Abstract
This chapter follows two years of one Tranquil Light family’s attempt to convert a tiny lilong room into a marriage flat (hunfang) for their only son. Through Mrs. Zhao, who keeps a stack of IKEA catalogues and a steady inventory of furniture plans for a wedding that has not yet been negotiated, and her son Mr. Zhao, whose marriageability in the Shanghai marriage market depends almost entirely on whether he can be presented as the owner of a flat, the chapter examines how the institution of marriage in contemporary urban China has been threaded through the housing system. The chapter argues that to be a marriageable man in central Shanghai is, in 2014, to be the occupant of a particular kind of property – and that the gap between the housing the Zhao family can offer and the housing the marriage market expects is the gap into which Mr. Zhao’s life, in the years I followed it, slowly fell. When the expected path becomes impossible, some men step sideways out of it: not a triumph, but a refusal to keep performing a version of manhood the housing market has priced beyond reach.
Keywords： marriage, hunfang, housing, masculinity, Shanghai, lilong, marriage market, People’s Park, intergenerational housing, family
This chapter begins with a Sunday afternoon at People’s Park, about a kilometre west of Tranquil Light, and for the past twenty years the principal site of Shanghai’s open-air marriage market.
If the air was decent – which in Shanghai also meant that the fine particulate count was not too high – I sometimes walked out of Tranquil Light on a weekend afternoon after the week’s lane conversations, past the lottery kiosk where I would often run into Mrs. Yan, into the ordinary traffic of the city. About twenty minutes west of the north gate sits People’s Park: a former racecourse from the treaty-port era, converted into public green space by the Communist government. Older Shanghainese remember comrades meeting there in the high socialist years, when homes had no space for dating and couples shared long benches with little privacy. On weekdays the park is mostly older Shanghainese sitting, walking, talking. On Sundays a different institution takes over a stretch of pavement in the south corner – what locals call the blind-date corner (xiangqinjiao), and what foreign journalists more often call Shanghai’s marriage market.
The marriage market is not a market in the strict sense. Nothing changes hands. What happens is that several hundred parents – almost always parents, almost never the prospective brides and grooms themselves – gather every Sunday afternoon and lay out small handwritten advertisements for their unmarried adult children. The advertisements list, in a remarkably uniform format: the child’s age, height, education level, profession, monthly salary, hukou status, marital history (almost always: unmarried, no children), and – at the top of every notice, in larger characters than any of the rest – whether or not the child owns a flat. On the lower half of many sheets, expectations (yaoqiu) for a partner are listed: age range, income, height, and again, usually, housing. If the four-character phrase fei cheng wu rao – roughly, ‘you are the one or do not disturb’ – appears at the bottom, it means: do not approach unless you meet the listed requirements. Those requirements are often, if not always, Shanghai origin and home ownership. I walked the market often enough that the novelty wore off and the cruelty of the format became ordinary—which is when fieldwork usually starts being useful.
The owns-a-flat line is the line that matters. It is the line parents read first when they stop in front of someone else’s notice. It is the line they have, with great deliberation, made the most prominent on their own. A child who owns a flat is a child who can be married. A child who does not is a child who, in the market’s careful but unmistakable logic, is going to have a difficult time.
Tourists wander through with cameras. Matchmakers who charge fees work the edges. These are not the unpaid introducers (jieshao de ren) of the high socialist years – aunts, uncles, bosses, teachers who derived dignity from successful matches. Modern conditions have produced a fee-charging generation of hongniang. Parents exchange phone numbers within sight of hundreds of curious visitors. Children are often absent; sometimes they do not even know their parents are there. On the Sundays I came with Mrs. Zhao, I learned to stand slightly back from the notices and to decline matchmakers who tried to recruit me as inventory. The market is not a museum. It is a labour of parental anxiety performed in public, and a foreign face changes the temperature of that labour without ever quite becoming part of it. Zhu Laoshi, a matchmaker I came to know, put the ordinary arrangement without romance: the children know that whoever they bring home has to be approved by their parents; since many are not financially independent, they listen; that is why most of his clients are open about the fact that their children know the parents are at the market on their behalf.
