8 Eight-Minute Date

 

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There were several ways to find a husband, and after a migrant woman landed a stable job that was the next order of business. Some girls consented to the services of a matchmaker back in the village, though that risked being paired with an unpromising young man who had never ventured far from home. Girls who had lived in Dongguan for a while sought introductions from friends, but when you met a man in the city there were things you didn’t know about him, like whether he had a wife and children back home. Some girls signed up with dating services, but many people felt this method was too “direct.” The boldest girls met men online. The hazards of that route had inspired a song called “QQ Love”; QQ was the name of the most popular chat service on the Chinese Internet.

 

This one claims to be so handsome
With a good heart, and well-behaved
Asking how old I am this year
And how many one-night stands I’ve had
Scaring me speechless
What kind of E-era is this?
Hurry up and tell him “bye-bye”
Oh! QQ Love
Real or false, who can guess?

 

 

There was never any question of not looking. City life was lonely and sharing it with someone lightened the burden. And marriage was a filial duty; by the time a migrant worker was twenty years old, the parental pressure to wed was relentless and directed at both sexes. No one wanted to become the dreaded daling qingnian, a phrase that literally meant “aged youth” and was defined in the dictionary as “unmarried men or women between twenty-eight and thirty-five.” The traditional timetable of the village matched the city’s pragmatism: A young woman should lock in marriage early, when her value was at its peak.

The Dongguan Making Friends Club was the biggest dating agency in town. Originally set up to help women find mates in a city estimated to be 70 percent female, the club had grown to more than five thousand members. It was run by the All-China Women’s Federation, a national organization staffed by well-meaning matrons who believed it their duty to “guide the masses,” whether the masses wanted their guidance or not. Female club members outnumbered males two to one, which organizers pointed out was better than the city’s female-to-male ratio of four to one, or five to one, or maybe three to two—like the population of Dongguan, its sex ratio was a highly variable statistic.

In America, dating agencies are set up so that a stranger can ask a fellow member on a date. But that seemed immodest to most Chinese people. Instead members met every Sunday afternoon at the club’s headquarters, on the second floor of an aging office building, for what was delicately called “information exchange.” The club also organized weekend outings for its members. In China, a date was a group activity.

 

THE MAN NEXT TO ME stood up. “Hello. My member number is 2740.” He sat down.

Li Fengping, the middle-aged woman who ran the club’s matchmaking arm, objected. “That’s it? You must do a self-introduction.”

The man stood up again. “I am from Hunan. Originally I only tested into vocational college, but later I studied on my own, so I could get a bachelor’s degree.” He sat down again.

Thirty people had assembled in the club’s main meeting room on a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 2004. The space felt like a classroom with its fluorescent lighting and plastic chairs, and perhaps in response the members had segregated like schoolchildren, the men sitting in rows along the sides of the room, the women clustered in bunches for safety.

“I am from Guangdong. I am in sales, an ordinary worker.”

“I am from Jiangxi. I am a very plain person.”

A woman wearing a lime-green sweater and white jeans stood up. “Hello. I have been in Dongguan quite a while, doing sales. I’m from Hunan. My goal in coming here today is to give myself more opportunities.”

Most of the introductions were brief and painfully shy. People gave their club membership numbers and native provinces but not their names; they described themselves as “ordinary.” The men were electricians and lawyers and advertising executives and assembly-line workers; the women worked as nurses and clerks and teachers and salespeople and assembly-line workers. A fair percentage of both sexes were divorced. Occasionally a voice sounded from the school of self-help, and the mood in the room turned hushed, confessional.

 

I have gone through a lot. I have suffered many injuries. Today, I have come through it.

 

I am a college graduate. I studied computers. I am an office manager. My goal is to find someone who loves me, whom I can love.

 

“Now,” Li Fengping said, when the introductions were finished, “everyone can go and approach whomever you like.”

No one moved.

After an excruciating silence, the woman in the lime-green sweater spoke up. “I have a suggestion. In the future, we should have more professional gatherings, so there are fewer of these awkward moments and we don’t waste so much time.”

“Yes, there should be more planning,” a man sitting near her agreed. The matchmaking threatened to disintegrate into a finger-pointing free-for-all. Whenever I watched Chinese people interact in a group setting, I understood in my bones how the Cultural Revolution happened. People were terrified of being singled out, but from the safety of the group they could turn on someone with a speed and ferocity that took your breath away.

Suddenly a pretty elementary school teacher with fierce dark eyes stood up.

“What’s your name?” she demanded of a man slumped in his chair against the wall.

He sat up straighter and answered her.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Guizhou.”

“I like you very much.”

She sat down. There was thunderous applause.

And then, silence again.

The man sitting next to me—member 2740—stood up and left. I turned to Li Fengping and suggested that people might be allowed to walk around. “Can’t we turn on the music?” someone pleaded. In the end, the pressure to walk across a room and approach a stranger under the eyes of thirty others was too much to bear. Most members fled the Making Friends meeting as soon as they could. The man who had been singled out by the schoolteacher made no move to approach her, and she remained seated too, staring straight ahead with a determined look on her face.

 

AFTER THE GATHERING, I went up to the woman in the lime-green sweater. She was shorter than she appeared at a distance—barely five feet tall—with a curvy figure and restless dark eyes in a pretty heart-shaped face; she wore frosty pink lipstick and a glittering rhinestone barrette in her hair. She was twenty-nine years old and worked in sales. “In the past, I ignored my personal matters to focus on work,” she told me. “But now I am thinking of it, which is why I’ve come here.”

I asked what she was looking for in a man.

“It doesn’t matter to me what a person’s education is, or his job, or how much money he makes,” she said. “To me, feeling is most important.”

The woman was Wu Chunming. After I met her for the first time that day, it was what she had said to the gathered club members that I remembered—My goal in coming here today is to give myself more opportunities. That, and her voice: sharp as a scythe, and unashamed of its broad peasant accent that no number of years in the city could erase. Hers was a voice that won arguments and carried across construction sites and made men sit up and take notice.

Over time I learned the details of Chunming’s story—how she had started out in a toy factory, was almost tricked into a brothel, talked her way into management, and struck it rich selling Tibetan medicine and funeral plots. After the government banned direct sales, Chunming got a job as a reporter at the China Inspection and Quarantine Times. The newspaper was run by the government agency in charge of import and export inspections, and the nature of her work would have been unrecognizable to any conventional practitioner of journalism. Chunming would decide to write an article about a company; her chosen subject, fearing trouble getting its goods through customs, would pay the paper for positive coverage. The price for good press was determined on a sliding scale, in the same way that advertising rates are set. Two thousand yuan bought a brief mention, while a full-length feature might cost fifty thousand yuan. This was journalism as extortion, and Chunming worked on commission and did well. Afterward she worked for two years in the sales department of a building-materials company, then in 2001 she and her first boyfriend set up a building-materials wholesale business. The venture lasted six months, during which Chunming lost her entire hundred-thousand-yuan investment—all her savings from her direct-sales days, minus money she had spent renovating her family’s house. When I met her, she had landed as a salesperson at a Swedish-owned company that made paint and other coatings used on the surfaces of buildings.

