Modern concubines

Last Wednesday was the second of my two recent appearances at the local TV station to be one of the guests in a “light-hearted” chat show. For both topics, the person in charge thought it would be interesting to hear the “foreign” point of view, so I got invited along.

The topic of the first programme was something I became aware of a good year and a half after coming to Xian. It’s 'ernai', literally meaning ‘second grandmother’ but actually meaning private prostitute. I suppose the ancient term is concubine.

An ernai (sometimes called xiao san, or small three) is a girl, usually a university student, who, in return for large amounts of money, plus a car, a flat, etc, agrees to be the private prostitute for a rich man, usually a businessman or government official. It’s called ‘to be wrapped up’ (bao), which means that in return for having her material needs fully taken care of, she agrees to be on call whenever he needs someone to make him ‘comfortable’, to sit with him when he’s drinking baijiu with his friends, go on holiday with him, and to not do anything of that nature with anyone else.

After hearing about it the first time, I was pretty surprised. Afterwards, every single time I asked someone about it, they looked at me like I just asked them “Have you ever heard of chopsticks?”. It’s now such a common thing, no one pays attention to it anymore. One girl friend of mine who was a student at the Xian Film University and is in the know about things like this said about 10-15 percent of girls in her year were ernai, while another 30-40 percent worked as “masseurs”, “waitresses” in KTV bars, or prostitutes in high-class hotels.

If you ever see a red car, particularly a red Mazda, in China, it’s probably being driven by an ernai (or the “dakuan”, rich man, who is her ‘employer’). Beijing Foreign Languages University is the most famous in China for its legions of ernai. It’s the same at the universities here with the prettier students, ie, the music university, the arts university and the foreign languages university. Every Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, there’ll be piles of expensive German cars, usually black, waiting outside the main gate. A small procession of girls come tottering out on high heels and park themselves in the front seat before driving off. One of my colleagues at work tried to deny this happens, and everyone rolled their eyes. It’s fairly well accepted that the vast majority of eligible men (rich and powerful) will ‘wrap an ernai’.

This is, of course, not to say that everyone is in on it. Most girls would not do it, especially the conservative types like my colleagues. I often get told I should learn the ‘good things’ about China, not the 'bad stuff’, which is a pretty lame attempt to save face. However, I’m still fairly surprised by how most 'eligible' people would consider it and indeed do it. Most people talk about it like it’s nothing. I've been told that any man who can afford one will have one, while the richer ones will have two or more. I’ve got a friend from the music university who helps rich guys make contact with willing ernai from the ranks of her classmates.

The reasons for it are probably numerous. Most men over forty got married early in a much more austere age than now. With their one child grown up, wife unlikely to divorce him, and the money rolling in, the temptation is not insignificant. As for the girls, it’s a huge amount of very easy money in a highly competitive, over-populated country. A slightly more cynical take on it would be that it shows the pre-eminent position of money and materialism in modern Chinese society.

The topic of the second programme was why married women ‘stretch over the wall like a red apricot’. Or, in modern terms, why do they have affairs. I made the point that a lot of Chinese men, even now, tend to be nice and loyal before getting married, then after getting married and earning more money, they start to ‘wan’, or play around. I also said that sex life is near the bottom of the list for the vast majority of people when it comes to choosing a lifelong partner. Money, in the form of rich parents, stable job, high salary, etc, tend to be at the top of the list. These points were not denied. The other special guest, a 29-year-old psychologist, had just got divorced three days previously after discovering her husband had four different girlfriends during their four years of marriage, and never once came home before 2am.

In modern China, there seem to be ancient ways of thinking, communist (1949-1976) ways of thinking and ‘modern’ ways of thinking all jumbled into one and spread across different generations. Coupled with the unprecedented speed of unsustainable economic development, it’s hard to get to grips with it, particularly for the only children. As they say, ‘the forest is big, it contains every type of bird’.