When I first returned from the park to Tranquil Light and asked neighbours about it, every informant over sixty knew exactly what I meant. Many had been introduced to their own spouses through a related process. The contemporary market looks traditional on the surface. Underneath, as parents repeatedly told me, it is a response to modern pressure: busy singleton children, long work hours, and a housing bar so high that parental brokerage feels like help rather than control.
I have walked through this market in the company of Mrs. Zhao several times. The first time, in the autumn of 2013, she asked whether I would mind walking with her on a Sunday afternoon. She did not, then, tell me why. We arrived around half past two. The market was already busy. Sheets of paper were clipped to umbrellas, taped to bags, held in plastic sleeves against the wind. Mrs. Zhao moved through slowly, reading notices, occasionally stopping to chat with a parent she recognised from previous Sundays. After about an hour she stopped at a small concrete bench at the edge of the park and asked if I wanted some hot water from her thermos. I did. While we drank, she said, almost as if mentioning the weather, ‘I am here every Sunday for my son.’
This chapter is about her son. I call him Mr. Zhao. The name is a pseudonym. Mr. Zhao is a composite constructed from one primary interlocutor and a small set of adjacent cases whose details, taken together, would identify any single household too clearly for a chapter this intimate. Composite does not mean invented. Small biographical specifics that would identify him have been changed. The shape of the story has not. He was, when I met him in early 2014 through Mrs. Zhao’s painstaking introduction, thirty-one years old. He had a college degree. He had a stable but not impressive job at a state-affiliated insurance firm. He earned a salary that, by the standards of central Shanghai’s marriage market, was on the low end of acceptable. He did not, in any meaningful sense, own a flat. The flat his parents lived in – a four-by-five-metre former master bedroom on the second floor of a Tranquil Light lilong house – was the flat he had been raised in. He was, in 2014, sleeping in a partitioned half of that same room, behind a thin wooden panel his father had built when Mr. Zhao came home from college. The panel did not reach the ceiling. He had been sleeping behind it, on and off, ever since.
The chapter follows what happened next. It is the book’s hardest chapter. It is the chapter where the costs of the housing system the rest of the book has been describing land most heavily, and most personally, on a single individual.
Mrs. Zhao Plans a Hunfang
Mrs. Zhao’s plan for her son’s marriage was, when I came to know it, several years old. She had begun thinking about it in 2010, when Mr. Zhao turned twenty-seven – the age at which Shanghainese mothers traditionally begin to worry in earnest. She had refined it, drawn it, redrawn it, and adjusted it many times since. By the time I first sat down with her in her bedroom – Mr. Zhao at work, Mr. Zhao senior watching television in the small living area – the plan existed in three forms: a stack of IKEA catalogues with relevant pages folded down, a hand-drawn floor plan on a piece of grid paper kept folded inside the catalogues, and a small spreadsheet, in pencil, on the back of an envelope, of estimated costs.
‘Leaving the house was not an option for my son,’ she told me. The Zhaos had moved into the room in the 1960s. It was the family’s only real-estate asset. Keeping him at home was the only economically feasible choice. I also sensed that Mrs. Zhao was personally happiest with the idea of keeping her only son near her. That meant the space in which the three of them lived had to be spatially reorganised. Part of the central living area would become the room for the couple – the hunfang, the newlywed home, even if in this case it was only a room.
Mrs. Zhao did not merely talk about the plan. She walked me through it in the actual room. She would bring the thick pile of furniture catalogues – IKEA was her favourite; Shanghai then had multiple branches dominating home décor for households of her means – and ask what I thought about the chairs, tables, couches, and lamps on the pages she had folded halfway as reminders. She emphasised, more than once, in the professional tone she had decided was appropriate for consulting an architect: ‘What do you think of my plan? Since you’re an architect, your comments are welcome.’ The catalogues were hope with page numbers.
