On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road to visit the city’s so-called marriage market: a cluster of footpaths and lawns in the park’s northwest corner, where hundreds of parents gather each weekend to matchmake their unmarried adult children. It was the winter solstice: a particularly auspicious occasion this year, as an aunt had written to our family’s thirty-one-person WeChat group—a day on which it was said that heaven and earth would reunite.

It had rained that morning, so the air was damp and cool. I’d come here before as a child, glimpsing the idling marriage brokers—the “aunties” and “uncles”—as my parents and I crossed the park to the city center. Though I was now of marriageable age, I doubted I’d find a husband here, a city from which I felt largely estranged. I’d grown up in Hong Kong and visited family in Shanghai every year until moving abroad over a decade ago. The cultural differences alone between any potential Shanghainese suitors and me foreclosed the possibility, I figured, of a real bond.

But perhaps there was something to learn from the stand-in courtship practiced here, so radically different from the flirting and swiping I was predisposed to. What were the right conditions under which to find a life partner? Long a romantic, I had lately come to learn that love might instead be something worked toward, an earned outcome rather than a projection sustained until its inevitable end. The idea of courting prospective in-laws before spouses therefore seemed reasonable. This market was pragmatic: it conceded that familial compatibility could only help a relationship. It was to the point, with no beating around the bush about your finances or genetic ailments. 

I’d always enjoyed meeting the parents of friends and boyfriends—particularly the Chinese ones, who often seemed like strange permutations of my own: religiously preoccupied with their kids’ well-being and success, offbeat and quaintly crude, their politesse at odds with an inborn urge to voice their sometimes inflammatory convictions. Like the rule-abiding child I’d been, I was known to succumb to the flattery of my Chinese elders, who softened at my xiaoshun deference and fluent Mandarin—I’d spent months on the mainland as a child. I caved to cajoling missionaries at the supermarket in New York’s Chinatown, to the Mandarin-speaking Bank of America employee who convinced me to sign up for another credit card when all I’d wanted was to update my address. 

I entered the park through a western gate, next to which a Starbucks played Mariah Carey and Willie Nelson. The market emerged suddenly: crops of middle-aged Chinese huddled around laminated advertisements that littered the ground or were clipped to trolley bags and music stands. The otherwise quiet grounds, within these few thousand square feet, were beginning to teem with brokers and visitors alike. Fleece-clad aunties lined the shrubbery; raincoated uncles smoked under the wutong trees. I slipped into the sparse flow of people that circled the gardens and moved through sheltered walkways.

***

The first uncle I saw stood on the outskirts of the market, a few yards before a long archway that drove deeper into its heart. Bald and stocky, he wore sweatpants and hiking boots. One hand was tucked into his pocket. He used the other to nurse a cigarette.

A dozen listings were spread at his feet. These were bare-text summations of vital information: gender; education level; age, via birth year; height, and sometimes weight; employment status and occupation; income; hukou status, which granted residence and access to health care, education, and housing within a given region; property holdings (owned or rented? number of bedrooms? car?); parent profiles (pensioned? healthy or ill?); debt, or lack thereof; vices (smoking, drinking), or lack thereof. A few listed hobbies or a Chinese zodiac sign. 

The faceless prospects on offer were probably playing video games at home or hanging out with their friends. It was common knowledge that the matches themselves were generally uninvolved and uninterested in their parents’ schemes, that young people in Shanghai were dating on their own in all sorts of ways, both online and in person.

“You looking?” The uncle lifted his chin at me. “Birth year? Education level?”

 “Ninety-nine,” I said. “I have a bachelor’s degree.”

 “Plenty for a woman.”

This uncle charged a hundred yuan per month per listing and another fifty yuan for each date.

Women, he told me, ought to choose a husband with a higher education and income level than their own. He should also own an apartment. Most of the men advertised here at People’s Park had at least a master’s degree. “Bachelors with just a bachelor’s don’t bother coming here,” he said punlessly in Chinese.

There are thirty million more unmarried men than women in China, a result of the many girls aborted or discarded during the one-child policy. But the criteria for marriageable men have long been more stringent, so that there are many more women on the market than men. Many otherwise eligible young men—uneducated, rural, poor—simply don’t make the cut. 

