I have been single for a good long while, and while I thought my former in-laws had accepted the situation with a modicum of good grace, I'm beginning to wonder. For one thing, my father-out-law likes to rib me about drinking Chinese liquor at my next wedding (as if I'd invite him) which was a not-so-subtle dig about dating more than one man. My mother-in-law, alarmed at the prospect of having me grace the family dinner table to infinity, became determined to set me up with someone. I thought what the hell, why not? As long as I wasn't being trotted out like a prize heifer at a corner park somewhere with a sign that said, "Foreign bride. Fat and poor. University graduate from state school, so not much of a catch. Bad tempered, drinks too much coffee, can eat two giant soup dumplings for breakfast and still have room for lunch. Lazy. Only had a daughter" then I was good. Or so I thought, until I saw the men she tried to fix me up with.
I'm no snob, and while I do have an advanced education, I'm not a Harvard graduate. My Chinese skills are conversant on a good day, non-existent when stressed. For some reason, my mother-in-law saw fit to match me with a bachelor who spoke zero English and had not finished high school, and as she told me sternly, no one had actually been able to prove he was gay. I demurred: What I objected to was a certain lack of hygiene. That, with the combover, told me he was not gay so much as inexperienced with the ladies, and perhaps not really interested in anything at all. The dealbreaker: He informed me he didn't believe in women using washing machines as it was no problem to wash clothes by hand. Looking at his clothes, and worse, smelling them, convinced me he had never actually washed any clothes, and that his mother visited from their hometown once a year, max. (I was right.) She was furious at my lack of interest: Dude was a CATCH and he probably wouldn't "bother me." Another selling point, "He's poor and can't speak English, but his brother lives in a very nice hotel!" That wasn't the cause of my disdain. We were simply not right for each other. End of story.
Riled and feeling challenged, my mother-in-law then reached into her grab bag of eligible bachelors and pulled out her pièce de resistance, another high school dropout, a former foot soldier in the army, a widower and single dad, who came to our first and only meeting wearing his army uniform from the 90s, his kid, some very expensive apples with the marriage symbol on the peel, and oddly, a pogo stick which the son, grim-faced, used to demonstrate fine balance skills. Mr Right smoked like a fiend and insisted on walking me back to my apartment. Every internal alarm in my brain told me that I did not want this man to know where I lived, so I had him walk me to a friend's house, quickly texting said friend, a bodybuilder, to come to the lobby to greet us, effectively scaring this man away. Once I rejected this good catch in the nicest possible way ("My dad just died and I can't marry while I'm in mourning") then she conspired with my co-teacher to Find A Man. My co-teacher, the lovely Miss Sally, is internet-savvy and consequently joined several matchmaking sites, threatening at one point to drag me to a marriage market in Shanghai if I refused to give a prospective suitor my WeChat contact. Her idea of a good match: He owns two apartments next door to each other, his kids live in Canada, and his mom lives across the hallway. Gee, what's not to love? The fact he's 10 years younger than I am and half my weight?
I'm left asking whatever happened to the Meet Cute of Chinese cinema, where my scarf blows away and is caught by a shy boy who loves English and big-haired, big-bummed Texas ladies with loud laughs and a penchant for the ridiculous?
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