Hot Chinese Girls
Most Chinese girls traditionally had love only for the purpose of bearing children. But China’s one-child policy, while resisted by many women in the countryside, has made urban women freer both to pursue careers and to pursue love. “Now it’s for pleasure, for health,” Ms. Wang said.
“My husband used to say, `You have your job, your study overseas, a roof over your head, what more do you want?’ ” said Liang Hua, 41, who divorced last year. “What I wanted was a husband who didn’t sit at home all day, watching sports on television.”
If most Chinese men still look for a stable home and a reliable mother for their children, several women in different professions agreed, women who used to be content with a steady family income now want more: romance, love, and affection.
“My husband never kissed me, not once,” said Lan Ding, 40, a self-employed tailor who said she had divorced her husband, an air force officer, because of the way he treated her. “We had a child, but he never kissed me. I only learned how to do that much later.”
One of the most popular books in Beijing this year is “The Bridges of Madison County,” the American best seller whose story of a midlife affair that brings romance to a woman’s life clearly struck a chord here. Several women said they had spent evenings sitting around with friends, debating whether the romance described in the book is possible in marriage.
“Before, marriage was very stable, but the quality was very low,” said Wang Xingjuan, who listens to hundreds of complaints each month on the women’s hot line she runs in Beijing. “It was something you did and didn’t think about. Now, people have high expectations from marriage.”
Wu Liyong, a 36-year-old director of a food products company in Beijing, said one of the causes of her divorce earlier this year, after 12 years of marriage, was an unsatisfactory love life.
“We were taught that the man is the one to intitiate love,” she said. “I didn’t say anything for a long time. But when I finally talked about it with my friends, they told me I was stupid. I feel like I wasted 10 years.”
If China’s economic reforms have brought greater independence to women in some ways – more choice of career, place to live, husband, lover – they have also brought women a greater danger of unemployment than men face.
At the same time, the loosening of government control has also meant a resurgence of traditional attitudes among men: that money means access to women.
“Men like to see women as objects,” said Feng Yuan, an editor at China Women’s News who has written extensively on how social changes affect women. “They feel that the more they achieve, the more ability or charisma they have.”