The wild reversals of fortune in Chunming’s life reflected the boom-and-bust ethos of south China. But perhaps the most unlikely part of her story was that in this most hardheaded of cities, she was still holding out for romance—as the man had said: to find someone who loves me, whom I can love.

*  *  *

 

Her first boyfriend was a driver at the building-materials company where she worked. Chunming did not particularly like him at first, but they spent a lot of time together and he knew how to charm women. Already twenty-five, she had never slept with a man before.

Soon after they started dating, Chunming sensed he wasn’t right for her. He frequently borrowed money from his parents and lacked her gift for hard work. “He couldn’t accomplish the big things and didn’t want to bother with the small things” was how Chunming put it. Twice when they fought, he hit her.

“He used his hand like this, and slapped me hard on the face,” Chunming told me, holding her hand out stiffly, palm up, to demonstrate. “The first time he hit me, I cried and cried. He promised he would never do it again. The second time he hit me, I didn’t respond at all. I was just very calm. There is a traditional saying that the man who hits once will hit again. Now I know that it’s true.” That was in 2002, but Chunming stayed with her boyfriend for another year and a half. They shared a rented three-bedroom apartment across from the Wal-Mart in downtown Dongguan.

“Whenever I told him I wanted to break up with him, he wouldn’t answer, or he would say I was just toying with his emotions. I didn’t know how to get rid of him,” Chunming said. “I would tell him we should break up, then I would come home from work and he would be there. I didn’t know what to do.” Resorting to indirectness, she wrote him letters in her diary: This time I have really decided I must break up with you. We have no future. The ink on the pages ran, because she was crying as she wrote. She left her diary on the kitchen table, but if he read it, he never let on.

It took another woman to resolve the matter. One day a woman from her boyfriend’s hometown called Chunming and informed her they were having an affair. Chunming was relieved, and when she told her boyfriend that she knew about the other woman, he packed his things and left without argument. Since then she had not had a serious relationship, though she had many flings. Sometimes this was enough for her; in the future when she had made her money, she dreamed, she would have an apartment and a car and lovers whenever she wanted. At other times, these casual affairs made her more lonely. “If you just have lovers,” she told me, “it’s like you’re always floating on the sea and can never come into harbor.”

*  *  *

 

 

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.

The binders hinted at the reasons past relationships had gone sour. SEEKING A 28- TO 34-YEAR-OLD WITH AN OPEN PERSONALITY WHO DOESN’T GAMBLE. SEEKING A CULTIVATED PERSON NOT ADDICTED TO WINE AND WOMEN. An occasional brave woman threw caution to the winds: SEEKING A 35- TO 45-YEAR-OLD, THE REST IS UP TO DESTINY. Many women regarded apartment ownership as a prerequisite for a date. That was common in Chinese personals, which sometimes read like real estate listings, as in this ad in a magazine for rural women:

 

A 27-YEAR-OLD MAN . . . DIVORCED WITH AN OPEN
NATURE . . . POSSESSING A FIVE-BEDROOM TILE
HOUSE WITH FURNITURE, MODERN APPLIANCES,
AND A MOTORCYCLE, SEEKS A WOMAN TO BE A
PARTNER FOR LIFE.

 

The preoccupation with property was not as mercenary as it appeared. Like height, apartment ownership was a marker, a sign that a man could be depended on. “The women aren’t really asking for very wealthy people,” a man named Tang Ao, who ran another matchmaking agency in the city, explained to me. “They just want some security.”

Every member of the Making Friends Club I talked to was dissatisfied with the club in some way. Its male members were uneducated and low-class, I was told. Married men looking to have affairs sometimes sneaked in under an assumed identity. The club administration was “a bunch of grandmothers,” Chunming said. Yet every time I stopped in at the club, some members were already there, poring over FEMALE 78 or MALE 71, still looking.

*  *  *

 

As Chunming moved up in the world, she left many people behind. Friends from her early days on the assembly line returned home to marry and have children. Most of the better factories did not employ women over the age of twenty-five as ordinary workers; older women were relegated to poorly run factories or menial jobs like housecleaning. For a migrant woman, social mobility was a survival tactic—the best way to remain in the city once her first bloom of youth was gone.

Chunming’s friends, women in their late twenties or early thirties, had all survived this mass culling. Most, like her, came from rural villages, though a handful had grown up in a city and attended college. They usually ran factories that manufactured one microscopic piece of the vast supply chain stretching from Dongguan to the world. One woman and her husband made metal studs for decorating handbags; another couple manufactured the glue used to attach the heel of a shoe to the shoe upper. A twenty-six-year-old woman operated a shoe-sole factory, and another specialized in wooden flooring, and yet another sold building materials but was considering a move into the underwear wholesale business. For Chunming, this network of friends was family. On sales trips, she frequently showed up unannounced at a friend’s apartment and stayed for days; her changes of clothes and spare toothbrushes were scattered up and down the Pearl River Delta. Once when I met up with Chunming in Shenzhen, she had been away from home for five days but was carrying only a clutch purse big enough for a lipstick and a mobile phone.

Spending time in Chunming’s circle was like looking at one of those optical illusions that showed two things at once. Out in the city, they appeared plausibly middle-class. They owned apartments and cars, or planned to buy them soon. They took driving lessons and vacations; they got manicures and went on diets and learned Latin dance steps. They always knew about the newest Brazilian barbecue restaurant or the best place for frozen yogurt. At other times, the village seemed indelibly stamped on their DNA. Their apartments might be tastefully furnished, but the bathroom invariably had a squat toilet. Their medical knowledge was the folk wisdom of their grandmothers: To recover from illness they steamed chicken with ginseng, and when the weather cooled they ate pork lung soup to stave off respiratory infection. They still traveled long distances by bus and train, and almost none of them had been on an airplane. Tradition was most on their minds when they journeyed home for the new year, covering in one day a distance they had traveled over years.

 

CHUNMING SELDOM SPOKE of her early days in the factory. I don’t think she was ashamed of it, exactly—it was more that the girl who had worked on the toy assembly line, who had kept a diary and struggled to learn Cantonese and memorized Benjamin Franklin’s thirteen rules of morality, was so far from the person she had become. She still worked tirelessly to improve herself. The shelves of her apartment were almost entirely self-help books: One Hundred Success Stories and Mary Kay’s Nine Leadership Keys to Success and an etiquette series with English titles like Tone and Crass. (Of all the ways to misspell class, that was the worst way.) On the living room wall was a giant glamour photograph of Chunming with shiny pink lip gloss and a jeweled barrette clipping back her hair. The apartment was a reflection of her character—carefully crafted, relentlessly self-examining.

