People of all cultures know the struggle of finding true love, the trials of managing relationships, and the difficulties in keeping love fresh. What makes the stories in this chapter special is the way each one deals with these problems. From the uniqueness of their frustration, struggle, and resolution, you may get a feel for the challenges that aspiring young people face in contemporary China.
It is common to see unmarried women in their late twenties, early thirties, and even older, everywhere in the world. It is probably more common with career women like Mary Zhang, the titular character in our first story. But the story “Mary Zhang” introduces much more than the problem of finding that special someone. In China today, “leftover girls” or “shelved ladies” (剩女 shèngnü) have become a social phenomenon. Usually referring to single, educated women with money who are over twenty-seven years old, these terms betray both biases and anxieties. The issue is all the more mind-boggling when we take into consideration that for every one hundred women in China there are one hundred fifteen men.1 This story by Xing Hua depicting a female professional thus categorized can be your gateway to exploring how an ancient culture confronts this new challenge.
Although all four stories show the impact of China’s rapid development on the institution of marriage, the most disturbing among them may be “Missing Zhang Meili.” According to World Bank statistics, China’s urban population surpassed its rural population in 2011. The unfortunate consequences of this transition evident in the story are usually the focus when reading. But if you read more deeply than the obsession with fading love and its denial, you may begin to understand the price people are paying for modernization in everyday life. In the desire to “return” to what seems like a more original and authentic way of life, you may also sense contemporary China’s (re)orientation toward the good things of its past.
For those who advised Zhang Meili’s husband to get a divorce, it is puzzling why Monk in “The Cost of Marriage” absolutely had to buy a second and larger apartment for his bride-to-be. Shouldn’t marriage be just about being happy together? Instead of clear answers, the story presents matters of the heart as inseparable from the socioeconomic aspects of life. It is difficult to buy a home; it is even more difficult to shelter love within a home; and most difficult of all is to not give up on love and trust. Monk and Tingting leave us unsettled.
There seem to be a ray of sunshine in “The Mint’s Invitation” when we measure equality with empathy rather than with strict numbers. Who says that positions of power can only be located in the workplace or in the public sphere? What could thaw what is “frozen” in your life better than your own hands? The story’s celebration of the aesthetic dimensions of everyday life—the poetry in firewood, rice, oils, and salt (柴米油盐 chái mĭ yóu yán)—is especially endearing, because the discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary points toward an alternative way of life and its different appreciation. Might the protagonist’s self-reflective way of dealing with the downward spiral of her marriage be a more responsible way of being? Perhaps it is time to accept the mint’s invitation and think about what constitutes a more meaningful and beautiful human existence.