Male chauvinism, narrow and well-defined beauty ideals, and materialism converge in a single phenomenon in China called “leftover women” — urban, professional women in their late 20′s who still haven’t married, and, so conventional wisdom goes, might never. Despite a surplus of males due to China’s ongoing legacy of gendercide, these professionally successful women feel their chances for marriage at 30 are quite slim, and the pressure to settle can be intense.

China’s “Leftover” Women
26-year-old newlywed college graduate Li Fang (a pseudonym) explained to me over dinner why she had been in such a rush to marry:

If I hadn’t gotten married now, I would still have to date for at least one or two years. Then I would already have passed the best child-bearing age and I would be a leftover woman.

More than 90 percent of men surveyed said women should marry before 27 to avoid becoming unwanted. The message to women: If you want to stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever getting married in this country, don’t demand too much from your man.

We’ve had our own encounters with this and related aspects of Chinese society:

• China’s Third Gender
  “A”-class women are so far outside the traditional definition of “woman” and have such trouble finding husbands and realizing the female roles of wife and mother that our teachers joke that they’re like a third gender.
• On Love and being ‘smart enough’ (by Jessica!)
  The guys also said that she should be “一般聪明” which means “smart enough” or “ordinarily smart.” There’s a definite thread in Chinese culture that says that smart, clever, and independent women are threatening or something to be feared, so the guys tend not to want a girlfriend that might be smarter than themselves.

This one is also worth a look:

• The options of yuppie women in China: “strong woman”, housewife or “fox”
  “Should I be a ‘strong woman’ (女强人) and make money and have a career, maybe grow rich, but risk not finding a husband or having a child? Or should I marry and be a stay-at-home housewife (全职太太), support my husband and educate my child? Or, should I be a ‘fox’ (狐狸精) — the kind of woman who marries a rich man, drives around in a BMW but has to put up with his concubines (妾，二奶)?”

Finding a mate is difficult when young people are scrambling for a job in a crowded and competitive market, so “marriage markets” (our term) are not uncommon. Since they’re full of bored parents and grandparents, they make great locations for students of Chinese to practice conversational Mandarin. We visited the one in Tianjin several times:

• China’s marriage markets
• Tianjin’s Marriage Market (photos)
• Central Park Marriage Market (photos)
• Marriage market, Eric Liddell, weekend slogan (photos)
• Tianjin bike ride (photos)

A Chinese writer’s recent speech delivers unflinching social criticism:
“In my country, the job of the press and electronic media is to promote the government,not to report the truth. The education system is tasked with instructing the people to be loyal to the government and keeping the people ignorant, not with disseminating knowledge. As a result, many people have never grown up intellectually even though they are adults. Even today, many people in my country still are nostalgic for the catastrophic Cultural Revolution that ended over thirty years ago and still promote the cult of personality. Some people still deny that the unprecedented great famine of the early 1960s ever occurred, and insist that the millions of deaths by starvation is a fabrication.
[..]
“In my country, there is a strange system that rewards liars, and with the passage of time, people have become accustomed to lying. People lie as naturally as they breathe, to the point that lying has become a virtue.”

I’m curious about how much of this would ring true for those who grew under Communism in eastern Europe and Russia.

And here’s an interesting piece on how such criticism are sometimes met by people in China: Agents of Conformity

Pronounced: xīn yǎn
Literally: heart/mind eye; eyes of the mind
Means: calculating, wily

The post “Dumb Americans”and one of its comments explain it this way:
“To many Chinese, Americans don’t have xin-yan (心眼, meaning, literally, eyes of the mind; or figuratively, calculating, wily), they trust what you say, and they believe you are doing what you say you are doing. For that, they are dumb. …to speak your mind straightforwardly, to defend your position forcefully, and to uphold what you believe without compromise, are all signs of childishness. A lot of Americans, alas, fill that bill.” [Link 1]

“There is another xinyan word/phrase: 实心眼。 It means solid, blocked 心眼 (note that 眼 also means “hole”), and, figuratively, honest, lack of wily flexibility. It is sort of like 没心眼，the difference being, 没心眼 means no 心眼 at all while 实心眼 means not necessarily the absence of of 心眼，but the insistence on doing things in a more principled way. It is generally recognized that, in China, 实心眼吃亏 — if you are too principled, you stand to lose, you suffer, and you are dumb.