Everything was an educational opportunity. From Korean soap operas, Chunming learned that you must hold a fork in your right hand and a spoon in your left, but a fork in your left hand and a knife in your right. It was also on Korean television that she saw Tupperware containers for the first time. Once I gave her a DVD of Roman Holiday—she had asked me for some American movies—and out of Hollywood entertainment she spun a Marxist morality lesson. “The poor journalist could have made a lot of money on the story of the princess,” she summarized the plot for me. “When he gave up his chance to make a lot of money, he rose in morality.” She did not know who Audrey Hepburn was but pronounced her “not as beautiful as Julia Roberts.”

She was ruthlessly observant; in a sense she was taking notes on me the same way I took notes on her. The first time we met up, she picked the place—the European Style Coffee Western Restaurant—and then ordered the same thing I did, spaghetti Bolognese. She noticed that I often drank beer with dinner, and one night she announced that she had been practicing in private and could now have a glass with me. She asked how I liked my steak and which country had the most considerate men and how American mothers raised their babies. She was constantly trying on new versions of herself: coloring her hair, or perming it, or straightening it. Her clothes always matched, and I never saw her wear the same outfit twice.

Until I came to Dongguan, most Chinese people I knew belonged to the educated class, and they felt keenly the difference between us. They wanted to know whether I considered myself American or Chinese; they were invariably surprised, even offended, when they found out that I could not read Chinese well, or that I dated American men. They lectured me about democracy and the Iraq War and the inability of the foreign press to understand China. Their nation had experienced 150 years of submission to the West, and this troubled history rose up between us whenever we talked. This was the world of my grandfather, and all my relatives, the world that many Chinese still lived in.

Chunming and her friends didn’t care about any of that. They didn’t care that my Chinese was bad or that I didn’t know the names of famous Chinese writers, and they never asked my views on democracy. They had been born without many advantages but also without the burden of the nation that weighed on the educated, particularly men. When I did meet one of Chunming’s male friends, these preoccupations usually rose to the surface. One time, a surgeon friend of hers named Ah Qiang asked me what I did, and I told him I was writing a book about migrant women.

“Nanfengchuang had a lot of pieces about that,” he said, referring to a Chinese newsmagazine. “You can just use their articles and save yourself a lot of time.”

Chunming sighed loudly. “Different people have their own points of view,” she said. “She might see things in a different way from other people, and that’s what she wants to write about.”

I felt like standing up and cheering.

She turned to me. “Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

Ah Qiang persisted. “You should write about the problems with the Chinese constitution,” he told me. “We have such a beautiful constitution, but when it goes down to the lowest level of government, officials act against it.”

“That is so far from what she’s writing about!” Chunming said with exasperation. She took out her mobile phone and began checking her messages, a signal that the conversation was over.

Chunming understood me instinctively. In a sense, she was engaged in the same endeavor: seeing life from a different point of view and writing her own story. She had saved all the volumes of the diary she had written since coming out from home. “Someday if I have the means, I would like to write,” she told me. “I would write only about the simplest, most ordinary things.”

*   *   *

 

One Sunday evening in December 2004, Chunming invited me out to a Hunan restaurant with friends: a nurse named Ah Ning, who had very white skin and an appealingly raspy voice, and two young men who were supervisors in a factory. Chunming looked chic in a black sweater and plaid pants with wide cuffs; she carried a fake Fendi handbag. The men wore their factory shirts.

As soon as I sat down, one of the men turned to me. “In your opinion, what are the differences between Kerry and Bush?”

“He’s trying to get you to say whom you voted for,” Chunming said.

“I voted for Kerry,” I said reluctantly. I did not particularly want the conversation to go in this direction.

“Do you think China is ready for democracy?” he asked. He didn’t think so. “If we could vote,” he continued, “I would vote for Chiang Kai-shek. I think he was a good leader.” Then: “Do you feel more Chinese or American?”

Three bottles of Tsingtao beer appeared on the table. My interlocutor was visibly excited: The only thing better than bullying me with politics was bullying me with beer and politics. “Might as well get drunk tonight,” he announced.

Chunming came to my rescue. “I think it’s stupid when people force each other to drink,” she said.

Ah Ning quickly changed the subject. She had recently enrolled in a modern dance class at a health club, she said.

“I want to learn how to dance, too!” Chunming said. “I want to learn the cha-cha.”

“I want to learn yoga,” Ah Ning said.

She turned to me. “Do you know how to mix drinks?”

“What kind of drinks?” I asked.

“Like cocktails,” she said.

I said I knew a few basic ones.

“I really want to learn how to mix drinks,” Ah Ning said. “I would even work at a bar for free just to learn.”

“I was at a party with clients recently at a hotel,” Chunming said. “There were many foreigners there, and we were drinking chilled wine in glasses. I was holding the wine glass by the bowl, but someone told me you must hold it by the stem.” Her eyes widened, the way they did when she was surprised or excited about something. “There are so many rules! But it’s good to learn these things, because there will be times in your life that you attend such parties.”

The young man tried to edge back into the conversation by asking Chunming what kind of work she did. “My company is foreign-invested,” she said coolly. I don’t think either of the men said a word during the second half of the meal. After dinner, Chunming and Ah Ning rushed both of them into a taxi; they lived in a remote part of the city, which meant they had an hour’s ride home.

We hailed another taxi to go check out a health club that was offering yoga classes. Chunming leaned back in her seat and let out a sigh. That man was a fellow Hunanese, she told me; he had been introduced by a friend who wanted to set them up. The man had called her that afternoon and said he was in town for just one day. “He’s from the same part of Hunan as me; otherwise I would not have invited him to dinner,” she said.

“He is so childish!” Ah Ning said.

“He is unacceptable,” Chunming agreed. “He had nothing to say. And he is three years younger than me.”

I didn’t say anything—by then I felt a bit sorry for the young man. I also realized that I had just been on my first Chinese blind date.

 

AT THE HEALTH CLUB, dance class was over, yoga met only twice a week, and none of the instructors was around. Ah Ning suddenly realized that we were near the Making Friends Club. “I wonder if there are any activities tonight. Let’s go see!” We ran down the street and up the stairs to the club. The main room was almost deserted: no making friends tonight. Chunming and Ah Ning sat down and began flipping through the binders of the club’s male members. “There are so many beautiful women, and look at these men!” Chunming said.

She flipped rapidly. “I look at the pictures first,” she said. “You can’t tell from looking at the photo if someone is any good. But the photos are useful at ruling out the really bad ones.” She pointed to a pudgy man with a hapless look on his face, standing behind a fake picket fence. “Only the most low-class people still get a photo done in a studio. That’s the kind of thing I did ten years ago! It’s much better to get a photo in a park or a natural setting.”

Ah Ning seemed to have dated a significant portion of the club’s male membership. She showed me a photo of a man leaning against a tree. “He looks tall, but in person he isn’t. It’s just that he is standing alongside that tree.”

She flipped to another photo. “This man looks like he has a kind face, but he is really not a nice person.”

