Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang

Author:Leslie T. Chang
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780385528528
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-06T22:00:00+00:00

25-YEAR-OLD ACCOUNTANT SEEKS A GUANGDONG

MAN WITH A PROFESSIONAL SKILL, AN APARTMENT,

A LOVING HEART, AND A SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY.

Women wanted a man with a good job and steady income. Men wanted a woman who was young and healthy. Women wanted a man who was over 1.7 meters tall—at least five feet seven inches—and had his own apartment. Men didn’t care about height or real estate but they preferred a woman with a gentle temperament. Some women favored men from Guangdong Province, who would bring the benefits of local residency, while others felt a local man would have too much leverage over them. Men didn’t care about residential status. Women had many more demands than men.

The members of the Making Friends Club filled out index cards with their personal information and what they wanted in a mate. The card listed a member’s occupation and marital status and personal details like height, weight, and health. It also included characteristics that could appear only on a Chinese matchmaking application, such as political identity, apartment ownership, and the health and financial standing of one’s family members. Political identity denoted whether a person belonged to the Communist Party; few club members were so exalted and most simply wrote “masses.” The cards also mentioned whether a person had to support aged parents or younger siblings—those with no such burdens took pains to point out that their parents were healthy or their siblings already grown.

Taped to the back of every card was a photo. Women wearing lacy skirts and high heels posed in parks or perched on rocks set in the middle of artificial lakes, like damsels awaiting rescue; men in suits stood on hillsides. Both men and women were photographed in front of fancy apartment complexes where they almost certainly did not live. Many of the shots had been taken in street-side photo studios, where subjects strained to look natural while standing on a fake Great Wall or under a fake maple tree or beside a fake picket fence such as I had never seen in China. One man who listed dancing as his hobby struck a disco pose against a painted city landscape of McDonald’s signs. The cards were filed in loose-leaf binders according to gender and year of birth: FEMALE 78, FEMALE 77. A fair portion of FEMALE 71 and FEMALE 72 were divorced with a child. The most aged female youths cohabited in the grimly titled females above forty.

Most of the members were not looking for love. They did not crave walks on the beach or hot-air balloon rides; their overriding concerns were pragmatic. HAVE AN ENTERPRISING HEART. HAVE GOOD ECONOMIC CIRCUMSTANCES. HAVE STABLE JOB AND INCOME. CAN EAT BITTERNESS. Women in particular were obsessed with height: As at the talent market, physical stature was a marker for quality—a promise that a man was healthy, stable, blessed. Although many women insisted on a man who was at least five feet seven inches, a handful would go as low as five feet five. No one wanted to date a man who was only five feet three inches tall.

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