Continue to be amazed with how direct certain aspects of Chinese social taboos are. Ex-landlady (the one who’s been trying to find a man for her daughter) calls and says, “say Tongli, you forgot some stuff at your old place. When can you come over and get it?” I arrive, grab stuff, and ex-landlady says, “why don’t you stay for dinner with us?” Inner monologue: well this will probably be awkward but I do like free food and it would be solid language practice. So I stay, and the daughter notes that she saw wine bottles in my old flat, concluding that I enjoy the occasional spirit, and offers some Korean sake. “Sure I’ll have a little bit,” I declare.

Moments later, the whole bottle goes into a big cup; I of course drink the it all to avoid being rude (seriously when was the last time a 60 year old poured you a bottle full of liquor?) Dinner is good, and the interaction not as awkward as it could have been. I learn how they came to own several flats in Pudong, and how the mother and two grandparents subsist entirely off of the daughter’s very modest income.

Having previously explained at length to the pair that foreign men are generally very bad dating prospects (pump-and-dump versus pumping out babies) it’s sort of amazing that they are so persistent. This time the mother assured me that she simply wanted a starter boyfriend of sorts, despite continued protestations. “You can start from friends!” she assured me.

Many young Chinese women behave as though they are strapped with an explosive that will detonate if they reach 30 and are unmarried. At least their parents often seem to think so. Though this behavior seems out of place among persistently aloof Westerners, Robin Hanson points out that egg count decreases to approximately 12% by age 30, with steep declines each year thereafter. He ponders a different equilibrium, where women have kids much younger and delay career/grad school until age 28+, in order to produce healthier children (or simply, more children among certain demographics, which is something the developed world badly needs). This is not to say that planned birth policy is the answer (as China has in fact done), merely to question why the status quo appears to be sub-optimal from the perspective of long-term survivability.

Perhaps aggressive landlady, with her old-lady ways, is on to something.