The China Daily a couple weeks ago had an article,  “Young Couples Splitting from Tradition”, that highlighted the stresses and strains of marriage on the fruits of the one-child policy: the little emperors and emperesses of China. It seems they’re finding it difficult to get along:

Gao and Deng, who were both born to single-child families in the 1980s, filed for divorce at the Mentougou District Court in Beijing early this year, citing constant arguments over the housework, local media reported.”

In 2003 the Chinese government made divorce far easier than in the past by no longer requiring a mountain of paperwork be completed by complainants and a thirty-day waiting period during which everyone with whom the couple comes in contact tries to talk them out of the divorce. Now, it takes a mere 30-minutes, though adjudicators can throw the cases out if they seem just plain stupid.

The marriage of Wang Jing, 24, and Chen Sen, both from Beijing, only lasted 18 months as Wang complained her husband had become addicted to online games, missed meals and did not care for her when she was sick.”

A few years ago I had known a lovely local Suzhou couple in their late twenties whose relationship seemed to be made in Chinese-matrimonial heaven: they were classmates, the families were old friends, and they had a lot of friends and classmates in common. Leonard and Lei Lei, born and bred in Suzhou, are archetypal of the kind of pressure, expectations and distractions that can tear a young marriage apart in modernizing China. The couple seemed perfect, by Chinese middle class standards: both locals, both classmates, the parents of both children knew and liked each other, and all were of the same rising socio-economic status and rising. Both offspring in their late twenties, Lei Lei, the bride – a pretty, wide-eyed and intelligent young lady who but for her height would have gone on to be a professional model – and the groom, Leonard: a pudgy, good-natured bloke who frequented KTV parlors and partied at discos. Indeed, both bride and groom would appear at the hotest discos in town several times a month.

Each of the couple still lived with their families, though Leonard’s family had bought the couple a lovely two-bedroom apartment in a clean, middle-class apartment block in the south part of the city. Lei Lei had personally supervised the decoration of the apartment, which was a throw-back to the bright colors, polka-dot-and-daisy patterns so popular in Britain in the 1960s. They invited friends and classmates to a house warming party at which guests marveled at the miniature flat-screen TV in their dining area and the huge 42″ screen in the den that anyone could watch from the plush sofa wrapped in fuzzy red fabric. The plan was the small room would likely one day soon become the baby’s room. They would be moving into the freshly renovated flat after the wedding banquet, less than a month off.

After Leonard and Lei Lei returned from their honeymoon they invited all their friends to one of the more trendy discos in Suzhou. The couple had just returned from several weeks in Thailand, with several days spent in Bangkok. His wife had cut her long, gorgeous hair to something short and frizzy. It wasn’t very attractive, as Leonard noted loudly. His wife ignored him. Leonard waxed enthusiastically about all the exotic performances he had seen on the streets and in the nightclubs of Bangkok: the lady-boys, the strippers – male and female, the cheap prostitutes, the discos. Oh my!

It was as though Leonard had been to the Promised Land. Within weeks of returning to Suzhou with his wife he was in discos around the city three sometimes even five nights a week. Sometimes he would give me a call on a Sunday night and ask if I was game to go out with him for an evening of fun, dancing and drink. I wasn’t difficult finding an excuse like, “I have to work tomorrow; don’t you?,” for him to relent. Eventually, he figured out I was not the party animal he seemed to aspire to. Still, the times I did take him up on his offer to party at the latest Chinese disco I was surprised to see his wife was no longer accompanying him.

Instead, with friends and classmates in full view, he was saluting another woman, who, it became quite apparent, was his girlfriend. Though it had been several months since I had seen Leonard, I was shocked and disquieted by the rapidity and publicity with which he had repudiated his marriage to a woman I took to be quite intelligent, attractive and charming. I would not see Leonard for a long time after the revelation. Several months later I would learn from some of his childhood friends that he had gained a divorce.

Leonard had cracked. He simply wasn’t ready for the responsbilities of marriage, especially with the near-immediate expectation to pump out a baby within months of the Banquet. I had understood family members and his oldest friends had tried help him through the transition to being a householder and husband, but he would hear none of it.

A year later I received a phone call on my mobile phone whose number I would not recognize. It was Leonard, who had moved to Xiamen, in Fujian Province, just north of southernmost Guangdong. He was calling his friends in Suzhou to update them with his new mobile phone number. He was fine, he told me, working as a salesman for a mobile phone company: the same job he had had in Suzhou. “The clubs down here are great!,” he enthused, “and the women so beautiful!” He seemed not to have changed much from when I had seen him the year before.

I had gathered from the distance and relative remoteness of Xiamen from his friends, family and past in Suzhou that he needed to go somewhere where he would not be afraid of being knifed by a family member or close friend of his former wife. Whatever the ultimate reasons for the divorce and move, it was plain that Leonard’s life was merely a symptom of the stresses of a society in perpetual motion; with dire implications not only for its youth ,but for its elderly, who are increasingly looking to their married children to support them in retirement.