The Price of Happily Ever After in China

Fresh out of college, I was proud about my first job at an IT company. Maybe it wasn’t exciting but it had prospects. After a year and a half I was promoted to a specialist role at our Shanghai office.

The forefront of China’s rapid economic development, and located in the city’s district of former farmland, it had developed to become a booming metropolis constructed with what looked to be gigantic Lego pieces. Long hours, more responsibilities, I was prepared to take on the challenges.

At the time I was also younger, a little more fair-skinned, and a lot more naïve.

Nevertheless, in time I learnt to lift my head up as I got gawked on by Chinese business men during meetings. Exhibit my strength as I fended off men who thought they could do or say whatever they want; hold my ground when I got passed over for a male counterpart. 

After some time on the job, my boss would say, “Its good that you girls nowadays take your work seriously. But you should focus on finding a boyfriend, getting married. Having a kid.”

“Don’t you know, with your European passport, Chinese men would pay you thousands of yuan if you would get married to them?” he chuckled in front of my all-male colleagues.

And there it was: a full-in-the-face statement, which forced upon me the irrefutable difference between my self-image and my status in China where, I was simultaneously fetishized by Asian standards of beauty competing in terms of ability but never by gender. And regarded as a Westernized commodity possibly to be purchased for “love”.

Or a joint venture – whichever came first.

It took a moment to realise that it wasn’t so much that I needed to surrender my self-image as that I should consider suspending it.

Only after living and working in China did I come to understand how women there struggle to break through the male-dominated work environment. Very few possess the emotional and financial resources required to brave the tide of political, social and parental waves pushing them towards marriage.

You see gender discrimination is as much part of modern China as bad air is. But unlike the air, which degraded in recent decades and is theoretically reversible, gender inequality stretches back centuries and is deeply entrenched.

Confucius, who continues to occupy a godlike position in China, said that men were at the top of the social hierarchy, while women were at the bottom. According to him, women’s only role was to get married and have children, ideally sons. He also believed that an unmarried life is an incomplete one. Not much luck finding "love' during your time on earth? There's always hope in the afterlife! 

To ensure a son's contentment even after they're dead, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple, called minghun or “ghost wedding.”

The existence of such a market for brides has even led to scattered reports of grave robbing and corpse selling during Qing Ming Festival – a public holiday to honour the souls of the departed – during which a female corpse can sell for up to 10,000 yuan. Families with deceased unmarried children believe they are also carrying out an obligation to their child, as a way of finding them a place in a society.

Chinese culture traditionally prefers sons because it was believed a woman does not belong to her parents. She must marry and have children of her own before she has a place among her husband's lineage.

Flash forward to today and as my boss’s comments indicate, the view of women hasn’t changed much.

Haven’t they heard? Chinese women have become quite a force to be reckoned with in recent years. “China dominates listof Female Billionaires” and “Women in China: The Sky’s the Limit” are just some of the headlines from international press.

But the rose-tinted portraits detracts from what is really happening to women’s position in Chinese society and in its fast-growing urban work force. The reality is China’s figure is high because it includes women working in the countryside, and unlike developed countries, nearly half of China’s population is still rural. The picture for urban women is very different. They are losing ground fast. Ground, which technically was never theirs, as some may say.

“Would be a pity if you end up being a ‘Sheng nu’” my boss continued. A few more years and you could be ‘on the shelf’.” I was 23 years old.

Shengnu, (剩女) “leftover woman”, is a term China’s Ministry of Education has added to its official lexicon. It describes an urban professional woman over the age of 27. The prefix, sheng, is the same as in the word shengcai, or “leftover food”. Between 31 and 34, still-unmarried women are referred to as “advanced leftovers”. By 35, a single woman is the “ultimate” leftover, spiritually flawed in thinking she is higher than the mandate of marriage.

Annkie, a woman in her late-thirties I looked up to, was “spiritually flawed”. A decent, well-educated, hard-working woman, she had made a fortune launching an interior design company. Annkie proved an astute businesswoman and, by Eastern and Western accounts, a great success. But in a conversation in her loft apartment, she told me her younger sister was more successful in the “important way”.

“Why would you think that?” I asked.

“It’s what I know. My sister is married, and I am not because I refused to play the game they all play."

“What game?” I pried.

“You know - the marriage game. All my friends would either pay top dollar to enroll in the top universities and Ivy League Schools abroad or work really hard if they had the brains, get hired by Fortune 500 companies, all in the hopes of meeting the right caliber of men or people who could potentially know of such men. Then they get married and quit their jobs and become a full-time tai tai,” she laughs.

