Sexual liberation?

‘From now on, JIAO Richu will be known as YANG Richu,’ our teacher announced to the class one gloomy and chilly day. Like 9/11 or the Great Tsunami of 2004, events which make everybody remember where they were when they first heard about them, I remember that it was 1974, and I was in Year One. It felt as if we had just been hit by an earthquake. A divorce or re-marriage was unheard of until then, and stayed out of our vocabulary throughout my education and well into the late nineteen-eighties.

In the early ninety-nineties when a high school friend broke up with his sweetheart, I was asked to help ease her pain, and for years, he wore a guilty look whenever he saw me. In those days, if you dared to go out with anyone, it was expected that you would eventually marry them.

Some fifteen years later in a bar in Beijing, a high school friend asked me if I had been in touch with a certain classmate. He wanted to tell her the long-kept secret that he was in love with her, as were many of his classmates – a fact that he had only just learnt at a reunion party.

‘Have you tried asking Tan?’ Tan was a classmate who went out with the best friend of this girl and they got married soon after university. Surely Tan would know the whereabouts of his wife’s best friend.

‘How dare anyone ask such a private question?’ another school friend jumped on me. He didn’t say another word, but he was evidently mindful of the divorce rate, which since the nineteen-nineties had positively surged.

In fact, what is surging is not just the divorce rate but also the number of those among the younger generation who are choosing to co-habit. When my sisters and I were going out in the nineteen-nineties, my mum would stay up until we got home, even though we were then well into our twenties and my eldest sister was a single mother in her thirties. It was expected that a girl should keep her celibacy until the day she was married.

These days, however, it seems the last concern of anyone who knows my niece that she is living with a man whom she has just met on an internet dating site.

There was a time when divorce and co-habitation were considered as social evils or forms of ‘spiritual pollution’ that were imported in the films and music of the West. But these days, they seem to be accepted as an ordinary fact of life.