Invited to the annual Christmas dinner at parents' friend's house. Every year, the conversations are somewhat embarrassing if not just out right hilarious. It made my day that I discovered that people of my parents generation have a good sense of humor when it comes to arranged marriages.
So the story went - a person (and if you think this is about to take a ethnocentric turn, you are not wrong. For how could it not? When you gather a bunch of people who were as weather beaten as those of the Cultural Revolution generation, and put them around a family dinner table in America, the subject inevitably turns to how good their descendants in America has it going), he went through three years of college in UoH, did not graduate, and went back to China to find himself a bride. There he listed four conditions in his er... request, I guess.
Bride candidates must be:
1) Not from a big city
2) Not from a cadre family (so no princesslings)
3) Not from a rich family
4) Not from an intelligentsia family
So he found a bride who came from a small and humble village in the Northeast and he and his children lived happily ever after.
This is all told by a person having married a well educated women from a big city. The conditions are a bit medieval, people around the table said, but then everyone went on to praise the person for his pragmatism and insight.
Merry Christmas! Love and well wishes all around, especially for bride candidates!
