marry at all. (Small wonder that there is a growing niche in renting boyfriends or girlfriends to take home for family celebrations.)
Chinese state media campaigns also contribute to the pressure many women feel to wed, says Leta Hong Fincher, author of a book on leftover women. Such efforts may lead single women to turn down promotions to focus on finding a mate. Married women may make excessive financial compromises when it comes to purchasing a marital home or even stay in an abusive marriage, rather than risk being leftover, argues Hong Fincher.
Unsurprisingly, the rising generation of self-reliant, poised, successful women does not always comply with its social obligations. Following a shift that has already occurred across most of the developed world, over the past 30 years women in China have been marrying later. A rapidly growing share never does so at all: in 1995 less than 2 per cent of urban women between 30 and 34 were unmarried; by 2015 some 10 per cent were. Unlike the impoverished "bare branches", these women are concentrated in China's most important cities, with Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen topping the charts. And society does not approve.
Given the gender imbalance, June should have her pick of mates. But things haven't turned out that way, not just because the pool of men with equivalent education is relatively small. Culture, not just demographics, plays a big part in the search for a mate – and many traditional sensibilities persist. "We like our wives to be yoghurts," says a 35-year-old Chinese investment banker. "Plain yoghurts, so that we can flavour them as we'd like." On paper he seems like the kind of match that would suit June. Like her, he's ambitious, well educated, has a good corporate job and speaks excellent English. At work he is surrounded by high-achieving, single women but, though he enjoys their company, he's not interested in marrying an educational or professional equal. In fact, he's already engaged. "My fiancée is a plain yoghurt," he says. "She's low maintenance and doesn't really have her own ideas. I like her because she's easy to manage."
Chinese women have been an integral part of the formal economy for far longer than many of their Western counterparts, yet many men have a tendency – some would say a cultural obligation – to reject women with equivalent education and salaries. Finding a man who was better educated than his potential wife was less challenging in the days when girls were barely schooled past early adolescence. In the past 20 years, investment in higher education has increased dramatically; nearly 90 per cent of high-school graduates now attend university and women represent more than half of this cohort. The downside to this rapid advancement of female education is the emergence of a dangerous paradox. The higher their degree, the less likely women are to marry: some 18 per cent of women between 30 and 34 with master's degrees were unmarried in 2010, compared with just 7 per cent of those who had merely completed high school. Again, the vocabulary is telling: female PhDs are often referred to as di san xing, or "the third sex", referring to the idea that few want to marry them.
Blind dates
June's mother is well aware that the qualities that make her daughter appealing to prospective employers are intimidating to prospective mates, so she is trying to render her more wifely in the eyes of suitors. "Whatever you do, don't get physical!" she says. Far from being a histrionic, modern-day Mrs Bennett, June's mum is a practical dating coach. "After you reject a man physically, you need to lavish him with praise," she instructs her daughter.
As a young girl June didn't realise that her educational pursuits would affect her romantic prospects. She grew up with few examples of what dating should look like. After so many years of relationships being brokered, the mores and manners of modern courtship in China are still being established. As most people date with the purpose of finding a marriage partner, relationship culture is stifled because too many people have a stake in the outcome. Most of the blind dates June goes on are completely devoid of romance. "They're like business meetings," she says. "It's not uncommon to talk about marriage on the first date, though physically, it's imperative for things to move much slower. There's lots of nodding and absolutely no touching."
In most countries where more women get university degrees than men, the prevalence of hypergamy – women marrying "up" a social class – tends to diminish over time. A group of demographers from Barcelona, who gathered data for 56 countries spanning a period from 1968 to 2009, found that in the early period of their study it was more common for women to marry "up". But by 2000 trends had changed drastically: in half of the countries for which they had data, a majority of women were married to men with less schooling than themselves.
Paternalistic China is a flagrant exception to this trend. It is a sign of female empowerment that some women now remain single, either because they do not wish to wed or because they have not found someone they like enough. For the first time in China's history a large number of women has the money and status to forgo marriage willingly. Yet accomplished women such as June who do wish to find a partner often face an apparently insurmountable wall of conservative values.
