Jump to navigation. As younger Chinese became more independent - and reluctant to have their parents decide their love lives for them - the markets began to fade. It's a hot summer Sunday morning, and Mrs Zhao is making herself comfortable on a hard wooden park bench. In a couple of hours, this quiet section of Zhongshan Park, a green oasis adjoining the Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing, will be noisier than a fish market. It is business that brings Mrs Zhao here, but it is a trade that is going to be far from straightforward. She lays out on the ground in front of her bench a carefully laminated A4 paper that has on it a few lines of text.
A crowd of gray-haired parents of single adults negotiates with one another along a stretch of Beijing's Zhongshan Park. These confabs occur on a strip of pavement lined on one side with rainbows of tulips and, on the other side, with the moat of the Forbidden City. A woman, whose son was born in , asks whether I have a daughter. Yes, I tell her, one that is the same age as her son.
Having hit upon enough discussions about marriage market on our social media feeds, the Elephant team that's us, Biyi and Yan decided to visit Zhongshan Park on a Sunday afternoon, which, according to the internet, is currently the biggest, oldest marriage market of Beijing. We had so much curiosity, yet also a lot of anxiety and even fear! All these traditional common sayings, the things that today's young Chinese no longer buy or even know much about, granted historical legitimacy to the parents who had come to, or are still coming to the marriage market for their kids. After meeting each other and paying the 3 rmb entry tickets for the park, me and Yan headed in with equal amount of excitement and doubt: so far, everything we've heard about the marriage market is from strangers online; what if the market no longer exists?
Jump to navigation. As younger Chinese became more independent — and reluctant to have their parents decide their love lives for them — the markets began to fade. In a couple of hours, this quiet section of Zhongshan Park, a green oasis adjoining the Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing, will be noisier than a fish market. It is business that brings Mrs Zhao here, but it is a trade that is going to be far from straightforward. Marriage market, parent matchmaking meetings funded by hundreds of single adults.