The plan was modest and ingenious as micro-architecture. The Zhaos’ lilong room had a three-metre ceiling – high enough, in Mrs. Zhao’s calculation, to install a half-floor mezzanine across the rear two-thirds of the room, accessed by a fold-down ladder. The mezzanine would become Mr. Zhao and his future wife’s bedroom. Mr. Zhao senior and Mrs. Zhao would continue to sleep on the main floor, in the same bed they had occupied since 1985. The kitchen, the bathroom, and the corridor would be shared, as they had always been shared. The thin wooden panel that had been Mr. Zhao’s bedroom would be removed. The bookshelf in the corner – Mr. Zhao’s beloved bookshelf – would be removed. In its place, a small dressing table and a mirror, which Mrs. Zhao believed every newlywed daughter-in-law would expect. ‘Why would he need that bookshelf anyway,’ she said with annoyance when I asked whether her son would be fine with it. ‘He’s been reading too much and that’s why he doesn’t have a girlfriend.’
The mezzanine would have produced an additional five to eight square metres of usable floor area – roughly enough for a queen-sized bed and the dressing table. The total cost, by her envelope-back calculation, was about seventeen thousand yuan, which the Zhaos could fund out of savings without borrowing. Parents and newlyweds would share facilities. The arrangement would not be convenient for anyone. It was, she believed, the only option. Buying a new home in Shanghai was not financially feasible on the family’s pensions and her son’s salary.
Historically, about two-thirds of the rooms in Tranquil Light had at some point been used as hunfang of this kind – marriage spaces carved out of parental rooms under conditions of chronic shortage. Mrs. Zhao was not inventing a tradition. She was trying to make the only tradition available to her look modern enough for a marriage market that no longer accepted it.
The plan was also, as marriage-market positioning, almost certainly inadequate. A marriage flat in central Shanghai in 2014 was not a mezzanine in your parents’ room. A marriage flat was a separate apartment. A marriage flat had its own kitchen and its own bathroom. A marriage flat, ideally, was in your name on the title deed.
Mrs. Zhao knew this. She had been to the marriage market for years. She knew exactly how her son’s prospects would read on a People’s Park notice. She had, however, decided that the mezzanine was the best plan the family could honestly execute, and that her job was to execute it as well as it could be executed and trust that her son would find a daughter-in-law for whom the mezzanine was acceptable. ‘Some girls don’t need much,’ she told me. ‘They want a good man, a stable income, a clean room. They don’t need a high-rise.’ She said this with the firmness of a woman who had decided, some time ago, that hope would be a discipline.
The labour was weekly and mostly invisible to her son. Catalogue pages folded and refolded. The grid-paper plan adjusted when she decided the ladder should sit against a different wall. She measured the rear third of the room with a cloth tape she kept in a biscuit tin. She asked me, on separate afternoons, whether a white bedframe would make the mezzanine feel larger, whether a folding table could double as a writing desk for a daughter-in-law who might also work nights, whether the shared bathroom needed a new curtain before any formal introduction. She kept a running oral inventory of neighbourhood marriages: whose son had married a Pudong nurse, whose daughter had moved to a titled apartment, which landlord had used ‘my son is getting married’ as an excuse to raise rent or clear a tenant. Conversations with the matchmaker about how to describe the housing without lying took place on weekday evenings after Mr. Zhao had gone behind his panel. Sunday circuits of People’s Park compared other families’ notices to the notice she carried for her own child – height adequate, education adequate, salary borderline, housing the wound she kept trying to dress in better language. Occasional dinners to which I was invited ended with her returning to the furniture question as if it were the evening’s unfinished business. Whenever we met in the main lane or a branching alleyway, she told me how agitated she had been that her son never showed interest in getting married. She did not want to draw attention to the ‘problem.’ Going to People’s Park was her way of remedying it without announcing it to every neighbour.
I asked her once whether she had told Mr. Zhao about the plan in detail. She paused. ‘He knows,’ she said, ‘in general. Not the details. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s a bit sensitive.’ She paused again. ‘He’s been a bit sensitive about all of this for a few years.’
Mr. Zhao
The chapter has so far been mostly his mother’s; its subject is his life.