In an effort to make the men they are dating feel honoured and respected, educated women often find themselves playing down their smarts. June says she switches between two distinct modes, Chinese girl or overseas returnee with an Ivy League degree. Her friends tell her that is not enough: she needs to be versed in the ancient art of sajiao, or the strategically executed temper tantrum, an indispensable element in the dating arsenal of every Chinese woman.
"A woman who knows how to sajiao knows how to make a man happy," declared an article in the Chinese edition of Psychologies magazine in 2012. Sajiao involves pouting, mewling and the stomping of feet. That doesn't sound attractive. Yet in a rapidly changing social and economic environment, it has become a critical skill for maintaining a sense of continuity and order in gender relations by helping a Chinese man feel loved, honoured, chivalrous and, above all, manly. "For the competent career woman, sajiao is an indispensable tool for appearing neither too independent nor too self-sufficient for her boyfriend," says another Chinese magazine article. "Sajiao allows her to appear soft and feminine rather than hard and powerful, traits that challenge traditional notions of womanhood. By playing up to the male ego, she accomplishes the near-impossible: making her man feel like a man."
Useless and completely lost
Given the centrality of marriage in China, there are plenty of services to help women improve their dating skills. Sajiao isn't going to get June anywhere, but a seduction master class with one of Beijing's most beguiling sirens sounds more promising.
Ivy is her guide. Though only 27, Ivy gives the impression of a life already well lived. A Cartier watch encircles Ivy's wrist, a Dior bag dangles from her forearm, Chanel earrings illuminate her ears, a cashmere Burberry coat is cinched around her waist and Louis Vuitton patent shoes with small golden bows adorn her feet. She is a veritable pageant of luxury branding, and yet somehow – shockingly – it's all been put together rather tastefully.
"In the eyes of many Chinese men, a beautiful girl can only be beautiful so long as she's useless and completely lost and destroyed without a man supporting her," she says. "And a smart girl can only be smart so long as she isn't too beautiful to be taken seriously," she adds. As for a smart, beautiful woman? That, Ivy proudly proclaims, is a mistress.
Ivy is certainly beautiful, though probably not considered "wifely" or "doting" by Chinese standards. She smokes with vigour: right after exhaling she re-inhales with force the very air she has just expelled. When a waiter comes over and politely asks her to put out her cigarette, she dismisses him coldly by saying that it's late, she knows the owner, there's nobody else in the café and she isn't bothering a soul. Seconds after she tells him to go away, she summons him back to bring her an ashtray. (She had previously been stubbing out her cigarettes in a bowl of fragrant rice.)
She turns sweetly to June to resume the conversation. June had recently been on a few dates with a man her mother had chatted up on a dating site by posing as her. He is a lieutenant in the military, in his mid-30s, doing well in his career but a bit square and prone to sharp mood swings. But she hesitated to break things off with him, worried not about his feelings but her mother's. "I can't say he's unattractive, she'll just say that won't matter in 10 years," she says. "I also can't say there's no chemistry or she'll just say I'm being shallow. In her eyes, all problems fade away with time." It had taken four more dates for June to come up with a reason her family might accept: that she found him both aggressive and needy. Her mother still won't let her off the hook. "He's trying to make a good impression," she says. "It's normal that he's struggling to hide his true feelings!"
Listening to this, Ivy's diagnosis of June's main problem returns to familiar territory: she is not a hua ping or "flower vase", as many men in China like their women to be. She is beautiful but also self-assured in a way that Chinese men don't always appreciate.
In a sign that the class is ending, Ivy shares the bawdy details of her latest tryst with a wealthy real-estate mogul. She pauses for a few moments before explaining that although she has been generously compensated for her services, her line of work is also exhausting. "I will retire soon," she says. By "retire", she actually meant that she planned to get married: "I'll start looking for a husband in the spring." Ivy explains that, like many mistresses, she has made wise investments for her future in the knowledge that her market value as the "other woman" will tank the older she gets. But she doesn't want to be dependent on mistressing for her livelihood: this was just her first step to a better life. Like June, she is approaching the age at which she either gets hitched or is left on the shelf.
Source: https://www.afr.com