The Empty Nest Era

Lin Zhixia is a thirty-two-year-old product manager at an internet company in Beijing. She has been with her boyfriend for five years, earns a decent salary, and faces one question from everyone: “When are you getting married?” It’s not that she doesn’t want children. She doesn’t want the kind of life that comes after having them. During the Spring Festival trip home, her mother’s thirteen voice messages, the dinner-table question “How many have you had?”, and the A4 sheets listing prices at the matchmaking corner all hold up mirrors to her “out-of-step” life. Her grandmother had five children and lost a daughter. Before she died, she said, “Don’t give her away. A girl is a person too.” Her mother once received a university acceptance letter, only to be turned back by the words, “What does a girl need all that education for?” She spent her whole life wearing gray skirts. Lin Zhixia asks: Why, in the most materially prosperous era, are people of her generation so hesitant about having children? When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, she neither enters an operating room nor steps into a traditional marriage. Instead, she chooses to “renegotiate” with her boyfriend. Not “you marry me and I marry you,” but building a new home together. An empty nest doesn’t mean having no home. It means you get to decide for yourself what to put in your nest.