A new hot topic has gone viral on the Chinese internet—“Did you go blind date this Chinese New Year?”
A large number of young, single Chinese complain that continuous blind dates arranged by parents have made the holiday season “more tiring than work days.”
5 Blind Dates in A Day
20-year-old Jin Juan is a migrant worker in southern China’s Guangdong Province. Like tens of millions of other young migrant workers in China, Jin traveled back to her hometown, a rural village in central China’s Henan Province, to spend the holiday with her family, and to carry out a huge mission—blind dates.
Jin’s parents arranged five blind dates for her in one day on Feb. 3, and she has more to meet on other days, according to the state media Xinhua.
“When I met the fifth boy, I could hardly remember the face of the first boy,” Jin said tiredly.
Early 20’s is still a young age for marriage in big Chinese cities, but for the most of the countryside in China, it’s already an age that have parents worrying their children are unmarried.
Engaged After Two Meets
21-year-old Wang Tao has also had two to three blind dates everyday since Feb. 1. Wang is now engaged with one of the girls he met after seeing her twice, the report says.
“I kind of like one of the girls I met on the blind dates. So we met again, and had a good talk. Now we are engaged,” Wang said, “My parents are now relieved. And I’ll go back to the city for work in a few days.”
Blind dates and a flash marriage like Wang’s is quite common in rural China nowadays. The Chinese press calls it “Chinese countryside-style love and marriage.”
For a large number of migrant workers in China, Chinese New Year is the only time they can go home to be with their families. Thus many of their parents want them to marry someone in the same town for the convenience of family get togethers.
“Finding my other half in my hometown is the most realistic choice,” Wang said.
Fighting Back Against ‘Torture’
Not only do parents in China’s countryside worry about children’s marriages, parents in big cities do too.
25-year-old Miss. Zhong just finished her graduate study last year. Always treating her as a schoolgirl in the past, her family suddenly changed its tone with her this New Year, according to Beijing Youth Daily.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” “What kind of boy do you like?” “Don’t be too picky!” Questions from parents, aunties, and grandparents flew at Miss Zhong, out of her expectation.
“Going home for the new year is just torture!” Miss Zhong said, “If they do this again next year, I’ll be afraid of going home.”
Some Chinese young people take extreme methods to escape from such “torture” on Chinese New year.
The whole front page of the Chinese-language Melbourne Daily on Jan. 14 is a letter from a Chinese mother to her son, who refused to go home due to too much pressure from his parents to marry.
The letter says, “Mom and dad will not force you to get married any more. Please come home for the new year.”
The mother indicated that her son in Australia doesn’t answer their phone calls because they pushed him too much.
According to Chinese reports, just before the New Year a 29-year-old woman holding a white collar job in central China’s Wuhan City begged in tears to doctors to let her be hospitalized, fearing the new year family gathering would give her too much pressure to get married.