Mr. Zhao was, when we became friends in early 2014, an introverted thirty-one-year-old with a quiet sense of humour that took several months of acquaintance to surface. He worked in mid-level corporate insurance – sales support for a state-affiliated firm – at a salary that, in 2014 Shanghai, allowed him to contribute a small monthly sum to his parents’ household and to put aside almost nothing for himself. He had a college degree from a respectable but not elite university. He had no debt and no savings. He had a small circle of friends from college, most of whom had moved to Hangzhou or to Shenzhen for better-paying work. He had, by his own description, ‘never been very good at the dating thing.’ At home he sometimes helped hang laundry, fetch water from the dispenser, water plants on the balcony. His mother cooked, cleaned, and managed the marriage project. He listened to her more often than he argued.
He read constantly. The bookshelf in the corner of his half of the room – the bookshelf his mother considered the principal obstacle to the marriage flat – held about four hundred volumes. The books were, in their majority, Chinese-language paperbacks: classical Chinese poetry, modern Chinese fiction, history, a small but careful shelf of philosophy in translation. He had read them all. He had reread several of them many times. The bookshelf was, when I first saw it, organised by topic and then alphabetically by author. He did not put the books away in any other order.
One conversation with Mr. Zhao is, more than any other piece of this chapter, the chapter’s centre.
It was a Saturday afternoon in late spring of 2014. Mr. Zhao senior had taken Mrs. Zhao to a wedding banquet across town; Mr. Zhao the son and I were sitting in the family’s small living area, drinking instant coffee. He had been quiet for most of the afternoon. We had been talking in fragments – a small story about a coworker, a passage in a book he had been reading. He set down his coffee, looked at the wall, and said:
‘Sometimes I think my mother sees me as a project that has not been completed. Something that needs to be finished. She doesn’t say it like that. But that’s how it feels.’ He paused. ‘I am thirty-one. I have a job that is not amazing. I have a room that is not really a room. I have a salary that doesn’t really allow me to leave the room. I would like to meet someone, of course I would like to. But I would like to meet someone who likes me. Not who likes my room.’
He laughed, then, at his own seriousness, and the conversation moved on. It is the only conversation we had that I asked his permission, immediately afterwards, to record. He said yes. The conversation is in my fieldnotes. I have changed the name and the small biographical specifics that would identify him, but the words are his.
The housing system the rest of this book has been carefully describing was, for Mr. Zhao, the medium through which his entire personal life was being filtered. He could not date freely. The marriage market would evaluate him on his housing first and his person second. The flat he could not afford to buy was a wall that stood between the kind of relationship he wanted and any actual relationship that would be available to him. His mother’s careful planning, however well-intentioned, was a constant daily reminder that the system saw him as inadequate. He had absorbed the inadequacy. He was, by 2014, not sure whether he wanted to marry at all.
Housing and Manhood
At People’s Park, and in the quieter conversations that followed Sundays there, the economic conditions of each party were a major component of matching. Marriages were still expected to satisfy something like men dang hu dui – matching doors and parallel windows, socioeconomic compatibility. Housing sat at the centre of that calculation.
Men feel this pressure with particular force. Women face the stigma of becoming ‘leftover’ (sheng nü) if unmarried by their late twenties. For a man to remain single into his thirties is widely treated as socially incomplete. Several Shanghainese men told me versions of the same sentence: without a house, they did not even feel like men anymore. They were stuck between partners’ and parents’ expectations – still shaped by the idea that a husband provides the home – and an economic climate in which providing that home on a white-collar salary had become nearly impossible.
Mr. Xie, an older Tranquil Light neighbour with a married daughter, put the gendered housing maths from the other direction. Through his wife’s work-unit quota he had secured a modest attic-like space as his daughter’s hunfang when she returned from college. She later moved to her husband’s family’s slightly better arrangement. ‘We’re lucky to have a daughter,’ Mr. Xie said. ‘For pensioners with economic conditions like ours, it would be different if we had a boy… this attic would be too embarrassing to be given to him as a wedding home.’
