The parents of another member of the group said the only comfort is that
their daughter is not alone.
"There are a lot of her kind," the woman's mother told her parents, showing
them newspaper articles as evidence. "Nearly half of the daughters of my
friends, who are approaching 30, haven't started a family, and some don't even
intend to do so."
The 20-something daughters are sympathetic to their relatives' sadness, but
they have other priorities right now.
"Even when the right man shows up one day in the future, I may not be able to
catch him simply because I don't have the time to do so," said Sabrina Li, a
29-year-old project manager at an American investment bank.
Li travels frequently between Shanghai, New York and Hong Kong, and she stays
in her office until midnight almost every weekday when she is not travelling.
Anita Wang lost her boyfriend because she wouldn't quit her present job as a
lawyer and take on a more leisurely teaching job, as he suggested.
Women say they have been told, since childhood, that they should have their
own careers. But because the jobs are in competitive fields, they leave little
time for private lives to be blank, unlike the women of even a generation
before, who could give full attention to their families because they were under
the protective umbrella of a planned economy.
Staying-single trend to remain
With Chinese society in transition, the trend of remaining single and
focusing on careers will not change anytime soon, as the previous two waves did,
according to Hao Maishou, sociologist at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences.
The nation saw a record-high divorce rate after its first marriage law took
effect in May 1950. An unexpectedly large number of people who got married
during war divorced when peace arrived. By 1953, for every 100 couples who were
getting married, 53 couples were getting divorced.
The government played an important role in getting the
singles married by arranging meetings of young women with older men at the time,
Hao said.