“I read somewhere that the Eskimos have a lot of words for snow; and heck, we Chinese have tons of words for 心眼!” [Link 2]

In China, different cars mean different things, and sometimes they have different consequences. That peasant-driven speeding dump truck with its headlights off at night is not going to stop for that red light. And if you don’t know what a black Audi with tinted windows *means*, you’d better find out. So here’s a helpful article:

In China, Car Brands Evoke an Unexpected Set of Stereotypes
“Audi is still the de facto car for government officials,” said Wang Zhi, a Beijing taxi driver who has been plying the capital’s gridlocked streets for 18 years. “It’s always best to yield to an Audi — you never know who you’re messing with, but chances are it’s someone self-important.”

And of course there’s lots more on traffic in China:

• Traffic right-of-way: China vs. Canada
• Tianjin street market dash (video)
• Tianjin bike lane hero grandpas curse out obnoxious bus 天津大爷加油！
• Today’s commute by the numbers
• How to: Confuse the traffic in your hometown
• How to: Ride a Bike in China (Part 2)
• Crossing the street (video)

From Caixin, a translated interview about the moral state of Chinese society, the religious market in China, and the commercialization, vulgarization and voodooization of religion written by Yang Fenggang, professor of sociology and director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University.

I don’t actually agree with a lot of what he says – both in fundamentals and particulars – but it’s interesting to read an outsider’s take on Americans and American society, and I found the bit quoted below particularly interesting for the way he distinguishes external (Chinese ‘face’ concerns) and internal (“religious faith”) motivators for acting ethically and morally in a modern, urban context.

The Problem with Chinese Religions: Vulgarization and Voodooization
I don’t think all religions have positive impacts on social morality. But … Why does modern society seems more than ever need religious faith? Because modern society has turned society to be strangers society. … So, this is the real problem: in a “strangers society,” losing face is no longer a big concern in most people’s life most of the time. People can only be moral out of their own consciences. But where does this sense of conscience come from? Religious faith. When you don’t have a faith, you may say to yourself that ‘I want to be a good person, do good things,’ but very often people tend to give up halfway, especially when you encounter sticky problems and when the conflict of interest is very severe. It is usually human nature to think for self-benefit, thus, only with firm faith can we be moral and ethical. As China is developing rapidly, China needs a basis of faith to greatly improve its ethics and morality.

A recent commenter noted that in China people assume a legitimate moral double-standard between insiders and outsiders (the degree of perceived moral obligation to each is drastically different). Another culture reading I’m in the middle of right now talks about Chinese culture’s honour/shame orientation, how those are moral categories in China, and how “individuals do not exist apart from a web of relationships”. So several things I’ve come across at the same time are talking about how Chinese communalism and the relatively bright insider/outsider distinction plays out morally. And all that ties into the larger on-going discussion surrounding “Good Samaritans” in China — a topic recently big in the news but one on which I’ve been writing for a while.

Morality — the lack of it, actually — is a hot topic in China right now. So here’s some more about Mainland China’s moral collision with its post-Reform and Opening modern society:

• “Mao’s Great Famine” and China’s moral landscape
• Prostitution in Tianjin, China — anecdotes, STD vocab, and how one group of local women is fighting back
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.1): examples
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2): explanations, excuses, & scapegoats
• “Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China
• Lying, “Lying” and Mainland China

China’s a very interesting place right now in terms of sex education, sexual behaviour, and tenacious, strong taboos surrounding discussion of sex.

When we first landed in Tianjin (2007) we walked to Chinese class, and noticed that the walls lining the sidewalk outside of residential and school compounds had condom boxes affixed to them. The anonymous (though still public) nature of the transaction made sense to me, given that sex talk was still very much taboo and buying condoms at a convenience or grocery store risked a scowl or scolding from the cashier if the customer looked young.

