Results tagged “marriage”

As foreigners in Shanghai, we understand the difficulties with assimilation: if you're not from Shanghai you are different, no matter where you're from. In all honesty, though, it may be easier to be a foreigner in Shanghai than it is to be an waidiren, an outsider from another part of China.

You know what's a damper on any big day? A Divorce. And so at least one municipality has decided it's not going to let couples unwed during the 60th anniversary. Seven out of ten Chongqing districts have said that they will not process divorces during the eight-day holiday, even as they're getting extra staff to help with the weddings. Supposedly, they can't cope with the "high demand" for weddings and also issue divorces at the same time. Luckily for them, nobody's tried to process a divorce yet anyhow, though we wonder what kind of urgent circumstances would make couples want to split during a specific week and whether it then might be a good idea for Chongqing to ban knives as well, just in case.

So we've sat on this piece of news over the weekend and we're still not sure what to think about it. Is it super awesome that a Chinese wedding couple decided to attach a 2.16km long train to the back of a wedding gown, complete with 9,999 silk roses, in an attempt to challenge the current world record holding wedding dress (1.58km)... or is it just super tacky? Zhao Peng and Lin Rong got married in eastern Jilin province, and it took their 200 wedding guests three hours to unroll the fabric of Lin Rong's dress. After the ceremony, he cut the dress down to 1,984.1022m to represent his bride's date of birth and then added 608 crystals to represent each day they dated. The whole dress cost about 40,000RMB - probably equivalent to the annual salary of his schoolteacher bride. Source: BBC

Renowned sexologist and sociologist Li Yinhe (李银河) in a recent blogpost on the lives of tongqi (同妻), heterosexual women who find themselves married to gay Chinese men (translation adapted from Yawning Bread):

Despite stereotypes, it seems like Shanghainese men are less henpecked than you would think: they're less likely to wash their wives' panties than other Chinese. Wait, what?...

Bet you never thought this would be a victim of the recession: foreign men with yellow fever. According to a Shanghai Daily article, they've been losing their attraction as potential husbands for unmarried Chinese women since the financial crisis began.

A record 2,662 couples got married in Shanghai on Saturday, according to figures from the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau. That's three times the daily average of roughly 800 marriage applications and about 30% more than last year's Valentine's Day. A representative of the bureau said that younger couples are more likely to pick fashionable Western festivals, especially V-Day, to get married. We say these Shanghainese ladies will probably regret it in the future when they end up getting combined Valentines-slash-Anniversary gifts from their husbands. Source: Shanghai Daily

For lots of young folk going back to visit their families, the Spring Festival can be a bit of a pressure pot. Many times, Chinese parents like to follow up the customary greeting of "Have you eaten?" with "So when are you getting married?" One 31-year-old in Ningbo was so desperate not to disappoint mom and dad that he posted a notice asking to hire a pretend girlfriend.

Do you know of a marriage that failed after the couple became expats? Karen Mazurkewich, who previously worked in Hong Kong for the Wall Street Journal, is seeking interviews over the next few weeks about how the unique aspects of living and working abroad could spell ruin for the wedded.

A Date With Lu Yu《鲁豫有约》is one of the most influential talkshows in China which has been known to constantly push the envelope and to broach topics previously considered too hot to touch. One such episode is the one below which features two homosexual men from the Sichuan Province — who, long before the word "gay" had entered the Chinese lexicon — married each other, adopted a son and have been together for 21 years.