In the ordinary town of Jianghan Plain , there are a group of middle-aged and elderly men who have been single for various reasons until now. Among them, some are rich in appearance but poor in their families, some are self-reliant, have small assets but are inferior because of their education, and some are just picking and choosing and staying in the marriage and love market until they enter their twilight years. In the long time of being single, the most difficult thing to put on is emotions and desires.
My hometown is in a small town between Hanshui and Yangtze River . In the villages under their jurisdiction, the villagers do not have much entertainment hobbies except playing mahjong. At first, Baolin, a 53-year-old cobbler in the town, also liked to join in the fun. Mahjong is fun, but unfortunately the poker table in the village is still a public opinion field. When I go to the table, my private life must be cleaned by card friends and onlookers during chatting.
"Why are there no one in the factory? Old Zhang has brought back a wife from another place." On that day, one person mentioned Baolin's words to marry a wife.
"You don't have to choose this age anymore. If your mother leaves in the future, how can you sit alone until dark?" another person said. Baolin is familiar with this way of getting along with neighbors and is not disgusted with it. But after a game of cards, I lost a little money and my anxiety became even worse. When I got off the card table, the old cobbler Baolin returned home in disappointment.
In the family, there is only an old mother who is nearly 90 years old waiting for Baolin. The elderly are healthy and can still take care of themselves, but as they are older, many places cannot do without Baolin's care.
This family originally had 7 people. In 1980, when Baolin was 10 years old, his father died of illness and his mother raised five children alone. Baolin is the youngest child, with two sisters and two brothers on it. After graduating from elementary school, Baolin farmed with his mother at home, helped the villagers do some farm work and get some wages, just like his older brothers and sisters who started making a living early. When he got older, he learned to make shoes with the cobbler in the town. I have been working on shoes and repairing shoes for 30 years. During this period, the brothers and sisters completed their marriage, each formed their own families, and left the family.
Baolin is glad that he built his own small villa before he arrived in 2019. He originally worked in a shoe factory in Wuhan, but because the villa was completed, he was lucky enough to escape the lockdown of Wuhan. After retiring to the countryside, he learned to farm again. After a lot of spare time, he spent looking for a partner when he had a lot of extra time. When he built the building, he thought that he might not have used the second floor when he was older in the future. But what the house brings him was not only peace and security, but also face.
When he was young, he lived in a single brick house. His simple living environment persuaded many matchmakers who were willing to introduce to Baolin.
People believe that Baolin has been single until now, and is largely burdened by the embarrassing economic situation.
Although he is over fifty years old, Baolin is the one who is very upright among the middle-aged and elderly men in the countryside. He is tall and has worked for so many years, but he has not shrugged his shoulders and has a strong nose that can make this drooping life look more elegant. When he doesn't have to work, Baolin likes to wear white and light gray shirts. The elderly in the village all said that the cobbler Baolin was born slender and handsome when he was young, and had a fair skin that was rare on rural men. If this beauty is born now, it will not be wasted whether it is used to attract peach blossoms or attract traffic. But he was born in the 1970s, in a brick house by the river that would leak rain.
The inferiority brought by poverty and the pride brought by handsomeness have put Baolin in an embarrassing situation in the rural marriage and love market, from young to old.
When I was young, many rural girls had difficulty even in survival, and it was impossible to just want one man to have a good birth. When Baolin was in his 20s, he met a female worker from a cotton mill through an introduction. He probably really liked that person. He once bought the girl a white sleeveless dress for two months' income. The girl is about 1.6 meters tall, and she is about the same age as hers and looks.But the girl couldn't stand the work of working in the cotton spinning mill for three shifts, and finally married a man who worked in a state-owned enterprise. The man was not as good as Baolin in appearance, but after the man got married, he transferred the girl to work in the supply and marketing cooperative, which helped her get rid of the job she didn't like.
As we grow older, Baolin's little appearance capital gradually fades away, and fewer and fewer people come to say they are close to each other.
According to the neighbors, some people have introduced some women to Baolin in recent years. Those of the same age as Baolin usually divorce and take care of their children. Baolin felt that he would help others raise children when he got married, and he could not do this sucker himself. When he meets a younger person, he doesn't look down on a cobbler. After all, he has no savings or pension insurance, and his craft is not popular now. There are so many cobblers, carpenters and bricklayers in the village who are not working, and they are familiar with the land again, and they have grown the land.