“It’s a choice I made and I am happy I did. Just sometimes I still feel I am shaming my parents by still being a Shengnu.”

Now, why would China’s state feminist agency conduct a scare-mongering campaign against single, educated women?

A 2007 announcement issued by China’s state council, claimed the country faced a severe problem of low population quality that would impede its ability to compete on the world stage. As a result, the government made ‘upgrading population quality’ a priority, citing China’s severe sex ratio imbalance as a threat to social stability.

What better way to upgrade population quality than to frighten “high-quality” women into marrying and having a child for the good of the nation?

Three decades of combustive economic growth have reshaped the landscape of marriage in China.  For years, people could rely on village matchmakers and parents, factory bosses and Communist cadres for efficiently pairing off young people; with minimum participation from the bride and groom. Romance then became political in 1919, when Chinese students demonstrated for democracy, science, and an end to arranged marriage, on behalf of what they called “the freedom of love.”

But of all the new “freedoms” the Chinese enjoy today — making money, owning a house, choosing a career — there is one that has become an unexpected burden: seeking a spouse. At a supposed time of sexual and romantic liberation in China, the solemn task of finding a husband or wife is proving to be a vexing proposition for both the rich and poor.

Nobody seemed to know how to make the most of that freedom. Instead those practices merely reinforced existing barriers, and for vast numbers of people the collision of love, choice, and money was a bewildering new problem.

As we sat down to lunch with my then Shangainese boss, he flashed his Patek Philippe watch while accusing the barista of watering down his latte. Epitomizing today's China nouveau-rich, he likely drives a slick car, owns an even slicker high-rise and probably shelled out for a Western-style tuxedo, wedding cake, live music, and, of course, a platinum Tiffany ring for his wife during their wedding, I thought.

By contrast, millions of his fellow rural countrymen will likely never know such splendor or even the joy of matrimony. The male equivalent of “leftovers” these young males are known as "bare branches," trees without leaves, involuntary bachelors demographically destined to a life without a wife or child. 

It's a reversal of hundreds of years of gender discrimination in China. A longstanding preference for boys -- presumed better able to assist in backbreaking farm work and carry the family name -- has played out in sex selection through abortion and infanticide. After the country instituted its One-Child Policy in 1978, seeing a total of 336 million abortions, completing 196 million sterilizations, and inserting 403 million intrauterine devices - it gave most families only one chance at that precious baby boy. 

This only exacerbated the imbalance. By the end of this decade, Chinese researchers estimate, the country will have a surplus of 24 million unmarried men.

Without traditional family or social networks, many men and women have taken their searches online, where thousands of dating and marriage Web sites have sprung up in a million-dollar industry. With the proliferation of premier match making services, “love hunters” and social media apps with a function that allows people to find one another when they shake their phones simultaneously, it would seem like the  Chinese netizen today in seek of a spouse would be spoilt for choice.

Even courses on “How to marry an‘elite’ foreigner in 90 days” seem to enable the quintessential Modern Pocahontas Tale whereby the white man is a one-way ticket to freedom far, far away from the rigid, traditional structures of the deep-rooted Chinese beliefs.

However, how much of those beliefs do really transcend virtual, let alone geographical borders?

My boss continues, “You should look for a Shanghainese boyfriend if you want to stay in China. They cook, clean, look after the kids – they make the best husbands.”

“Look at the new watch I bought my wife – do you know the brand?” He asks, taking out his iPhone to show me a snapshot image.

“Getting married is very important in China. But I don’t understand how you foreigners can marry between races; blacks with whites, Indians. I see so many white guys that go after Chinese women – usually they end up marrying the ugliest girls,” he shakes his head. “White men really have no taste,” he laughs.

“Whereas, we Chinese, we find it impossible to marry within different province! Let alone country! Like for me? I couldn’t possibly marry a non-Shanghainese girl. Our dialects, diets, way of thinking and manners even would be too different.”

The greatest shock to the marriage tradition came from an unlikely source: in 1997, the government gave people the right to buy and sell homes on the open market.  China had never had an official term for “mortgage,” but real estate was suddenly an asset.

Therefore cost of rural females marrying up is leaving the men from their villages high and dry. Hard-pressed to compete with higher-earning males and unable to spring for the car and perhaps the house that some young women see as a matrimonial prerequisite, such bachelors subsequently fall victim to what could be deemed as the "poor->bare branch->poorer" cycle.

"In China we have a term for if a man doesn’t have a house, a car, or a nest egg, he is a “triple without.” Women from good backgrounds wont look at a guy who doesn’t have at least one of the three now.”