Here’s a picture of one kind (they didn’t all come with cute posters and fancy framing):

关注生殖健康，共建和谐家园
Pay Attention to Reproductive Health, Together Build a Harmonious Home
关注生殖健康，构建和谐社会
Pay Attention to Reproductive Health, Construct a Harmonious Society
安全套售货机
Condom Vending Machine (They chose “safety cover” 安全套 rather than “contraception cover” 避孕套。)
Contraceptive Social Marketing

I was reminded of these things by a recent e-mail from the author of this article: “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Didn’t Learn Because You Grew Up in China): Despite the one-child policy, millions of Chinese citizens don’t know how to have sex without getting pregnant”, and much of it rings true to what we’ve seen volunteering with a sex ed. project in Tianjin — for example, the practical difficulty of implementing sex ed. directives:

his teacher forced an assistant—who until then had not taught a single lesson—to lead the class. The younger instructor stood in front of the students red with embarrassment, unable to broach the subject. Eventually, the students were told to read the chapter themselves.

The article makes for a decent introduction to the current sex ed. situation in China, tying together the state of Chinese sex ed., cultural taboos surrounding sex talk, traditional Chinese patriarchal gender roles, the rampant, uninformed sexual activity among students, the lack of birth control use and China’s abortion epidemic.

Here’s more on sex ed., cultural taboos, and current sexual behaviour in China, including stuff about the university sex ed. project we’ve volunteered with:

• Sex, drugs, and Tianjin University students
• On Love and being ‘smart enough’ (by Jessica!)
• Moonlighting as Sexperts
• Sex and Politics
• “Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China
• There is no prostitution in China
• AIDS in the countryside – How China struggles to control the epidemic
• Teaching school girls how not to become mistresses
• ‘True Love Waits’… with Chinese characteristics
• Interview with Chinese exile, women’s rights campaigner and founder of All Girls Allowed
• 色

Guest post! Cindy is one of the very few 100% fully bi-cultural people I’ve ever known. She originally wrote this in Facebook, and after reading it I asked to repost it here. I think it connects powerfully with everyone, especially those of us who live far from home, and most especially with Third-Culture Kids who aren’t really sure where ‘home’ is.

Let’s get to know each other

by Cindy
I had a conversation with my girlfriend about the hypothetical situation of whether we should remarry if our husbands died. I know my married girlfriends have had this conversation too, don’t deny it people. Her response was how hard it would be to have to get to know another person as intimately all over again.

Truly one of the greatest gifts in relationships is to be understood by another person. And trusting you will be accepted and loved in spite of the intimate knowledge. However, the process from acquaintance to intimacy takes time. It takes time to tell stories, to react to circumstances in life, to laugh and cry together, to argue and disagree, and then to make up. These experiences build layers of trust and loyalty and compose the patches of material that make up friendship. Through time we weave our lives together and enter together into the depth of relationship that allow us to be known by one another. And we are created to long for that depth. To be deeply known.

The trouble is, then we move. We pick up and move to another town. Or in my case, across the freakin’ ocean. I grew up in a small school where my friends were like my brothers and sisters. We were that small and that close. At graduation we scattered literally all over the world. Our new communities didn’t know our collective history and we had to start over from scratch with the storytelling and the laughing and crying and all that relationship building stuff. Then we’d move again. And start all over again. It’s no wonder people who are forced to move around a lot, like military families, have intimacy issues. It’s simply too exhausting.

Each time we enter a new community, that new place shapes us, molding us into someone different. When I left Wheaton, I was starting to question some of the conservative elements of my beliefs. Fuller helped introduce a broader spectrum of theology and how to incorporate doubt and criticism into a vibrant faith. In a sense, there was a Morrison Cindy, a Wheaton Cindy, a Fuller Cindy, a China Cindy, and a back-to-Taiwan Cindy. As time went on, the world changed and so did I. In the moving river of life, people who stepped in along the way journeyed with me downstream without the knowledge of who I was before I became who I am. Like a diamond, we can only reflect light off of one surface at a time even though we are made out of many facets.

