There are countless specialized markets in Kunming. You’ve got the bird market, the pet market, a flower market and I’m sure there’s a market dedicated entirely to binder clips of all shapes and sizes. During a walk through the city, I fell in love with the wonderfully quirky cultural tradition that I call the De-Flower Market.
Instead of Match.com, Great Expectations or Chuck Woolery, every weekend in Kunming (and other cities in China), the kids let their parents do the work.
Based in the very lovely Green Park, there is a section dedicated to parental matchmaking. Not content to leave their children’s coupling up to chance or peach schnapps, hundreds of people browse prospective spouses to connect their sons and daughters. Often without the knowledge of the kid involved.
Your first encounter in the park is with people hawking photography services. If you’re trying to marry off the 30 year old daughter who’s still living at home, a good head shot is essential. Evidently, the ones that Photoshop her and her missing teeth into a scene of blossoming peach trees is the win of all wins.
Once you pass the commercial side of things, you get into the meat. For several blocks, hundreds of sheets of personal information are hung from clotheslines, revealing far more than a row of drying panties would. Each lists 20 people – organized by gender, age, profession, height and lots of information in Chinese that I couldn’t quite translate. I’m not 100% certain but there was a number on some of the profiles that I believe indicated a dowry.
If you find some that are interesting (i.e. a good job), you can pay the matchmaking vendor to get a copy of a sheet complete with phone numbers.
Further along the path are parents taking a more direct route. Rather than working through a vendor, they post their offspring’s exceptional marital qualifications on tear sheets with the phone numbers immediately accessible.
Once again, the Chinese show off an underdeveloped sense of irony by posting these profiles on barbed wire.
In many cases, the parents are there to discuss the merits of their kids, show photos and do their sales pitch.
Based on the conversations going on, this weekly experience is not only matchmaking. It’s a social opportunity for locals to stroll around the park and participate in a little parental voyeurism and commiseration. In a country with such a vast population, it’s comforting to know there are so many other people who aren’t able to get their kids to stop playing Farmville long enough to find a wife.
For more, you can also read thoughts at SpunkyGirlMonologues, who was my partner in crime in Kunming and I owe for finding this in the first place.
