Photo: movieline. Several days ago as I was walking down a main street in Guangzhou city centre, I witnessed a young lady, squatting beside a tree on the pavement, howling with such unbridled anguish into her cell-phone it bordered on lunacy.
Her shopping and handbag had been discarded behind her in a kind of Hansel and Gretel trail. At the time I was with a friend, who began to translate what this poor girl was wailing about. He told me her boyfriend wanted out of their relationship, the result of which meant she wanted to "leave this earth", as she no longer thought it had a place for her anymore.
As we passed, she began bashing her head against the tree, screaming "Are you there?! Such dramatic breakups are common in China, particularly at the younger end of the scale. My Chinese teacher told me that after what seemed to have been an amicable split from her boyfriend turned sour when he then decided to beat her up as a parting gift.
Finally my own girlfriend was once blackmailed with suicide from a 30th floor balcony if she were to leave her ex. Adolescence and even adulthood can be an emotional time regardless of creed or ethnicity. Yet from my experience, Western breakups on the whole lack the all-consuming intensity they have over here. Clogged with scantily clad boys and girls provocatively pouting and posing, social networking sites can paint a picture of Chinese youth that is both easygoing and promiscuous. These images, I am repeatedly told by young men and women around me, represent only a small proportion of the still traditional and conventional population.
Newly formed Western relationships tend not to carry such expectations from the get go. Unless one person actually inquires as to the status of the relationship the whole situation can be rather informal. For me, being "an item" has always been preceded by weeks, sometimes months, of a laissez faire scenario where no one really knows where they stand.
