In Bookstores: Chinese Whiskers

Bye Bye Beijing:

Inside the house a clutter of boxes and bubble wrap, material portents of the impending move, stare up at me accusingly. I look outside the window to escape their relentless, reminding, gaze. Willows are weeping their welcome of spring to Beijing. Little bursts of colour adorn trees that only a few weeks ago were starved of life. The long months of cold finally over, I walk around the city. Beijing! A city drenched in history, magnificent in imagination, imperfect in reality but over and above all else a city that has become home.

Parallel stories

Beijing and I, we grew up together. When I first moved here seven years ago, a (relatively) fresh-faced university graduate, to take up a post teaching English at a local university, the city had only just won the bid to host the Olympic Games in 2008. A year earlier China had joined the WTO, binding it closer than ever before to the international trading system. I found myself in an old-new city. A city with ancient, seeing eyes but with a youthful soul; a city imbued with energy and beginnings. Aged streets were spitting up new buildings at a vertiginous pace as Beijing went shopping for new clothes to dress up in for the Olympics. And not since the Tang dynasty had a Chinese capital exerted such a magnetic pull for foreigners of every hue. Columbian doctors, Bulgarian singers, Indian yoga teachers were only some of those who had begun to wash up in Beijing, desirous of hitching their wagon to the city’s rising star.

Old world charm

I walk through the hutongs, the narrow winding alleyways of Old Peking where I had lived for years. A gaggle of old men with gnarled faces and wide, gummy, smiles sit in a corner, smoking in companionable silence. Next to them, caged songbirds trill springtime tunes. An itinerant gold-fish seller comes cycling past on a tricycle, her gold-fish displayed in little glass jars.

I keep walking, finding myself in the pulsating, glass and chrome jungle of the Central Business District (CBD). This is a frighteningly modern creature inhabited by yuppies glued to blackberries and a tsunami of haute couture stores. When I had first moved to Beijing, the CBD had been but a drawing on a city planner’s draft board. Beijing had changed. But then so had I. This was the city where I married my long-term boyfriend; where our bonny boy, Ishaan, was born and where I built up a career as a foreign correspondent.

I had arrived in China at a point in its history when a series of dualities, tradition and modernity, control and chaos, were in particularly sharp relief. I spent the next several years in an attempt to map this country in transition, travelling from booming Zhejiang to troubled Tibet, interviewing monks and medics, scholars and government officials. Through the pages of The Hindu I tried to bring alive to an Indian audience a sense of the awesome changes and churnings of modern China. It was a formidable task and one with profound consequences for me as an individual.

Instead of answers I only found more questions. What is the real nature of freedom? Can a society free to become rich but not to criticise be called free? From what source do governments gain their legitimacy? Can stability and social justice legitimately be prioritised over free speech?

Ultimately, I found myself increasingly eschewing black and white, while my fascination for the shades of grey that permeated China, grew. This was a country of oxymorons; an officially atheist country in the midst of a religious revival; a country of dynamic bottom-up resistance in a top-down system. It was a country, moreover, where every street and every contradiction was shot through with the irrepressible spirit of Chinese-ness.

This intangible, yet concrete sense of Chinese-ness lived in the language and the food and the faces of the people. These were people who had eaten bitterness and survived through dint of sheer will and endurance. These were good people who had experienced bad times but whose optimism somehow remained intact. These were a people at once proud and practical, clannish, yet welcoming.

I continue my walk, past the imposing vastness of Tiananmen Square and the improbable oval-ness of the new National Theatre next door. I feel a dull ache. Children flying dragon kites high into the bright white sky; a migrant worker taking a quick nap on a mound of piled up bricks; the crimson of the lacquered doors of a courtyard house. I want to hold on to these images in my heart.

I return home. My son is waiting. He’s seven months old and only responds when spoken to in Chinese. But he’ll forget soon enough. His first real memories will be of Brussels’s stately streets to where we are headed, rather than the curving confusion of Beijing’s hutongs. It is I who, when sitting down to a bowl of moule frites, will suddenly find my mouth filled with longing for the perfection of a Sichuan peppercorn.

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2009/05/03/stories/2009050350280800.htm

Matrimonials – Chinese style

A sea of spring-fresh tulips rent deep gashes of red across central Beijing’s Zhongshan Park. It’s a Sunday afternoon on the cusp of summer. Little emperors, the only children of China’s increasingly affluent urban populace, chatter happily as their indulgent parents ply them with ice-creams and balloons. Their familial idyll is punctuated by the panting of health-conscious joggers and other devotees of exercise who collectively transform the park into a hive of activity. 

The most curious of the crowds that throng the park, however, is a large, thousand-plus, conclave of the elderly, milling around the willow-lined banks of the moat that runs along the park’s northern edge. The senior citizens stare at each other appraisingly, looking one another up and down slowly. Some sit on low stools, their faces crinkled up in frowns. Others stand up, leaning against trees. What they all have in common is a piece of frayed paper, either held up in clutched hands or laid out flat on the ground.

Listening in on the murmured conversations that thread the congregation, it is possible to make out references to a series of numbers. “One point six,” says a smartly dressed woman in her fifties. “One point seven five,” comes the reply.

