Age of Ambition (7 page)

There was something different about her generation, the young men and women born in the seventies. You could hear it in their speech, their comfort with saying “I” and “me,” where their parents would have used the plural: “our work unit” and “our family.” (Older Chinese took to calling her cohort the
wo yi dai
—the “Me Generation.”)

When Gong was sixteen, her test scores earned her a place at the top local high school, a transformative moment for a farming family. Shortly before school was to start, she was riding into town on a tractor-taxi, on her way to restock her ice pop supply, when the tractor plunged into a ditch. The other passengers were thrown clear, but she had been sitting on the front bench. Her right leg was crushed, and her nose was nearly severed. She would recover, but when she got out of the hospital, wearing a hip cast, she discovered that a rural school could not accommodate a student unable to walk. The school suggested she withdraw.

Gong's mother, Jiang Xiaoyuan, would have none of it. She moved into the dorm and carried her daughter on her back—up and down the stairs to the classrooms, back and forth to the toilet. (Gong trained herself to use the bathroom no more than twice a day.) While Gong was in class, her mother hustled outside to the street to sell fruit from baskets to make extra money. I wondered if the story was a metaphor, until I met her mother. “There was one especially tall building, the laboratory, and her class was up on the fourth floor,” Jiang said, scowling at the memory of it. Gong had never seriously considered an alternative. “School was the only way out,” Jiang told me. “We never wanted for her to work in the fields like us.”

*   *   *

Gong's medical bills plunged her parents into debt. “My accident made a mess of the family,” she said. It was 1994, and China's epic labor migration was gathering. In 1978, nearly 80 percent of the Chinese population had been working on a farm; by 1994 this figure had fallen to less than 50 percent. Gong dropped out of the elite local high school and set off for the factories on the coast.

As migration grew, the government tried to manage the course of the flood. One slogan urged rural people to find work close to home: “Leave the Land, but Not the Countryside! Enter the Factories, but Not the Cities!” The state officially named the new migrants the “floating population”—a term that shared Chinese characters with the words for hooligans and stray dogs. Police blamed crime on what they called “Triple Withouts”—migrants without a home, a job, or a reliable source of income. Cities sought to limit the number of new arrivals. In Beijing, the local government barred various categories of people, including “beggars and buskers, fortune tellers and other people engaged in feudal superstitious activities.” If they were found, they would be sent home. Beijing offered official “green cards” to parcel out access to public schools and housing, but it set the standards so high that only 1 percent of the new migrants qualified. Shanghai published a handbook called
The Guide to Entering Shanghai: For Brothers and Sisters Who Come to Shanghai to Work
, in which the opening chapter was entitled “Do Not Blindly Come to Shanghai for Work.”

Still, they came. By 2007, 135 million rural migrants were living in the cities, and the “floating population” became known by the government as the “outside population.” The State Council ordered governments to improve insurance and workplace-injury protections, and to ensure the migrants were “baptized in civilization,” as the Party press liked to put it.

In the city of Zhuhai, Gong found work on an assembly line making Panasonic televisions. She soldered two wires together, two thousand times a day, and sent money back to her family. If she finished early, the foreman raised her quota for the next day. The factory had an in-house newspaper, and after a few months Gong wrote a piece of spectacular propaganda entitled “I Love Panasonic, I Love My Home.” It had the desired effect; she was taken off the assembly line and promoted to editor. She'd found a kind of contentment in her job. Then one day a former classmate visited and spent the weekend regaling her with news of their old friends rising up through college and moving to exotic new places. In the confines of the factory, she'd come to see herself as a success; she worked with her mind, not her fingers. Yet hearing about what she was missing was shattering.

She cursed her decision to drop out of school. “It was weak and naïve,” she said. China's economy was rising on all sides of her, and she was trapped in the basement. Factories making televisions and clothes needed uncomplaining workers with no promise of job security or training or progress. Migrants like her were earning just half of what regular residents of Guangdong were earning, and the gap was widening. If she stayed in Guangdong, she could look forward to a life of second-class health care and education. She would have to pay five or six times what local parents paid to educate a child with a local
hukou
. More than three-quarters of all women who died in childbirth in the province were migrants with no access to prenatal care.