The potential for misunderstanding is alarming. In our limited perspective, it’s too easy to make judgments regarding a person’s comments without a fuller understanding of their background. Wheaton Cindy would be appalled at some of the theological slants of back-to-Taiwan Cindy, and Chinese Cindy cannot hardly stand American Cindy most of the time. The complexities of our biological, cultural, mental, and spiritual identities is what fuels the psycho-therapy economy. And yet there exists inside of me the desire to be wholly known. The impossibility of somebody understanding the nuances of every past experience, every hat I wear, every idea and action and word I exhibit, doesn’t stop me from trying.

So I tell stories. I share my reaction when stuff happens. I laugh and cry. I argue and disagree. And I make up. Then I listen, not only to stories but to the stories behind the stories. I try not to jump to conclusions about people because I don’t know where they’ve been upstream. I look for the other faces of the diamond that make up each person I encounter because seeing only one side is not satisfying. I lean deep into the relationships around me to know and be known. It’s what I was created for.

I’m Cindy. It’s nice to meet you. Let’s get to know each other, shall we?

War is failure.

We will not save ourselves.

(11-11-11 and Remembrance Day.)

Millions of young Chinese are developing a sense of individualism. That’s one of the insights revealed in the pages of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. The author suggests that the previously unknown degree of personal freedom offered by factory work in a city far from one’s village is a big reason that migrants are willing to tolerate the conditions in the factories and the lifestyle that comes with it. She compares the suffocating social world of the village (and the traditional Chinese subjugation of the self to family and nation) to the new-found degree of independence in the migrant worker life:

When I read my grandfather’s diary, or watched the adults gang up on Min and her sister during a village wedding, I felt as if I were witnessing over and over where China went wrong. The concerns of the family and nation were overwhelming, and they trapped a great many people–millions upon millions–in lives they never would have chosen. …it was also why my father suppressed so much emotion. It had led my aunt Nellie to express her feelings through poetry, and it had driven Lijiao’s children to diminish the past. Only Zhang Hong had chosen to remember, and for him this memory had become a kind of torture.

And perhaps I, too, am more Chinese than I knew. Because now I understand all of them–understand why a person would choose not to tell her story, or be unable to tell it, or not admit to any feeling, because the emotion would overwhelm you otherwise. [p.382]

The Chinese countryside is not relaxing. It is a place of constant socializing and negotiation, a conversation that has been going on for a long time and will continue to go on after you are gone. Spending time in Min’s village, I understood why migrants felt so alone when they first went to the city. But I also saw how they came to value the freedom they found there, until at last they were unable to live without it. [p.293]

There was a lot to dislike about the migrant world of Min and Chunming: the materialism, the corruption, the coarseness of daily existence. But now there was an opportunity to leave your village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real. …their purpose was not to change China’s fate. They were concerned with their own destinies, and they made their own decisions. If it was an ugly world, at least it was their own. [p.383]

I’ve heard people point to the often sub-human treatment of strangers as evidence that individualism is on the rise in China. I think that’s backward; the way Chinese treat outsiders comes out of their communalism, not individualism (though individualism is certainly no guarantee that strangers will be treated well; and in certain contexts communalism can encourage great hospitality toward strangers — though obviously, not in China). And even the sprouting individualism described in Factory Girls still has a long way to go before it reaches the point of actually ascribing value to the individual (and I don’t at all assume that that is inevitable). Still, young people making personal life decisions based on personal, rather than other people’s, desires is a huge step.

Here’s some related stuff:

• Mainlanders and their past; Mainlanders and their selves
• Steve Jobs, Apple, China and Us
• Empty chairs: the pain of rural China’s Moon Festival

“Lying” isn’t just a cross-cultural communication pot-hole between Chinese and Euro-Americans, it’s a crater. Conflicting communication styles result in Westerners sometimes thinking their Chinese counterparts are lying even when they actually have no intention of deceiving anyone. The Americans get the (long-standing) impression that the Chinese are devious and deceptive, while the Chinese, who weren’t intending to deceive anyone and were merely being polite and gracious, are annoyed to no end at the simplistic and judgmental Americans.

But there’s another side to Mainland Chinese society, where ethics are simply a non-factor in decision making. Mainland Chinese lie and deceive reflexively in many aspects of their daily lives and relationships; it’s routine, accepted, expected and generally considered unavoidable. If you’re straight, honest and genuine, people will think you’re simple, naive and stupid. Corruption is endemic in every layer of society, and it is common for it to taint thesis papers, resumes and job applications, personal ads, and communication between spouses, parents and children, employees and employers, clients and suppliers, etc.