Flip. “This man is forty-eight years old. I told him, ‘Even if I could accept you, my parents never could.’ ”

Flip. “This person has mental problems.”

Ah Ning had recently gotten divorced and she was aggressively seeking a boyfriend. She had dated more than twenty men from the club and once went on four blind dates in a single day. “I met one guy who said he was very happy living in his rented eight-square-meter room,” Ah Ning told me. “I said, ‘Oh, really? Are you so happy living in your eight-square-meter room?’ ” A blind date with a teacher also flopped. “When he finished chewing his gum, he played with it with his fingers. I couldn’t stand it. This person is a teacher! He teaches children!

“Every time after I meet one of these men,” Ah Ning said, “I feel like crying.”

“After I meet one of these men,” Chunming said, “I feel like throwing up.” She picked up another binder—FEMALES 74—to show me her own photo. It was a black-and-white shot of a girlish-looking Chunming with cropped hair, in artful soft focus—perhaps too artful, because only two men had phoned her up after seeing her picture. Her stated requirements for a mate were: KIND, HONEST, HUMOROUS, HAS AN APARTMENT. Hers was the only listing I had seen that mentioned a sense of humor.

“The apartment is not an absolute requirement,” she said. “We could buy an apartment together. I just meant I would prefer that he had one.” But she absolutely would not date anyone under 1.7 meters, because a man that short gave her no sense of security.

 

AFTER WE LEFT THE CLUB, Ah Ning elaborated on the man with mental problems. “I went on one date with him and he told me he had been hospitalized for two weeks with suicidal tendencies,” she said. “At first I felt like I should help him, since I’m a nurse. But then I decided I shouldn’t get wrapped up in it.”

The man continued to send text messages to her mobile phone at odd times. “I really don’t understand how someone with mental problems could be the chief financial officer of a five-star hotel,” Ah Ning said.

“He lied to you, that’s all,” Chunming said.

We went into the TCBY frozen-yogurt shop, where Chunming suffered agonies of indecision before finally ordering a blueberry-cheesecake frozen-yogurt sundae. She instructed Ah Ning, who was having her period, that she must not eat anything cold, so her friend ordered a hot strawberry milk instead. It had a chemical pink color, like industrial waste.

The visit to the Making Friends Club had not been in vain. There was a new activity this weekend called Eight-Minute Date, and Ah Ning explained what she had heard about speed-dating. Chunming was excited to attend. She loved to try new things and she was an optimist by nature. These qualities had helped her survive in Dongguan, even if they were a mixed blessing when it came to dating.

“The problem is,” Ah Ning said, “sometimes eight minutes is too long.”

*   *   *

 

Living in the city changes what young women from the countryside expect out of marriage. Surveys have shown that migration makes a rural woman more likely to meet her future husband on her own, marry later, want fewer children, give birth in a hospital, seek equality in marriage, and view divorce as an acceptable option. More than 60 percent of migrant women in one survey cited either “building a happy home” or “having a partner in the career struggle” as the purpose of marriage, while fewer than 10 percent chose “having someone to rely on for life.”

In traditional society, a young woman would live with her husband’s family after she married and submit to the rule of her mother-in-law. She would also give birth in the home of her in-laws, symbolizing the claim of her husband’s family over the baby. But migration is freeing the younger generation of such obligations: Couples in the city often pay for a wedding themselves, and a migrant woman soon to give birth is more likely to return temporarily to her own family home rather than her husband’s.

For a long time, scholars believed that the vast majority of migrant women eventually returned to their villages to marry, have children, and work on the farm. Many migrants in the 1980s and 1990s did follow this path, but the fate of newer migrants is changing. More young women are marrying fellow migrants and setting up house in their adopted cities. If they do return to their native provinces, they often move to a provincial city rather than to the villages where they were born. And marriage does not necessarily mark an end to migration: Young couples frequently return home to marry and then go out again together.

Spending time with Chunming and her friends convinced me that the conventional wisdom—that most migrant women eventually return to the farm—was flawed. Everyone in their circle had been away from home for years; it was clear that they would never go back. But because changing one’s residential status was expensive and cumbersome, they did not count as official Dongguan residents either. The scholars who studied returned migrants always did their research in rural villages, where they could conclude only that a person like Chunming was temporarily away from home. They could not see that she had already resettled somewhere else.

*   *   *

 

Chunming had two dates from the Making Friends Club. The first time, a man came in a taxi from another part of Dongguan. She went downstairs to meet him on the sidewalk outside her apartment building. They took a good look at each other.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she said.

“I think you’re pretty,” he said.

“Let’s just be friends, then,” she said. The taxi had not left yet, so the man got back in and cruised off.

The second date took place at a soymilk restaurant near Chunming’s apartment. The man got lost and was half an hour late, so she started eating by herself. It was nine in the morning. When her date finally showed up, he was upset that Chunming had started without him. He tried to take charge and order a soup for her but she refused it.

“He ordered hot soup and cold soymilk,” Chunming told me. “Can you imagine? A hot liquid and a cold liquid: That was his breakfast.”

After this liquid nourishment, the man suggested they go for a walk together. “It was nine in the morning and he wants to go for a walk!”

Chunming told the man she had some things to take care of, but he didn’t take the hint. “Let’s just be friends, then,” Chunming said. Finally he understood. After that Chunming gave up on the Making Friends Club. She put more faith in meeting people through the Internet, which she believed drew a higher class of men.

One day when I was over at her apartment, Chunming showed me how the QQ chat service worked. When you went online, you could pull down a list of everyone who was online at the moment, selecting for traits like native province, city of residence, age, and gender. She warned me that people talked about sex a lot. “These are things we can’t say in the real world,” she explained, “so we say them online.”

She had been online a few minutes when a man approached. He was a friend of a friend and had been introduced to her as potential boyfriend material.

Are you working?

Yes, are you?

No, I’m at home.

Where are you?

The man was an urban planner in Dongguan, originally from Shandong Province. He was twenty-seven years old, three years younger than Chunming, though she lied and told him she was twenty-five. The conversation quickly progressed to turning on their computer video cameras so they could see each other. The young man looked serious and heavyset, with glasses.

Sorry, I am ugly. Are you frightened?

Chunming turned to me. “He looks like an honest person.”

Not at all, she wrote. I think you look okay.

Are you married? Do you have a boyfriend?

No.

Ah, so you are more conservative, then?

No, I am not conservative, but I am more traditional.

In what way?

She leaned back in her chair, looking at me, thinking aloud. “In what way?”

The young man was impatient. Sex? The conversation frequently jumped ahead of her; the young man typed much faster than Chunming did. Educated people knew how to type, but Chunming had little formal schooling.

No, not in sex, she wrote. To be honest, I go online to meet a boyfriend.

Why must marriage be the goal?

It doesn’t have to be. To meet friends is good, too.

How much can you accept? He was asking whether she would have sex with a man who was just a friend, Chunming interpreted for me.

When can we meet? I am free after work.

“Oh no!” she squealed. “He wants to meet me!”