Matchmaking in China dates to imperial times, when marriage was a more explicit economic arrangement administered by and for the sake of one’s family. A bride-price or caili remains standard today, while able parents are expected to house their children until they are wed, to finance their nuptials, and then to purchase property for the newlyweds. The Shanghai Marriage Market has reportedly been around since 2004, when retirees congregating in the park found common cause in setting up their children, but this uncle said he’d known it to exist since the nineties. Though Shanghai’s is the largest, similar markets exist in major cities across the country. 

These markets, the uncle told me, mostly serve older parents—those desperate for their children to settle down before it’s too late. Students in their twenties are largely dating online—which requires less up-front commitment—on apps like Tantan, China’s Tinder equivalent; Momo, a more socially oriented platform, featuring livestreams and local interest groups; and Jiayuan, which requires users to have a university degree. More popular than dating websites are multiplayer role-playing games such as Tencent’s Honor of Kings, which counts more than a hundred million players daily, and the more abstruse Dota 2, through which a cousin of mine met her husband. But there’d been a rise in fake online profiles (Zhenai, one of the older dating platforms, was fined 1.7 million yuan last year for displaying false listings), not to mention the perennial risk of what was called jianguangsi, or “dying in the light”: breaking up upon seeing a partner’s appearance for the first time in person.

“It’s easier to find the right person under these conditions,” the uncle said, pointing to the flyers in front of him. Still, the marriage market’s success rate was low. Everyone’s standards were too high. 

Most of the singles, I noticed, were in their thirties or forties. There was a PE teacher, a military veteran, a civil servant, a technician at a foreign-owned company. Annual salaries ranged from fifty thousand to one million yuan. In place of names, epithets abounded: “pale complexion, cleanly”; “slim, graceful”; “polite, excellent physique.” Women sought men with a sense of responsibility; all sought a spouse with Shanghai hukou. One man desired a spouse with no dating history. In the event that she had been married previously, he would prefer that any child of hers be a girl. 

When I asked the uncle if he had children, he flinched. His only son was thirty and single. 

“I’m not worried,” he assured me, though I sensed he’d turned morose. “I won’t pester him. He’ll find his way. He’s already dated many girls. I always tell him to take a break . . . dating can cost you thousands of yuan!”

Our conversation was intercepted by a woman looking on her daughter’s behalf. They didn’t mind that I lingered like a buzzard to eavesdrop. When I waved goodbye minutes later, he was recounting: “I bought him a car. He drove for Didi [China’s Uber]. Then I told him, You’d better date, not drive. There’s no business there anyway!”

***

I’d rewatched Disney’s animated version of Mulan on the flight over. Pressing further into the market, a series of women who brought to mind the movie’s formidable matchmaker—with whom Mulan fumbles her first meeting, all but ruining her family’s honor—flanked the park lawns like infantry. These aunties bore a similarly fiendish Chinese aspect: powder-white complexions, sheepskin hats, leopard-print coats. Honeyed words dripped from their cherry-red lips. “Beauty, beauty!” they called out to me.

The first auntie wore plum lipstick and drank fruit tea from a ribbed glass jar. What was I looking for?

I told her I was visiting from America. 

“America is fine,” she said, rummaging her files. “I have someone looking specifically for a foreign girl.” The local girls had done him over, strung him along for his money. 

“Conditions are not good here.” She gestured at an invisible economy. “Foreign girls are more carefree.”

Why didn’t they include photos with the listings? Out of respect to the singles, she said. There were, of course, photos. Brokers offered them to me like presents once I’d shown sufficient interest. (A man in a suit, arms folded, under studio lighting. “Not to say he’s dashing, but he’s got a warm look about him,” the broker narrated. Another, pouting at the camera. “Is he handsome? What do you think?”)

The second auntie sat on a folding stool, behind which a clothesline hung résumés like blouses out to dry. She’d found her daughter a husband on this very corner—he had a Ph.D, she said, and was a professor. Both his and her families owned property. Would I like to see their wedding photos?

