For as long as she remembers, Calif Jong has been struggling for the freedom to choose who and when she marries. “I grew up being told that a happy life isn't about marrying someone you love,” Jong says. “It's about finding someone suitable and doing it early.” At 27 she's still young by Western standards, but in her native Hong Kong, Jong's old enough to be labelled as a “leftover woman”, a derogatory term describing unmarried women who are 25 or older. Jong is one of the younger generation of Chinese women defying the traditional beliefs of her parents in order to be independent, career-oriented and, above all, single. “In their opinion,” Jong says, “Marriage to a financially-secure man is the only way to happiness and anything else is just wrong.”

 

There's a popular Chinese saying that goes “first get married, then worry about love later”. It's a centuries-old idiom which perfectly exemplifies the traditional practicality of China's older generation. They value material concerns such as what kind of job, income and background their daughter's partner has well above ideas of romance and love. Jong describes marrying into a suitable family as feeling like a duty she had to carry out. “As soon as I graduated from university at 21, my mother had already set up a string of dates for me with men she had picked and I didn't know. She told me that I was totally forbidden to date anyone who wasn't from the Fujian province of China, where her and my father are from. For a while in my late teens and early twenties, I thought any kind of dreams I had were basically irrelevant and not practical to think about. Pursuing them could mean going against what my parents had planned for me and that definitely wasn't an option.”

 

The traditional views regarding marriage in Chinese society are supported by the Chinese government's highly conservative stance towards family matters. They see it as potentially adding to the difficulty Chinese men already face finding a wife in a country with a gender imbalance of 115 boys born for every 100 girls, the result of illegal gender-specific abortions occurring across China. The country's official women's organisation, known as the All-China Women's Federation, was criticised internationally after publishing an article on International Women's Day 2011 called “Do Leftover Women really deserve our sympathy?” The article criticised “average or ugly appearance girls” for attending university, saying: “They don't realise that as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their M.A. or Ph.D., they are already old, like yellowed pearls.” When asked by Pressed about the pressure faced by young Chinese women, the All-China Women's Federation said that the pressure doesn't come from them, but from “friends, colleagues and classmates in a race for marriage and security, parents want their daughters to be taken care of – they don’t want them ending up as an 'old maid' or 'spinster'”.

 

The societal stigma attached to staying single has been described by many as one of the main reasons for the staggering rate of suicide among women in China. Of the 22.23 per 100,000 people who commit suicide each year in China, 16.67 are women, according to a 2011 report by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. This makes China the only country in the world in which more women commit suicide than men. To put this into perspective, the suicide rate among men in the UK is 16.8 per 100,000 with the rate among women at only 5.2 per 100,000, according to a report by The Samaritans in 2014.

​

“As I get older and older, they keep saying how shameful it is to have a leftover woman as a daughter”

​

Elva Wu, a 28-year-old unmarried woman from mainland China came to the United Kingdom to improve her English and pursue her dream of becoming a clothing designer. Born into a small village in Guangdong, she describes strong social pressure as pushing her to marry from a young age: “In my home village everyone knows each other and everyone knows each other's business. I witnessed all four of my older sisters get married, have children and become very unhappy. Three of them have admitted to me that they don't feel anything for their husbands and they only did it out of duty to our parents. I grew up hearing about their regrets, so when I became old enough I just said no.” Despite being only 19, rejecting the traditional call to marriage resulted in months of arguing between Wu and her mother, changing their relationship forever. “As I get older and older,” Wu describes, “they keep saying how shameful it is to have a leftover woman as a daughter and about the comments other people in the village are making. That's the main reason it hurts them, because it causes them to 'lose face' in front of their neighbours, and in China face is everything.”

 

Sukie Liu, from the Islington Chinese Association, describes much of the pressure as presenting itself directly through families. “Many parents believe women should enter into a marriage early in their youth,” she says. “They consider marriage to be a sort of morally solid and healthier kind of status for women. I think its sort of like a split from what they think is good for their children and what's the reality of the younger generation, how they really live their lives.” This split has led to the national divorce rate rising to its highest point ever at 3.63 million in 2015, a staggering 3.9 per cent of the famously conservative country's population and more than twice that of a decade ago.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

Calif Jong describes the worst element of the parental pressure she receives as coming not just from tradition, but also practicality: “Ever since we are born, we are told that our duty to our parents is to look after them when they are old. This role is traditionally given to the daughter, whose parents move into the family home and her husband supports the household financially. They say 'well, we supported you for so much of your life, now you need to support us'. It feels as if having kids for them is a type of investment, they expect to be totally cared for as they get older and it's going to be my responsibility to do so. Already, as a 27 year-old student I'm facing the pressure of supporting two people and the easiest way for me to do that is to just give in and marry someone suitable.”

 

The level of adherence to traditional Chinese customs varies greatly depending on class in China, with the poorer, rural communities holding it at a much greater value than the comparatively richer and more cosmopolitan residents of big cities. Dr Di Wu, professor at the SOAS China Institute, says: “Because girls are living in big cities, they're probably from more wealthy families. So compared with the rural girls, they have more choices in the sense that they don't need to consider getting married as a way of achieving social mobility.” Rural suicides outnumber urban ones by around 4 to 5 times, according to a 2016 study by BioMed Central, with the vast majority of these being women. This indicates a further link between extreme societal pressure and Chinese women taking their own lives. The All-China Women's Federation gave Pressed various reasons for the disproportionate rate of suicide, including “career pressure, sexual discrimination” and “psychological problems” caused by the fact that “some women couldn't gain a high position and salary when they are employed”. The Federation also says: “Romantic losers often carry things into extremity if they don't have good mental qualities,” ultimately concluding that, “women themselves must improve their mental qualities”.

 

“Even though I moved to the other side of the world, I still don't feel like I've been able to escape the pressure coming from my family,” says Elva Wu. “One of the my worst experiences happened three years ago, when I found out my parents had posted a picture of me at Guangzhou marriage market.” Marriage markets take place weekly in public parks across China, with parents posting an advert on their son or daughter's behalf with the aim of the parents of other singles seeing the advert and offering a match. “Next to my picture was information such as my age, height, past employment, income and whether or not I own a house or a car. It was just like a CV for a job. The worst part was they didn't even tell me, I found out because my friend saw it and sent me a picture. It was completely humiliating, I felt like I was being sold off in a meat market. I called my mother straight away and told her to take it down. She said they were only trying to help me and I knew that according to their own logic they were, but it still felt like a big betrayal.”

 

While the All-China Women's Federation admits that in recent years “men and women's roles have become less strictly defined”, the burden of traditional expectations from a generation born into a very different kind of China still remains heavily on the shoulders of millions of women. Calif Jong remains optimistic however, saying: “The Chinese culture is a very ancient one, and very traditional too. But the speed with which the country is developing and changing really gives me hope that my generation and younger can give our children the kind of freedom that we missed out on. For now though, I'm just going to try and stay in control of my own future.”