When the old cobbler Baolin was still picking and picking, women of the same age in the town had already begun their second and third springs. Aunt Zhang, who will turn 60 next year, has a rounder body as she ages. This not only does not make her look less graceful, but also makes her more noble among her peers. Her husband died a few years ago, and after that, she began to go on blind dates. A local male guest who was over 10 years older than her successfully won her heart with the "three golds and 100,000 yuan pension insurance". Aunt Zhang can enjoy the brown sugar tofu that her wife brought home from the breakfast shop every morning. She dances square dance every night, and the other party also likes to watch it. In the exchange of straightforward marriage interests of the elderly, you can even appreciate the sincerity of "walking through most of your life, seeing the mountains or mountains".
The concept of older generations favoring boys over girls has created a long-standing unbalanced male-female ratio in the town. In addition, in the process of urbanization in China, many women in the town went out to work, and some girls who went to Jiangsu, Zhejiang or Guangdong would find ways to find partners to settle down in more economically developed areas. The gender imbalance between men and women and , coupled with the outflow of women, makes women in the town more popular and have more choices than men in the marriage market.
Therefore, in a small town, if a man does not have a job in state-owned enterprises and institutions such as Electric Power Bureau , Industrial and Commercial Bureau , and banks, it will be difficult for ordinary farmers, workers and small vendors to find a partner. This law has not changed since more than 20 years ago. After the epidemic, some men who originally worked in the city went home because of factory bankruptcy and unemployed, and more young bachelors in villages and towns also grew.
In China, there are many towns with similar situations as in the small town in my hometown. According to the data from the " China Statistical Yearbook 2021", the ratio of men and women in rural areas in 31 provinces across the country is greater than 100 (referring to 100 women as a reference), that is, there are 31 provinces with more men than women in rural areas. Among them, Hubei is 111.34, which is much higher than that of men and women in rural areas across the country.
Compared with older men and women in big cities who are busy doing careers and actively not getting married, bachelors in villages and towns are more caused by seeking but not getting what they want. In the city, even people who are not married will have several romantic experiences or more open sexual relationships. In the countryside, falling in love is a rare and waste of each other's time and energy. Everyone goes straight to the theme of marriage when they go on a blind date, and there is almost no process of falling in love and trying marriage. If a pair of lonely men and widows come together and don’t mention marriage in the end, people always think that they are playing hooligans or having an affair. The collective miserable situation of
actually makes Bao Lin feel at ease.
42-year-old Hu Ping is another bachelor in the town. He was short and had no inheritance of his mother's strength. He wore a pair of metal-framed round glasses all year round, and his eyes were big and vivid behind the lenses.
Hu Ping is one of the earliest college students in the town. He graduated from an English major at a university in Hubei and worked as an English teacher at a middle school in Shenzhen 20 years ago. Unexpectedly, after being an English teacher for 3 years, Hu Ping returned to his hometown 16 years ago.His parents thought he was just coming back for a rest during the summer vacation, and still feel that he has lost a house worth tens of millions of yuan in Shenzhen.
Why did you come back then? Hu Ping only said to the outside world that he was too tired and his body couldn't bear it.
If Hu Ping was willing, he could be an English teacher in a small town middle school, but not everyone liked to endure a profession with a moral halo. I have been studying English for many years and have not heard Hu Ping say a word in the town, but this language probably taught him: people have the freedom to fall.
As an old bachelor, Hu Ping always appears in the town in a "wandering" manner. Most of the time, people regard him as a coward or a deserter. In the town, from East Street to West Street, no one knows that the children of the Lao Hu family will destroy their own future. Sometimes he wanders into the topics of the townsmen's homes and becomes the "negative textbook" mentioned by the older generation - now there are occasionally young people in the town who have left the town and propose to go back to their hometown to rest and "lie down" or do small business. When the elders at home think of Hu Ping who has been single in the town since he was a single, they always persuade the children to leave with worry. Some parents asked their children anxiously: "Where is there any pastoral life here? Why are you doing when you come back? Are you wandering around with those old bachelors?"