Chunming met up with the young man that night. He seemed like a good person and he had a good job, she told me afterward. But he was very ugly, with a potbelly and a zit at the base of his nostril. Over the next few months, she seesawed between these conflicting points of view. He is very ugly. He went to a brand-name school. He is mature for his age. He is very ugly. She accompanied him on a shopping trip to buy a sofa for his apartment. She slept with him once, but she could not bring herself to start a real relationship with him. “Most Chinese marriages are not built on love,” she said. “Perhaps I will have such a marriage. But I am not ready to compromise just yet.”

*   *   *

 

Dongguan was not just a place for young women to change their fates. Older women also saw the city as a place to redefine themselves. One day I visited a dating service called the Dongguan City Metropolis Destiny Planning Company. The club was smaller than the Making Friends Club and claimed to be more exclusive. Members had to be vocational college graduates or earn at least two thousand yuan a month. I met with the company’s managing director and his two female assistants, a grueling experience that involved all three of them speaking over one another while their mobile phones rang nonstop. One of the assistants was young and soft-spoken; the other, Xiang Yang, was a middle-aged woman of imposing bulk, with a red face and a fur hat with aggressive-looking bristles. Both women were single, and they appeared to be working at the company in part to advance their marriage prospects.

The managing director planned to set up matchmaking offices around the city using a franchise model. But from his business card I learned that he was also hedging his bets.

 

COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING
TOURISM BUSINESS
REAL ESTATE PLANNING
TUTORS AND HOUSEKEEPERS
LICENSE APPLICATION AGENCY
CREATIVE DESIGN
ARTS TRAINING
MARKETING AGENCY
PROPERTY AGENCY
ANNUAL ASSET INSPECTIONS
CIS INPUT
RITES AND CEREMONIES
HEADHUNTING
LEGAL CONSULTING
FINANCIAL ACCOUNTS
MANAGEMENT CONSULTING
WEDDING PLANNING
JOBS CENTER
CIVIL INVESTIGATIONS
TAX AUDITING

 

As we were talking, a middle-aged woman walked in off the street to inquire about the club’s services. She had a handsome long face and wore a sober black blazer and matching pants. Xiang Yang offered to take both of us down the street to see the club’s activities center. As we left the office, I noticed that its front window was plastered with real estate listings.

The woman’s name was Sun Cuiping, and she was from Anhui Province. She had been laid off from her job at a department store, then divorced her husband when she found out he was having an affair. Friends in Dongguan had urged her to come take a look at the city—she had been in town twenty days.

“You’re very brave,” I told her. I was astonished that a woman whose life had been upended by a homewrecker had chosen to come to Dongguan, famous for its population of kept women and karaoke girls.

“You should write about the lives of middle-aged women,” Xiang Yang urged me. “Things are very hard for us. I have just met Big Sister Sun, and I know only part of her story. Yet I know that she has suffered injury.”

She was still talking when I noticed that Big Sister Sun was crying. She stood stock-still in the middle of the sidewalk and turned away so we couldn’t see her face. Displays of emotion in the Chinese always caught me off guard: People were perfectly self-contained until the moment they started weeping on a city street in broad daylight. Big Sister Sun rummaged in her purse; I gave her a tissue. “Give yourself some time,” I said, mumbling generic phrases of reassurance. “Take things slowly.”

We continued walking. Xiang Yang had been unnaturally quiet, but now she started up again as if Big Sister Sun were not even present. “Big Sister Sun is of the sixties generation,” she said. “She is nice-looking, she is tall, she is capable. Yet society has told her that it doesn’t want her. She was a beautiful girl once, yet now she is of a certain age. She cannot avoid having white hair. She cannot hide her wrinkles.”

She went on and on in this declamatory vein, sacrificing Big Sister Sun rhetorically before our eyes. I was appalled at her callousness, but when I ventured a look at Big Sister Sun I saw that she was nodding quietly in agreement. “Many of my friends at this age are getting divorced,” Big Sister Sun said.

“Would that it had happened sooner!” Xiang Yang announced dramatically.

“This is the time when a man is economically more comfortable, and there are many activities for him,” Big Sister Sun continued. “He goes to the hotel, and there are young women. He goes to the sauna, and there are young women. Then he goes to the hair salon, and there are young women, too.”

“In society today, men’s economic situation is improving but their morality is getting worse,” agreed Xiang Yang. “We must guide society to support middle-aged women like Big Sister Sun.”

We arrived at the activities center, which had exercise machines, mahjong tables, and a reading room. Xiang Yang was in full cry. “This is a very crucial time,” she said. “If Big Sister Sun is not rescued now, she may, like the seaweed, just be washed into the sea forever.”

I didn’t answer her—I was beginning to have a pretty good idea of why she was still single. I would have liked to spend more time with Big Sister Sun, minus the interpretive commentary; it was unendurable to watch one woman cry while another compared her to seaweed. Big Sister Sun gave me her Dongguan mobile-phone number so we could meet up another day. When I returned to my apartment, I felt as if I had just been through a harrowing emotional experience—as if I had been the one who had burst into tears on the sidewalk.

In the months afterward, I called Big Sister Sun’s number many times, but it had been disconnected. I never learned if she found what she was looking for in Dongguan, whatever it was.

*   *   *

 

Dongguan was China’s capital of prostitution. Business and the sex trade went hand in hand; a night out with a partner or a client frequently concluded at one of the city’s many karaoke bars, massage parlors, hair salons, or saunas that were all fronts for prostitution. The industry’s steadiest customers appeared to be factory owners from Hong Kong and Taiwan—men with money to spend, living away from their wives. All of my male friends in Beijing knew of Dongguan’s reputation; those who had passed through had been propositioned in hotel lobbies and phoned in their rooms at night: Sir, do you want a massage? I was curious to learn about this world, but I needed a man to get inside.

I knew an American in town named Ben Schwall. He had buzzcut blond hair and a rugby player’s build, and he had worked in the diamond trade in Taiwan. Now he ran a bunch of ventures in Dongguan that sold security systems and lighting fixtures and, inevitably, mobile phones. I called him up and asked if he could introduce me to karaoke girls who engaged in prostitution. Ben had been doing business in China for a while and he took this request in stride, organizing an evening out with a local businessman friend. “These guys are a little bit crude,” he warned me.

Ben’s friend picked us up in a brand-new Honda minivan that seated eight people. It had cost 280,000 yuan, he told us as we climbed in, and he had a second one just like it, as well as a BMW.

He asked Ben, “Is she your wife?”

“No, we’re just friends.”

“Then I have an opportunity.” He laughed. His name was Gong Yaopei, but everyone called him Lao Gong, Old Gong, which was also a familiar term for a husband. He was probably in his mid-fifties, with a handsome gaunt face and tired eyes, like most of the Chinese entrepreneurs I knew. He looked even more tired when he smiled.

I asked Lao Gong what he did. He responded in gibberish, something about scientific instruments used by hygiene inspectors to check for microbes in food.

