Age of Ambition (8 page)

Gong was nothing like the other Web entrepreneurs I knew in China. For one thing, the top ranks of Chinese technology were dominated by men. And unlike others who glimpsed the potential of the Internet in China, she didn't speak fluent English. She didn't even have a degree in computer science. She still had a trace of the countryside about her. She spoke at high volume, except before crowds, when her voice trembled. She was five feet three, still with narrow shoulders, and when she talked about her business, I got the feeling that she was talking about herself. “We're not like you foreigners, who make friends easily in a bar or go traveling and chat up a stranger,” she told me. “This is not about messing around for fun. Our membership has a very clear goal: to get married.”

In her spare time, she wrote. The Internet was taking off as a forum for all kinds of ideas, and she carved out a reputation for herself as the “Little Dragon Lady,” an advice columnist who was attuned to the problems of the People's Republic. She flipped through messages from anguished bachelors, concerned parents, and anxious brides—many of them current or former members of her dating service.

Often, her advice read like an argument against China's ancient pieties. If your mother-in-law sees you as “nothing but a baby-maker” and your husband won't help, she told one new wife, forget the husband, “get some courage, and get out of that family.” In the case of a newly rich couple, in which the husband had taken to sleeping around, she applauded the wife for not becoming a “blubbering, feeble, pitiful creature,” and advised her to make him sign a contract that would cost him all his assets if he cheated again. Above all, Gong framed the search for love as a matter of self-reliance. Heaven, she wrote, “will never throw you a meat pie.”

 

FOUR

APPETITES OF THE MIND

 

Not long after Gong Haiyan launched her business, a posting caught her eye: “Seeking a wife, 1.62 meters tall, above-average looks, graduate degree.”

The seeker was a postdoc, studying fruit flies. He liked to exercise, and he attached a jokey photograph of himself flexing his triceps in front of his lab bench. “He had the whole package,” Gong told me. Then she looked at his requirements and discovered, “I didn't meet a single one.” She decided to answer him anyway, in a pose of high confidence. “Your announcement is not well written,” she wrote. “Even if someone meets all those requirements, she'll think you're picky.”

The man's name was Guo Jianzeng, and he was embarrassed. “I've never written anything like this, and I don't quite know what I'm doing,” he replied. Gong volunteered to polish his announcement. “After polishing,” she told me, “I could think of exactly four girls in the world who met the criteria, including me.”

Guo Jianzeng was thirty-three and shy. When they met, his phone had eight numbers stored in it. He was not a born romantic—his first gift to her was a replacement for a pair of broken spectacles—and he was not rich; he had less than four thousand dollars to his name. But Gong asked him to take an IQ test. She was surprised when he beat her score by five points. She was also moved by the way he cared for his widowed father. On their second date, he proposed marriage to her on the subway.

She rode sidesaddle on the back of his bicycle to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, where they paid nine yuan for a marriage certificate. The ceremony took ten minutes. Instead of a wedding ring, he bought her a laptop. They rented a speck of an apartment for a hundred dollars a month and shared a bathroom with an elderly neighbor.

By 2006, Gong's dating site had a million registered users; the following year, venture capitalists invested. She began to charge a fee (about thirty cents) for sending or receiving a message. By her seventh year in business, the site had fifty-six million registered users and was ranked first in China in time spent online and in the number of unique visitors. It was China's largest online dating service. She dropped the name Love21.cn and adopted something grander: Jiayuan (“Beautiful Destiny”). She gave it a tagline that suited her disposition: “The Serious Dating Website.”

*   *   *

I was at her office one morning when Gong slipped into a conference room for an orientation meeting with new employees. It was just before the Chinese New Year holiday. Single men and women across the country would be returning home to visit relatives—and would be interrogated relentlessly about marriage prospects. For some, the pressure would be unbearable. Afterward, Jiayuan's enrollment experienced a surge similar to the New Year's boom at fitness clubs in America.

Speaking before groups, even small ones, still made her nervous, and she carried her notes on a typewritten page. Before she spoke, the employees heard from the chief operating officer, a soft-spoken man named Fang Qingyuan, who told them, “Don't bother looking for favoritism or nepotism here. Work hard, and your success will be clear in your results. Don't bother kissing ass.”

When it was Gong's turn, she took a seat at the head of the conference table and informed the new hires that they were now in “the happiness business.” She did not smile. She rarely did when she talked about the happiness business. She focused instead on “price/performance ratios” and “information asymmetry.” She was in office attire: glasses, ponytail, no makeup, and a pink Adidas jacket with a ragged left cuff. The young men and women before her were joining a staff of nearly five hundred. Your customers, she told them, will be virtually indistinguishable from you: migrants, alone in the city, separated from love by “three towering mountains”—no money, no time, and no connections. The goal was simple: give people choices.

In China, people had yet to acclimate to the proliferation of choices. In the local press, Gong was often described as “China's No. 1 matchmaker,” even though her business was a rebuke to the very idea of matchmaking. Despite the name of her company, Beautiful Destiny, she projected nothing more plainly than her belief that destiny was obsolete. “Chinese people still put their faith in destiny,” she told the new employees. “They say, ‘Oh, I'll get used to whatever happens.' But they don't need to do that anymore! Desire can lead them now. We're giving people the freedom of love.”

