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Living in China: Welcome to the Marriage Market!

“Tall handsome guy looking for love… or for somebody with 2 masters degrees” […]

Each Saturday in People’s Park, every elderly citizen that is not hellbent on killing you on a transport vehicle in this city is located inside this park instead. A swarm of parents (of every age, really) with children of marrying age engage in “modern” match-making activities such as pinning a cardboard information pinned onto a piece of shrubbery or a standing plastic bag.

Blind-dating in China: "tall handsome guy looking for love... or for somebody with 2 masters degrees"

Blind-dating in China: “tall handsome guy looking for love… or for somebody with 2 masters degrees”, originally uploaded by designative.

This resumé includes their offspring’s best attributes: height, age, hometown, occupation, monthly salary, whether they own a house or not, perhaps an occasional photo. Aside from hovering family members, other points of interest include strings of personals wrapped around trees, matchmakers that will work for a fee, as well as rosters of every applicant in the market. It’s like the parent-controlled version of Match.com.

By Itamar Medeiros

Originally from Brazil, Itamar Medeiros currently lives in Germany, where he works as VP of Design Strategy at SAP, where he leads the design vision for the entire Human Capital Management product line, ensuring cohesive product narratives and establishing best practices.

Working in the Information Technology industry since 1998, Itamar has helped truly global companies in multiple continents create great user experience through advocating Design and Innovation principles. Itamar has also served as a juror for prestigious design competitions and lectured on design topics at universities worldwide.

During his 7 years in China, he promoted the User Experience Design discipline as User Experience Manager at Autodesk and Local Coordinator of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in Shanghai.

Itamar holds a MA in Design Practice from Northumbria University (Newcastle, UK), for which he received a Distinction Award for his thesis Creating Innovative Design Software Solutions within Collaborative/Distributed Design Environments.

2 replies on “Living in China: Welcome to the Marriage Market!”

Ha-ha! Amazing! I just heard of this news but here I see the real photo! Is it incredible for you? But it indicates the love and care of Chinese parents to their children, which may be difficult to understand for the people from the other countries. How about you?

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