“We have too many girls,” the auntie grouched, crossing the arms of her long pink puffer. Of her listings, thirty were men and more than fifty women. “The men here are shy. They always stop through, but they’re absolutely meek . . .”

A third auntie had moved to Shanghai from Anhui Province when she was sixteen. At one point she’d worked at a factory in the city making plastic bags; now she’d been advertising at the market for a decade. 

“Are you on TikTok? The young people here are all on TikTok. It’s skewing their perceptions of love.” A TikTok had gone viral, she explained, about a man who’d committed suicide before his arranged marriage. “What is wrong with these kids? How could a parent live after that?”

In lieu of individual résumés, she had printed spiral-bound booklets with abridged candidate profiles. I passed over WOMEN—NEWEST INFORMATION and flipped through NEW & UPDATED OUTSTANDING WHITE-COLLAR MALES ’87–’97, taking out my phone to capture one of the dozens of pages of information: name, age, occupation, and contact number, tabulated row after row after row.

“No photos!” she exclaimed, wresting the book from me. 

***

Lone fathers napped upright on benches, hugging their daughters’ credentials to their chests. The more resolute lapped the grounds with résumés clipped to their lapels or hung from lanyards around their necks, like dogs seeking owners. At the most populous square, by the park’s northern gate, parents and brokers ogled me as I passed through their line of sight, trailing and then abandoning me upon overhearing my unsuitable credentials.

I approached a fiftysomething woman in a red vest who’d been noticeably staring at me.

“You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?”

What was the giveaway?

“You’ve got that glint in your eye,” she said, “Of independence, critical thinking.”

She and the man next to her were here to advertise their and their friends’ children. The group rotated shifts every weekend. 

“We just want them to find someone they like,” she said. His son was twenty-seven, her daughter thirty-five. 

“We persevere,” he said. They had been coming here for three years.

Did their kids have any prospects? I asked.

“If they did, we wouldn’t be here!”

“Xinku,” I said: “It’s not easy,” or more literally, “how bitter.”

“Mingku!” her friend corrected me: “Life is bitter!”

Indeed, China had just reached a record low of 5.6 annual births for every 1,000 members of its population, nearly on par with South Korea and Taiwan. Marriage had been on the decline for a decade now, and divorce on the rise, while recent state incentives (a handout of up to the equivalent of $1,500 per infant, a 13 percent sales tax on contraceptives, a ramp-up to a two-child and then a three-child limit) had hardly made a difference. The country’s one-child generation, born between 1980 and 2015, was coming of age, singularly burdened with the onus of continuing the family line.

But this man’s son had recently turned down a woman with a Ph.D, as he himself had only a master’s. This was too threatening, he explained. A mismatch.

***

The energy picked up at three. I passed parents on benches, legs crossed and leaning toward each other, speed dating as proxies for their unwilling or unaware children. “A 1.69-meter woman should look for a 1.79-meter man,” mused a mother to two fathers. “It’s the educated countrywomen you want,” said another. “Well-off in-laws can be their own problem.” “Inferior doctors have only master’s degrees.” “Eighty-five kilos? My daughter’s hardly seventy-five.” “Girlorboy?” they chirped. “Girlorboy?” 

My elders laughed and spat. Two mothers discussed the odds of pregnancy at thirty-five. An uncle loudly recited his phone number to anyone who would listen. Another stood pontificating from his square foot of the park as though it were a podium.

When I approached, he leaned over and lowered his voice. “Any requirements, just let me know.”

I caveated that I lived abroad.

“America is the best country in the world. You shouldn’t be looking here—that would be beneath you.”

The woman next to him buckled in laughter.

“I would emigrate immediately if I could.” He was yelling now. “You ought to back Trump, get involved with the greatest people. Get out of here while you can.”

“Otherwise you weren’t raised right!” quipped the woman.

“America is the most civilized, democratic country there is. All the growth in China over the past few decades has been thanks to its example. Without the U.S., we wouldn’t have half this innovation. There’s no freedom of speech here. Ever since the Cultural Revolution . . .”