After so many years without much say in one of life's great decisions, people seemed to be making up for lost time. I read an online personal ad by a graduate student named Lin Yu in which she itemized her expectations for her future husband:

Never married; master's degree or more; not from Wuhan; no rural registration; no only children; no smokers; no alcoholics; no gamblers; taller than one hundred and seventy-two centimeters; ready for at least a year of dating before marriage; sporty; parents who are still together; annual salary over fifty thousand yuan; age between twenty-six and thirty-two; willing to guarantee eating four dinners at home each week; track record of at least two ex-girlfriends, but no more than four; no Virgos. No Capricorns.

The greatest difference between Internet dating in America and in China was conceptual: in America, it had the power to expand your universe of potential mates; in China, a nation of 1.3 billion people, online dating promised to do the opposite. “I once watched a twenty-three-year-old woman search for dates in Beijing, where there are four hundred thousand male users,” Lu Tao, Gong's chief engineer, told me. “She narrowed it down by blood type and height and zodiac sign and everything else until she had a pool of eighty-three men.” (A Chinese banker told me that he used Jiayuan to filter for a single criterion, height, which provided him with a list of gangly fashion models.)

When I signed on to Jiayuan to get a sense of Gong's business, I answered thirty-five multiple-choice questions. The Communist Party had spent decades promoting conformity, but the questionnaire left little doubt that, now, a man was expected to be able to define himself as precisely as possible. After height, weight, income, and other vitals, I was asked to describe my hair, first by color (black, blond, brunet, hazel, gray, red, silver, highlights, bald, or other) and then by style (long-straight, long-curly, medium-long, short, very short, bald, or other). For the shape of my face, I had nine choices, including as oval as a “duck egg” or as narrow as a “sunflower seed.” For a moment, I wondered whether a “national character face” was the choice for patriots, but then I realized that it was for those with a lantern jaw in the shape of the Chinese character for “nation”:
.

I was asked to indicate my “most attractive feature,” for which I had seventeen options, including my laugh, my eyebrows, and my feet. For “religious faith,” I had sixteen choices; for variety's sake, I checked “Shamanism.” For a question about “Life Skills,” I worked my way through twenty-four options, including home renovations and business negotiations. By the time I was done, I had been asked for my views on vacation destinations, reading material, prenuptial agreements, smoking, pets, personal space, household chores, and retirement plans. Then I reached a question that asked me to choose from a list of labels with which to describe myself:

  1. A dutiful son

  2. A cool guy

  3. Responsible

  4. A penny-pinching family man

  5. Honest and straightforward

  6. A perceptive man

  7. A career-driven man

  8. Wise and farsighted

  9. An unsightly man

10. A humorous man

11. A travel lover

12. A solitary shut-in man

13. Considerate

14. Gutsy

15. Loyal

16. Managerial

17. A handsome devil

18. Steady, staid, sedate

A page later, I was asked to choose the best description of my personal aesthetic. I thought back to the era of the “blue ants” and then examined the options:

1. I am gentle and urbane.

2. I am a cowboy from the Wild West.

3. I am graceful and sunny.

4. I am handsome and suave.

5. I am mature and charming.

6. I am tall and muscular.

7. I am simple and unadorned.

8. I am reserved and cool.

*   *   *

Gong Haiyan had good timing in entering the business of choice. The Chinese were spending more and more of their lives choosing. When private income began to climb in the eighties, shoppers moved in herds, surging after the same products as their neighbors with a force that became known as “tidal wave consumption.”

In the village of Xiajia, the unofficial center of town moved from the headquarters of the Communist Party to the village's one and only shop. Young people began to speak admiringly of the quality they called
gexing
, “individuality.” The young men in town started buying gel for their hair and cowhide loafers. They drove to the village store rather than walking, a distance of only about three hundred yards. Families rearranged their houses so that couples no longer shared a communal bed with grandparents and children, and the generations started sleeping in separate rooms. The local Communist Party secretary gave up calling himself a “rustless screw in the revolutionary machine” and said plainly, “Why am I doing this job? Simple—money.”

Now that the state had phased out the direct assignment of jobs, it had to shepherd college graduates through the unfamiliar experience of choosing a profession. The new job market (and marriage market) created demand for new clothes and health clubs and cosmetics and razors and shaving cream. In 2005, Chinese television broadcast the first
American Idol
–style program—the
Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl Contest
. Its success spawned a new genre known as “choice shows,” in which contestants could choose or be chosen by one another and the audience.

Shopping, or at least browsing, became a principal hobby. The average Chinese citizen was dedicating almost ten hours a week to shopping, while the average American spent less than four. That was partly because the process was less efficient in China—public transportation, cost comparisons—and partly because it was a novel form of entertainment. A study of advertising found that the average person in Shanghai saw three times as many advertisements in a typical day as a consumer in London. The market was flooded with new brands seeking to distinguish themselves, and Chinese consumers were relatively comfortable with bold efforts to get their attention. Ads were so abundant that fashion magazines ran up against physical constraints: editors of the Chinese edition of
Cosmopolitan
once had to split an issue into two volumes because a single magazine was too thick to handle.

My cell phone was barraged by spam offering a vast range of consumption choices. “Attention aspiring horseback riders,” read a message from Beijing's “largest indoor equestrian arena.” In a single morning, I received word of a “giant hundred-year-old building made with English craftsmanship” and a “palace-level baroque villa with fifty-four thousand square meters of private gardens.” Most of the messages sold counterfeit receipts to help people file false expense reports. I liked to imagine the archetypal Chinese man of the moment, waking each morning in a giant English building and mounting his horse to cross his private garden, on the way to buy some fake receipts.