Chengdon't

Chinese Singles’ Day    光根节 – Match-making in the middle kingdom

You could say that romantics in China are spoilt for choice.  Not only do young Chinese celebrate the western festival of romance that is Valentine’s Day, but the Chinese also have their own day traditionally devoted to love.  Qi Xi (七夕), or the seventh eve, is often referred to as Chinese Valentine’s Day, but is also known as the Seven Sisters Festival or the Festival of the Double Sevens.  It is celebrated on the seventh day of the seventh month in the Chinese lunar calendar (August 26th this year), and while the annual gift-buying frenzy synonymous with February the 14^th does not take place, there are many customs associated with this day of romance that lovers can partake in.

However, if the prospect of a second Valentine’s Day fills you with dread then November in China has just the thing.  For groups of young western (and increasingly large numbers of Chinese) singles, it has also become customary to organise a sort of “anti-Valentine’s” get-together on the day itself fourteenth, but here the Chinese go one better and have a dedicated singles’ day on November the eleventh.  Also known as bachelors’ day, in Chinese the day is called 光棍节 (guāng gùn jié or ‘single stick festival’).

The idea originated from the early 1990s, when college students in Nanjing first put forward the idea of choosing the day as a festival for single people and began organizing match-making parties on campus.  The date was chosen because the date “11/11″ consists of four 1’s, and first became a hit on university campuses in the area then spread throughout the whole country.

As it is no longer such a huge taboo for an adult to be single in Chinese society, singles’ day is seen as a chance for young people to shake off parental pressure to marry.  They go out to clubs and karaoke bars to have a good time or attend organised matchmaking events, and at these events ‘guang-guangs’ and ‘ming-mings’ (internet slang for single men and women respectively) are paired up in order of suitability through pre-prepared internet questionnaires to try and find their Mr. or Miss. Right.  Some universities hold masked balls to help Chinese singles overcome their initial shyness, and ‘blind date’ parties where singles are introduced through mutual friends are also quite common.

In Shanghai’s People’s Park a huge crowd of people gather every Sunday morning to search for love, but the difference here is that these are not generally single people themselves, but rather worried parents or grandparents who come along to try and speed up their errant offspring’s marital timeline.  The done thing appears to be to write your vital statistics on a piece of paper (age, height, weight, telephone number, place of employment and income), attach a photo and peg it to a line for other match-makers to investigate.  If you’re so inclined there’s even a foreigner section!

Other customs that have evolved around singles’ day include breakfasting on four youtiao (deep-fried dough sticks) which represent the four ones in 11.11 and one baozi (steamed stuffed bun) to symbolize the middle dot in the date.  This practice is supposed to bring the breakfaster good luck in their love life for the coming year.

With statistics showing that among Chinese in the 22-49 age bracket, males outnumber females by over 20 million, events organized on singles’ day are rising every year and will surely only continue to increase in number as millions of young, single Chinese go looking for love in an increasingly competitive and crowded marketplace.