Shanghai complicates the old breadwinner script in another way. Local stereotype has long cast Shanghainese men as unusually willing to cook, wash, and share household labour – sometimes mocked, sometimes praised as valuable husbands. An eighty-two-year-old neighbour, Mr. Liang, put it pragmatically: it is not that Shanghainese men enjoy being dominated; it is that two pairs of hands are better than one. That domestic flexibility does not, however, dissolve the marriage market’s housing test. A man may share chores and still be judged incomplete without a flat.
Against this field, some men begin to step sideways. They do not overthrow the tradition in theory. They stop trying to meet a standard the housing market has made unreachable, and they rebuild a workable sense of manhood around work, reading, friendship, geographic exit, or simply not marrying. It is not a slogan, and not a happy ending, but a practical opting-out of a script that treats home ownership as the proof of being a man. The opting-out is incomplete and often lonely. It is also, for some, the only way to remain a person rather than a failed property project. Mr. Zhao’s story sits inside that broader pattern without exhausting it.
Two Years of Meetings
I followed the Zhao family for two years, beginning in early 2014. The family was kind to me. I ate dinner at their small kitchen perhaps twenty times. I drank Mrs. Zhao’s careful tea in her room many afternoons. I was introduced, on one occasion, to the matchmaker Mrs. Zhao had been using, who looked me over with a brisk professional eye, asked my hukou status, and lost interest immediately when I told her I was Thai.
The story of the marriage plan over those two years does not have a satisfying ending. I record it because the absence of a satisfying ending is the chapter’s argument.
In the spring of 2014, Mrs. Zhao identified, through her matchmaker, a young woman two years younger than Mr. Zhao who appeared to be a plausible match. The young woman was a Shanghainese hukou holder. She worked in administration at a hospital. She had a college degree. She lived with her parents in a Pudong high-rise. The matchmaker arranged a meeting in the form of a tea at a teahouse near People’s Park, with both sets of parents present. Mr. Zhao arrived in a pressed shirt and said little. Mrs. Zhao had rehearsed, the night before, how to describe the lilong room without using the word ‘mezzanine’ too early. The meeting went, by Mrs. Zhao’s careful recounting, ‘all right.’ There was talk of salaries, of hospital shifts, of whether the young woman liked living in Pudong. Then the young woman’s parents turned to housing. The young woman’s mother, in particular, asked whether Mr. Zhao would be inheriting the family’s lilong room, whether the inheritance was clear, and whether residency rights would convert to her daughter’s name in the event of marriage. Mrs. Zhao explained the situation honestly. The mezzanine plan came out because honesty, once begun, had nowhere else to go. The young woman’s mother thanked Mrs. Zhao for the tea and said she would think about it. They never met again. Mrs. Zhao spent the following Sunday at People’s Park anyway. She adjusted the wording on her notice. She did not adjust the housing line enough to make it false.
In the autumn of 2014, a similar meeting was arranged with another young woman – a teacher’s assistant at a local primary school. This one was warmer in person. Mr. Zhao mentioned, after the meeting, that he had liked her. They had talked, briefly, about books; she had not mocked the bookshelf. Her parents, however, again raised housing concerns. At the second tea, when the mezzanine plan came up, it was not received warmly. The young woman’s father said, with some directness, that he could not see his daughter living in another woman’s room – meaning Mrs. Zhao’s. Mrs. Zhao tried to explain shared kitchens as normal lilong life. The father did not argue at length. He simply stopped the pursuit. Mr. Zhao, for a week afterward, was quieter than usual. Mrs. Zhao folded more catalogue pages and said, to me, that some fathers had no imagination.
Between the meetings there were smaller failures that never reached a teahouse. Phone numbers exchanged at People’s Park that went unanswered. A matchmaker introduction that collapsed when the other side learned the address was a shared lilong room rather than a titled apartment. A brief exchange of WeChat messages between Mr. Zhao and a woman whose mother had liked his education line on the notice, until the mother asked for photos of the flat and Mrs. Zhao’s carefully framed pictures of the room – cleaned, lit, bookshelf partly obscured – were judged insufficient. Each failure returned Mrs. Zhao to the catalogues. Each failure returned Mr. Zhao to the panel that did not reach the ceiling.
