"But they're GIRLS!"
In which my students encounter the opposite sex, and I reflect on trends in relationships and marriage
“Excuse me, teacher, can we switch teams?”
I looked at the gangly young freshman who had raised his hand. The rest of the class were busy arranging themselves according to my instructions. They had worked in pairs to prepare a short explanation of a mathematical process, and were now supposed to work with another pair to present their explanation.
“Why?” I asked him.
He looked awkwardly at the pair I had assigned him and his partner to work with.
“Because they’re girls!”
I tried hard not to roll my eyes.
“You’ll have to work with girls sometime in your life,” I replied. “This is good practice.”
The boys still didn’t move.
“But I’m so nervous,” he said.
“Which is more nervous, talking to one girl or presenting to the whole class?” I asked.
“It’s different,” he replied miserably.
The two girls had already turned their chairs to work with this pair, and were waiting expectantly with notebooks at the ready. I wondered how they felt. In this class of engineering students, there are just four girls, but they seem unfazed at working with the boys. I left them to it, and when I checked back a little later they seemed to be doing fine.
Every year, every set of freshmen, we have to deal with those who have never worked with the opposite sex and who are paralysed at the idea. The first time I set any kind of mingling activity, where they’re supposed to talk with as many others in the class as possible, it almost inevitably results in one big clump of boys at one end of the classroom and a group of girls at the other.
Even with the sophomore students, it can be a challenge. In a class of sophomore engineers last week, one with only two female students this time, I asked them to form groups of four or five for a project. The boys resorted to playing “rock, paper, scissors”, with the losers sent to join the girls.
This is one of the ways in which our eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students seem much younger than their peers in the UK or US. Most of them have just come out of the incredibly intense high school system where all their energy is focused towards the gaokao, the college entrance exam. They’ve often had little time or opportunity to socialise or to develop other life skills. Over their first year at university, we see some of them begin to explore relationships and sexuality. By the second semester their WeChat Moments will probably begin to show romantic declarations and some of them will be holding hands as they walk between classes, or sharing each other’s meals in the cafeteria.
College romance is one thing, but it’s become a matter of national concern that more and more young people are rejecting marriage and childbearing. In my visit to the Hunan countryside last month, I got to know my friend Meg’s sister, Zoe. Zoe is in her mid-twenties and is studying for a PhD in medicine at a prestigious university in Shanghai.
“I don’t want to have a baby,” she stated categorically. “None of my friends do. Marriage, maybe. But at most, I would have a dog. No kids.”
Of course, she might change her mind. She’s probably a little put off by seeing her sister’s struggle to take care of a fourteen-month-old as a single mother. But it’s no secret that birth rates have declined, and continued to do so despite the lifting of family-planning policies. One friend who works as a kindergarten teacher in Beijing told me that there has been a significant drop in the number of children over the last couple of years, across all kindergartens.
This may be why there seems to have been a resurgence in matchmaking services, at least here in Canal Town. Walking through the old part of the city recently, I saw a new matchmaking business had set up shop, joining at least one other establishment already on that street. A little further on, I came across a former Covid testing booth that’s been transformed into a “Volunteer Matchmaker” service.
Matchmaking services are an ancient tradition, and advertising in parks and other public places is nothing new. In Beijing, anxious parents of unmarried children would congregate in the Temple of Heaven park and other green spaces, armed with their children’s vital statistics and marriage requirements on posters, looking for potential options. Concerned friends and colleagues will also eagerly help set people up with prospective suitors. (It’s even happened to me a couple of times, but maybe that’s a story for another post!) For most of my time in China, I’ve observed the social pressure for marriage and children to be immense. I have more than one friend who got married hastily, after just a few dates, only to regret it bitterly for years afterwards. And I have friends who married equally hastily, under the same pressure from society and family, and for whom it worked out just fine. What I’m wondering is whether this new generation will pay any attention to that social pressure, or whether they’ll just get a dog.
The danger of generalising about anything in a country this big and complex is that I’m seeing just a small part of it. I’m now in one of the richest provinces in the country. Our students, immature and awkward as some of them are, are mostly from well-off families. My friend’s sister Zoe is in cosmopolitan Shanghai, which is a milieu and a law unto itself. I expect that outside the well-educated well-off elite, extended families and ancient tradition will exert the glacier of pressure much as they always have, looking for grandsons to continue the family name. I guess the question is, as China continues to urbanise, whether the glacier might be melting, at least just enough to tip the country into the “Japanification” that its leaders are so worried about.
Meanwhile, I’ll just keep trying to help my awkward engineers treat their female classmates like human beings.
If you’re interested in some of the issues mentioned in this post, and the state of the social contract mentioned in my last post, Evan Osnos has a thoughtful and much more in-depth discussion in the New Yorker.
New to Canal Town Teacher? Start here for an introduction!
This is so fascinating! I’m seeing a similar trend, although with very different cultures undertones, in the U.S.