“How did you get into such a specialized business?” I asked. He did not answer directly. Instead he said he had previously sold infrared devices used by surveyors to measure long distances. Chinese entrepreneurship was nothing if not opportunistic, and many businessmen were involved in a string of specialized and completely unrelated ventures. The classmate of one Chinese friend of mine ran restaurants, a chain of pharmacies, and an English school.

Lao Gong took us to an eight-thousand-square-meter Japanese restaurant whose chief selling point appeared to be that it was eight thousand square meters. The place was palatial: miles of plush red carpeting, stands of fake bamboo, giant tanks for lobster and abalone. Hostesses rushed up to Lao Gong and walked backward ahead of him, like courtiers afraid to turn their backs on the emperor. It turned out that Lao Gong owned yet another unrelated business—interior decoration—and this restaurant owed him money. “So I eat for free,” Lao Gong said, “the more the better.” He led us through a maze of hallways, grandly throwing open doors at random. I glimpsed private rooms the size of entire restaurants, an acre of table at which a squadron of sushi-eaters could sit down together. “He is the king of Dongguan,” Ben marveled.

We were joined at dinner by another businessman with a lined face and gentle, even more tired eyes; he and Lao Gong had grown up together (“His family bullied my family during the Cultural Revolution,” Lao Gong said). The other guests were a manager of a local bank and a teacher whom Lao Gong introduced as “the head of the middle school’s music department, who is great at singing karaoke.” Ben explained to me the nature of their friendship with Lao Gong: The bank manager approved his business loans, while the teacher made sure his son received good grades in school.

A young woman named Rong Rong sat next to Lao Gong. She was a senior at a university in Guangzhou, majoring in English. She wore a tailored brown wool suit with high heels and carried an expensive handbag. Rong Rong looked like a college student on a job interview, except that no college student in China dressed like that. She was Lao Gong’s mistress, but I could not bring myself to believe it. A girl like that could get a job at a multinational company or go abroad for graduate school. “Why would a girl like her be with a man like that?” I said to Ben.

Ben had first met Rong Rong with Lao Gong three years ago, when she was just a freshman. He shrugged. “She likes gifts.”

Over the fanciest meal I had ever eaten in Dongguan—fresh sashimi, Kobe beef, curry crab, sake—the men passed a stapled sheaf of papers back and forth. I asked to look at it: It was a list of point spreads on upcoming soccer matches in the English Premier League. The men were all big gamblers who visited the casinos of Macao several times a year.

Such men were known in China as dakuan—self-made businessmen whose wealth carried a strong whiff of corruption. They were widely despised for their flashiness and free spending; when one was arrested, usually along with the official who had profited from his bribes, it was cause for celebration. To many educated Chinese, the dakuan in their amoral greed stood for everything that was wrong with their country today. Perhaps it was perverse, but I liked them. When Lao Gong and his friends asked what my book was about, they listened to what I said and did not immediately tell me how I should write it; I was not pestered to prove my loyalty to China. They took things at face value, which went a long way toward explaining their success. They had nothing to prove.

The middle-school teacher was different: He insisted on categorizing and defining and pinning down everything, and he started with me. “So are you writing your book from the positive angle?” he asked.

I explained that there was no positive or negative, that I hoped the book would reflect how things really were. Later I overheard him say to someone else, “She is writing a book from the positive angle.”

Then he went to work on Ben. “When you go back to America, are you no longer used to eating Western food?”

Ben said he liked both Chinese food and Western food.

“Do you like Chinese food or Western food more?” the teacher asked.

“Chinese food,” Ben said dutifully. He said to me in English, “I can see where this is going.”

“Chinese food is the best food in the world,” the teacher declared. “And all Chinese people are good.”

“Really?” I said. “All Chinese people are good?”

“No,” answered Lao Gong, who had not taken part in our conversation until now. “Seventy percent of Chinese people are bad.” He spoke with such authority that the teacher did not dare contradict him. And there the matter rested: Seventy percent of Chinese people are bad. You could see why one man was the king of Dongguan and the other just a middle-school teacher who was great at singing karaoke.

 

THE CLUB AT THE SILVERWORLD HOTEL had its own entrance, flanked by sixteen hostesses who bowed deeply at the waist as we entered. Its lobby was done in luxe nightclub style: black interiors, fluorescent purple lighting, an entire wall of glass shelves filled with bottles of Chivas Regal and Johnnie Walker and Great Wall wine. The bottles were lit from behind, like rare works of art. We were ushered into a private room lined with couches that faced three television screens. The giant screen in the middle was for karaoke music videos; the one on the right was for selecting songs and ordering drinks. Lao Gong’s businessman friend tuned the left-hand screen to the Liverpool–Manchester United match and proceeded to ignore everyone for the night. Money trumped sex: no surprise there.

Rong Rong and Lao Gong sat down on the couch. She plucked a grape from a plate of fruit on the table and popped it in his mouth; he swallowed it expertly, like a trained seal. Servers brought in fruit plates, glasses, ice cubes, lemon slices, soda, Chivas, vodka. This parade of petty commerce would continue through the night, as people moved in and out of the room offering cigarettes, bouquets of red roses, oversize stuffed animals, and ethnic-style dance performances. A woman called a mami came in to tally which customers wanted sex and which just wanted to sing.

Then the girls entered. There were seven of them, wearing shiny gold evening gowns with spaghetti straps that made them look like high school girls on prom night. They lined up near the door, bare shoulders hunched against the powerful air-conditioning. A couple of them jostled each other and giggled, but no one raised her head to look at a customer. Each girl had a plastic tag clipped at her waist with a four-digit number. It was the length of the number that impressed me—the Silverworld Hotel had a digital capacity for ten thousand girls. There were parts of Mongolia where phone numbers weren’t even that long.

If a man liked a girl, he would tell the mami her number, and the girl would come and sit next to him on the couch and plant her hand on his thigh. Customers could be very picky, so the mami would send in wave after wave of girls, and a man could dismiss one after another like a sultan bored with his harem. But there was usually someone to satisfy even the most demanding customer. The Silverworld Hotel was not large by Dongguan standards, and it employed three hundred girls.

 

A YOUNG WOMAN NAMED AH LIN, number 1802, sat down next to me. “Do any of these men want to go out?” she whispered. Ah Lin was seventeen years old, with creamy white skin and the small, perfectly round face of a child. She had attended two years of high school in Chongqing before going out to work; her father was a migrant and her mother farmed. Ah Lin had initially planned to join a factory, but friends said that working in a karaoke bar was more lucrative. She had been a virgin when she started, and back then she had cried when men groped her too hard. Now on average she had sex with a customer four nights a week.

The working day at the Silverworld ran from 7:30 P.M. to 11:30 P.M. A girl made two hundred yuan an evening—twenty-five dollars—for sitting with a customer, pouring his drinks, placing fruit directly in his mouth, applauding his singing, and enduring his hugging, kissing, and groping.