My boss’s words spoke of the worst kind of self-judgment, and it was difficult for me to understand the irrational degree to which a woman’s self-esteem or even existence in the world would be held in abeyance until she was married. Still, his and Annkie’s plight was not without claims on my pity and sympathy. Because even if at one time I, like Annkie, would have been an “advanced leftover”; eventually, I like to think, I will get married, after falling in love with a man.

Which and when of course, I will give myself to him for free.

DON'T

There are two ways with dealing with being alone during Christmas. One is to indulge in a spiral downward of self-pity and sadness. Whether triggered by the on-the-minute Facebook newsfeed of the latest tropical retreat your friend went to, the sequin and glitter clad party celebrations your friends back home are posting from, or the Instagram filtered turkey centerpiece family dinner photo, most people who have experienced the “fear of missing out” syndrome will recognize its symptoms. It begins with a pang of envy. Next comes the anxiety, the self-doubt, the gnawing sense of inadequacy. Finally those feelings fizzle, leaving you bilious with a sense of sorrow.

The other is to refuse this holiday is a big deal anyway. You are living in China – where Christmas is not traditionally celebrated, and even those infamous Coca Cola trucks and Mariah Carey’s YouTube videos need a VPN connection. In homes and streets back home, the things that make Christmas different - from the special TV shows to the closed shops and the eerily quiet streets - all serve as constant reminders of what everyone else is doing that day. In China however, you soon forget what it is you're not doing. Christmas really does kind of disappear.

And I am pretty sure I have bounced back between big baby and wannabe adult depending on my mood. This Christmas, however, was when I had to practice the apparent grown up skill of “delayed gratification.”

At 8:45am on Christmas morning I awoke in my apartment in Shanghai, after a grueling three-day business trip in Hong Kong. I couldn’t wait for a cup of tea and honey toast in bed watching my all time favorite Christmas movie, ‘Elf,’ followed by Christmas mass service and finally arriving just in time for work at the office. All of this I would do alone.  

Spending Christmas alone is generally assumed to be a bad thing. Mine may sound desperately sad and lonely. But in my experience of this ultimately ‘different’ Christmas suggests that any mockery or pity is displaced. Inspiration might be more appropriate.

You see the truth is, I technically had a choice of whether or not to be in China for the holidays but due to work restraints and not wanting to exhaust my entire gasp ten (!) annual leave days, that choice was an unspoken bu (不). So in that respect I did make a choice. But a choice for career prospects, personal development, future rewards and experiences.

These are known as the ‘promises’ of delayed gratification. In the life machine, you put in hard work and good things come in return – good karma, good grades, and a good pack on the back. The concept of  “delayed gratification” is admittedly a new one to me. “Don’t add sugar to your coffee,” “Don’t stay in; go out for a run,” “Don’t wait until the last minute.” Perhaps because deprivation is the way I live.    

But I have two forces that operate within me: the belief that in sacrifice I will attract good and the force of my desire that seeks instant gratification. To me, the first is honorable and instant gratification is slimy. In my attempt to balance these two impulses, I have formed my own habits, which have evolved into compulsions about what desires I can submit to and which I have to restrain. They tell me that I am twenty-three years old once, that this is the time to make mistakes. I can pay in sleepless nights for the possibility of engaging in the magical marginal behaviors that only occur between 2 and 4 am. I can go to parties almost naked because I will never look this good and I can still claim my youth. In a world that condemns the enactment of impulses, at twenty-three, I can get a free pass.

The truth is there is no foolproof formula and it takes a lot of work and a lot of waiting, before the good things come, and the good things are not always genuine. The observable results are mainly votes of affirmation that we are doing the right things and that we are decent people. I do not actually the feel the effects of intellectual or monetary stimulation when I turn in a proposal that I worked until midnight on, which is someone’s assessment that I have fulfilled an expectation. I expect pleasure to arrive to me after I toil, after I’ve received a pay rise and proceed to the next task. In other words, the promises require patience.

And there’s the rub. Patience is not a virtue that most hyper-connected, power-hungry humans today are accustomed to. Working for eventual pleasure may have risen in the mid-17^th century as part of the “American Way” when the Puritan colonists settled in New England, believing in Calvinist ideals that the “hard worker” was part of the “elect” and thus going to heaven. The movement then was “work hard, play later.” Rather our culture has roots in religion and philosophy as “work now, play when you die.”

