A Chinese Daughter Tells All

I met her in Beijing over my 清明节 — Tomb Sweeping Holiday break, a member of my running group that has chapters all over the world. Bilingual, sharply intelligent, fiercely independent. She reminded me of me.

We ran together, then the next day she messaged me, asked if I wanted to go out for dinner with her and her fiancee, offered to show me around town a bit. I happy agreed.

We chatted life and work over bowls of beef noodle soup and glass bottles of orange soda, a Beijing specialty she grew up with. Her husband, in French accented Chinese, joined in the conversation as he could, alternating between languages. All of us are teachers, all teaching our native languages. Her fiancee teaches French, me English, her Chinese. The conversation was lively, pleasant. I felt safe.

It was only later over three non-alcoholic drinks at the local run club bar that the scratch we made in the surface opened, and we dove in.

Here’s what I learned that night from an open minded Chinese woman, a daughter, a sister, someone mentally not bound to the trappings of the culture she was born into, and therefore struggles from within its confines all the more.

Academic Corruption

First of all, I learned that wealthy families in China hire a service for their children that will help them with their academic path. Help, here, is perhaps not strong enough of a word. These agencies will take care of the child’s every academic need. They will ensure their admission to the best schools. They will manufacture reference letters. They will “help” them write their papers and do their homework, even. All this to get them admitted to prestigious colleges overseas. These students, through perhaps little to no merit of their own, then end up overseas, completely unprepared for the rigors of university life abroad.

While I, as a newly minted high school teacher, am aware of some level of bribery in China (and let’s admit, in the US as well), this level of corruption was previously completely unbeknownst to me.

My own students, most of which I can presume are doing their own homework, of which I see and grade personally (unless they use AI, which is painfully obvious, and earns them a failing mark), will have it hard enough in university abroad. I work for a Canadian-Chinese high school where most of the students will attend university overseas, primarily in Canada.

They will face many difficulties. Cultural differences in academic philosophy abounds. Plagiarism is not a thing here in China. Students are encouraged to copy, memorize, learn things by rote, listen, not speak, not put forth creative ideas, not have their own ideas at all, a world away from the creativity and independent thinking we in the West (presumably) encourage in our education. I have to tell students repeatedly that if they hand in plagiarized work abroad they are likely to be expelled, and there may even be legal consequences.

Family Tensions

Family is the backbone of Chinese society. However for many young women and men, including my new friend, tensions run high.

Young people 25–35 years old are given intense pressure by their families to marry and have children, to the point where many do not want to return home on holidays and face the scrutiny.

Parents will often write marriage advertisements for their children and look for a suitable spouse without the adult child ever knowing. Boyfriends or girlfriends found unsuitable by the parent are done away with. The parents simply tell their child to break up with them, and that’s that. You can’t say no to your parents. Filial piety is the number one value in Chinese society, and if you break it, the shame and guilt is severe.

There are still arranged marriages in China. A quick Google search says it is rare, but I found out that night that it is still happening. A bride and groom meet just days before their wedding. The parents have chosen a spouse based on his financial status.

Why? The logistics here can get very complicated. In order for a man to marry a woman in China, he has to at the very least buy a car and a house for the family. Buying a house in China is incredibly expensive, many times over the yearly wages of most Chinese citizens. Some brides’ families will go even further and request that the house be in the bride’s name alone, a condition most grooms’ families cannot accept. There have been cases of a couple divorcing soon after the wedding under these circumstances, presumbably so the bride and her family can get a free house for themselves.

Mother Daughter Tensions

For my new friend, her relationship with her mother is fraught. She told me when she met her fiancee, her mother cried everyday, and it continued for years. Still to this day her mother does not accept him. Why? Because he’s a foreigner. He’s going to take her daughter far away, back to France. It doesn’t matter that he lives and works in Beijing and has for years prior to meeting her. She’s as good as gone.

And why can’t she leave? She has to stay to care for her mother in her old age. There’s a saying in Chinese, you have kids to insure against old age. China doesn’t have a formal system of eldercare, so the pressure falls entirely upon the next generation to care for their parents. Usually the daughter leaves the family to go live with the husband and his parents and help care for them. This is why sons are so valued. Luckily my friend has a younger brother who can relieve some of the pressure she is under to care for her mom.

“Isn’t it selfish?”, my new friend asks, “that my mom just wants me to care for her and doesn’t want me to live my life and have my own happiness? Her entire focus is on what I can do for her.”

Having Children: a Cultural Prison for Women

We talked the longest about children. How the entirety of Chinese society is focused on the child, to the point where the mother becomes a non-entity. She is just the caretaker of the child. We talked about how scared she is to lose her identity to motherhood, and, more importantly, how she doesn’t feel like she can love a child because she felt she never recieved love from her mother.

I can relate.

“But”, she said, “my fiancee can love our children, and his family can be good to the children. So even if I can’t, I can learn from them, and slowly I can figure it out.”

“I’m scared though”, she added, “I’m really scared. I’m not sure I can do it.”

Me too.

In the US, if you don’t feel right in your family, you can distance yourself. You can walk away. You can even estrange yourself completely, like I have. You can’t in China. You cannot risk breaking filial piety. Your job on this earth is to take care of your parents, serve your parents. Then, once you have a child, your job is to take care of them, to serve them. There is precious little space left in the middle for you to exist.

Inside Looking Out — Outside Looking In

It strikes me that I am free from these norms as a foreigner in China. I already know I am not really suited for marriage to a Chinese man, unless he perhaps has a child already from a previous marriage, and his ex-wife is raising that child so that I don’t have to, and he doesn’t want any more children with me. It’s a narrow window of opportunity. I am here to live and experience life for the time I am here, as yet undetermined. Perhaps I will meet a foreigner here and they will take me away, as my friend’s mother is concerned about.

My friend, though, she’s not free from China. She’s bound by China. What’s worse, she is painfully aware. She knows she doesn’t want to raise children in this environment, with the stress and pressure to perform, to be perfect, to achieve and accomplish and please. She’s had her own crisis, spent years reading pyschology books learning about life, walked herself out of her own dark mental caves of despair. Maybe she’s bound for France, maybe she lives child-free in Beijing.

Either way, she’s me. She’s me if I was born Chinese. My Belarussian mother her Chinese mother. My life reflected in the red pool of hers, ripples shimmering out in all directions, disorting both our figures, blending them into one.