In a previous column, I outed my pre-pandemic dating life as a middle-aged newly single Chinese woman in the United Kingdom.
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Six months into my spreadsheet approach to love (100 daily Tinder swipes, 50 culls and a literacy-and-basic-human-decency filter), however, I decamped to China – on sabbatical, to research xiaolongbao, and for the anthropological thrill of being a shengnu (leftover woman) on home turf (sort of).
China greeted me with a shrug. On Tinder and Baihe in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Shanghai, a 40-something woman doing dozens of free swipes a day netted two to three matches a week. Hong Kong said hello, then ghosted. Shenzhen tried to sell me a pyramid scheme involving hair transplants and bee pollen for men and women of all ages.
Shanghai, though, came with a wingwoman. G, a no-nonsense East German at the conservatory where I was on research leave, pushed me into Friday tango lessons on the ninth floor of an inner-city office building that had sprung parquet flooring and was all very earnestly renovated. The Shanghainese instructor, a severe taskmistress with a bloodhound’s nose for fakes, clocked my synthetic felt-bottomed heels (I swear I was conducting fieldwork for a dance anthropology project). Everyone else refused to swap partners. I left with a sprained ankle and a compendium of stern glares.
So, on to the infamous weekend marriage market at People’s Square. G, a formidable matriarch fluent in love, duty and European bakeries in Shanghai, encouraged me with a mock-imperial flourish: “Go forth in the name of anthropology, discover and conquer.”
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The park is a prehistoric but ruthlessly efficient analogue of Tinder, run by parents with umbrellas. Elderly Chinese mothers and fathers tape their children’s vital stats to rain gear: gender, age, height, salary, square footage of the apartment already secured in a first-tier city, in that order.