“If you’re more popular, you earn more,” Ah Lin said.

I asked her what being “more popular” meant.

“If you have bigger breasts,” she said flatly, “or are more stylish.”If a girl went out with a customer for sex, the club charged eight hundred yuan for a single encounter; that was called kuaican, fast food. Spending the whole night cost one thousand yuan, though a satisfied customer might give double or triple that amount in tips. Some of the girls didn’t like to go with men very often. The ones who did could make twenty thousand yuan a month—$2,500, an astronomical sum in the migrant world. The girls were not supposed to smoke on the job, to eat too much of the food that the customers ordered, or to have sex with anyone in the karaoke room. Other than that, they lived a casual and disorderly existence. In a city where most lives were ruled by the factory clock, they slept as late as they pleased and worked fewer hours than anyone I had met.

Ah Lin had seen enough of the world to draw some conclusions. Sichuanese men were the worst gropers, and stingy to boot. Foreign men were kinder than Chinese men. Some of the customers asked the girls to be their girlfriends, but Ah Lin would never fall for that. Yet she said she would like to have a boyfriend, and she wanted to get married someday. No one back home knew what Ah Lin did for a living. She told her parents she worked in a factory, and she sent home only a fraction of her earnings so they would not become suspicious. Some of the girls had worked in a factory when they first came out from home, but they would never go back to that life now. They had no illusions about that.

 

THE MAMI SITS AT THE APEX of the karaoke world. She matches up customers who want to have sex with girls willing to go out on a given night; a girl can request to stay in if she is having her period or not feeling well. The mami gets a cut from each girl’s earnings, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 percent. A good mami earns the loyalty of her girls, and when she moves to a different club the girls go too.

Two types of women work in the karaoke rooms. “DJs” manage the rooms, serving food and drink and helping customers select songs; the women who drink with customers are called zuotai xiaojie, young ladies sitting at tables. Xiaojie usually have sex with customers, and some DJs do as well. DJs don’t give a cut to a mami, but they must bring in a certain number of customers each month or pay a fee to the club. Many clubs hire more DJs than they have rooms, pitting them against each other to please customers and earn more money for the club. The lowest people in the club hierarchy are the waiters, who come and go as invisible as eunuchs: Cut off from the sex trade, they have the least earning power.

The karaoke world is dreamy and unreal. Young women in evening gowns laugh at all your jokes, until their flattery feels as natural as breathing. “You have such well-preserved skin!” one xiaojie said to me, then turned to Ben and exclaimed, “Your Chinese is so good!” They tease their customers and address them as laogong, husband; the men seem to like this, perhaps because they are unable to imagine, even in their wildest fantasies, a world without wives. Every once in a while someone stands up to sing and everyone else applauds. The room is dark and it has no windows, and your glass is always full.

The young women were disarmingly frank about what they did for a living. I met many of them on two successive nights at different clubs; when I said I was writing a book about Dongguan and asked about their work, not a single one played coy or denied that she had sex with customers. Occasionally I sensed small deceptions. They might overstate their earnings, or claim they had been tricked into this line of work; several told me, rather unconvincingly, that they planned to quit their jobs the following day. But they were not cynical and hard, as I had expected them to be. They were girlish and they giggled like teenagers, and sometimes as we were talking they started to cry.

I was torn about what to think of them. It would certainly be awful to have sex with the type of Chinese man who frequented karaoke lounges; in that respect, they had my sympathy. Yet much of their workday was spent in leisurely fashion—sipping cocktails, eating peanuts, watching music videos—and for that, they made more money in a month than someone like Min earned in a whole year. The initial decision to enter this world was surprisingly casual. Most of the young women I talked to had started working at a karaoke club because a friend or cousin was doing it, the same way a migrant would go to a certain city or factory because she knew someone there. After they arrived, they came up with reasons to stay: It was easy work, it paid well, and you could learn about the world.

The karaoke girls came from better circumstances than the factory girls I had met—that, too, was a surprise. Often they had grown up in a small city or a town rather than on the farm; a fair number were only children or the youngest in their families, which meant they had fewer financial burdens. Quite a few had attended high school, which placed them in the rural elite. Ah Lin, with two years of high school, was the most educated young person in her village. “At home they are expecting me to come out and make a success of myself,” she said. “If they knew I was working in a place like this, they would never forgive me.”

Compared to the factory girls, they were freer to do what they wanted. Maybe they were too free, and lacking a clear purpose had made them lose their bearings once they came to the city. No one had forced them into prostitution. In fact, they had chosen this line of work because they expected more out of life. Most of the girls wanted to return home eventually to set up a clothing shop or a hair salon—almost everybody knew someone who had done this. A motivated young woman could save enough money in a year or two to pull it off. But it was easy to lose your way.

The next night at another club in a five-star hotel, I met Ding Xia. She was twenty-three years old, tall, with sculpted cheekbones and a high nose—genuinely pretty, unlike most of the girls, who were just skinny and young. She had been out from home for six years and she claimed to have saved four hundred thousand yuan. Once she had made another hundred thousand, she said, she would move to a city where no one knew her, open a shop, and live a simple life. Her story did not hold together; for one thing, setting up a shop cost only a fraction of the money Ding Xia was talking about. Her lies seemed intended to justify, perhaps to herself, why she was still here.

It was also possible for a xiaojie to rise and become a mami. The mami in the club where Ding Xia worked was petite and businesslike; she wore a navy-blue pantsuit and carried a walkie-talkie, and the title on her business card read promotions manager. She told me she was in charge of sixty girls and had previously run a clothing business.

“Do a lot of girls rise from being a xiaojie to being a mami?” I asked.

“Very few,” she said. “One percent.”

“Why not?”

“You need to have skills to do this,” she said. She politely toasted me with a glass of beer and excused herself. As soon as she had left, Ding Xia turned to me and said, “She used to be a xiaojie here.” Then she put her finger to her lips. Ding Xia had worked at this club long enough to know. But most people moved in and out of jobs so quickly that to invent the past, along with the future, was easy enough.

 

AS THE NIGHT WINDS DOWN, the fantasy world dissolves: The food is gone, the bottles drunk, and everyone is tired of singing. Some of the xiaojie excuse themselves to change their clothes; they return wearing jeans and windbreakers that make them look alarmingly young. They yawn and rest their heads on the shoulders of the men. Sometimes this preserves for another moment the illusion that they are their sweethearts—but what they resemble most are sleepy and affectionate daughters, up past their bedtime.

Finally the bill for the evening arrives. There is a fee for the room, a bill for food and drink, and two hundred yuan, cash, paid to each xiaojie. The woman selling stuffed animals returns to the room to collect, but the colleague of Ben’s who had showered a sulky young woman with attention all night long does not want to spend money on her now that the night is over. She relinquishes a stuffed bear reluctantly—another daughter, this one a little spoiled. The DJ punches her contact information into another customer’s Palm Pilot for future room reservations, and everyone leaves the karaoke room together. The men, accompanied by the mami, head toward the elevator, and the girls disappear down a different hallway.

