Sticky or sweet – China’s tricky choice; The country witnessed a clash of eastern and western cultures

February 18, 2014 4:36 pm

Sticky or sweet – China’s tricky choice

By Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai

The country witnessed a clash of eastern and western cultures, writes Patti Waldmeir

It hadn’t happened in a generation: Valentine’s day, that most mercenary and occidental of holidays, coincided in China last week with Lantern Festival, culmination of the lunar new year holiday, oriental and traditional. Talk about culture clash.

Sticky rice dumplings with the family, or Lafite and Louis Vuitton with the girlfriend? The choice was clear: east or west. Nobody could choose both.

The last time the two holidays coincided was 1995 – but that was before Cupid was canonised in China. These days Valentine’s day is celebrated at least as enthusiastically in Beijing as in Boston. Even I got an avalanche of Valentine greetings; the last time I got that lucky was in 1960, when sending a Valentine to each child was a requirement for graduation from kindergarten.

So who won this latest culture quarrel? Surveys published by Chinese media and social networking sites found a clear majority – and sometimes as many as 70-90 per cent – of young people claiming to have celebrated with parents rather than lovers. Even allowing for a certain amount of filial piety inflation in the results, it looks like dumplings beat bonbons hands down.

One couple tried to have it both ways: “My boyfriend and I are both only children, so we took the whole day off. First we accompanied my parents to shop at the supermarket and then make dumplings for dinner. Then afterward, we had another dinner at my boyfriend’s parents’ house. Only afterward did we have some time for ourselves. We were exhausted but we took a walk and spent some time in a quiet bar,” says one culture clasher quoted in the Beijing News.

Thousands of couples tried to get the best of both worlds by getting married on the double-lucky double holiday; the Shanghai registry office opened its doors especially at 6am to accommodate the queue. The market tried to do its bit, too: Chinese bakeries offered Lantern Festival dumplings flavoured with Valentine rose petals, in a bid to bridge the big divide.

Lovemaking, per se, isn’t antithetical to the spirit of Lantern Festival. Centuries ago it was the only day of the year when unmarried girls were allowed out of the house to parade around the streets looking for someone to marry – under the guise of lantern gazing. But that was before Ferrero Rocher and Louis Vuitton first traversed the Silk Road to establish a colony dedicated to St Valentine in the Middle Kingdom.

But it wasn’t just consumerism that detracted from the romance of this year’s Cupid worship. In some quarters love itself fell out of favour. Netizens collaborated to use a crowd funding website to buy out all the odd numbered seats for the movie Beijing Love Story at one Shanghai cinema on Valentine’s night. The goal? To prevent lovers from enjoying the film together.

The organisers put a sign outside the ticket office saying “Destroy Valentine’s day”, though they insist it was a joke. But there is nothing funny about the underlying frustration that appears to have driven many participants. Unmarried urbanites in China are increasingly fed up with being stigmatised for being single – especially at this time of year. According to one online survey, 89 per cent of respondents said they knew someone who was grilled about marriage prospects during the recent new year holiday.

Some spinsters and bachelors seem increasingly minded to fight back against what used to be seen as legitimate familial pressure to marry. Tens of thousands of online singles, for example, launched a boycott of the dating website baihe.com after it aired television commercials over the new year holiday showing an urban professional agreeing to marry the next guy who comes along, just to please her dying grandmother. The girl shows up at the end of the commercial in a wedding dress proclaiming: “I should stop being picky.” Granny couldn’t have said it any better.

Most urban Chinese parents have only one child so they consider it their life-long job to make sure he or she gets the marriage thing right. But increasingly, imported ideas about social freedoms – such as the freedom to choose a mate, or even the freedom to refuse to choose one – seem to be creeping in right behind Cupid and Ferrero Rocher. It’s that old east-west thing all over again.

Lucky for China’s youth, Occident and Orient won’t meet on the same calendar square again soon. But even without another Valentine-Lantern double header next year, one thing seems clear: the dumpling-bonbon wars are just getting going.