DON’T YOU WANT SOMEBODY TO LOVE? or MY UNSOLICITED INTRODUCTION TO CHINESE ONLINE DATING

I was walking to the bus stop from my office last Thursday with the director of the program I am researching, a woman in her early 50’s who I’ll call Ms. Han, when it came up again. The topic: family and marriage, the subtopic: I’m no spring chicken and ought to be thinking about finding a husband and starting a family. I hedged, as I usually do, telling her politely that I knew I should but it’s hard to meet people in Beijing and most men are frightened by lady scholars (one popular Chinese joke suggests that female PhDs constitute a third gender). Ms. Han, divorced with a grown son, and a devoted reader of the stories about true love found in cheaply printed magazines, said she understood and that she would help me. I thanked her for her concern and insisted she needn’t worry.

Cut to the next day. I show up at the office and Ms. Han ushers me into her office, broad smile on her face, to show me what she made for me: my own profile on a popular Chinese dating website! “Look” she says, pointing to a number in the hundreds, “it's working!” Horrified and rendered temporarily speechless I grunt in appreciation then, pleading time-sensitive work, run for my desk to IM with my friend Dan. Dan thinks it is all just hilarious and wants to know if I'll go out with anyone I meet. Not a chance! I insist. It would be one thing if I was looking on my own but Ms. Han had already taken it upon herself to write an introduction for me, stating that I was “an American girl who deeply loves China and believes that love does not recognize national boundaries” and that furthermore I hoped “to experience love before I conclude my studies here.” Yeech. But how was I going to get out of this without offending Ms. Han, who I respect and admire, and threatening my research relationships?

“Qiao Wei!” I was summoned to Ms. Han’s office once again. She had decided that the website she had originally chosen was too common and full of the wrong kind of people but that she had found another which used scientific methods to calculate compatibility and attracted high-quality people who had graduated from top schools. I only had to fill out a survey of a few dozen questions: was I more emotional or idealistic? Did I like to plan or go with the flow? Did I prefer billiards or bowling? Sunsets or long walks? (apparently these can only be enjoyed exclusively). The robot analyzed my responses and proclaimed me a “教师测试” or, “professor-type”, recommending I seek out other professor-types, journalists, lawyers, or adventurers.

Ms. Han took the initiative to fill out all the information on me and who I was looking for as I watched helplessly. Not only did they want my height, weight, astrological sign, nationality, and occupation, but I was asked to state my blood type, Chinese zodiac sign, income, and housing status (if you didn’t answer the form would state 以后告诉你, or "I’ll tell you later"). I also had to stipulate the marital status, education, and income level of my desired partner. Ms. Han insisted I shouldn’t bother with anyone making less than 1500元／month (about $2,250).

Next came the awkward process of choosing profile pictures. Ms. Han knew I had a cache of photos on my laptop and I told her she could make the selections. Sorting through them, politely ignoring the many in which I am dressed as a panda/eagle/frog, covered in Holi paint, or reprehensibly drunk, she looked for one which would show what she determined to be my best features, namely my high nose, long neck (?!), and pale white skin. She favored pictures of me looking chubby, saying my face looks better when I’m fat, but didn’t like ones where I was smiling with teeth. “Why not add a picture of you as a little girl so they can see how cute your children would be?” I brought this on myself, I kept thinking as I bit my tongue.

Here’s a screen shot of my profile:

I have no idea how my screen name came to be “jeruik” but I suspect that Ms. Han, who has never been able to remember my legal name, thinks that is what it is.

The weekend came to my rescue and I tried not to think of how I was going to handle the situation; not hard to do when there are shows to see and old men crossing one’s path wearing t-shirts that read “Ape Shall Not Kill Ape”. Friends I pleaded with for help agreed that the best way out would be to slowly create a fake boyfriend, planting the seeds the next Monday by gushing about some charming foreigner I had met that weekend. But Monday came and I just didn’t have the heart to embark on such a big, long stretch of lies. Would I have to tell her about fictional dates where we walked along a lake and he opened doors for me? I just couldn’t.

I was soon to regret my weakness. Ms. Han had been monitoring my profile (I didn’t yet have the log-in information) and had selected some promising candidates. She especially liked a baby-faced guy with a Masters in management and another who went by the screen name BMW. She showed me how to use the site and how to look at all the messages that interested suitors had sent my way. There were over 70 by that time but many notes couldn’t be opened without paying a surcharge to the site. “No matter” said Ms. Han, “it’s obviously not 缘分 (fate/destiny, or colloquially, meant to be).”

As I got down, under supervision, to the business of reading the dozen or so messages that were 缘分, I came to realize how frequently the concept arose in the world of online flirtation. There was actually a painful earnestness to many of the messages, which seemed odd when juxtaposed with the pragmatic information provided in the short descriptions of the sender which accompanied their notes.

