Marriage in China

My wife and I attended a wedding celebration yesterday for one of my former students. The wedding itself was last Wednesday, in their hometown (they've known each other since high school), but they had a party for post-high school friends here, and we we're happy to celebrate with them.

Here's a small, but significant cultural feature that visitors to China may find a bit confusing. There is a strong impulse in Chinese people, pretty much across the country (note: I will often speak in generalizations on this blog, and I am intending just that, to be general. Of course there are exceptions. It wouldn't be a generalization if there weren't) to be married by the age of 30 (primarily for men, though more recently in history this has spread to the women as well). I have long wondered at the source of this impulse. It is so prevalent, and strong. What could possibly be so pressing about age 30?

In my considerations I thought about some historical realities. Perhaps because the life span was shorter in ancient history (and the not-to-distant past), particularly for males who generally did harder physical labor, it was very important for a people to institute strong cultural rules to get married early enough to produce the next generation. This next generation was and continues to be an extremely significant aspect of Chinese culture. Some people would even say it is the way they achieve 'eternal life', which is not an entirely unbiblical concept.

That is not to say that the Bible doesn't affirm the eternal identity of each individual person, but if you look at phrases, especially relating to Abraham (my mind harkens back to childhood church songs like "Father Abraham, had many sons. Many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them, and so are you...) and King David (think of David's family line, as well as David's preservation of Saul's family), there is clearly some continuity of a person through their ancestors. Even in Paul's letters to the Roman and Corinthian Christians, we are all 'in Adam'. Somehow, something significant is passed down from generation to generation. Each person matters.

Anyway. Progeny is important, beyond the sentimental feelings of "aww, what a cute baby! He has your ears!"

In a rare and random moment I stumbled upon something I found to be quite significant, relating to the source of this cultural element. It may not be the ORIGINAL source, as it may go back much further in Oral History. But it was enough for me to say, Ah ha! That's why it's so important today!

I was flipping through the LiJi (Book of Rites), one of the more ancient texts of Chinese culture, that prescribes many actions and rituals that made up ancient Chinese culture. It covers all those important things like mourning the dead, marriage, how to properly shoot arrows in a competition, etc.

Book 1, Section 1, Part 1, 7. 27 says this: "When one is ten years old, we call him a boy; he goes (out) to school. When he is twenty, we call him a youth; he is capped. When he is thirty, we say, 'He is at his maturity;' he has a wife."

In James Legge's English translation he adds this footnote as an explanation to us who are removed by time and culture: "When it is said that at thirty a man has a wife, the meaning must be that he ought not to reach that age without being married. Early marriages were the rule in ancient China, as they are now. Confucius was married when barely twenty. In the same way we are to understand the being in [political] office at forty [later on in the same passage]. A man might take office at thirty; if he reached forty before he did so, there was something wrong in himself or others."

Today, in reading through some articles before writing this blog, I came upon Daniel MaGuire's book Sacred Rights, that said this:

"Just as there is a right season for growing crops, there is a right time for marriage. Thought the appropriate age may vary from time to time and place to place, that ancient Chinese seemed to understand that in order to produce quality children, men and women should marry in accord with certain time periods...Some held, however, that men of the age of 30 and women of 20 would be better suited, according to the Book of Rites, for only at these ages would both man and woman have completed their physical and mental developments in preparation for marriage."

So apparently this is not a new thing in China. It has been around for several thousand years.

I'll certainly be posting more on Chinese marriage in the future. I'm just thankful that my wife and I 'made the cut' and are not yet considered strange...No. I take that back. We are very strange here. But at least we successfully met this one cultural expectation.