one side effect of Spring Festival

22 is a bloody evil age since people around you, no matter how free and easy you used to think they were, started to ask about your relationship status. Sometimes parents or older relatives could be a little too helpful with it. They urged you to get involved in a marriage-oriented relationship. They kinda held the opinion that "you don't have to love him or her deeply because your passion could thrive in the long run (yea, right). You just gotta find someone good enough to have a family with". I just tried to be kind and firm but I guess I'd have a family-reunion phobia after one year or two if I stay single. Well, it's not gonna be any better even if I find my right one, because they would urge you to marry by then.

Chinese people generally tend to be family-oriented and very much appreciate our family bonds. But at every Spring Festival I got the feeling that I was brain-washed. It's no fair to blame mom or other relatives on giving me the brainwash but I have to admit that what they did and said affected my mind in some ways - I barely paid attention to the things in my routine life and I neglected school, my ambitions and even didn't bother being cynical. Instead, the definition and the concept of FAMILY became more graphic in my consciousness. Maybe that was what Spring Festival originally for.

The other day I invited my British friend over for dinner. It was not the first time for mom to meet my foreign friend, but she was still being very Chinese. When he said he hadn't really thought of marriage, mom started to enlighten him (in Chinese though). It seemed funny to me. Well, I believe foreigners like my friend would take marriage more sincerely and seriously than most Chinese people (although they get divorced more easily) because most Westerners must commit to the ones they love, but not the ones "well-matched in their social and economic status".