The strange new trend with China’s young parents is arranging marriages for their toddlers. These virtual vows are being promoted by Babytree.com as well as a few other sites, which allow parents to create social network profiles for their infants and then review possible matches. While these online betrothals seem to be little more than sensational play-dates, it does beg the question, what kind of society comes up with baby marriages? When you actually look at the underlying social factors, the practice becomes somewhat unsurprising, and that makes the factors all the more interesting. We’ll work backwards on this phenomena: What is the purpose of marriage from the perspective of the parent? In modern China, marriage fulfills several important social functions. For families with sons, a marriage means […]

…continued Chinese men also come with involved mothers.  Their mothers are full of opinions and criticisms.  The Chinese fathers I have known, on the other hand, are not involved and extremely difficult to have a relationship with.  The best way to deal with the introduction of a new mother-figure into your life is to demonstrate to her that you are an adult who is open to and cares about her opinions, but is not obligated to follow them (I learned this the hard way from my step-mother).  You don’t yet have water under the bridge with this woman, so there’s no need to get worked up when she does not agree with you.  I am very pleased with my husband’s mother because she genuinely likes […]

This post was written by my good friend Heather, about her new life with her husband Huichun. I had the honor of being the best man in their wedding and wish them both all the best as they work through the immigration process. None of my friends or classmates of other racial backgrounds have EVER asked me to elucidate my experience as a “white woman.”  So now that I have been called upon to give a kernel of insight into White American woman–Han Chinese man marriages, I can understand a little better the plight of the lone Black American in some of my high school and college classes who would frequently be expected to give the “Black” outlook on the topic.  How can one person […]

Today’s guest post comes from Jo. She writes the blog Life Behind the Wall about life as an African-American woman in China. There have been several controversial articles written on the internet regarding multicultural, multiracial relationships concerning Chinese men; however, being a Black American woman married to a Chinese man and living in China, brings a whole new level of chaos to the multicultural mix. The recent internet chatter has been about African women marrying Chinese men and how they are being received in China by the locals.The negative feedback has caused a lot of people from Western countries to be shocked and appalled at the ignorant and discriminatory comments that were posted all over the website (here is a post from Chinasmack that translated […]

A few weeks ago my friends my friends were on a Chinese TV show called “My Man Can” (Which can be watched here), they are the American Girl-Chinese Guy couple. This episode featured 4 intercultural couples competing for a free trip to almost anywhere in the world. The basic premise is that the wives bid how well their husbands can do on a particular challenge, while the husbands have to hope their wives don’t push the goal up too high. The show ended up taking nearly 4 hours to film, but lead to several interesting insights about how the Chinese view these intercultural marriages. The most striking was that before the show even started the producers told my friend that they were rooting for them […]

Today’s guest post comes from Mr. Kuaizi, who writes wonderful comments in response to many of my posts (and sometimes he eve agrees with me).  He writes a blog that covers a wide variety of topics, and that can be found here. I was very thankful that he agreed to share his story for the first time here for all of you. After reading much of the commentary on foreigner/Chinese relationships related to Tom’s recent post on “I hate the Chinese ideas about marriage”, I feel compelled to offer some of my own insight on the subject matter. I am American and my wife is Chinese. We first met in China more than 15 years ago when I was there on scholarship teaching English and […]

Continued from yesterday It turned out his girlfriend had already paid the 1,000rmb to meet him, and really wanted to avoid paying the 10,000rmb if they got married. So she came up with a plan for him to break up with “her” on QQ, so that they could continue dating without the companies knowledge. Otherwise she knew the company would come looking for their money, it had happened to her friend who married an Australian through the same company. The company had convinced this friend that her new foreign husband could pay, “Just tell him your family needs money, and get mad if he refuses,” the company had said, “To foreigners it isn’t very much money.” My friend was OK with this idea, even though […]

Continued from yesterday In the week before his new girlfriend arrived, there was a flurry of emails. He told us that he was spending hours each night writing and reading her emails. She was kind enough to accept them in English and would reply in English, all with the help of Google translate. They would even talk on the phone, but that was just a few very simple phrases. My friend seemed genuinely happy with this new-found love. They were able to communicate well enough, and he thought that with her determination she’d be able to learn enough English to handle living in the US. For now though he had a simple solution. He bought two pocket translators, and ever so slowly they could “talk” […]

Yesterday I brought you the wonderful example of true love in an intercultural marriage, so today I want to look at some of the ways these relationships can be exploitative. Now generally speaking when I hear Chinese-Foreigner marriage, I think of a Western Man and a Chinese woman. Typically the man is 10-30 years older than the woman, and she is far better looking than he is. In most of China’s major cities it is hard to miss seeing these kinds of relationships, and it’s harder still to believe that these could be true love. I know when I first arrive in China I thought it was disgusting that these men were so clearly taking advantage of the younger woman. Last year though I met […]

Tim and Yan Jiang were married this weekend. A few weeks ago Yan Jiang took the time to write out the story of how they met, and I think it is a wonderful way to begin our look at inter-cultural marriages. I picked this story because too often people assume that these marriages are not based on true love, and I think this is a good reminder that this is not always the case. You can read more about them at TimCorbin.com My soon-to-be husband, Tim, and I met in October, 2008 in the college that I attended and he taught at. Before that, I wasn’t sure I would ever have any foreign friends, so dating a foreigner was never even a thought. Tim is […]

Seven’s post yesterday touched on many of the aspects of getting married in modern China. Today I’d like to look at a few of those issues closer to wrap up this five-part series (just check the archive). Seven called them “expired” but the more popular term in Chinese is “Left-over.” The following video features “Left-over women”(shengnu), the term describes women who are seen as being unmarriageable. One factor being that they are older than 25 (Chinese women are pretty much expected to marry as soon as they finish college), and that they make a lot of money or are highly educated (Chinese men find this kind of woman intimidating). Before you feel too bad for these women in the video, or start wondering why they […]

This guest post was written by the same friend who wrote – Why I didn’t join the communist party. This time he asked me if he could share his opinion on marriage, and I am so glad he did. Like arranging for a blind date, let me introduce myself first: I’m a 30-year-old single man growing up in a big city in China and I’m the only child in the family. I have a postgraduate degree and a decent job with a comparatively good salary. Moreover, I have 2 condominiums on mortgage. Everything I said here puts me in an advantageous position in the dating circle. But I hate the Chinese idea about marriage. Let me go back a few years. I had a sweetheart […]

The wedding fun continues (Part 1, Part 2)! Today we will wrap up with a few odds and ends about the activities surrounding the wedding day and the wedding night, before we begin to look at marriage in China. I realized this morning that I had almost forgotten an incredibly important part of getting married in China, wedding photos.The name is misleading; they aren’t pictures taken at the wedding, instead they are taken months in advance in clothes you don’t even own. My wife and I experienced this joy/ordeal for ourselves last year in Chengdu. We opted for the cheapest package (I think 2-3,000rmb), which included 3 outfit changes, 2 indoor backdrops and 1 outdoor photo shoot. My Chinese friends have gone with more pricey […]

One of the things I enjoy about living in China is that culture here seems to be in a constant state of change, even if many Chinese stubbornly claim that it isn’t. This is true of many cultures but China is doing it at an impressive rate. Yesterday we looked at an example of weddings in modern China, but it’s also important to get a sense of how much weddings have changed in the last 100 years. Anthropologically, weddings are of huge importance. They define new relationships and new roles. Where the new couple lives, who pays for the wedding, and the requirements for a dowry all reflect and reinforce the dynamics of male-female relations throughout society. Traditional weddings in China emphasized the transfer of […]