EYESHENZHEN  /   Opinion

Looking for Mr. Right

Writer: Debra Li  |  Editor: Zhang Chanwen  |  From: Shenzhen Daily  |  Updated: 2022-07-04

It’s not easy for a woman to strive for career success and also find a perfect Mr. Right, who can truly appreciate her, support her and love her without reservation.

That’s why the recent Chinese period drama “A Dream of Splendor” has gained such great popularity among young audiences, particularly women.

Set in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), the story is inspired by “Jiu Feng Chen,” a four-act play by Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) playwright Guan Hanqing about a sophisticated woman’s effort to rescue her friend from domestic violence. The period drama introduced more characters into the story, and made it a crowd-pleasing story of a heroine (Zhao Pan’er) who became a successful restaurant owner in the capital city Bianliang, and along the way found her soul mate in a handsome upright imperial court official born in a prominent and wealthy family.

While it’s laudable that the show via Zhao’s words professed such values as that a woman needs to make her career and financial independence a priority and stop attaching the hope for happiness to the good will of a future husband, the focus on women’s virginity as a prime value has drawn the ire of viewers. Many also argued that while Zhao always proclaimed the importance of relying on herself, she had to count on the help from her love interest, the official named Gu Qianfan, at a critical moment to win a lawsuit and rescue her friend.

All that said, what happened between Zhao and Gu in the show depicted a kind of ideal romantic relationship between a man and a woman. Zhao always insisted that Gu treat her with respect as an equal human being. The duo appreciated each other for their good character, their ability to deal with people and things in their lives, their graceful demeanors and of course, beautiful looks. Zhao was also mature enough to put aside the grudge against Gu’s father whose actions had led to the misfortunes of her family of origin and recognize that Gu was different from his father and worth loving. Only all the beautiful happenings depicted in the show seem too good to be true in real life, driving home the idea that the perfect relationship is but “a dream of splendor.” It seems to say that only the very good-looking, intelligent, kind and lucky people can find true love in people that are equivalents of their own. The show’s rosy depiction of love, nevertheless, got many in the audience addicted to the sugary taste of an ideal romance.

Another popular Chinese TV series called “Nothing But Thirty” from 2020 gave audiences the complete opposite outlook on relationships. In that show, as in “Dream,” three women from different social backgrounds had different worries in life, only they were surrounded by immature irresponsible men. After suffering setbacks in her life and relationships, Wang Manni (her name indicating a “gold digger,” as the Chinese pronunciation sounds like “want money”) finally was disillusioned in men and decided to make herself a more successful and better person.

Statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs revealed that the number of newly registered marriages in China has decreased from 13.07 million in 2014 to 7.64 million in 2021. With the improvement of women’s income and social status, more and more women in China have given up finding a Mr. Right, because “why bother if a relationship cannot provide a financial boost or emotional satisfaction?” Nowadays, people are more realistic in finding a future mate. On matchmaking sites, you can see all the clearly stated criteria required of a date: height, looks, education background, profession, annual income and net assets. It seems as if people are competing for a job opening as someone’s future wife or husband.

However, in secret, people still crave for a slice of romance and harbor the slight hope of finding a soul mate, as evidenced by the high rating of the “Dream” on Douban, China’s equivalent to Rotten Tomatoes. The show is rated at 8.5 out of 10 points by a total of 572,105 viewers on the site.

Looking for a soul mate in the style of the “Dream” is a fairytale, but a modern fairytale actually provides some clues to the conundrum.

The “Shrek” franchise has always been one of my favorite animation films. In that story, a princess falls in love with an ogre because he is kind, humorous and “has layers” like an onion. They get married, have kids and continue to have troubles in life. But that doesn’t stop them from accepting and appreciating each other as they are, just as they do with themselves.

(The author is a Features Department editor of Shenzhen Daily.)