Interestingly, Hu Ping actually installed the computers of the neighbors. Whoever can't use their mobile phones or need to be repaired, they also ask him for help. Afterwards, everyone did not forget to praise him again: This is still different when they went to college.
After two years of doing nothing at home, maybe it can't stand the nagging of parents all day long, or maybe it's too boring. Hu Ping opened an Internet cafe with his savings. More than ten years ago, Hu Ping's Internet cafe business was very good. At that time, there were thousands of junior high school students and a group of idle young people in the town, and there were only two Internet cafes for them to enjoy.
After Hu Ping's sister graduated from college that year, she settled in Chengdu early on with a high salary. After his younger brother dropped out of high school, he went to Chengdu with his sister to find a job and got married. The two old men poured all their attention on Hu Ping and arranged many blind dates for him.
However, Hu Ping looked down on girls who dropped out of school and worked in towns, thinking that they were uneducated, and those energetic girls looked down on his thinness. The girls who have received higher education in the town are eager to leave here quickly. After hearing Hu Ping's story, they are not even willing to meet. Later, despite his age, Hu Ping still yearned for a young and beautiful partner, so he could not match his success and entered the marriage for a long time.
Hur Ping has taken the initiative to leave the blind date game during his resistance and setbacks. He spent all his thoughts on his convenience store. In his early years, the Internet cafe business became bleak, so he changed the Internet cafe to a convenience store. Even if he sells a bottle of mineral water, he sells it very seriously. Whenever he comes into the store, he will make some polite words. Unlike convenience stores in first-tier cities, you can only hear an electronic sound "Welcome" when you enter.
Picture | Hu Ping's convenience store changed from an Internet cafe
Machinery repairman Master Guo, a few years younger than Hu Ping, is much more enthusiastic about getting married and having children.
Master Guo, 38 years old this year, is the only agricultural machinery repairman in the town. After finishing elementary school in the village, he went to the town to study in junior high school. Because of his poor grades, he dropped out of junior high school. In the past, many peasant parents were powerless and unwilling to guide their children's education.
After dropping out of junior high school, Master Guo explored alone on the road to "establishing a career". He first helped his parents with farm work at home for two years, and later worked odd jobs in various factories in the county. Until he was in his 20s, he saved a tuition fee and sent himself to vocational school to study molds and CNC. After graduation, he worked as an apprentice in an agricultural machinery repair shop in the county for two years. Finally, he finished his studies in his early 30s and returned to the town, rented a store and opened his own repair shop. Master Guo can earn more than 100,000 yuan a year, which is considered a high income in the town.
After establishing a career, Master Guo has the only major event in life - getting married.Master Guo is not tall, less than 1.7 meters tall, he is relatively fat, he doesn't like to talk, but he is kind and smiles politely whenever he sees anyone. Usually, he always wears a blue work shirt. Before going on a blind date, he would take off his work clothes that smelled oil and change his body-faced clothes.
still feel regretful that he has not been to high school. After every blind date, he always feels that he has lost points because of his low education.
Master Guo said: I had met many girls in the factory before, but I didn’t dare to chat with her. When I was in my 20s, I liked a girl. I had asked her for dinner several times and took her to the haunted house in the county town, but the other party did not refuse. But before confessing, they already had a boyfriend.
Not all men are ordinary and confident. Master Guo sometimes wondered, if he had taken the initiative at that time, would it be possible? He often complained about himself who was not brave enough back then.
After returning to the town, relatives and neighbors saw that his store was doing well and made a lot of money, so they took the initiative to come to the door to help him say he was married. A few years ago, Master Guo met with a barber 10 years younger than him in the town. The girl graduated from high school and has been doing beauty salons in the county. For this reason, Master Guo went to the county town and booked the best garden hotel to invite the girl to dinner and drink flower tea. But after an afternoon passed, the girl did not appreciate Master Guo's hard work and simplicity and refused to make an appointment again. Now this girl has become a mother and has a two-year-old daughter.
