The market, May 2015. Photograph by Reinhold Möller, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road to visit the city’s so-called marriage market: a cluster of footpaths and lawns in the park’s northwest corner, where hundreds of parents gather each weekend to matchmake their unmarried adult children. It was the winter solstice: a particularly auspicious occasion this year, as an aunt had written to our family’s thirty-one-person WeChat group—a day on which it was said that heaven and earth would reunite.

It had rained that morning, so the air was damp and cool. I’d come here before as a child, glimpsing the idling marriage brokers—the “aunties” and “uncles”—as my parents and I crossed the park to the city center. Though I was now of marriageable age, I doubted I’d find a husband here, a city from which I felt largely estranged. I’d grown up in Hong Kong and visited family in Shanghai every year until moving abroad over a decade ago. The cultural differences alone between any potential Shanghainese suitors and me foreclosed the possibility, I figured, of a real bond.

But perhaps there was something to learn from the stand-in courtship practiced here, so radically different from the flirting and swiping I was predisposed to. What were the right conditions under which to find a life partner? Long a romantic, I had lately come to learn that love might instead be something worked toward, an earned outcome rather than a projection sustained until its inevitable end. The idea of courting prospective in-laws before spouses therefore seemed reasonable. This market was pragmatic: it conceded that familial compatibility could only help a relationship. It was to the point, with no beating around the bush about your finances or genetic ailments. 

I’d always enjoyed meeting the parents of friends and boyfriends—particularly the Chinese ones, who often seemed like strange permutations of my own: religiously preoccupied with their kids’ well-being and success, offbeat and quaintly crude, their politesse at odds with an inborn urge to voice their sometimes inflammatory convictions. Like the rule-abiding child I’d been, I was known to succumb to the flattery of my Chinese elders, who softened at my xiaoshun deference and fluent Mandarin—I’d spent months on the mainland as a child. I caved to cajoling missionaries at the supermarket in New York’s Chinatown, to the Mandarin-speaking Bank of America employee who convinced me to sign up for another credit card when all I’d wanted was to update my address. 

I entered the park through a western gate, next to which a Starbucks played Mariah Carey and Willie Nelson. The market emerged suddenly: crops of middle-aged Chinese huddled around laminated advertisements that littered the ground or were clipped to trolley bags and music stands. The otherwise quiet grounds, within these few thousand square feet, were beginning to teem with brokers and visitors alike. Fleece-clad aunties lined the shrubbery; raincoated uncles smoked under the wutong trees. I slipped into the sparse flow of people that circled the gardens and moved through sheltered walkways. Read More