I ran across a couple of interesting articles in the Los Angeles Times during the recent holidays.
This article from last Saturday describes matchmaking efforts by parents in China. As many as 6,000 middle-aged people have shown up in a park in Beijing to describe their sons or daughters and what they were looking for in a future marriage partner for their child.
From the article:
Known in slang as "bare sticks," more than 500,000 singles between 30 and 50 live in each of China's two main cities, Beijing and Shanghai, according to government figures. That is a fivefold increase from 1990. In China, the average marrying age in 2001 was 24 for men and 23 for women, although experts say it's closer to 30 in big cities such as Beijing.
It's the fate of Chinese parents, the park-goers say with a weary sigh, to do whatever they can for their children and future grandchildren, in a culture centered on clans, generational continuity and ancestor worship.
"China has 1.3 billion people," says Bai Qianling, a woman in her early 60s out looking for a suitable match for her very tall 27-year-old daughter, a former volleyball player now doing brand marketing. "Why is it so hard to find one reasonable person?"
And according to this article from today's newspaper, speakers of the Cantonese dialect living in the United States are finding that they need to learn Mandarin to do business with Chinese companies in the United States, run successfully for political office in Chinese American communities, or communicate with their grandchildren living in China.
Cantonese was the dialect of most Chinese immigrants to the United States until the last thirty years or so. The earlier immigrants came from towns of the southern province called Guangdong. Today Cantonese is still the main dialect spoken in Hong Kong, located in Guangdong, but the Chinese government is working to make Mandarin the standard language of the country.
