A Visit to Beijing's Wedding Market: Understanding the Fantasies and Realities of Marriage in China

“This is a Drag Queen's wet dream” , my friend joked as we trawled through the first rack of dresses. Beijing's Wedding Market is hidden above the Camera Market in Wukesong, in the north-west of the city. Climb up an inconspicuous flight of stairs, and you are crossing into a world of its own making: a world that in many ways encapsulates the Chinese Wedding experience. Crammed with dramatic ball gowns, fantastic wedding dresses, mens' suits and a large variety of wedding shoot props, couples are here given the resources to create a wedding (and the photographs to remember it by) which leaps into the realm of fantasy.

Having made this claim, I have to admit to having only attended one wedding in China. However, pairs promised to each other in marriage posing for their wedding shots even months before the ceremony are not an uncommon sight. In 2008, I visited Qingdao, a city on China's coastline and a former German concession. Many of its beaches are crammed with locals, tourists and the heaps rubbish with which they surround themselves. However, on one quieter sandy beach, the only other people around were a few retired couples and newlyweds having commemorative videos and photographs taken. A bride stood in her white flowing dress, knee deep in the undulating waves as her young husband wrapped his arms around her. Later, she lay with half her body resting on the sand, her lower half in the water, looking into a video camera and whispering “I love you” in English over and over. I kept thinking about the ruined, salt-water soaked dress. Among other sightings, a beautiful and traditionally dressed couple standing in red costume outside Wangfujing's Dongtang Cathedral in Beijing, and a couple posing by a water duct with a tiny patch of green grass surrounding it, of all places, directly underneath a motorway bridge intersection.

I step back into the present that conjured up this host of visions. In one shop, I spot a white dress appliquéd with cut out silver lilies on white gauze, a long train and sparkling sequins. The next shop along carries in its range a red-orange ball gown that opens out at the front to reveal layers of white petticoat, with a plunging neckline and ruffles upon ruffles expanding the bust. One dress reminds me of Terry Pratchett's book Monstrous Regiment, as a full military uniform-come-ball gown is brought into creation in a glaring combination of reds, golds and oranges. Another dress consists of whip-cream like twists in white gauze, shaped by metal wire and streaked with pinks and blues I usually associate with food dyes. The imagination poured into these dresses might not always be couture, but for me, it reflects the ideals and dreams of a new generation stepping into adulthood and family life.

Marriage in China is important, and always been. Father and son, husband and wife, have traditionally been considered amongst the most important and compulsory relationships to people here. Now, with the One Child Policy and laws to ensure volitional unions, marriage still remains the single greatest requirement for any individual growing up in China. Despite laws which forbid men from marrying before 22 and women before 20, women in particular are expected to marry young. In the eyes of the majority, women who have reached the age of 30 are guoshile – “gone off”. A few decades ago in the UK, being “left on the shelf” was a concern for many women approaching their 40s. I have Chinese friends who have fretted for years over finding the right partner within their allotted time frame (while they are still “ripe”). The social pressure is immense. Marriage is also a life insurance for a generation that cannot rely on the state for care in their old age, and hope to be able to lean on future children for support. Strips of white papers float amongst the trees in Peoples' Parks such as the one in Shanghai, where busy-body mothers have posted up advertisements of their children. When mothers meet to discuss the potential of setting up their grown-up offspring, the most important questions involve property ownership, incomes and levels of education. In this context, finding a marriage can become an aggressive and business-like affair, the source of anxiety as much as stability.

So, where does this leave us in terms of the dream-fantasy marriages this market tries to offer? Are weddings which go into all-out dress-ups and props just a thin layer concealing a truly sad reality? Divorce rates are increasing in China, but this has been the case for many countries around the world in recent decades. Marriage is a status symbol across the world, but the case in Asian regions seems particularly acute. Marriage has continued to be a link between families and a way to climb the status ladder, whether this depends on the bride and groom's status as a good communist cadre in the 60s and 70s, or as a wealthy businessman now. I have spoken to Chinese singles in their early twenties who make no secret of their materialistic criteria in any potential life-long mate. I asked one woman in her early twenties about her concerns. Her long term ex-boyfriend had recently married another girl back in their hometown of Dali. She had left only 3 months earlier to study in Beijing. Although she was only 24, she worried most of all that she would not find someone who she could love before she got too old, and that she might have to settle for someone she didn't really feel for. She felt rejected, but also sad that a young man she had loved so much had been so quick and desperate to get married.

What she said was both hopeful and depressing. It reminded me of all that this market stands for. Ridiculous dresses and props can be a way to ignore the reality for many: an unromantic and entirely materialistically motivated marriage. It also expresses perfectly young couples' surviving expectations or hopes to find romance and love in their partnerships, whether they have to build them from scratch or not. As we prepared to leave, escaping the feathered angel wings, puffy dresses and lacy parasols, I paused. It was irresistible: I had to try one of the dresses on and feel the fairytale it represented. Decked in white lace and suffocating under a tight bodice, I felt (if self consciously) for a flitter of a second like a princess, ready to be rescued by her prince charming.   

The UK Riots as seen through the Internet. Is it a UK Apocalypse?

I am sipping a piping hot cup of green tea.  Beyond the cafe window Chinese and Western tourists stroll leisurely past the old style Hutong buildings near Beijing's Drum Tower.  On the BBC's website, images of flaring orange fires and silhouetted riot police cover the front page.  I am certain that the violence is an unpleasant, and for many of those living the UK's major cities where riots have broken out, a terrifying experience.  Seen through a computer screen and constantly updated media reports, it appears almost apocalyptic.  Margaret Atwood, 28 Days Later and several recent zombie films are just a few examples that spring to mind.

A call to a relative in London, and I was reassured that although the violence was "terrible" and "simply out of control", they had been fine because it was "mostly in the black areas".  And so I realised that I would not have to even look online for 'explanations' of the sudden unrest.  The social issues and ignorance which have plagued Britain for years are simply getting even worse.  A woman who has lived in London for 10 years, and still thinks Hackney is just a 'black area'?

Meanwhile, politicians and a host of reporters condemn the looting, rioting, arson and even attempted murder that has arisen over the past few days.  The New York Times and other foreign media have placed UK's riots far down on their headline pages, so that a glancing browser might hardly notice the tiny orange box that is a photograph of the recent fires.  Reportage about Duggan's shooting is so scarce that it seems an event entirely removed from the violence of recent days.  Is this frustration from a society trying to unshackle itself from the controls and patronising language of the government and police force?  Has unacknowledged deprivation in our country left people so uninterested in their own lives and prospects?  I really do not know, but from my quiet cafe on a picturesque street in Beijing, even the closer social upheavals in China sometimes seem surreal.

In fact, one of the most visible and accepted social factors in China is educational and economic disparity.  Standing outside a bar and getting ready to go home after a relaxing evening with friends, a tractor full of middle aged migrant workers trundles past to continue working throughout the night. With free healthcare, affordable housing and free education in Britain, it is easy for the middle class in the UK to ignore the problems many people in our society face. Just because schooling is free, does not mean that it is always successful. If people feel they are in a society which gives them little opportunity or choice, it might be difficult to find a place within it they are satisfied with.  Aware that an arrest will mean for many a first offence, people cannot see into their own future enough to care about it.