【纽约时报110805】Looking for a Date as China Looks On

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/0 ... ay-day-up.html?_r=1


By ADAM CENTURY
Published: August 5, 2011


THE object of my affection was within reach. Yu Wanlin, a former winner of the Miss Chongqing beauty pageant, stood across from me on the set of “Day Day Up,” a Chinese dating show with more than 100 million viewers. She blushed when our eyes locked, accepted my invitation to dance goofily onstage and giggled promisingly when I inquired about Chongqing’s culinary treats.

Then, in a comparison that left me speechless, she told me I bore a striking resemblance to Jesus. I had close-cropped hair and little more than a 5 o’clock shadow. Despite Ms. Yu’s assurances that she had meant to flatter — “Jesus was in fact a very handsome man” — I could manage but a bewildered gaze in return. With an intimation of my impending mortification, I faced the camera head-on and plunged into the alternate universe of Chinese dating shows.

My embarrassing fate should not have come as a surprise. As a freelance writer who has lived on and off in Beijing for the past several years, I’ve watched Chinese dating shows develop a reputation for their intentionally humiliating formats and emphasis on materialism. In April 2010 a male suitor asked Ma Nuo, a contestant on the hit “If You Are the One,” whether she would be willing to ride on the back of his bicycle. She infamously replied, “I would rather cry in the back of a BMW.”

While Westerners may imagine Chinese television as a staid remnant of the Communist-controlled information system, the reality is that more than a decade of media commercialization has made television here — particularly provincial satellite channels with national audiences — provocative, even by Western standards.

Satellite outlets like Hunan TV, the creator of “Day Day Up” and the second-most-watched station in all of China, often face less stringent censorship regulations than China Central Television, known as CCTV, allowing the smaller, decentralized outlets to challenge CCTV for ratings supremacy.

Nowhere has this regulatory divide been more apparent than in the realm of dating shows, which populate the provincial channels but remain largely off limits for CCTV. “If You Are the One” has been at the forefront of the divisive new genre. In that show 24 women are presented with a succession of handsome men. The bachelors then undergo an intrusive and ego-deflating round of questioning in which bank statements are often exhibited and salaries made public.

The show’s debut on Jiangsu TV last year prompted a number of imitators. The episode of “Day Day Up” that I appeared on last month featured seven foreign men trying their romantic luck with an equal number of stiletto-wearing Chinese women.

The show opened with a test of superficial impressions. Before we even had a chance to talk with the objects of our affection, we had to choose our favorite based on curves and smile alone and present her with a bouquet of roses. Empty-handed, the least popular woman defensively declared, “Foreign men are not my vegetables,” implying that she intended to stick to a strictly domestic diet in the future.

Beneath the glossy veneer of a dating show the program felt more like a clichéd confrontation between Chinese and foreign cultures. The male wooers were given placards typecasting our identities: I was a “shining American,” whatever that meant; the South Korean was the “stay-at-home introvert”; and the British contestant was obviously the “gentleman.” More difficult to label were the Ukrainian kung fu master and the Syrian gynecology student who moonlighted as a male model in Beijing. We spanned seven countries and four continents, an array meant to underscore not diversity but the perceived incompatibility of foreign men and Chinese women.

“Foreigners are usually used on Chinese television in order to highlight China’s cultural discord with the outside world,” Miao Di, a professor of television arts at the China Communications University in Beijing, told me. “All shows use foreign guests occasionally as a fresh injection of entertainment.”

This subtext became much clearer after the show was edited. (On that score, at least, the Chinese producers are no different from their American counterparts, who are routinely accused of manipulating reality via editing.) When the hosts — reminiscent of Austin Powers in their capris and pinstriped shirts with sunflower-adorned lapels — asked me what type of woman I like, I carefully emphasized independent personality and literary taste. This was distilled into a crude “I like bigger, curvy women.” The post-production “Ahhh” from the crowd made my answer sound like a kind of revelation, as if all American men shared a predilection for the plus-sized.

Similarly, the interview with the Syrian contestant lasted roughly 20 minutes, but the post-production version was cut to about 30 seconds and focused solely on his religious polygamy. On the broadcast he’s shown half-jokingly asking a female contestant if she would be willing to become his fourth wife, the limit under Sharia law. “In China we have equality between men and women, so absolutely not,” the woman stiffly replied.

My nadir was still to come. In the finale, when the Korean and I both picked Miss Chongqing, Lucy, an American-born Chinese woman from Miami, was left dateless and dejected. Her puppylike entreaties tugged at my heartstrings, though, so I moved to her side, earning a relieved smile in return. That’s when she stonily rejected me, to the cackles of the audience.

Going into the show I knew that my chance of success was slim. In this consumerist crowd I had neither property nor a car to my name. And in a country that is 93 percent ethnically Han, outsiders remain something of a novelty whether we like it or not. Miss Chongqing has since befriended me on QQ, China’s largest instant messaging program. “I thought you were going to pick me,” she messaged recently. Perhaps there is hope yet.

薄凉

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