He seemed to remember why we were here. “Look,” he told me, “you can find someone here if you want, but best to bring them back to the States. If you stay here, you’ll regret it for a lifetime.”

The woman was cackling. “If we could leave, we would.”

I thanked the pair for their advice and was wandering toward the next column of brokers when a man caught up with me and tapped my shoulder: “You’re not from here?”

“No,” I turned around. “You?”

He paused, shuffling a black crossbody across his chest.

“Who are you looking for?” I asked. He was maybe forty.

“Guess,” he said, smiling.

“Oh,” I deflected. “Ha ha. Are you from Shanghai?”

“Jiangxi. Do you think we could, you know?”

I made a conciliatory face.

“I’m a generation above you . . .” he sighed.

***

Turning a corner, I came face-to-face with a man in a baseball cap, a surgical mask, and sunglasses. A morbid fear of darkening, even in the winter, meant that many at the market wore full sun coverage, lending them an ominous and all-knowing mystique. 

“Oi,” he whispered. I caught the whites of his eyes above his frames. “I’ve got a ’95 man. Want to see? Most of my clients are at least 1.85 meters.”

He pulled up a sepia-toned photo of a guy smiling in what looked like a gift shop, a shelf full of stuffed capybaras behind him. 

“Don’t trust them,” he said, pointing to a pair of brokers I’d spoken with down the path. “Don’t share your WeChat either. They’ll sell your information in bulk for six thousand or eight thousand yuan, then vanish once you pay them to set you up.”

“I’m a veteran here,” he said. He’d found a husband for his sister here in the aughts. “I can tell you’re a rookie. I won’t charge you for any information.” 

I told him I lived in America. “We Shanghainese don’t revere Westerners. We don’t care for them. But foreigners from the outer provinces, they’d love nothing but to marry them!”

Had I been to North Korea before? He had visited a few years back and enjoyed it so much he didn’t want to return. “All the bad things they say about the DPRK are bullshit. Housing is free, health care is free, there’s job security. Whatever you want to eat, you can eat!”

A gaunt, wizened lady in aviators and a black mask nodded beside him. 

“There’s no job security in Shanghai,” said the vet. “It’s hard to see a doctor.”

“North Koreans love Chinese people. They treat us with respect; they know that we fought for every inch of their land.” I was reminded that during the Korean War, the CCP had assumed a staunchly pronatalist stance: mothers of more than five children were feted by the state as “glorious,” and those with more than ten “heroic.”

“Shanghai’s elderly homes put you to death,” the vet continued. The caregivers they employed were individualists, capitalists. A new health aide might be okay the first month—then she took on additional clients to make more money, started asking for more and more red pockets.

The wizened woman added, her voice like sand: “Because you can’t walk, can’t move, and don’t have offspring to hold them accountable, they bully you. They eat your food.”  

The vet shrugged. “This is just how an individualist society works.” 

A woman with permed, maroon-dyed hair asked my age. I’d thought, nearing my late twenties, that here I’d be a borderline shengnü, a woman left over (a term popularized in 2007 by China’s Women’s Federation denigrating the country’s growing population of unmarried and highly educated women), but all she said was, “You’re a child!”

“Westerners, they’re not like us,” said the woman. “I ask what kind of person they want to date, a Beijinger or a Shanghainese, and they say they don’t care: I don’t need a house or a car—I want someone pretty!”

***

The market contained several submarkets. At the seniors’ corner, a woman my mother’s age was being set up with an older man. Adjacent to it was the divorced zone, where those who, according to listings, had secured a “clean break” from their marriage sought to remarry “as soon as possible.” Passing the Muslim corner and the old-Shanghai corner, for the children of families who went back generations in the city, I at last reached where I belonged: the foreigners’ corner, for those Chinese based outside Shanghai.

A posse of male exchange students from Oxford dictated their dating credentials to a pair of aunties who diligently transcribed them onto their phones. A herd of small Australian children walked past them, led by a chaperone. “You’re so pr-etty,” one uncle enounced cheerily in English at one of the girls. 

