An Older Woman’s Romance: Marrying into a Wealthy Family

Time: late autumn, 1999. Place: Kaicheng, Northeast China. That morning, a wealthy young woman named Xiao Ping and I were introduced and arranged to meet at the Tianshui Jinlan Teahouse. We were two adults, three years apart, giving a blind date a shot. I was twenty-nine, and she was thirty-two. Forget all that talk about how a woman three years older brings a man a gold brick. All I knew was that her family had a mountain of gold, while I was just a low-ranking police officer. The difference in our lifestyles was like the distance between countless mountains and rivers. Before you can marry into a wealthy family, you have to get past the trials of social graces and human relationships.