‘有你才完美’ (If I had you it would be perfect), a 30 year old artist and writer measuring in at 180cm, wrote “I hope when you see my letter, our predestined affinity can began, I’m very happy to have met you here.”

‘懂你’ (I understand you), a 36 year old man with a college education suggested that “destiny might come in the blink of an eye” and wished me “a happy life.”

A 42 year old man in Guangdong province with less than a high school education used a lofty and rather formal writing style, perhaps to demonstrate that one doesn’t need formal schooling to be a scholar: “It is fate that we meet here, I boldly extend my greeting to you, hope that it will win your attention”. I wondered whether I should tell him that his screen name, 风雨无阻 (stopped by neither wind nor rain) both attracted my attention and caused me to think about the US Postal Service.

I wondered too about 饕餮, whose screen name I had to look up in the dictionary:

Whether glutton, gourmand, or mythical animal, Mr. 饕餮, wrote more like a teenage girl. “Hello, ha ha, let’s get to know each other”, he wrote in his first email; sending a second: after Ms. Han had viewed his profile on my behalf “very happy to meet you, ha ha”.

Several notes were simple and friendly, only saying they had looked at my profile and (ugh) self-introduction, that I seemed congenial and would I be willing to get to know them by chatting a bit online? A few others were much more serious. V哥 (Uncle V), 40 years old and with a smile so friendly I wanted to buy him a puppy, told me his “heart wished to go forward” and he was “sincerely looking for someone to marry”. Another gentleman of the same age notified me that I had not yet completed the version 8 personality test offered by the website and invited me to do so in order that he might discover how compatible we were for marriage.

I felt guilty even reading the messages, worse still for not replying. Ms. Han told me to ignore the ones I wasn’t interested in but I told her I felt bad - what if they were checking back, hoping for a reply? I know what it’s like to extend your heart and have it meet only dead space. And then again I had no intention of replying to any of them. It isn’t that I’m dead set against dating a Chinese guy (though I do have doubts that I could find one with many interests or ideas in common - in this sense these fellows are far more open-minded than I, regardless of their interests in a green card), but I felt dishonest from the get go having my introduction written for me. I am from a deeply ironic culture; even if I had such earnest feelings about love I could never express them so easily.

Some messages, however, were so ridiculous or cheesy that I delighted in reading and mocking them to myself.

The ambitious yet soulful BMW, a 28 year-old professional who Ms. Han had personally recommended, wrote: “Autumn, a time of harvest, will we or will we not make our harvest together?”

大海 (Ocean), penned a lengthy note in which he referred to himself in the third person, telling me he worked “in a CCP organ, is healthy, fit, and comparatively attractive” had a “steady and cheerful personality, also scholarly and refined” with multitudinous hobbies and areas of knowledge, and also possessed “compassion and a sense of duty, tolerance and generousness in dealing with people”. He drew my attention as well to his sound economic circumstances and home ownership (I only hope he would have been more clear about whether or not he owns a BMW). I have a feeling Mr. Ocean is not fretting tonight over not having received a response from me; more likely he is sipping cognac, reading Lu Xun, and thinking “her loss”.

And perhaps it is. I shall never know. I’ve made this long enough already so I won’t burden you with the story of how, over our weekly $3.50 hour-long foot massages yesterday, I drew from both my anthropological training and fortuitously fragile emotional state to gently persuade Ms. Han that I wasn’t ready to find love online. My profile, and the disingenuous possibilities it offered, are now gone from the interwebs, and “Jeruik” will never rise again. And I’ll always be a jerk for never writing back.

AIRPLANE AMBIVALENCE

I must have thousands of words in my vocabulary and yet the one foremost in my brain lately expresses only my inability to understand. It was weird to be back in the states; it's weird to be back in the motherland. It's weird that I don't know where my home is. It was weird to wander eerily deserted brightly lit Seattle grocery stores piping inoffensive soft rock, trying to use all of my powers of logic to figure out where, in the product pantheon, baking soda was hiding; it was weird to be back in my Beijing apartment yesterday unpacking and to look down and realize that without ever being conscious of it I had somehow removed my shoes and put on my house slippers. Sometimes what should be foreign slips on easily: Chinese on my tongue, feet keeping pace with pedestrians and dodging various motorized vehicles, and what should be familiar sticks uncomfortably like a peanut butter sandwich eaten in the desert.

It was grand to see beloved people, to look into your shining eyes, but I am ever unsatisfied with the limited time I have to spread among those I want to share it with. I want to tell you about the year I've had and hear about yours but until we have brain sharing igoggles we're just going to have to make do with words, and when those won't do, hugs. On this visit in particular it seemed, with several lovely exceptions, that I was especially unable to communicate. It was weird.

