When love crosses borders
Mainland brides are not exactly flooding over the border to marry Hong Kong men. This newspaper reported recently that about 150 of them arrive each year. In the opposite direction, according to anecdotal evidence, the trend is older successful Hong Kong women. They are looking for their socio-economic equals outside the relatively small pool of potential husbands in Hong Kong. A third fixture of mixed marriages is the inter-racial couple: a Hong Kong woman, say, and an American man.
These mating strategies are interesting regarding the relationships themselves, but also in terms of what they say about Hong Kong. The particular pattern and the number of mixed marriages are widely regarded as a good measure of the state of relations between races and sub-groups: people from different social spheres who intermarry have to feel that the social distance between them is small enough that it won't doom the marriage.
Research done in the US on foreign-born Asians living there, for example, tends to frame racial and ethnic intermarriage as an important factor that determines the partners' social and cultural adjustment. By extension, it is a barometer of social harmonisation.
But this view is probably only partly justified. There are plenty of historical examples of densely intermarried groups falling out and even going to war. Cousins and brothers fought on opposite sides along the Rhine border during the second world war. However, marriage does offer a unique insight into the mechanisms for maintaining, or breaking down, a racially or otherwise stratified society.
In the United States, intermarriage between foreign-born Asians and Anglo-Americans is least frequent in first marriages and when the Asian is older and more educated than his or her spouse (usually his, in practice). This is true of the general population, too: people tend to marry those who are very much like themselves, the first time around; only for a second or subsequent marriage do they look elsewhere.
It seems as if the 'mail-order bride' stereotype - in which Asian women are assumed to be less educated than their husbands - does not hold water. Census figures show that a higher education greatly increases the odds of Asian women marrying interracially in America.
An important element in marriage is the relative status of the groups to which the partners belong as individuals. In this part of the world, there is a lingering sense of inferiority among mainland Chinese, especially regarding anything perceived as western, says pollster Wang Xiaodong.
But what he calls 'reverse racism' is strongest among those in their 30s and older - they would look up to the older, high-flying, comparatively westernised Hong Kong women in search of love north of the border.
The younger generation of mainlanders, on the other hand, is self-confident. Hence, when counselling was recently arranged to prepare young mainland brides for their future married life in Hong Kong, social workers said it might make more sense to prepare the Hong Kong men to adjust to their new wives.
One can look at mixed mainland-Hong Kong marriages as part of the process of Hong Kong-China reunion; the intimate manifestation of homogenisation. Marriages between westerners and Hongkongers are the equivalent of globalisation. Both are happening in conjunction with the cultural acceptance of divorce and the normalisation of the reconstituted, racially and/or culturally blended family. Increasingly, in marriage and remarriage, the only firm rule is that there are no firm rules.
Jean Nicol looks at everyday issues from the point of view of a psychologist
