The past week has been a non-stop eating festival. Chinese New Year might as well be known as Eating Like it’s 1999. There was the requisite CNY eve meal that required the serving of fish, since “鱼(fish)” is a phonetic synonym of the word “余(plenty)”, hence having fish = having plenty. But the greater damage was done by the requisite visits to various aunts and uncles and cousins, each of which involves a meal – lunch or dinner. The younger generation (i.e. the cousins) have also adopted the British tradition of afternoon tea as a meal sans parents. Hence one literally eats 4 meals a day.
What’s contradictory to this semi-forced feeding (to refuse would be impolite) is the constant commentary about weight. This is primarily targeted towards the girls, but certainly not exclusive. On one hand, eat eat eat! On the other hand, wah! 胖了！(you’ve gotten chubby / fat!) Geez thanks. I wonder why.
Which brings me to the semi-forced topic of boyfriends and marriages and children. There were numerous posts on Weibo going around (for several years apparently) which stated something to the effect of “for Chinese New Year, the ones without boyfriends must rent a boyfriend, and ones with boyfriends must rent a girlfriend.” Perhaps due to the generational gap, the topic that the older generation turns to after the favored topics of retirement and housing has been exhausted is the love life of the younger generation. Something has been lost in this single generation. In private (or in English which serves as a kind of privacy), my cousins and their friends all have pretty vivid albeit complicated love lives, but not the kind that is on the straight and narrow path towards marriage and children, as hoped for by the parents. So they pretty much just keep mum and suffer the barrage of kind invectives until the older generation tires itself out. The Chinese word for finding a spouse is 找对像，literally “finding an appropriate reflection”, focuses the match on appropriateness – i.e. family and educational background, incomes, location, and maybe physical attractiveness. Nowhere to be found is the concept of love.
Which brings me to the semi-forced topic of boyfriends and marriages and children. There were numerous posts on Weibo going around (for several years apparently) which stated something to the effect of “for Chinese New Year, the ones without boyfriends must rent a boyfriend, and ones with boyfriends must rent a girlfriend.” Perhaps due to the generational gap, the topic that the older generation turns to after the favored topics of retirement and housing has been exhausted is the love life of the younger generation. Something has been lost in this single generation. In private (or in English which serves as a kind of privacy), my cousins and their friends all have pretty vivid albeit complicated love lives, but not the kind that is on the straight and narrow path towards marriage and children, as hoped for by the parents. So they pretty much just keep mum and suffer the barrage of kind invectives until the older generation tires itself out. The Chinese word for finding a spouse is 找对像，literally “finding an appropriate reflection”, focuses the match on appropriateness – i.e. family and educational background, incomes, location, and maybe physical attractiveness. Nowhere to be found is the concept of love.
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