I felt like the madman who has seen something that has so shattered him that all he can do is clutch at strangers with wild eyes, except in my case I want to shake people and implore them: "can't you see what I've seen? don't you understand that our lives are different now? don't you want to know CHINA?"

It's not, of course, that anyone I know isn't interested in China, it's that I don't know how to show it to you. I was thinking of this as my plane began its descent from the Mongolian grasslands, down over the mountains that give way to the plateau of Beijing, and how I wished certain people were sitting next to me so I could gab at them about what we were seeing. So I took some pictures and made some mental notes.

China still has beautiful, wild places.

The mountains above are where the Great Wall snakes and towers, though it isn't quite visible here.

But inhabitable places are inevitably inhabited.

Outside of the something like 170 Chinese cities with populations of one million or more are endless small settlements like this one, many bustling in their own right, others providing a source for the hundreds of millions of migrant workers in the country (the largest movement of humans in history).

The standards for comfortable living established by rich, sparsely populated countries are aspired to by those living in poor, densely populated countries.

Above, one of the numerous "villa communities" outside Beijing proper, places with names like "Shakespeare Town" and "White Peony Hollywood Village" that take out multi-page ads in the glossy real estate magazines I sometimes pick up at the gym. While the vast majority of the Chinese population lives comparatively lightly on the planet, occupying small spaces, using public transport, conserving water, using 1/4 the energy used by the average American, the wealthy folks (including, I should mention, some foreigners) who occupy developments like this live like the elite of another European era, far away from the teeming hordes, retaining drivers, wet nurses, maids, and even enjoying (if the magazines are to be believed) such bizarre luxuries as private waterfalls. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the homes of the new rulers of the world.

Infrastructural capacity hints at plans and potential for continued economic growth based on personal consumption.

"It's interesting to see all those huge roads with hardly any cars on them, isn't it?", said the man next to me on the plane as we flew over one of these highways. New highway and road construction was occurring at breakneck speeds over the second half of the decade (nicely treated in Hessler's Country Driving) and received a further boast from the 2008 stimulus package implemented in response to the global economic crisis. Cars are comparatively few now, but with Chinese car buyers now outnumbering American car buyers, and Chinese car companies growing both on their own accord and through acquisition (i.e. Geely's recent purchase of Volvo), these highways should fill up fast.

The air really is awful.

I saw Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent for The Guardian, speak about his new book a few weeks ago and make the argument that "Red China" has become "Gray China". There is hardly a better illustration for the national unwillingness to sacrifice economic gains for environmental improvements than the descent into a Chinese metropolis. Sky never looks so blue as when you know you won't see it again for months.

I love it. I hate it. I love it. I fear it.

We've all heard similar inconceivably large numbers and frightening trends associated with China, and not a day passes here when I don't see people's appetites for cars, plastics, and concrete and worry about what it means for our world. So much of what is happening here goes against all the principles I have always held dear, and yet, as I saw the sights above from my window seat I felt an unaccountable affection for the monster. What is wrong with me?

I think it's probably that I love an underdog, and even though most of the world regards China with a mixture of curiosity, fear, and admiration, living here you come to understand that Chinese folks don't see their nation as an industrial-policy-wielding human-rights-abusing new superpower, but rather, on a good day, The Little Engine That Could. I want to cheer for the Chinese people who have been through so much in this century and have worked so hard to obtain their own version of the good life, and, too, I feel so at home around bicycles and street markets and earnest belief in the transformative power of education and hard work, so much less than I do in the land of cars and strip malls and irony. 中国加油!

If only it weren't for the things I see from the air or the train or the streets reminding me that this little engine won't stop until it has eaten all the oil and burned down all the trees. Don't fall in love with national entities boys and girls; it will only lead to tears.

COLORADO SPRINGS

At the beginning of August I went to Colorado Springs for a week

to visit my dad

and his birds,

Nick, Nora (/Norman), and Asta.

They live in a giant bird mansion full of amenities,

but have free rein of the living room during daylight hours.

Despite this freedom they seem most content hanging out on the roof of the cage

from where they nudge their toys off and then watch them drop

and hold meetings plotting the destruction of the humans ("tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet-kill").

When the birds allowed it we ventured out, stocking up on supplies at the famed King Soopers,

driving around the old town,

visiting the cute and kitschy town of Manitou,

and looping through the Garden of the Gods.

My pops used to live in Los Angeles, and I am pleased he has made the move to a new location with fresh cool air, puffy white clouds, and friends nearby. I am also pleased that his new home has the space with which to display some of the stunning artwork of my youthful years.

PANDA, PANDA, BURNING BRIGHT. IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT.