Further off, a woman in a green raincoat stood browsing the flyers intently. Though she looked about my age, she was in fact in her late thirties, visiting from Chongqing. Her guimi (best friend) had brought her here. It was her first time at a market like this.

She had dated just once before, but it hadn’t worked out. It wasn’t easy to find someone these days, she said. What was she looking for? She wasn’t sure, exactly, but “someone taller than me.” 

“I haven’t tried dating online,” she admitted. “I’m just not up to it.” She was pretty and seemed kind; I wanted to talk to her more, to encourage her, but our conversation was interrupted by Huawan, a mother who had been hanging around the foreigners’ corner waiting for the right woman to pass through—someone willing to move for her son, who ran a business in Tokyo. Anyone from Shanghai, or Zhejiang, where she was from, would do. 

Huawan affixed herself to my side and led me forth along the path. “If you share your photo with others,” she primed me, “take it sideways so your face isn’t clear. Don’t tell anyone where you live.” 

She roped in a roaming father to help me survey my prospects. “Check out this guy,” he said, showing me the résumé of a man from New York. He was born in ’87. Too big an age gap, Huawan and I agreed. The uncle argued it was doable, but offered other options: Melbourne? Auckland? Frankfurt? Tianjin? How about this one, in San Francisco? (“Is that far from New York?” the uncle asked.) He was a solutions engineer at Google, and his father was here today at the park—Huawan pointed out a man in a top hat seated under a distant gazebo. 

Another option, in Connecticut, was within a decade of me, but only 1.70 meters tall. 

“Shorter than you,” Huawan observed. 

I was too tall, I conceded. 

“Not in the north, not abroad, not in Dongbei!”

When it seemed unlikely I would find someone suitable even abroad (“If it’s not a fit, it’s not a fit,” mused Huawan), I exchanged WeChats with her (“Perhaps you and my son could have a call?”) and peeled off toward a small pond, next to which, beneath a lopping willow, a pair of French Canadians stood atop a rock advertising four of their male friends. They’d ChatGPTed their friends’ Hinge profiles into marriage-market-style résumés and printed them out that morning. Now their WeChats were blowing up, they told me. The blond one had recently gotten engaged, at twenty-two. The other was single.

I translated for the mob. Yes, those being advertised were medical students. No, they weren’t doctors yet. Yes, they were living in China for the next year. No, they weren’t the same guys standing here. Yes, they were looking for Chinese girls. No, they didn’t speak Chinese. Yes, this one was taken. No, I was not his fiancée.

The Canadians asked me to tell the crowd they were leaving soon. They were to go to Wuhan that night; their train was leaving in two hours. This didn’t stop a pair of local girls from clinging to their sleeves, asking if they were free that evening. “I’m from Wuhan!” one of them cried. 

***

Around five, the brokers closed up shop, and a gray pallor blanketed the park, mirroring the skyscrapers that encircled it. On the southern fringe of the market, I locked eyes with my last parent. His son had a newly renovated apartment, he said, right in the city center. Would I like to see a video?

I asked how the search had gone for him today. “You have to make compromises if you yourself are not perfect,” he said. “We used to stumble blindly into relationships, and it worked fine!”

He continued: “Single kids, for now they’re all right. Once they’re old, they’ll be abused by everyone. Their neighbors will look down on them, hobbling around like this”—he mimicked walking with a cane.

I sympathized with these mothers and fathers, galvanized by a fear that their children would age without a companion nor children of their own to take care of them in their final days. The rural poverty that so many of them had grown up in had long been replaced by an unrecognizable urbanism that had yet to deliver the economic security promised alongside it. Now the city’s youth unemployment was soaring, peaking at 19 percent a few months prior, as costs of living continued to mount. Where social services fell short, filial piety, these elders hoped, would fill the gaps.  

“No one could find a job this year. Without a paycheck, how can they afford to date? By the time the economy is better . . . maybe in five years . . . they’ll be in their forties.” 

In a final bid he presented me with a selfie, taken in natural lighting, of a man with wire-rimmed glasses and a strong jaw, his hair swept loosely across his forehead. Not bad, I thought.

Becky Zhang is an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine.