Some generalizations - Chinese relationships, marriage, and foreigners

This is mostly coming "straight from the horses mouth" if you will, so I'll allow myself some leeway.

I have noticed for some while that foreigners - as frightening as they might have originally been considered - are representing something of coolness here. It is true that I'm being stared at a lot, but 95% of the time - this is with some sort of admiration. A lot of Chinese - mainly young people and children - just love to communicate with foreigners, even if that means just saying "hello" or "how are you?".

In my case, there's the added advantage of the protruding belly - it seems like Chinese people just cannot get enough of the Buddha thing I have going - this might just be the thing that keeps getting me all them free drinks.

This is one with the clubs, and the dancing - copied 1-to-1 from MTV, all apart of feeling closer to western culture. They see a foreigner in a club, and they expect her/him to automatically pull out some serious MTV dancing routines.


With that, and maybe because of that - Chinese men fear nothing more than a foreigner man next to their girlfriend.

Teach (my teacher of the last few weeks) is 26, coming from a city in Henan (just north east of the area I'll be traveling). Her big dream is to open a Bar of her own when she's 35. In the meantime, she really enjoys teaching Chinese to foreigners. She started with this accidentally, by helping out a foreigner woman on the street, and now left her hotel-job to join this school and teach me (yes, I was the first experiment).

Teach says that it is quite difficult for Chinese men to accept that she is working in the vicinity of foreigners. She was recently on what might be considered a first date. All was going well until the guy asked her what she was doing for work.
She told him she was teaching Chinese (bad move), and he asked "Chinese? who are you teaching Chinese? ..."

And there you go - this was the end of it.

Generally speaking, it seems that most of Chinese men will find it very difficult to live with the fact that their wife-oriented girlfriend or their wife will have work that puts them in touch with foreigners.
And this can be pretty tough for women that have passed 25, and are fearing getting to 30 without marriage - becoming what is known as 3S ladies - originally coined for Single, Seventies (born) and Stuck, but we can generalize by replacing Seventies with Thirties (age). See here.

The foreigner thing is rather a singular case of a broader picture - not unfamiliar to men all around the world - we (men) being jealous of capable independent women. The point just seems to magnify itself and be crystal clear, rather than sub-conscious when it comes to the foreigner issue.

I said wife-oriented girlfriend before, as this apparently can be quite specific. As teach says (she can say it, as she was quite in love with a married-man with a 7-yearold daughter), girlfriends and wife are separate things here.
Creating a family is an expectation and tradition, and both men and women feel the pressure to get there in their 20's (the law actually forbids women to marry here before they're 20, and men before they're 22 - but nobody seems to care). So they opt to quickly find someone suitable for starting a family, but then many times find other forms of fun or love outside the nest.

Not highly surprising, when you hear about the expectations from Teach's last boyfriend. That boyfriend comes from a small city in Guizhou province. For context, here's a quite from Lonely Planet: " Poor Guizhou, always the short-end-of-the-stick southwest China province. A much-quoted proverb has it as a place 'without three li of flat land, three days of fine weather, or three cents to rub together', Ouch. "
The guy is now "making it", jumping between Kunming and Chengdu (capital of Sichuan province). The guy was expecting Teach - if they were to be married - to go and live with his family back in Guizhou, while he will continue working (and partying) between Kunming and Chengdu. (she said "no" by the way)

This is quite the norm in many cases - not something that was never heard of. While Teach is really fond of drinking and bars, she's not really into the club thing. She has a friend though - a married man, with his wife and daughter leaving in some remote town while he's working the Kunming-Chengdu line. She says that he really likes the clubs, and has numerous "close" female friends.

You're getting the picture, but this is just one woman telling a story, so I asked for the opinion of Lin Yang (fabricated name). Lin is 25 (just entering the pressure zone), half Han and Half Yi (minority). Came to Kunming from a small town not too far off. She's been in Kunming working in a Jewelery shop for the last 5 years, and she has a boyfriend she's been living together with for the last 2 years. She originally thought she wants to marry the guy, but seems like she's recently going through some second thoughts. Her boyfriend recently told her that she's a bit too much on the chubby side, and he might not marry her. Her parents don't really like him, and would rather she doesn't marry him.

I asked Lin whether she would go for a combo as described above - marrying a guy and joining his family in some remote location (where she would probably be a slave of the mother-in-law), while he will continue to work in the city. She said that she doesn't like the idea, but that probably she will agree indeed.

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