To those familiar with the procedures of many American online dating services, the methodology of the international Chinese internet dating sites can seem incredibly crude. In contrast to the lengthy questionnaires and personality profiles of such sites as the big multi-national and USA sites, some China dating sites require you to submit only the most basic personal information along with a few statements about yourself and your ideal mate. How, you might ask, can such a slender set of facts lead to a lifelong match? This is where it is important to realize the dissimilarity between Eastern and Western ways of viewing the world. Knowledge of such differences is important in navigating the sometime treacherous waters of cross-cultural dating.
Since Aristotle, the West has given logic and the disciplines associated with this way of viewing reality - in particular math and science - pride of place. By contrast, reason and logic never gained the death grip on the Eastern mind the way it did on its Western counterpart. This is not to say that the Eastern mind is illogical. It is more accurate to say that the East has always recognized the limits of rationality. As that great twentieth-century interpreter of China for the West, Lin YuTang, put it in his book My Country and My People: "For a Westerner it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature."
What, you ask, has all of this has to do with dating a real Chinese woman? Quite a bit, actually. One way to view Western online dating services is to see them as natural offshoots of the Western preference for (or obsession with) reason and logic. In essence, these websites are attempting to transform the search for the perfect mate into a sort of mathematical equation: Input the proper information-interests, hobbies, personality, political/religious views and favorite vacation spots-and out comes the ideal match. It all sounds like a perfectly rational way to find a life companion, and for all I know it might well work.
The only problem is that every Chinese woman I have every met (o.k. I exaggerate, but not that much) thinks that this way of finding a life mate is crazy. To understand why, we need to recall Lin YuTang's line about reining in logic. We all know couples who on paper are terrible matches. That is, rationally, it makes no sense for them to be together. But yet, it works (can you say James Carville and Mary Matalin?). However, if you limit yourself to the standard Western formula, you will forever miss these possibilities. Fortunately, Chinese women rely on something to take them beyond this narrow and overly rational way of viewing relationships: "yuan fen."
There is no single English word with which you can translate yuan fen. The closest term is fate - the idea being that two people are destined to meet in this life. It is yuan fen rather than interest inventories and personality profiles that rules the day for many Chinese women. Without it, the going is definitely harder; with it, all things are possible.
For many of the Chinese women who are online dating, the lengthy questionnaires and massive amount of information requested by the big western dating websites is simply not relevant. The fact that of the billions of people in the world the two of you have hooked up on this website is enough to give you 'yuan fen cred'. What you do with it is up to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment