He Bought Her for 60K USD
A remix of Kai-Chieh Chan’s photo
Two days ago, my phone vibrated, there was a message from my ex-girlfriend. She was home for the Mid-Autumn Festival, the second-most important holiday after the Chinese New Year with a history dating back 3000 years. I love this time of the year, when you savor mouthwatering mooncakes, and watch lanterns lit in tranquil lakes.
“I’m engaged to someone I don’t know, and we’re totally different,” she wrote.
“WHAT??? You agreed?” I wrote back.
“Yes, then I cried for hours, am still crying,” she wrote, “sometimes I do stupid things with no brain, listen to parents.”
I read it again. How could this be possible? She was independent, loved traveling, was even learning Russian because she wanted to go on a Trans-Siberian railway adventure next year. Marriage was the last thing on her mind, or at least that’s what I thought. She said, two years ago, when we first started dating, her parents told her she only had a few years to get married, because when she turned 27, she would be a sheng nu; meaning “leftover women.” She said, she hated going home for the holidays, because all they talked about was why she was still single.
We dated for a year. I met her at the school I was teaching at. We connected the moment we met, just like the movies. Not the Bollywood dance in the rain kind, but a scene from Steven Shainberg’s Secretary, when the young Maggie Gyllenhaal falls for an old attorney.
Just like Maggie, my girlfriend’s parents were overbearing and demanding. They will never accept a foreigner, she reminded me, but I hoped that one day I would meet them and change their mind. And the funny thing was that even though I said, You know I don’t want children, she hoped that one day I would change my mind. We were blind, in love, and we secretly believed we were right for each other. But the truth was, even though our sadomasochistic relationship was on fire, we weren’t right for each other. Not in a million years.
She said, her fiancé’s family offered a house, and the equivalent of over 60,000 USD to her family! Get the fuck out of here, I raged with anger. I don’t know who I was mad at? At her, for saying yes? Or at her family, for creating the mess? Or at the guy for paying the cash? May be all of them.
After three decades of the one-child policy, China now has a highly imbalanced male-female ratio. As a result, now in 2020, an estimated 30 million Chinese men are left without potential mates. In that sense, women of a marriageable age have become more valuable – and the bride price they command has risen accordingly.
My phone vibrated again, “I want to see you,” she wrote.
In the last five years, this has become a pattern in my life. I meet a young woman in her late 20s or early 30s, because everyone else in China is already married. We fall in love, we make future plans, and then it all falls apart, because all the Chinese women I’ve fallen for so far, want children, and I don’t. After we break up, they get engaged to a random Chinese guy, a total stranger. They cry for weeks, and then one day, my phone vibrates, and it says, I got engaged, I can’t stop crying. Can I see you?
Maybe I should’ve said yes, to tell her in person that she was making a huge mistake she would regret later. Maybe I should’ve told her to break it off with her fiancé, and move to Russia for a year. Or maybe I should’ve just ignored her last message, like how I did with the women before her. Though, a part of me wanted to see her, to hold her in my arms, and to make love to her, one last time, but I wrote:
“Just close your eyes, be silent, and listen to your heart.”
She never wrote back.
P.S. Maybe this is a sign for me too. I’m someone who thinks differently, someone who challenges the status-quo, yet, I live in a land where the majority of the people follow tradition, they value what I detest. So why am I here? Shouldn’t I be living in a land that values diversity, freedom of choice and expression, and a civil society? Like Toronto. Maybe it’s time for me to go home.
What y’all think?