Puritanism is Christianity and Christianity worships martyrdom. Jesus after all, died for the sins of millions of people that he didn’t know, performing the ultimate delayed gratification. And to continue the retrospective biblical trajectory, Eve gave into the allure of the apple, consumed the instant sweet gratification, and so humans have been eternally condemned.

Furthermore, with an estimated 600,000 people dying from work related stress and its effects in China - currently ranked number one worldwide for exhaustion related deaths - this mantra transcends social and geo-political borders too.

But just how much self-control is too much?

I recall the famous psychological experiment conducted by Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. In the Marshmallow Test, Mr. Mischel asked a preschool child to choose between receiving one small reward now (say, one marshmallow or one cookie) and waiting a short amount of time — about 10 minutes — to receive two rewards (two marshmallows or two cookies). The scientists were hoping to identify the particular brain regions that allow some people to delay gratification and control their temper. They were also conducting a variety of genetic tests, as they searched for the hereditary characteristics that influence the ability to wait for a second marshmallow.

The Marshmellow Test posits that children who possess the ability to voluntarily exercise self-restraint and delay instant gratification produce higher SAT scores, live a healthier lifestyle, and a possess a greater sense of self-worth later in life than their peers who were unable to resist temptation. Those of us (like myself) who have a natural inclination to resist the allure of instant gratification are in luck; the ability to delay gratification for the sake of future consequences is commended as an acquirable skill. 

Instant gratification is sketchy because at its extreme, it can lead to obesity, bankruptcy, and unwanted pregnancies, but deferred gratification might be over-valued. Waiting for future fulfillment might just be a practice that is necessary to thrive in our cultural structures that demand it, and not a virtue in itself. There is the common saying that life happens while you’re waiting. But where is the satisfaction in postponing satisfaction to a time when we probably will not care anymore? Any more importantly, just how many of us are actually waiting?

In an “anywhere, anytime” culture, choice can be an inherently stressful luxury; every time we make a choice, we’re turning down a myriad of options and outcomes. But with Facebook, say, we can decide to delay our want for instant gratification while remaining connected, taunting ourselves with glimpses of the wild evening that may have been instead of getting a good night’s sleep in time for tomorrow’s 9am meeting.

The truth was that Mischel wasn’t really measuring will power or self-control. But how well the kids made a situation work for them. Society’s equation of situations like ‘save now, enjoy later.’ Or ’being alone’ as ‘lonely’ is instead what should be questioned. Did I really need that company or did everyone else think I needed that company? After all I did have friends in the city to reach out to. Was I really at peace in my solitude or was I a tragic figure pretending I wasn’t? Who was running my life and my choices, me or “them”? 

The children want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can change how we think about it.

Since at the end, the problem with delayed gratification is that the “want” still remains. Learning to deal with impulses isn’t so much about building up self-control as it is training yourself to appeal to certain emotions – countering the ‘needs’ with the ‘wants’; distinguishing the importance of the ‘now’ from the ‘later.’ It's known, for example, that sadness can make us even more impatient than we are normally. When we are depressed, we tend to make decisions that devalue future promises in favor of the here and now. 

But what about other emotions? If sadness exacerbates impatience, is it possible that positive emotions might diminish it? David DeSteno of Northeastern University affirms that while happiness does not have any obvious connection to judgment or rewards, gratitude might. They decided to compare gratitude and global happiness, to see if either one boosts patience. His findings showed that the intensity of gratitude directly predicted the volunteers' increasing levels of patience. After all, gratitude is a discrete social emotion linked to cooperation and altruism, and as such might be instrumental in reinforcing a future perspective.

Part of being human is that effortful self-regulation can and does fail us, and such failures can leave us vulnerable to impatient decision-making. A better alternative can be seen in another practice well known as -- the gratitude list. Reflections on all that we have to be grateful for -- this exercise may be the most effortless and effective way to inoculate ourselves against the pernicious consequences of impatience. After all, isn’t this what Christmas is all about?

So on New Year’s Eve and in toast of my New Year resolutions I will try to focus more on “gratitude” as a means of “gratification.”

If you feel pity, there's no need. And if you feel inspired, there’s still 2015 to do something about it.

THE GREAT DIVIDE

“Wow, Shanghai is beautiful!” I exclaimed to my co-worker, Alex, as I stood bathed in the buzzing metropolis skylines. The lights. The energy. I was giddy with excitement.

“Yes it is,” he smiled. “But it’s getting too crowded. Too many people; It's the people who are ruining this city.”

As I probed his statement further I discovered Alex had one eight-year old daughter, he family owned a toy manufacturing company and like many born and bred Shanghainese he was not particularly fond of the city’s migrants from neighboring towns or villages or ‘peasants.’