When I was waitressing at the Queen Mary I enjoyed seeing the faint traces of stamps from last night’s rock shows on my upturned wrist as I delivered trays of afternoon delicacies and tea in fine bone china. It was for similar reasons that I enjoyed going through the motions of conducting research this week while recalling that in the wee hours of Monday morning I was pole dancing in a panda suit at a Russian nightclub. Allow me to explain.

On Sunday afternoon I met up with Anna, a fellow Fulbrighter working on divination in the Han dynasty.

We attended an indie short film festival at Dos Kolegas (featuring the mural above), where the contributions ranged from uninspiring to painfully awkward, leaving early to meet Dan at my tailor Wu Lin’s. Dan was in the states last month and took the opportunity to appropriate and remove to the motherland a panda costume owned, for reasons not entirely clear, by his father. The panda suit was in good shape but for a large seam rip in the butt. The limp costume slung over his shoulder, Dan entered the tailor’s shop with Anna and I behind him and announced in Chinese that he had just slain a panda and needed to repair its pelt. Wu Lin and her assistants chuckled and stitched the suit up in minutes, refusing to charge us.

We strode triumphantly to the north end of Ritan Park to buy supplies for the evening and seek out dinner. At the restaurant, Aaron and Christine joined us and we shared a delicious meal. Spirits were high. Leaving the restaurant we wandered around the park enjoying the retirees pair-dancing by electric lamp while waiting for an important call. Just after nine the call came and we headed to the north gate to meet the pieman, who delivered into our greedy arms the apple pie he had baked us that afternoon.

All the elements were finally in place. We staked out a low stone table that looked made for a sacrifice and the fixing of drinks commenced. Dan played his trumpet, and we took turns trying on the suit. It was still rather hot outside so we often went only half in.

The park “closed” at 9:30, the cue for a guard with a bullhorn to broadcast this fact and for all the lights to go off. Undaunted, we went south, moving by business district light pollution up the rocky paths to the pagoda at the parks’ highest point. There the pie was cut, served, and devoured, with some assistance from a nearby Chinese couple gazing at the full moon. Christine, who plays in a popular bluegrass band in town and possesses an angelic voice, sang a few tunes for us as we licked our forks. She was accompanied at times by an older Chinese man lying flat on his back on the pagoda’s thick bench seats.

As we descended hours later, Anna and Christine duetted on a song from The Little Mermaid. We made a brief foray to the Stone Boat, a nearby bar, delighting and perplexing the patrons and generally being hammy.

Around midnight we said goodbye to Christine and made our way to a decadent Russian nightclub called Chocolate at the north of the park. Our bags were searched (I stashed the pie knife in shrubbery beforehand) before we descended the escalator into the subterranean club, an enormous space with dozens of tables peopled with puffy Russian oligarchs and the occasional lavishly dressed lady or scantily-clad prostitute keeping them company.

We sat in high-backed velvet chairs and stared at the empty stage, waiting for the show to began. I couldn’t take it. Commandeering the panda suit slung pleadingly on the back of my chair, I took off my shoes, pulled it on, and asked for guidance to the stage (the eyeholes in the panda suit are tiny so the wearer is practically blind). Once there I terrified patrons (or so I was told) danced to Lady Gaga, and tried (mostly without success) to climb a pole with my furry paws. I fully expected to get kicked out but apparently the audience thought it was part of the show. And dear god it was fun.

Finally, disoriented, I fumbled around for my friend and was led back through the tables to my chair (in the picture below, I appear to be a celebrity panda being escorted by bodyguard Dan), where my performance was praised by my comrades and I removed the hot fursuit.

Triumphant, I leaned back, sipped my beer, and beamed with delight at my co-conspirators. No matter where I go I somehow find the most extraordinary people.

The floor show started not long after, a few numbers featuring sexy dancing ladies in skimpy dresses and lingerie.

It concluded with the women moving about the tables, gyrating their g-strings at our eye level in an unsubtle request for tips. That was our cue to leave. Aaron and Anna headed homewards and Dan and I shared a taxi to the treehouse to hydrate and calm down a bit before attempting to sleep. Sophie was off to bed so we helped ourselves to water and went up to the roof, once there, finding it pleasant to lie in the white sand (a friend of Sophie and Wu Jie’s who ran the place for a week while they were out of town had plans to give the rooftop a beach theme) with pillows under our heads. And there, looking up at the tree stretching high above us into the star-less sky, we fell asleep, waking at dawn to brush the sand off our clothes and make our ways home. “You got home late last night, didn’t you?” Auntie Zhang asked me this afternoon over lunch. “Yes”, I said, “quite late”. And I left it at that, knowing that elsewhere in the city, there were four more with visions of a night of childish glee keeping them company as they went about their day.