第四篇 Passage 4

In booming coastal cities like Shanghai, pricey new apartments are being snapped up by young, single Chinese women.

You Yang was hanging out with friends in Shanghai last fall when she saw the television advertisement that would change her life. “Come, live in freedom,” a voice beckoned, as images of neatly groomed young men and women with radiant smiles flashed across the screen. You, a 24-year-old secretary working for a multinational firm, scribbled down the Shanghai address. At the appointed time, she raced down to the site and, bought a home.

You Yang’s apartment is in a massive new complex by the Huangpujiang River. It is small. And the mortgage is already draining more than half of her $500 monthly salary. But the place is all hers. “I really wanted to have freedom,” she says. “The most important thing is to live an independent life.”

China’s housing boom is remarkable enough. But even more stunning is that the rush is being fueled, in part, by an unexpected class of people: young, single women. Looking for independence along with a good investment, young female professionals are increasing buying homes of their own before they get married. While hard statistics are unavailable, real-estate experts say young single women are becoming one of the leading categories of homebuyers in coastal China. This is not only forcing developers to cater more to women, the trend is transforming relations between the sexes.

“Most men still wait until they’re married to buy a house,” explains Han Jiahui, a 28-year-old telecom worker. “But women are going ahead on our own. Why should we wait?” Han could hardly wait to escape her childhood home, a damp one-room apartment that shared a kitchen and bathroom with four other families. Last year she bought a $45,000 two-bedroom apartment for herself and her father, a laid-off engineer. Buying a place not only fulfilled a life-long dream, but also helped Han assert herself. “It’s important for a woman to be financially independent,” she says. “Otherwise, what would happen if your husband dumped you? You would have nothing.”

In China’s coastal cities, young women are increasingly developing professional careers and marrying later. Owning property serves as a way of ensuring they are not beholden to men.” A house gives you the freedom to choose your life,” says a 29-year-old journalist from Hunan who bought a house in 1998. “If you don’t have a house, you have nothing—so you have to get married.” A recent change in China’s marriage law offers added protection: Any property the husband or wife owns before marriage is his or hers forever. This is considered a moderate step forward.

The irony is that most of these women are not running away from tradition, only giving it a new twist. Because of China’s “one-child” policy, many female homeowners are single children, with no siblings (i.e., brothers) to bear the burden of taking care of their aging parents. As a result, they often move their parents, who lived on meager wages, into their new homes. Hu Xiuli, a 26-year-old tax accountant, bought a two-bedroom apartment in Shanghai last year. Her parents are therefore able to live in a spacious apartment nowadays, thanks to their daughter’s generosity and $900-a-month white-collar job. “I’m all my parents have now,” says Hu.

Shanghai developers are now appealing directly to young white-collar women like Hu. In the marketing of a 32-story apartment building with 520 modestly priced units, a large advertisement displayed in the sales office depicts a happy woman and a list of friendly exhortations. The first: “Forget about the sadness, forget him, start a new life!” The appeal seems to have worked. All the apartments sold out within weeks of going on sale last December, and more than 30 percent of the independent buyers (as opposed to investors) were single women, including many from 22 to 25 years old.

Buying a new home doesn’t always bring freedom, however. One 31-year-old female executive recently bought her second home-----a lavish, four-bedroom villa in the outskirts of Shanghai. The first time she moved, she was lifting her parents out of poverty and establishing her own sense of self-worth and independence. “I’m just going along with the trend, doing what everybody else is doing,” she says. “All my friends are buying new villas, so why shouldn’t I?” Now she doubts her decision. “It all happened so fast,” she says, with an air of regret. “I love my new house, but I also think it’s a burden, a loss of independence.”

You Yang understands the pressures of ownership: after paying the mortgage on an apartment as well as the rent on her current apartment, she’s left with just $140 a month to live on. “I don’t have any time to just hang out anymore, and I can’t afford to buy any clothes or fancy food,” says You. “But it’s worth it in the long run.”