John and I have fūqī xiàng? How could anyone think we look that much alike?
You two really have fūqī xiàng (夫妻相).
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this from Chinese friends. As much as I love when people suggest my husband and I are a lucky match, a couple destined to stay together forever, fūqī xiàng leaves me puzzled. How could anyone think we look that much alike?
I could imagine why such a saying came from China, a country dominated by the Han people, who share the same black hair and eyes, and similar skin tones. With that background, it wouldn’t take much for any couple to look alike. At a minimum, they’d need the same nose and the same shaped eyes; maybe the same shaped face, if you were a stickler. But even so, the odds are good you’d find many couples with their match reflected in their faces.
After her recent dating experiences in China, a woman wonders, should she expect Chinese men to have higher numbers of sexual partners and/or experience with prostitutes? (photo, a still of a sex scene from "Lust, Caution," from http://www.guardian.co.uk)
Anonymous asks:
I read your piece about dating pasts and Chinese men, but I have been having the opposite experience. I have dated some Chinese men in China. On each occasion as I became closer with the respective guy I was dating at the time, discussion of sexual history came up. Each had a fairly sizable number of partners (into double digits) and/or they had had sex with a prostitute. All other things considered, these were nice guys who treated me respectfully and didn’t seem to be players. I appreciated their truthfulness, but their sexual history combined with often poor sexual health practices (I blame poor sex-ed) kept me from becoming physically involved with any of them. My questions are these:
Are the men I’m meeting just outliers, or are higher numbers of sexual partners increasingly common among Chinese men in their 20s?
Could Westernization partially account for the higher number of partners?
My Chinese father-in-law was surprised to hear we had no time off — but he’s never known a world without Chinese New Year, like I have.
“Will you have time off for Chinese New Year?” Even though my father-in-law had retired more than 10 years before, he asked this question to us this past Saturday night with all of the wonder of a young child during the holidays.
“No, the semester already started,” John said.
“They gave us vacation for Christmas, not for Chinese New Year,” I added. “Christmas is the big holiday in America.”
“Oh,” my father-in-law said, with a voice that dropped off in surprise.
But he’s not alone. Every time we’ve called our Chinese friends back in Hangzhou, the “vacation during Chinese New Year” idea invariably sneaks into the conversation. And every time we tell them, no, there is no such thing in the US, they answer with astonishment.
Red envelope, hongbao, lai see -- whatever you call them, remember, at Chinese New Year, these are more for kids, not your boyfriend or girlfriend.
D asks:
I’m dating a cute Cantonese boy, although he was born in Canada himself (along with his brother), his parents are from China. His parents are pretty strict about him dating period, never mind dating a white girl like myself.
Chinese New Year is coming up, and I know it’s a time where the older give to the younger. As I’m older than my boyfriend by a few years, would it be odd if I had gotten him one of the special lai see envelopes with money in it? Or is that just strictly family related?Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: Chinese New Year Red Envelopes For Boyfriend?”
At Watson’s in China, a little personal shopping got too personal when I decided to stock up on condoms. (photo by Calvin Teo from wikimedia.org)
“Your Personal Store.” That’s the tagline for Watson’s, the most popular pharmacy/drugstore shop in Asia and my go-to in China for so many health and beauty items I need. But after my experience this summer, I began to wonder if Watson’s wasn’t becoming “Your A Little Too Personal Store.”
Last summer, I lived mostly with my in-laws and visited Hangzhou or Shanghai only a few times. For me, that meant no Watson’s conveniently just around the corner or a short bus, subway or taxi ride away. So when I saw a Watson’s, I would sometimes kick into “storage mode.” That meant buying some extra peppermint hand wipes, another bottle of Johnson’s Baby Wash (for my sensitive skin), and, say, some more Durex condoms.
I’m a married woman, and yes, I wanted to replenish my condom stash. I sure couldn’t do it in my Chinese husband’s rural village, which probably sold those dodgy ones with what always looked like adult movie stills printed on the package. On this day in question, I still stayed with him in his rented room in Shanghai for a few more days, we’d have a few weeks or so together at the end of the summer before returning to the US, and what we didn’t use, we could always take home. Yes, condoms would definitely come in handy.
But I’d have to go alone on this one. “It’s easier for you,” John said. “They expect foreigners to buy these things.”