In the electronics businesses, assembly-line bosses preferred female employees, because they were more conscientious about detail work. The only men in her factory were security guards and truck loaders and cooks. “If I ever wanted to settle down, those were going to be my choices,” Gong said. She knew the dangers of going back to the village. It was 1995, and already the income gap between the countryside and the city in China was wider than anywhere else in the world except Zimbabwe and South Africa. She had to get to a city. She said, “I decided to go back to school.”

“Everyone in the village was against the idea,” she went on. “They said, ‘You're a twenty-one-year-old woman. Go and get married!'” In the village hierarchy, the only person who ranked lower than a young woman was a young woman who had something better in mind for her future. But her parents supported her decision, and the school allowed her to reenroll in the eleventh grade. She scored the highest rank in the county on the national college entrance test, and earned a coveted spot at Peking University, where Chairman Mao, who arrived as a twenty-four-year-old in the capital, once said, “Beijing is like a crucible in which one cannot but be transformed.”

Before she enrolled, she, like Lin Yifu, changed her given name. She became Haiyan, a reference to the small, hardy seabird in an old revolutionary poem by Maxim Gorky, “The Song of the Storm Petrel.” It was one of Lenin's favorites. She cared nothing about the revolution, but she loved the image of a bird that turns to face the storm—“one free soul,” as Gorky put it, that “floats unharmed above the chaos.”

At Peking University, Gong studied Chinese literature and went on to Fudan University, in Shanghai, for a master's degree in journalism. By her second year, she had gained a sense of professional momentum. But something was lacking: a love life.

*   *   *

Of all the upheavals in Chinese life, there was none more intimate than the opportunity to choose one's mate. For centuries, village matchmakers and parents paired off young people of comparable social and economic status—of “family doors of equal size”—with minimal participation from the bride and groom.

Confucius has exhaustive advice about justice and duty, but he mentions emotion,
qing
, only once in the
Analects
, a record of his teachings. Love stories didn't become popular in China until the twentieth century. While European protagonists occasionally found happiness, Chinese lovers typically succumbed to forces beyond their control: meddling parents, disease, miscommunication. The stories were categorized so that readers knew which doom to expect: Tragic Love, Bitter Love, Miserable Love, Wronged Love, and Chaste Love. A sixth genre, Joyous Love, was not as successful. (The tendency to see love as a problem endured. In the 1990s, the researchers Fred Rothbaum and Billy Yuk-Piu Tsang analyzed the lyrics of eighty Chinese and American pop songs and discovered that the Chinese songs made many more references to suffering and “negative expectations”—a sense that if destiny did not ordain a relationship, it could not be salvaged.)

In China, romance had a political side: In 1919, when Chinese students demonstrated for what they called Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, they also demanded an end to arranged marriage. They called it “the freedom of love,” and from then on it was tied to a sense of individual autonomy. Mao outlawed arranged marriages and concubines, and established a woman's right to divorce, but the system left little room for desire. Dating that did not lead to the altar was “hooliganism,” and sex was so stigmatized in the Maoist period that doctors met couples who struggled to conceive because they lacked a firm grasp of the mechanics. When the magazine
Popular Films
ran a photo of Cinderella kissing a prince, readers wrote in to denounce it. “I heard the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers condemning you for being so shameless!” one wrote.

Though arranged marriages were banned in 1950, factory bosses and Communist cadres still did much of the matchmaking, and when a young intellectual named Yan Yunxiang was sent down from Beijing to the village of Xiajia, in China's northeast, in 1970, he found an abundance of miserable love. Local women had so little say in whom they married that there was a village tradition of sobbing when you left home on your wedding day. It wasn't until the eighties that the village elders began to relinquish control over local marriages. Yan Yunxiang eventually became an anthropologist and continued to visit the village over the years. He attended a wedding where the bride was marrying for love, and she confided to Yan that she was too happy to sob. She rubbed hot pepper on her handkerchief in order to summon the tears that her parents' generation expected.

