Who would your parents choose as a life partner for you given the opportunity? I am not sure I would leave that decision in the hands of anyone else but in China, there is the tradition of parents advertising their offspring to other similarly desperate parents trying to offload their own.
People’s Square is the most popular place to go to find a breadwinner for your daughter or a dutiful wife for your son. Here you can browse all that’s on offer categorised into single or divorced (in separate sections of the park). An umbrella makes a fine noticeboard although some ha
d opted for a more elegant easle. Others adopted a less elegant approach of clipping the advert to the front of the clothes with a peg making the wearer something akin to a walking admission of their inability to offload their child.
I met a man who explained that his 31 year old daughter treated their home like a hotel and expected her mother to do everything for her. Now they were both sick of it and were looking for someone to take on the resonsibility. He explained how fussy the girls could be nowadays, how any boy aspiring to trap a good-looking intelligent girl really needs to be able to offer her a house and a good salary. There is still a gender imbalance in China.
Looking at the desperate parents I couldn’t help ondering why they didn’t make more of an effort with their own appearance. I only found one man in the whole place who actually looked smart and clean. He had the right idea – after all, the whole process doesn’t just involve two people, in joins two families together. So you’re looking for a family which fits, not just a son or daughter-in-law. After all, as they say ‘people buy people’. Appearance is important.
All across the park, people were showing pictures of their children on their phone, writing down information in notebooks and taking contact details of interested parents. I did notice a few desperate parents had posted multiple adverts for their children in the park. Others had notices which had clearly been printed a long time ago, had been laminated to stand all weather conditions and some were frayed around the edges.
Maybe this is what you have to do in a country as big as China, in order to find a match for your grown up child. Maybe the opportunities to meet naturally are limited. There is after all, no pub culture, no evening classes, tennis clubs etc.
and people don’t tend to make strong work freindships. Maybe this is the modern form of the ancient matchmaker used in rural China in the past.