In the spring of 2015, Mr. Zhao senior had a stroke. He recovered, mostly, but not entirely. The household’s monthly medical expenses, which had been small, became significant. The seventeen thousand yuan Mrs. Zhao had saved for the mezzanine renovation was redirected toward Mr. Zhao senior’s rehabilitation. The mezzanine plan, by mid-2015, had been quietly shelved. Mrs. Zhao continued to go to People’s Park on Sundays. The notices she now circulated stopped mentioning renovation. Her son’s prospects, in the marriage market’s grammar, deteriorated. The owns-a-flat line, always the weakest part of the sheet, became weaker still.
In late 2015, Mr. Zhao took a transfer at work to a regional office in Suzhou, about an hour by high-speed rail from Shanghai. The transfer came with a small salary increase. It was framed, internally to the family, as a temporary arrangement. He packed two suitcases and a fraction of the bookshelf. Mrs. Zhao cried once, in front of me, and then stopped talking about crying. He has, as far as I know, not moved back. The last time I spoke with Mrs. Zhao, in 2016, she told me that her son had been visiting on weekends, that he was ‘doing fine,’ that the company had given him a small studio apartment near his Suzhou office, that she missed him. The studio was not a marriage flat in the People’s Park sense, but it was a room with a door that closed. She did not mention the marriage market. I did not ask. On one of those later visits to Tranquil Light I noticed that the IKEA catalogues were no longer stacked on the low cabinet where they had lived for two years. I did not ask where they had gone either.
Mr. Zhao, the last time I exchanged messages with him in 2017, was still living in Suzhou. He was still single. He had, at that point, been single for the entirety of the time I had known him. He wrote, in his quiet way, that he was reading a great deal, that his coworkers in Suzhou were nice to him, and that he hoped to visit Tranquil Light soon. He had not visited his parents’ room, by then, in eight months. The mezzanine had not been built.
I do not know what has happened to him since those 2017 messages. I will not invent an ending. The unfinished quality of the story is part of what the housing–marriage system produces: not always drama, often drift.
Getting a House Is Not a Dinner Party
There is a phrase I keep returning to from Mao Zedong’s 1927 essay on the Hunan peasant movement. ‘Revolution,’ he wrote, ‘is not a dinner party.’ The phrase has had a long life in modern Chinese rhetoric. Teacher Hu once recited a longer stretch of it over dinner, laughing, and then asked whether I knew what else was not a dinner party. ‘Getting a house,’ he said. Replace the word revolution with the phrase getting a house, he suggested, and you have the picture of the most crucial urban problem in Shanghai.
To borrow the phrase, with affection and some irony, for this chapter’s closing argument: getting a house, in central Shanghai in 2014, is not a dinner party. It is the central political-economic struggle of an entire generation of young urban Chinese, and it determines, more than any other single variable, who they get to marry, what kind of household they get to build, and what kind of life they get to live.
The chapter is also about something the rest of the book has, until now, been able to avoid: the fact that the housing system whose virtues the previous chapters have detailed has costs. Substantial costs. The original residents of Tranquil Light, whose collective political competence has kept the compound standing, are also the parents of children who cannot afford to live in the city the parents have spent their lives defending. The compound’s continued existence is, in some part, paid for by the unmarriageability of those children. This is not the local government’s fault alone. It is not the residents’ fault alone. It is the pattern that emerges when the housing system, the marriage system, and the global heritage market are all threaded through the eye of the same physical needle, and each generation tries to thread itself. Staying was a victory with an invoice. Mr. Zhao is one line on that invoice.
For some men, the response is to keep pushing – parental down payments, suburban mortgages, decades of repayment. For others, the response is the sideways step: leaving the parental room for a company studio in another city, reading instead of renovating, declining to treat home ownership as the only available proof of being a man. Mr. Zhao’s Suzhou transfer sits closer to that second path than to the first. The sideways step is not liberation in any grand sense. It is a workable refusal.
I dedicate this chapter to him. In 2014 he agreed that I could write about our conversations, with names changed. He has not read this.