"The only thing I care about in a woman is her worldview," he said, his good
humor souring slightly as the hours went by and we persisted that his statement
contravened the laws of biology.
I thought about that train ride of 35 years ago - it was March 1972 - because
of an item that appeared in one of the newspapers here the other day.
It was a comparison of personal ads over the years, or since the first personal
ads started appearing in China in 1981.
Even by 1981, Little Huang would no longer have had to maintain his
ultra-politically correct position.
Mao was safely under glass in his Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, and nobody's
personals said, "Good proletarian seeking lifelong companion to make world
revolution together."
But nor had anyone in authority yet decreed in 1981 that it was all right to
want to be rich.
Private cars were still a year or two away, as distant as other impossible
dreams that, by now, have become everyday realities in China.
And so the typical personal ad ran something like this:
"I am a preparatory Party member. My parents passed away and I have four
brothers. I love literature and do not smoke or drink. I work in a coal mine,
with a monthly salary of 80 yuan. I am seeking a woman for marriage who is
kind-hearted, can manage housework, and has a good job."
A whole, now-obsolete ideology is contained in that message, even without any
expressed concern for a would-be wife's political outlook. The fact that the
writer was a coal miner, with a monthly salary of about $10, and a preparatory
member of the Communist Party were obvious badges of honor, and, it seems,
romantic adornments.
Class background still counted - or at least people thought it counted - after
the years in the Cultural Revolution when to be from a peasant, worker or
soldier family was everything good, and to be from a former bourgeois family
was a mark of evil.
Things changed pretty quickly as China's economic reforms took hold, and by the
end of the 1980s, the Communist authorities had declared there was nothing
wrong with getting rich. Still, the move toward rampant materialism was still
only getting started, and life was pretty modest.
"I'm well educated and nice, gentle and quiet," said one 32-year-old woman's
ad, dated 1987, and introducing a crucial, once-forbidden word. "I'm looking
for an honest and enterprising man with similar conditions, from either home or
abroad."
The once banned word of course was enterprising, though equally new was the
interest in a man from abroad, probably an overseas Chinese likely to be
wealthier than a native son.
By 1995, with uncontrolled, semi-lawless capitalism well entrenched, personal
ads started to list the salary and luxury possessions of the person trying to
attract a mate - sleek, usually black, German cars with tinted windows and the
like.
And, in contrast to poor Little Huang, who by 1995 would have been middle-aged,
men and women were letting it be known that they themselves were physically
attractive, and that they were looking for the same in a prospective partner.
In a way, what was reflected in personal ads was the simple but earthshaking
fact that the Chinese after all those years of revolution had gotten the right
to have the same faults of greed and vanity as any other people.
They don't have political freedom. Their newspapers and Web sites are censored
and filtered. The great movement for democracy that had produced the Tiananmen
demonstrations of 1989 is well past and shows no signs of a revival. But the
Chinese have won the right to be as acquisitively bourgeois as they want to be,
and one attribute of being bourgeois is to want pretty things, including a
pretty wife or handsome husband.
But the most recent personal ads show signs that this may be wearing a bit
thin, or at least there's an impression that the seekers of mates need to show
something deeper than mere material possessions or good looks. The ads have now
started to brandish a certain spiritual quest, even if the wish for money is
expressed in the next sentence.
"I grew up abroad, but for some reason the traditions of 5,000 years are deep
in my heart," reads an example from this year. "I treat people without guile
and with a sincere heart. I hate hackneyed love, especially material love. My
personal fortune: over 5 million yuan. I am skinny but robust. I'm looking for
somebody who's elegant, comely and slim, with a personal fortune of more than
more than 2 million yuan."
A little bit of everything makes its appearance in that paragraph, including a
love of money and the wisdom to know money isn't everything - or at least the
wisdom to pay lip service to that notion.
It's a long way from that 1972 train ride, though, of course, we suspected that
Little Huang was lying when he insisted beauty meant nothing to him and the
revolution everything, and I suspect that he suspected that we suspected he was
lying.