I couldn’t deny the truth in what he said — that many Chinese believed foreigners, especially foreign women, were so much more “open” about sex. Sure, I liked sleeping with my husband, and wasn’t afraid to say so. But that didn’t make me some foreign Jezebel ready to screw on the spot. Besides, I couldn’t hide in China — people noticed me everywhere as a foreigner, and that meant they might even notice my purchase even more.
“But people will stare at me, it will be so embarrassing,” I said.
Accomplished Chinese food writer and yangxifu Carolyn J. Phillips talks with me about food and what it takes to charm your Chinese family at the table. (photo from zesterdaily.com)
Food is such an integral part of Chinese culture that it’s really hard to fit into a Chinese family if one isn’t adept at the cuisine. I suppose this is true to some extent with any country, but the Chinese are probably on par with the French and Italians when it comes to the importance of dining well.
This is probably doubly important when a yangxifu doesn’t speak Chinese fluently but still hopes to be accepted. Have your readers talked much about this? I truly feel that the old saw about the way to a man’s stomach etc is gospel for us yangxifu.
Carolyn should know — she’s a yangxifu who devoted her adult life to mastering the art of Chinese cooking. She blogs about food at Out to Lunch and tweets about it as @MadameHuang. She’s also working on two forthcoming books on the subject — “Simple Pleasures from a Chinese Kitchen: Authentic Seasonal Recipes from Every Region of China” and “Culinary Goddesses: The Women Who Changed Our Dining Landscape… Recipes Included.” — and is a regular contributor writing about Chinese food for Zester Daily. In addition, she’s even fluent enough in Mandarin to do court interpreting.
In any event, Carolyn has discovered a thing or two about what it takes to woo a Chinese family that truly loves to eat through food. So I sat down with her — from one yangxifu to another — to talk about all things related to food and Chinese family. As Chinese New Year approaches, it’s a topic that will come in handy for lots of readers.
if my experience means anything, many Chinese still turn to someone to play matchmaker -- even if that someone is just your coworker. (photo by DHSAM from wikimedia.org)
Last summer, I attended the Hangzhou wedding of my good friend Lao Da at the end of May. But it wasn’t until two weeks later — when we met over Dragonwell tea and snacks at a local teahouse — that I learned exactly how he met his new wife.
“We met through a colleague. He happened to be going out to dinner with a group of women who worked at the bank across the street from our office and didn’t want to go alone. So he asked me to come with him.”
“So, it was love at first sight?”
He shook his head. “No. I didn’t actually contact her until a few weeks later.”
“You didn’t have any special feeling for her then?”
“I had some. But later, my colleague said she had mentioned me, and he wondered if maybe we should date. You know me, I am not so outgoing. So I said I would meet her.”
Of course, Lao Da’s how-we-met story remained uniquely his — just like his geek-chic glasses, ocean-blue Chuck Taylors and funky stonewashed jeans. But I couldn’t help but notice that their story came down to the actions of one person: his colleague. Continue reading “Matchmaker, Informal Matchmaker”
My Chinese husband told me I've become more superstitious since I married him. (photo by zettmedia)
Cíjiù yíngxīn (辞旧迎新, farewell to the old, welcome the new). That’s what my Chinese husband said to me as we gathered the last of the dirty laundry to throw in the washing machines last night. We already scrubbed our entire apartment clean — I dusted, he vacuumed and washed all of the dishes. Now we wanted clean clothes too.
“You did this before?” he asked me as we walked to the laundry room.
“Nope, I never used to clean house for the New Year. Not before I met you.”
He smiled. “You’ve become more superstitious since you married me,” he said.
I delayed sharing this article to first request a few minor corrections in the online version, but became so busy this month that posting it here on the blog just slipped my mind. Actually, it’s probably a lucky omission since I am currently knee-deep in helping with last-minute checks on my husband’s psychology internship applications and had NO idea what I was going to put on the blog today. (Whew!)
Can this vegan and her non-vegan Chinese family share the same table in harmony?
Allison asks:
I’m a vegetarian in China and am finding that in general vegetarianism is a really difficult concept for people to understand here. Did John always know you were a vegetarian? How did that affect you guys when you were dating? and is/was it awkward with his family?Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: On Being Vegan in a Chinese Family”
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