The dating scene in Shanghai creates the hard knock life for us – stead of treated…we get tricked, stead of kisses…we get kicked. That’s the ugly truth and last week, during one of my morning survival drills aka work commute, I came across an article that shattered all remaining illusions. It revealed 13 stages of dating in Shanghai, where you commence as a happy single, go through your share of encounters, and when you finally thought you found the one, the impermanence of people’s lifestyles here leaves you convinced that you are going to die alone. Ouch, the author seems to come from a school of hard knocks indeed!
However! There is a way to stretch the game out and those who seem to have mastered the skill are none others than the infamous green tea bitches. The resourceful ladies always keep a bunch of bèi tāi guys in close vicinity. Bèi tāi - 备胎 – literally means ‘spare tire’ and in China by no means does it refer to skin surplus issues.
Chinese spare tire aka bèi tāi is a ‘temporary lover’ and although it can refer to both men and women, it is usually guys who fall bèi tāi ‘victims’ to stone hearted lǜ chá biǎos. Bèi tāi never gets to be declared as an official boyfriend. He complies with the fact that as soon as his love interest finds a long – term partner, he will be put on hold, and he realizes that he is just one of many spare tires in her entourage. That’s because merely one bèi tāi can’t fulfill all her requirements, so they will be assigned distinctive functions for their green tea bitch master: one will bring her lunch, one will help with her homework, one will walk her home, one will fix her computer…
There is a ‘subcategory’ of bèi tāi. My students explained to me that, as much as bèi tāi is in quite a predicament, it is still not as hopeless as qiān jīn dǐng - 千斤顶 – which literally means ‘jack’. They explained it to me this way’ You know, to use a spare tire, you need to use a jack first to get it out. But while the spare tire, once taken out from the storage spot, might be used for quite a long time, you need the jack very rarely and for a short period of time. Then you forget about it until the next emergency’. So while the bèi tāi has the potential to become the new, main tire, qiān jīn dǐng knows clearly that he will never be graced with the ‘boyfriend’ status. Nevertheless, he will still be there and show up at any conceivable emergency she might have.
Living in the humongous urban jungle called Shanghai is not easy. In a perfect world we would all just ‘be kind and have courage’ like Cinderella to deal with all the hard knocks. But in reality, when all your hopes of finding the right significant other get razed to the ground and ‘the situation ain’t improving’, you can either :a) become depressed feeling like you want to ‘murder everything moving’ OR b) get yourself some bèi tāis, so that, when you have one of those days in Shanghai when you feel like the city overwhelms you with its 99 problems, then at least loneliness/dating won’t be one.