What exactly do women want? Master Guo has never understood it. He thinks the difference between women is much greater than the machine in the store. The matchmaker felt that Master Guo was too tidy, his appearance was part of it, mainly because of his unsatisfactory personality. Women nowadays don’t just look at money. After one round of interviews with
, in 2018, Master Guo got married with a divorced woman who was two years older than him. But an accident happened before getting married. When Master Guo’s father was operating the field and operating the tillage machine, he mistakenly pressed the “pause button” to the “reverse button”. The machine cut off his father's right leg and also cut off this newly-grown marriage between Master Guo. The operation cost 20,000 to 300,000 yuan, which was originally used by Master Guo to prepare the wedding and bride price. The woman broke up because the money was not received.
Later, neighbors often stood up for Master Guo: Fortunately, this kind of snobbish woman did not marry her, and she was still a second marriage. After saying too much, Master Guo himself felt embarrassed: That just means that he is useless and can't even coax a divorced woman?
The self-comfort obtained by despising others will soon be trampled on in another blind date. But people are happy to build a chain of contempt for marriage. It is a transaction, so there must be a different price.
His marriage remorse and father's surgery, Master Guo was depressed for a while.
In the summer of 2019, a Vietnamese bride married into the town, which gave him new hope. A neighbor living on the same street is now in his 30s. A few years ago, when I was working in Hangzhou, I met an intermediary who worked in a transnational marriage and later successfully married a Vietnamese bride. The Vietnamese bride doesn't like playing mahjong or yells to go shopping in the city. She has a child within a year of marriage. She also learned to sew, and now she works as a female worker in a small town clothing factory, and can earn 3,000 or 4,000 yuan a month. In Master Guo’s opinion, this is his ideal wife: young, healthy, gentle, hardworking, and good care.
Many men in small towns have similar ideas to Master Guo. As for language communication and hobbies, they don’t think it’s important. The men and women here do not think that they spend money to "marry" a foreign bride. They are objectified women, or more serious, and they are suspected of buying and selling people. Otherwise, wouldn’t you also recognize the marriage of your parents or ancestors? Most of the families of the previous generation of small towns were formed by arranged marriages or two marriages. Just like opening a blind box, some people first get married and then love, while others are helpless all their lives. Moreover, when facing Vietnamese brides, people here also have an inexplicable sense of superiority, feeling that they are helping Vietnamese women to help poverty, so that their behavior is more just.
"Even the rural areas here are richer than Vietnam. As I said, it's good to find a little more Vietnamese brides." This is the evaluation of a local aunt in her 50s. Although she has never been to Vietnam, she does not know that Ho Chi Minh's housing prices are close to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Master Guo asked, the cost of marrying a Vietnamese bride was more than 250,000 yuan, of which 180,000 yuan was the bride's house, and 20,000 yuan was the agency fee for the agency, and the round-trip air ticket and accommodation fee were also paid. If you go there once, you may not be able to match it, so you have to go back and forth 2 or 3 times. Master Guo has never left China or taken a plane. The farthest journey is to take a bus to the county town with a clock, and then take a bus to Wuhan for dozens of minutes. Due to the epidemic in recent years, Master Guo’s Vietnamese bride plan has also been delayed, and he hopes that the epidemic will end soon.
has a vision in my mind, and Master Guo will work harder to save money. Relying on the fact that he is the only mechanic in the town now, he is brave enough to shout. Sometimes he calls 200 for one machine, and sometimes he calls 300 for one machine. But he was also worried that if the epidemic caused more people to return to their hometowns and someone robbed him of his job, the money would not be so easy to make.
Picture | Master Guo’s shabby machine repair shop
In the blocked marriage of bachelors, some people also see business opportunities and make profits from it. There is an aunt who goes around the streets and sells noodles and braised snacks. She works as a matchmaker and will charge a 20 yuan agency fee for helping introduce one person. If the negotiation is completed, she will charge another 200 yuan. When both parties have weddings, they will send her another red envelope, with the amount of the custom. Relying on , the aunt has bought a new house on a property in the county town. Introductions like
are all one-to-one, and you cannot organize multiple blind dates like in the city. The city's paid blind date bureaus or friendships organized by enterprises and institutions have been screened from the basic thresholds such as age, occupation, income, education, marriage and childbearing background, and health status. The visitors are all from the same circle. Although everyone has different preferences for their ideal partners, there are still common demands.