Measures such as the hukou (household registration) system are put in place to control this influx of migrants from other cities.  Essentially a social management system that ties benefits like health care and pensions to a person’s place of birth, it even requires students to take the college entrance exam in the place where their parents are registered. And very few migrant workers can move their hukous to the cities where they work.

So some 260 million Chinese migrants — about 20 percent of China’s total population — live as second-class citizens in their adopted cities. In them, but not belonging to them.

This has caused many controversial and complex ethnic issues within China, especially in first tier cities like Shanghai, where its citizens have since the 1930s was known as a mixed blood metropolis that upended every notion of East meets West. In this strange way, the window the Shanghainese want to portray to the West is also a window into a China that many other Chinese are unwilling to imagine.

Contributed by the fact that most people feel that too little of the country's spectacular growth is trickling down to them, it has created a wall between Shanghai and the rest of China.

“Our public transportation is crowded with migrants,” Alex continued. “Our hospitals are overburdened. We don't have the resources designed for a city of 10 million — not the 23 million or more we have now.”

It can be hard to comprehend the notion of racism towards one’s own people but you must first come to understand the fundamental changes in people’s lives here over the past 20 years or so.

China has had a hukou system for at least a couple thousand years, mostly, to keep track of who was in what family. But it was only under Communist Party rule, starting in the late 1950s, that the hukou system started to be used to restrict movement and enforce a kind of economic apartheid.

The change came because the Party wanted to speed the process of industrializing and modernizing China. The idea was that if farmers could be kept on the farms, producing food for factory workers in cities, the urban workers could be paid little, but compensated with an ‘iron rice bowl’ of benefits — free education, health care, subsidized food and pensions.

However due to rising labour costs, risks of instability Shanghai has come to realize that its consumer base will continue to shrink if at least some of its migrants are allowed to stay, work and spend.

So Shanghai has started dividing migrant workers into classes. The ones who are the most educated or talented – Class A — get the Shanghai hukou. The slightly less talented – Class B — might get a hukou after seven years of paying into the social security system. And the worst off who clean the apartments and sweep the streets? They’ll just have to wait longer.

It’s easy to dismiss the notion as relic of an era of Communist China that probably doesn’t fit the modern times.

To explain this we must remember the almost religious devotion people had to Chairman Mao over the course of a generation which all of a sudden disappeared overnight. But for the average person, the effect was transformative. All of a sudden people were told to go off on their own, find work for themselves and build lives with the little bit of money that they were accumulating. Like a bird or prisoner held for so long in captivity, they had been released from the system and were sent out on their own.

“There was no religion after that – money became religion,” he chuckles. “The Mao administration made many mistakes in values that still unfortunately live on today.”

“The current government will have a lot of socio-economic issues to deal with: Land grabs by local officials, unrestrained industrialization, growing corruption.”

And angry people can talk to each other, as they never could before, through the Internet. Or can they?

 “What’s worse is that after all these reforms, modernizations and urbanization, everyone in China cannot or worse, doesn’t want to voice out their opinions and frustrations.”

In this way China is a country of many paradoxes; a country that's transformed radically economically and incredible growth of new businesses and prosperity, It is still, at its heart, an authoritarian state.

Home to some of the world’s largest tech companies in the world, like Tencent and Alibaba, all of its media is censored and controlled by the government.

While the government encourages innovation and entrepreneurship through the ‘China Dream’ campaign and mobility with reforms to the hukou system, it still attempts to suppress speech and assembly.

“Living here you simply don’t know what to believe any more. What lie is more believable than the next lie.”

One would assume increasingly educated and affluent people travelling overseas would take note on other comrades and speak up. “Yet Chinese people have always valued stability over freedoms and rights,” he reminds me. “After all, if my family and myself have clothes on our backs and food on the table, why should we complain?” as he tries to explain their attitude.

Paradoxically again, today, even though their children are free of hunger and starvation, they face new dangers: they search for the latest air filters and pollution masks to reduce the effects of the environment; they shop for organic food to cut down on the risk of adulterated ingredients; and they evaluate new cars based on supposed safety ratings.

Of course, those who are ‘privileged’ enough to have the option.

So what is Alex’s China Dream, I ask?

“I want to migrate outside of China – show my daughter Europe, show her the world. I am afraid as she grows older, she will have questions I cannot answer. Because I don’t even know the truth any more.”

“So funny,” he laughs. “All you foreigners keep wanting to come to China. And all the Chinese want to move outside.”

“As soon as I get the opportunity I will. But until then you could say, I am just as immobile as the migrant workers.”