Adult children around the world returning home for festive celebrations often face the same fate: parents keen to share increasingly firm views on their life choices, from how to stack the dishwasher to who they should date.
But few parents have honed their tactics quite like Chinese elders when it comes to cajoling their children into marriage and parenthood. The methods range from the mildly intrusive to the outright extreme.
Every year, I hear of at least one blind date engineered by parents that collapses almost immediately — often because one, or both, participants were unaware that they were on a date. One set of wealthy parents threatened to cut off allowances to their 30-something son unless he produced an heir. A friend in Beijing told me his elderly father had grown so despondent about his chances of having a grandchild that he had paid a substantial deposit to a US surrogacy agency in order to have another child himself.