*   *   *

 

Occasionally a woman hit the jackpot. Ah Ning, Chunming’s recently divorced friend, started dating a wealthy local Dongguan man. One evening she invited Chunming and me over for dinner. The block of apartments where she lived felt heavy with decay; wastewater from air-conditioning units dripped down the sides of buildings in rusty orange trickles, like tears. But inside the apartment was spacious and nicely decorated, with light colors and wood floors.

Ah Ning was wearing a long ivory skirt trimmed with eyelet lace and a matching cardigan. She looked pretty and happy, and she had cooked us a dinner of steamed fish, spicy spare ribs, and a soup of chicken feet, papaya, and tomatoes. Over dinner she told us about her boyfriend, who was away on a business trip. He was eight years older than she was. The two of them had recently returned from a vacation in Beijing, where he had spent most of his time gambling on soccer matches.

“What does he do for a living?” Chunming asked.

“He does everything,” Ah Ning said.

Chunming’s eyes widened. “Everything?”

“He grew up around here. All of the people from here are involved in gambling and smuggling,” Ah Ning said. “It’s just what they grew up with.” At her boyfriend’s urging, Ah Ning had started to play high-stakes mahjong and had recently lost six thousand yuan—about $750—in one game.

Each detail sounded worse than the last. “Is he good to you?” I asked.

“Oh, he is so good to me!” she said.

Chunming asked, more pointedly, “Has he been married before?”

Ah Ning lowered her voice. “Yes. He has a daughter, about seven.”

That day Chunming had stumbled on a new method of meeting men. Someone had posted a photograph of a beautiful woman on a matchmaking Web site but listed Chunming’s phone number next to it. She wasn’t sure if it was a mistake or a prank, but all day long she had been bombarded with phone calls from suitors.

Are you the woman in the picture?

Do you have long hair?

Are you 1.66 meters tall?

After dinner, Chunming went into the living room to watch a television serial about doctors in ancient Korea struggling to aid the residents of a leper colony. Chunming found their humanitarian efforts very moving, but she was constantly interrupted by phone calls from strange men.

“Hello,” she would say. “Who is this?”

Listening. Then: “Yes, someone posted that picture and that information but it isn’t mine. Only the phone number is mine.”

Pause. “Never mind, we can still make friends,” she would say in honeyed tones. “Where are you from? What do you do?”

The men did industrial automation and worked as factory foremen; they were from Jiangsu and Gansu. After chatting some more, Chunming would say she was busy at the moment, but they should keep in touch. She was always the one to cut the conversation short. After she hung up, she scrolled through her phone messages. Hello, I am a factory manager in Tangxia. She beamed. “It doesn’t matter. I can still make new friends. And maybe some of them will want to buy parts from our company.” I had to admire her resourcefulness. She had turned a case of mistaken identity into her personal dating service, with the backup option of convincing these men to purchase parts for industrial molds.

“That woman must be really beautiful,” Chunming said as she scrolled through her list of messages and missed calls.

“And yet when you tell them it’s not you,” I said, “they still go on talking to you.”

“So many people in this city are so lonely,” Ah Ning said.

 

THAT EVENING, we decided to check out the local nightlife, which centered on a newly opened shopping plaza of clubs and bars. Inside the places were dark and deserted, with purple neon lights and throbbing music and small groups of heavily made-up women whose air of unfathomable boredom marked them as prostitutes. Chunming fielded phone messages as we walked.

I am a government official. I have lived here six years.

What are you doing tonight?

Hello, can we make friends?

We ended up in a bar near Ah Ning’s home. It was crowded with young office workers, and we stayed long enough to witness some strange scenes. After many drinking games, a young woman threw herself at a man who was probably a work colleague. She wrapped her arms around his neck and nestled into his chest. The man did not embrace so much as endure: He stood with his arms hanging stiffly at his sides, like a soldier consigned to guard duty during a rainstorm. When I looked again, the young woman had recovered and was chatting with her girlfriends; apparently the man had taken the opportunity to escape the bar. Nearby, a woman with fleshy thighs in a leopard-print miniskirt danced in a metal cage raised a few feet above the floor. After several songs, she crawled out of the cage through a low square opening in the back, like a door for a dog. She padded onto the floor, brushed off her knees, and then—in a small moment of glory appreciated only by me—resumed the upright posture of a primate. She walked over to the bar and ordered a drink.

A girlfriend of Ah Ning’s joined us. Five bottles of Tsingtao beer materialized on our table, and the women played drinking games. Ah Ning and her friend drank fast; several men from another table wandered over for a dice game. Around midnight, Chunming suggested that she and I leave for Ah Ning’s apartment, where we were spending the night. The men were still sending her messages.

Where are you now?

What are you doing?

I am a bundle of flaming fire.

 

AT ONE A.M., the phone rang. It was Ah Ning’s girlfriend. Ah Ning was too drunk to walk, could we help? Chunming went out. The friend lived one unit over in the same apartment complex where we were staying, and Chunming returned to tell me that they had put Ah Ning to sleep on the friend’s couch.

At two A.M., the phone rang again. Ah Ning was wandering around the hallway and refused to sleep, could we help? Chunming went out again. I struggled back into uneasy sleep.

At 2:30 A.M., Chunming returned. She walked into the guest room where I was sleeping, turned on the overhead light, and sat down cross-legged on the bed. “I have something to tell you,” she said. When she had arrived at the friend’s apartment, Ah Ning was rambling incoherently about having to go upstairs and explain things to a man. Chunming and the friend didn’t know what she was talking about, but they finally agreed to take her upstairs. The man who answered the door was skinny and dark, wearing shorts and an undershirt. He and three other men in similar attire were playing mahjong. The man let Ah Ning and her friends in, led them to a spare bedroom, pointed to a bed where they should deposit her, and returned to his game.

It dawned on Chunming that this man was Ah Ning’s boyfriend. He wasn’t away on a trip, and he did not appear to be at all concerned about her. “She lied and said he was on a business trip, when he was home playing mahjong with his friends,” Chunming told me. “And she always says that he’s so good to her. And this guy was old! And really ugly!”

The next morning, we stopped by the man’s apartment to leave Ah Ning’s purse with her. The boyfriend answered the door. His face was narrow and tough and darkish red, like a cord of beef jerky; he looked to be in his forties. He did not say a word to either of us. Chunming was right: He didn’t look like much. Ah Ning was still asleep in the spare bedroom. She could barely open her eyes, and she accepted her purse without saying anything. “Call me when you wake up,” Chunming said.

The next time I saw Chunming, I asked her about Ah Ning. What had she said about that night? Was she still with the same boyfriend? Chunming said her friend had not been honest with her about it, and they did not speak of it again. Ah Ning had not, after all, hit the dating jackpot. She was just pretending to be happy. In the end her relationship seemed like just another case of mistaken identity.