Expats offer to lease temporary love

• Source: Global Times
• [04:40 February 10 2010]
• Comments

By Andrew Tait

Last week, a female student at Peking University placed an ad, offering "10,000 yuan ($1,465) a day for a boyfriend to take home for the Spring Festival celebrations." She wrote in the ad that her parents had told her to bring a man home, or "you can forget about coming home for the holiday," according to ifeng.com.

Internet response to the ad was swift, with many commentators questioning both the parents' motives and the girl's own morality in making such an offer.

But the girl is not alone in her search.

One organization, the Xiao Bai Alliance, provides special services during Spring Festival. "Many clients report that at Chinese New Year, parents expect someone special to be brought home. So we are here to facilitate the meeting of 'special friends'," Xiao Bao reports on his website.

Ms. Yang, a 31 year old single accountant told the Global Times that she doesn't even look forward to the holiday, as her parents always pressure her to find a suitable partner. "But they'll never stop asking, not until I introduce them to a boyfriend."

According to Dalida Turkovic, a life consultant with Small Steps Coaching, based in Beijing, Spring Festival is a time when people are expected to show progress in their lives, which leads to stress and frustration.

"I help people understand the consequences of living their lives for someone else, for not standing up for themselves, and for only doing what makes others happy," she told the Global Times.

One new trend is the use of foreigners as short-term stand-ins.

In an effort to understand the situation, Global Times placed two ads online. One concerns a foreign male, hiring himself out as a Spring Festival boyfriend, and the other relates to a Chinese girl looking to hire a foreign male to accompany her to meet her parents during the Spring Festival break.

The foreign male ad received only one response, criticizing his offer of "temporary companionship." The Chinese girl's ad, however, received over 40 responses in three hours.

One hopeful suitor, a 26- year-old man from France, described himself as "quite funny, and well educated. Every parent likes me!"

He went on to explain how he had undertaken this kind of "work" before and requested between 400 and 800 yuan a day for his services.

Other replies came from Spanish, British, American and Australian nationals, from a variety of backgrounds and at a wide range of prices.

"For girls, it's true there is certainly a lot of pressure to start a new family and to release their old family from burden," commented Vincent Qi, founder of LadiesWhisperer, a dating trainer and consultancy firm in Beijing. "Desperate times call for desperate measures. Women want to find a good guy, but there are too few."

"There are two sides to every story, but in my opinion, in this case, both sides are pretty desperate. Only losers would look for an answer like this."