If you want to organize a bureau of dozens of people in a small town, you will find that there are all ages from 30 to 60, and those who are divorced and those who have two children will appear in the same room. The difference in our age and marriage history is too big, and we cannot have common ground. What's more, some people work in the county town, some people are idle in the village, and their lives are not as regular as those of the 996 people in the city, and it is difficult to get a group of people together.
As people often say, happy people are similar, unfortunate people have their own misfortunes, and the bachelors in the town seem to be even more uneven on blind dates.
nights in rural areas always come faster and deeper. After married couples close their doors, what are the single men doing?
lust is a taboo topic in the town. People here can tell dirty jokes, curse people with genitals, and spend money to enjoy some special services, but they cannot talk about "sex" as serious things. If you talk to someone seriously, the other person's eyes will flash and he will hold his eyes and smile in a daze. This concealed attitude has led to the "rural bachelor" becoming the same short video-type tag as the "European and American plumber", but the former is more insulting.
Baolin is very disgusted with the title of "rural bachelor", especially the word "old". When Mu Xin said that his ideal was to be a "bachelor", we all believed that this was true. But it is difficult for people to believe that a rural bachelor will not cause any trouble. It seems that their spiritual world is more empty, and naturally they will have stronger physiological desires.
There was also a hair salon in a small town that could provide special services. Later, because a man got sick here, his family made a big fuss, causing bleeding and injury incidents, and the shop was forced to close. The dance hall has existed for a short time, and it is difficult to know how it died. There is also a small movie video store, which not only rents and sells some CDs, but also provides private movie viewing services. For a long time, the men in the town loved to linger in these places.But now, if you want to spend money to solve your physiological needs, you need to go to a county town dozens of kilometers away. Every county town has its own customs street, and there is no need to promote it. People in need will come here in a dark way, which has nothing to do with being single or not.
Men will not get the table for those romantic pasts that occur in factories, incestuous events that occur in the countryside, or special consumption in cramped shops. Some people think that if it is not for the purpose of letting parents hold grandchildren or for getting a family, it is much cheaper to spend regularly than marrying a Vietnamese bride.
As we grow older, the desires of single men when they are young will slowly dilute into the idea of visiting several times a month, and finally slip away from the cracks of some services.
Trafficking of women or sexual assaults like Fengxian rarely happens here. I don’t know if it is because it is located in a plain area, the economy is not too backward and the vision is not covered. Some women have indeed said that they had been harassed. For example, a woman in her 40s reported that she was followed while walking on the river bank in the early morning, and a young girl mentioned that she was peeked at the bath at home in middle school.
For Hu Ping, even spending money to buy services is even unnecessary. Because when he was young, he had to take care of the Internet cafe business all night, so many loneliness were relieved. Every night, I play games online with a bunch of boys, typing the keyboard whirring, and then swearing a bunch of swear words. I have a midnight snack, and I will lose all my energy in the night. I fell asleep in a drowsy daytime, and I was too lazy to think about what my blind date last week thought of me.
For Master Guo, the urgency of making money is stronger. In addition to loneliness, if you have to say that there are any losses, it is that in order to establish customer relationships, he attended weddings of all sizes in villages and towns. I don’t know when the money I’ll be recovered with the money I’ll be able to be recovered. Money is the most important thing, whether you get married or not. This is an important lesson he learned from his fiancee who broke the contract.
Picture | Master Guo’s mechanic shop is said to earn more than 100,000 yuan per year
In the past two or three years, many people have returned from factory dormitories, construction site sheds, and urban village rental houses. Unlike those bachelors who have already guarded the world in the town, they not only have no marriage and family, but also have no idea about their next job. I only have a lot of time to wander around the villages and towns. Someone in the town joked that there are more than 200 people in a village, and there are almost 3 or 50 bachelors.
Sometimes more than a dozen people walk around the ridges of the fields or river bank facing the sunset, as if they want to step on the wasteland to bring some vitality. Finally, I just added some slanting shadows to this evening air.
*The character information in the article is fuzzy
- END -
written by | Huang Shanshan
edited by | Wen Lihong