In the heyday of socialism, every man in Yan's village wanted to be seen as
laoshi
, “frank and simple”; the worst thing a bachelor could be was
fengliu
, “rebellious and romantic.” But all of a sudden, the
laoshi
men were known as dowdy and gullible, and everyone wanted to be as
fengliu
as Leonardo DiCaprio aboard the
Titanic
, in the most popular pirated movie of the day.

In much of the world, marriage is in decline; the proportion of married American adults has dropped to 51 percent, the lowest ever recorded. But in China, even as rates of divorce have climbed, so much of the culture revolves around family and offspring that 98 percent of the female population eventually marries—one of the highest levels in the world. (China has neither civil unions nor laws against discrimination, and it remains a very hard place to be gay.)

The sudden freedom had its problems. China had few bars or churches, and no coed softball, for example, so pockets of society were left to improvise. Factory towns organized “friend-making clubs” for assembly-line workers; Beijing traffic radio, 103.9, set aside a half hour on Sundays for taxi drivers to advertise themselves; and CCTV-7, the military channel, organized a dating show for grunts. But those practices merely reinforced existing barriers, and for vast numbers of people, the collision of love, choice, and money was a bewildering new problem.

China's one-child policy had exerted unexpected forces on marriage. By promoting the use of condoms on an unprecedented scale, it delinked sex from reproduction and spurred a mini sexual revolution. But it also heightened competition: When sonogram technology spread in China in the 1980s, couples aborted female fetuses in order to wait for a boy. As a result, China has twenty-four million men who will be of marrying age by 2020 but unable to find a spouse—“bare branches” on the family tree, as they're known in Chinese. Women were barraged with warnings in the Chinese press that if they were still single at thirty, they would be considered “leftover women.”

*   *   *

“In China's marriage market,” Gong explained to me one day, “there are three species trying to survive: men, women, and women with graduate degrees.” She discovered, while studying for her master's degree, that Chinese men were wary of women who'd surpassed them in education. And in Shanghai, she said, “I didn't know a soul in the city. My parents had an elementary school education. I could never be interested in the kinds of people they had access to.”

Men and women with different
hukou
rarely married; this frustrated her. “Even though ‘free love and marriage' was written into the law, we don't actually have the freedom to choose,” she told me. In 2003 the Internet had just sixty-nine million users (5 percent of the population), but it was growing at 30 percent a year. That fall, a Web portal called Sohu reported that the most-searched-for name on its site, once “Mao Zedong,” was now “Mu Zi Mei,” a sex blogger. When Mu Zi Mei posted an audio recording of one of her assignations, demand crashed her server. (To those who gasped, she replied, “I express my freedom through sex.”)

Gong Haiyan paid five hundred yuan (about sixty dollars at the time) to an early online dating service. She selected twelve men and sent them messages. When she got no response and complained to the company, she was told, “Look at yourself—you're ugly, and you go after these high-quality men? No wonder you got no replies.” She tracked down one of the bachelors and learned that he hadn't even registered with the site. The photograph, the vitals, the contact info—all had been cobbled together from other online sites. China had mastered the fake Polo shirt, and now it was turning to the counterfeit date. “I wasn't thinking about being an entrepreneur—I was just so angry,” Gong said. “I wanted a site for people who were in the same position I was in.”

She mapped out a simple design on Front Page, the website software. She named her business Love21.cn. To sell ads, she hired her brother Haibin, who'd taken some computer classes after dropping out of high school. She signed up her friends, and other customers followed. A software developer agreed to invest the equivalent of fifteen thousand dollars. (Later, he met his wife on the site.) Gong used the money to expand, and she discovered that there was more demand than she had imagined. In remote areas, where computer scanners were still hard to come by, customers began to send photographs by post. People were signing up at a rate of nearly two thousand a day.