Gradually it becomes obvious that this peculiar gathering is a bazaar of some kind. There are buyers and sellers and the specifics of the commodities available are detailed on the mysterious pieces of paper that the majority of those assembled hold up for display.

A marriage mart

It is also evident that the commodities being advertised are neither vegetables nor household goods. This is in fact a marriage mart; a unique public gathering that mixes aspects of the collective culture of communism with the resurgence of the traditional parental role in arranging marriages as well as the more modern capitalist doctrine of consumer choice.

Held every Sunday afternoon, the market is a forum for parents who have come to despair of their educated, career-driven offsprings ever finding appropriate life-partners on their own and have thus decided to take matters into their own hands.

“Boy, 28 yrs, has own apartment in Fuxing district, no mortgage, Communist Party member,” advertises the piece of paper offered up by one bespectacled father.

A forlorn looking mother sits a few meters away from him holding up a scrap that states, “Girl, 35 yrs, 1.6 meters tall, PHD, University teacher.”

Some of the ads have photos attached, but it is more usual for a photograph to be offered only after initial contact with a prospective in-law has been made.

“Rat preferred,” one of the posters announces somewhat bafflingly to the uninitiated. What is being asked for, is, however, not a long-tailed, sharp-clawed rodent but a groom born in the “year of the rat” according to the Chinese zodiac.

A large crowd gathers around one pot-bellied gent whose piece of paper describes a 27-year-old, 1.8 meter tall, IT professional with a job in a State-owned company who does not smoke or drink and is very handsome. The boy “does not even know how to play Mahjong,” the ad continues, indicating his aversion to gambling. “Cow or pig preferred,” the notice concludes.

Walking through the market is a dangerous business for anyone with even a relatively youthful appearance. Parents swarm thickly around younger people many of whom simply happen to have stumbled upon the gathering in the park. Nationality appears to be no bar. I am quickly approached by several people anxiously asking if I am “available”. When I shake my head in regret they quickly change tack and inquire about prospective single friends I might have.

“I don’t mind if the girl is Chinese or foreign. She must have a good heart and be in a good job,” says a white-haired lady called Chen Quan De. Before I move on, she leaves me her mobile number in case I come across someone suitable for her 36-year-old policeman son.

Sunday afternoon marriage marts, several of which now exist in all major Chinese cities, came into existence only three or four years ago, explains Professor Wang Zhenyu, a leading sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

They had their origin in the habit amongst the elderly in China of collective exercise in parks; a legacy of the Maoist period, when group callisthenics was encouraged. “While exercising together some parents talked about the seeming inability of their single kids to get married and within a few months these informal discussions grew into large gatherings,” Wang says.

She goes on to explain that such public expressions of interest in finding spouses for children would have been unthinkable a generation ago. “Marriage in China was traditionally a very private affair and advertising a child would have caused a lot of loss of face,” she says.

Changing customs

In any case, during the Maoist period, arranged marriages were seen as relics of a feudal past to be shunned and parents were expected to stay out of their children’s private lives. This was a space that was instead occupied by the danwei or work unit, whose help and permission needed to be sought before a couple could get married.

However, with 30 years of economic reform, attitudes and circumstances have changed. Preserving “face” is no longer considered as important and a certain market mentality in all transactions has become acceptable she says. Moreover, the role of the danwei in the personal lives of employees has waned.

Parents, free again to help their children to find a spouse, often feel that meeting potential in-laws in person is a more reliable way of introducing their children to an appropriate match, compared to posting advertisements on the Internet or more conventional media.

However, Wang adds that there is not much proof that marriage marts have a better success rate than professional matchmaking companies which use extensive databases to bring well-matched lonely hearts together. In fact, modern youngsters are often irritated with their parents’ interference. Dates that result from Sunday afternoon deals struck in the park by eager parents thus often end in disaster.

Thirty-one-year-old Lance Zhang recalls his dinner date with a girl his parents urged him to see, having met with her parents at a marriage market in south Beijing’s Ditan Park. Although Lance, a marketing official with the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, initially refused, not having much faith in the efficacy of blind dates, he eventually agreed out of respect for his parent’s wishes.

The parents had seen a photograph of the girl and told Lance that she looked like a super model. “But in fact when I met her she was the exact opposite of a model. She was rather large and very below average looking,” he says. It transpired that the girl’s parents were in the habit of showing off someone else’s photo to lure in prospective matches.

Lance has decided that this is the last time he agrees to meet with any girls his parents unearth at a park. Although disappointed, his parents, however, remain undeterred and continue to attend the Sunday afternoon gatherings.

Persevering parents

If the numbers of those assembled at Zhongshan on this particular afternoon are any indication, Lance’s parents are not alone their perseverance. The crowd continues to swell and pulsate tirelessly, as evening approaches.

More easily fatigued than the determined parents, I slowly begin to wend my way away from the park. A lady who gives her name as Ms. Cao runs after me. She begins by asking for my help in finding a suitable boy for her 28-year-old daughter. When I agree to see what I can do, she takes my hand and whispers, “I feel embarrassed to say this, but I’m also looking for someone for myself. My husband passed away a few years ago. Someone between the age of 55 and 60 will do. I’m open to foreigners as well.”

Published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine

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