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But is still living at home with her parents, as her new husband is doing with his parents. It seems the girl's mother believes the boy should pay at least half of the price of a new house for the happy couple - and until she receives the cash from the boy's parents and a new house is purchased, the kids will continue to live at home with their parents. Shanghainese mothers are special in more ways than this. |
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One of my friends, a pretty girl now in her mid-30s, said during the years since her graduation she had met several young men whom she liked very much, and who wanted to marry her. But in each case her mother refused consent. She said, “My mother gave me life”, and so she felt obligated to obey in spite of the personal loss to her. The girl says if she were to disobey her mother, she would be thrown out of her family forever. Many of my other students concur with this, and it is so sad because this girl will now most likely never be married. She will live her life alone because the young men she wanted to marry didn't meet her mother's standards. |
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A Chinese friend of mine in Shanghai has provided some distressing facts to add to the situation. She tells me that of her three office staff, two (aged 26 and 36) are unmarried and have no boyfriends. And of her ten close friends, 5 are in the same position. One is 42 years old, one 36, one 35 and two in their early 30s. No husband, no boyfriend, and no immediate prospects of either on the horizon. |
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In another case, a young man I know just broke up with his girlfriend. He is rather tall, quite good-looking and has a fine personality. He has an engineering degree, is just finishing an MBA from Fudan, has a good job as production manager with a British firm, has a new car and is buying a new home, but that wasn’t enough for the girl. She wanted more attention, more phone calls, more everything, and he finally left her. He said he didn’t have time to call her during the day to chat about her broken fingernail, to call every evening and talk for hours, and all the other attention she demanded. Not only that, he said he works late every night because he wants to avoid all the pressure from his parents about why he isn’t married. Easier to just not go home. He isn’t demanding, but she is. I mentioned girls I know and he said there would be no point in introducing them because "I wouldn’t meet their requirements." How sad, and who are these girls that they have such a list of demands from the men? Are they international beauties, some kind of angels, that they should deserve all that? I asked this young man what kind of woman he thought he might be able to attract and actually marry. His response was that he might have some luck with a younger girl, one who was ‘maybe pretty, but maybe not’, one with perhaps no university education but maybe one or two years of college, and maybe no good job or no job at all. I was incredulous. It was almost as if he were saying the only girl who would marry him would be one who herded sheep in XinJiang. To test this situation, which I believed to be unreal, I asked several girls if they would like to meet this man, with no success. One girl said he was only 5 cm. taller than her, so she had no interest. This girl has only a part-time boyfriend and still is willing to meet other men, but she just tossed this one aside. Another girl asked me to send her a photo, and if she liked it she might send it to her cousin. The young man was right – women had no interest in him even with all his ‘qualifications’. |
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Instead of looking for someone they might love, the women have this long impersonal list of demands, like for a job ad written by an HR department. Something is seriously wrong with what is happening. Those who meet while they’re young, and who marry for love, seem to be ok, but the rest are all having great difficulty and it seems to be that the women are driving that. It is difficult to feel sympathy for the girls. If they think they are so wonderful, then maybe they should just stay single and tell themselves they are better than all the men, and that the reason they aren’t married is that there are no men good enough for them. What can be driving these attitudes? Why would all those women have such a high opinion of themselves that they should demand so much in a man? That behavior would be appropriate only in a ‘seller’s market’, where there were ten or 100 men for every woman. But there aren’t. There are more men than women, but not so many more, and millions of women are having no luck in finding a man but they persist in their ‘high standards’. Their only hope might be to find an older man or a foreigner, but these men will be in their late 30s or higher and will likely all be married. A divorced older man might be their only remaining choice. |
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I have a good friend in Shanghai who wanted with all her heart to be an elementary school teacher, but whose father believed that teaching was a poor occupation and insisted she study finance and accounting instead. She did so, and spent 15 years in jobs that she disliked and that made her quite unhappy. Eventually she quit those jobs to became a housewife and is now considering a return to university to become a teacher and to do, in her words, “something for me”. This woman wasted 15 unhappy years during the best time of her life, doing something that her father pushed her to do. She lost badly because of this, and her father gained nothing for himself. Nobody won, but everybody lost. And the father accepts no responsibility for that choice. He would say he was only doing what he thought was best for his child. It is easy to claim that we love our children and want only to do what is best for them, but this is too easy an answer. How can a parent force a child into a career that she doesn’t want and will never be happy doing? That isn’t love, it’s control. How does it help, and who does it help, that the parent is happy with the child’s career if the child is unhappy and miserable? We have a saying in English that it is easy to give advice when you have no stake in the outcome. That means that you force your advice on another person, but you have nothing to lose if your advice proves to be incorrect, or even harmful to the other person. They might suffer, and their lives might be miserable, but you are fine. Should loyalty extend to this extent, that a child should be essentially forced to accept choices that are not in his or her best interest? The question is “Whose life is this that must be lived?” It is the child’s, not the parent’s life. When children are small, we must make their choices for them. But when they become adults, a time is reached when they must make their own choices and accept the responsibility for those choices. In the West, we are taught to make our own choices at a young age, and to accept full responsibility for those choices and for our actions. For this reason, Western parents seldom try to impose choices onto their children – because the parents are unable to accept the responsibility for that. The children must learn to choose for themselves, and learn to live with the results of those choices. Parents will help and advise as best they can, but the final decision is not theirs because it is not their life that will be ruined by a bad decision – for a career or for a husband or wife. |