Mrs. Zhang went hunting for a man Friday afternoon. Equipped with photos, a resume and oodles of charm and enthusiasm, the 58-year-old spent the entire afternoon looking for a Mr. Right under the cypress and ginkgo trees of Shenzhen’s Lotus Hill Park.

She was not looking for a husband for herself. She was looking for her daughter’s. Zhang was not alone. Zhang and several other parents from Chengdu started the “singles’ parents matchmaking fraternity” at the end of May and attracted many like-minded parents to pursue love and marriage in hectic times when many working people do not have time to look for spouses on their own.

Parents hold personal ads featuring vital statistics such as age, income, height, mill around, chat and swap personal information at the gatherings every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday afternoon. The majority of their children are well-educated white-collar workers at well-known high-tech and foreign companies, according to these matchmaking moms and dads.

“I’m anxious about my daughter. She is 31, well-educated and has a good job at a local IT company, but no boyfriend,” Zhang said.

“Our children work and study so hard that they have no time to meet a good partner,” Mrs. Li said, adding her 28-year-old daughter is a beautiful, multilingual airhostess.

By traditional reckoning, Li has every reason to be concerned. Her daughter is three years older than the age when a person is considered a social minus if he or she remains single (25 for women, 35 for men). But attitudes are changing along with China’s rapid development.

“Here in Shenzhen every young adult is busy with their career development like my daughter,” Zhang said. “I feel that I’m more worried about her personal matter than she is.”

The matchmaking events are a response to such concerns among the older generation, who fear their children worry too much about work and not enough about continuing the family line, says Yi Songguo, director of social the sciences department at Shenzhen University.

Many young citizens’ parents only come to Shenzhen occasionally and lived for a period of time. “Some of them came to Shenzhen with the only task of finding a spouse for their children,” said Yi.

He also suspected that the dishonesty of many matchmaking services was another reason spurring parents to arrange the park meeting.

This kind of park meeting first occurred at Beijing’s Zhongshan Park last October. Though some have begun to make friends, so far nobody is said to plan tying the knot.

(Shenzhen Daily June 20, 2005)