I was in Changgang (昌岗) Starbucks, Guangzhou, China with a mocha in hand. I have lived in China on and off, since 2014. I have been dating Ria, a Chinese girl from Guangzhou, for five months. There are many cultural differences we have discovered in the time that we have been dating.
“Are you ready to go? My mother and brother already arrived to the Chinese restaurant. Would you like to have dinner with them earlier,” my Chinese girlfriend asked via a WeChat audio message.
Today I was being introduced to her Chinese mother for the first time.
“I am going upstairs. I need to use the toilet first,” I replied.
She said, “I need to go to the toilet too.”
I had already put myself in a good mood to mentally prepare for meeting my Chinese girlfriend’s mother visiting today from Hong Kong.
Ria then messaged me, “I love you.”
I figured she must be really nervous too. This would be the first time her Chinese mother had been introduced to a foreigner, a Caucasian English-speaking male from Australia who happens to also speak Mandarin.
The IELTS Training Academy Model Graduates
Ria and I took an elevator to the restrooms upstairs from Starbucks. As I waited for Ria to finish in the restroom, I snuck down the hallway to where there was an IELTS training academy. The English training academy had an impressive array of advertising marquees outside the entrance.
Two marquees had a list of Chinese students who had passed their IELTS tests in this English training academy. Each story had a profile photo, a description of the student’s aspirations, and their IELTS pass marks. The IELTS pass marks were all 8.5 band for IELTS or above.
When I scanned over some of the incredibly sexy, dolled up model-like Chinese female students in those photos, I could not help but think, “You have come overseas. Look at you.”
When I read the aspirations of these Chinese students, my first impression coincided with my experience of Chinese girls in Australia.
Learning English is a very sophisticated venture for Chinese women to flee China for a Western country to find a husband to marry.
Western countries like The United States, Canada and Australia in the past had this phenomenon of imported brides. Women from Russia who don’t speak English could be found on online dating websites. Then there was a phase of imported Vietnamese brides that mostly don’t speak English. Now, standing outside this IELTS English Training Center, I was at the start of the mail-order-bride supply chain.
Sometimes people do learn English so as to increase their opportunities to travel abroad, to ultimately marry into a richer country and a better life.
Chinese people who spend hundreds and thousands of their hard-earned dollars to learn English in English training centers in order to improve their chances of migrating to a Western country could be seen as another level of professional immigration dating.
The Importance Of A University Degrees In Eastern Vs Western Society
This drew on another cultural difference between Australia and China. In Australia, a university degree is not important in society. You can find a good job regardless of your education. In China, you are unemployable unless you have a university degree from a prominent university.
It seems, in Chinese society, English is a luxury. Why do Chinese women spend time achieving a high IELTS band? Chinese society prefers them to acquire an esteemed university degree, such as a law degree, which is deemed the height of success in Chinese culture.
Deciding to learn English in Chinese society would be to achieve the bottom rung of success.
I pored over the profiles of these Chinese female success stories, assuming that the rational in their minds is to believe, “I can’t go to university. I can’t use English for any jobs in my country. Let’s go on a dating website, snap some pretty photos of myself, and I will use my English skills to go to another country, enter a relationship with a Western male from that country, get married, have kids, and live the fairytale life in this fairytale Western country.”
Soon, my Chinese girlfriend joined me to stand in front of the English training center. We began our walk to the Chinese restaurant, where I would meet her mother for the first time. I knew it was on.
Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.