This is the China revealed Factory Girls: the post-Communist, unapologetically amoral, full-on materialistic free-for-all China. It’s a social world where everyone seems to automatically, reflexively lie all the time about everything to everyone else, including parents, boyfriends, coworkers, bosses, clients, employees and potential spouses. This is deliberate deception, not mere non-literal communication. Here’s one of many examples:

Married men who pretended not to be were the number-one dating hazard of Dongguan… In a place where people lied reflexively for work, deception naturally seeped into personal relationships. Lying was often the pragmatic choice because it got you what you wanted. Eventually your lies might catch up with you, but few people thought that far ahead.

Chunming had her own rules for such affairs. No one should get hurt, and neither side should make demands. “Of course, I’d like to find the right person and get married,” she told me. “But since I haven’t, it’s fine to be with someone you don’t love. You can still enjoy your time together. You can still rest your head on his shoulder when you’re tired and feel a sense of security.” [p.350]

So Mainland China presents outsiders with a cross-cultural communication double-whammy: a relatively high reliance on nonverbal, “high-context” communication, and generations of people raised in a corruption-saturated society in which deception is routine. You can find both aspects of Chinese “lying” in the posts below:

• Caging a Monster (by Murong Xuecun)
  “In my country, there is a strange system that rewards liars, and with the passage of time, people have become accustomed to lying. People lie as naturally as they breathe, to the point that lying has become a virtue.
  [...]
  “In this system, people only care about short-term profits. In this system, not following the rules is the rule, and unscrupulous means are the only means in government and business so only the dirtiest players emerge victorious. In this system, everyone is a criminal so no one needs to repent.”
• Chinese “Lies That Bind” (Frog in a Well)
  “because they live in closer and longer lived groups, Chinese are more focused on the social consequences of a statement than its literal truth. [...] these differences cut two ways. To be “free” or “independent” can also be “irresponsible,” “lonely,” or “selfish.” What Chinese call “harmony” can be “conformity” or “repression.” American “straight talk” can be childish, reckless, or self-righteous, and Chinese “sweet talk” can cover up realities until they fester.”
• Do the Chinese Lie? That Depends… (The Lingua Franca)
  “In short, for most Chinese people, lying is not really lying. What we in the West would consider to be a bald-faced lie, a person in greater China might think of as a courtesy, a convenience, or a smart tactic, none of which are immoral. In fact, lying to achieve some business or social aim, and getting away with it, is considered to be a sign of intelligence and social skill among many Chinese.”
• Dumb Americans (Seeing Red in China)
  To many Chinese, Americans don’t have xin-yan (心眼, meaning, literally, eyes of the mind; or figuratively, calculating, wily), they trust what you say, and they believe you are doing what you say you are doing. For that, they are dumb.

  …to speak your mind straightforwardly, to defend your position forcefully, and to uphold what you believe without compromise, are all signs of childishness. A lot of Americans, alas, fill that bill.

• Chinese people like it when you “lie” to them? (China Hope Live)
  “Interpersonal communication ‘with Chinese characteristics’: A little understanding goes a long way when feelings get hurt by Chinese/Expat miscommunication”
• To “lie” or not to “lie” (China Hope Live)
  “If you stop to think about it, there a tons of common situations in English where we use words to mean what they don’t actually literally say, but to us it’s “obvious” in those situations what the intended meaning really is. Our delivery, the context, and our non-verbals all speak quite loudly and quite clearly, so clearly that we would never think of such instances as “lies.” Sarcasm is only one kind of example.”
• Free Advice – for you and your Chinese friends (China Hope Live)
  “If you’re a Westerner with Chinese friends, or a Chinese person with Western friends, you probably ought to read this. It’s from the end of Communicating Effectively with the Chinese, which is co-authored by a Chinese and a Western scholar and easily the single best-all-around book I’ve read on the subject so far. They should force-feed it to all China-bound Westerners, in my opinion.”