Last year, one day before Lunar New Year, my friend from Beijing phoned me. “I rented a boyfriend for my Lunar New Year family reunion,” she said. Rented? I was incredulous. She explained that she did not want to endure the pressure to marry that her aunts and uncles would inevitably apply at her family reunion. Like many single women in China, my friend lives under the conventional thinking that women should marry in their mid-twenties. Why couldn’t she simply avoid the reunion altogether? Filial piety teaches that it is disrespectful to refuse to return home. Wanting both to return home and avoid facing pressure for marriage, my friend rented a boyfriend to pretend that she was in a relationship. 

My friend was not the only young woman in China renting a boyfriend to circumvent criticism from family members at Chinese New Year. As hypercompetitive Chinese society propels more and more young Chinese women to prioritize their careers over dating, boyfriend renting services have emerged and gained popularity. Customers pay to have a man pretend to be their boyfriend to avoid unpleasant confrontations with family members. After all, Chinese culture is inherently non-confrontational, and family harmony is valued. 

Chinese boyfriend renting services have received much criticism. They are often interpreted as a negative result of hypercompetition or the contemporary continuation of conventional thinking. Perhaps it does. But what the phenomenon reflects more is a way of thinking rooted in 5000 years of history.

The boyfriend renting service captures the essence of Chinese lateral thinking, which is characterized by indirection, flexibility, and comfort with contradictions. Linear thinking would perhaps suggest that a single woman should explain to her family that she has career priorities or that she simply does not want a boyfriend. However, a confrontation of that kind inevitably destroys harmony. To avoid this predicament, rental boyfriends are invented. Instead of dealing with the root of the problem, young Chinese women rent relationships to avoid disrupting harmony at family reunions. Although doing so challenges the Chinese value of filial integrity, Chinese thinking allows comfort with contradictions. 

The kind of thinking the boyfriend renting services reflects is also seen in the Chinese perception of truth. The Chinese tend to believe that truth is relative. While Americans tend to believe that there are absolute, self-evident truths, such as the value of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the Chinese do not believe that truth is binary. As Lin Yutang notes, “Truth, according to Chinese, can never be proved; it can only be suggested.” When I asked my friend who rented a boyfriend what she thought about the conventional belief regarding women’s proper age for marriage, she admitted that “it is annoying,” but stated that she does not believe it is inherently negative: “ultimately, my aunts and uncles want me to marry because they want me to be happy. It’s just that their perception of happiness is different from mine, and that’s ok. I can’t say that I’m right and they’re wrong. We just have different perspectives.” The Chinese belief in relative truth also explains the Chinese tendency to recoil at the assertion of definitive judgment based on constructs of absolute truths. 

Another extension of Chinese thinking can be seen in the treatment of sickness. During my two years in America, I realized that while American doctors treat the disease, traditional Chinese doctors restore the imbalance. During the winter term of my freshman year at my high school, I developed a terrible headache. When I went to the health center, the nurses gave me tablets to swallow. My headache immediately disappeared. If I had gone to a traditional Chinese doctor, the prescription would have been very different. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that sickness is a symptom of an imbalance in the person’s body. When I went to a traditional Chinese doctor a couple of years ago to treat constipation, my doctor looked at my tongue and took my pulse. He then told me that I had a “cold body” and needed to stop eating cold food. He also told me to wear socks and drink warm soup. My constipation stopped. 

Perhaps boyfriend renting services do speak to the hypercompetition that necessitates the prioritization of career over dating or the conventional thinking of marriage that clashes with contemporary society. But ultimately, what the phenomenon reflects more is the classical Chinese thinking rooted in flexibility, indirection, and contradictions. As an expression of culture, perhaps boyfriend renting services should be interpreted as neutral, instead of being classified on either side of the positive/negative binary.