pushing chastity in a nation of 1.3+ billion people strikes me as a hard-sell.

Parents always say the same thing but boys always can find a way to get over it. The words in the picture are hilarious but the translation lose all the tastes.

Thanks for translating stuff like this.

I don't know how to do a trackback, so here's the link: 'True Love Waits'... with Chinese characteristics.

I read the Chinese article. I have a feeling that some details were spinned by the reporter.

Good choice, Mr. Mu! Of the three stories, only Shen Fan (#2) merits a complete translation. The amusing highlight of the first story (page 1) is the part where Wang Quan Quan compares the experience of losing one's virginity (breaking the hymen) to the first time eating a watermelon:
“处女膜该在何时破已经成了我的心理障碍。社会太乱了，结婚太晚了，不知道什么是对的。以前结婚等于初夜，现在完全乱套了。”王泉泉说，“如果有一天，大家说这就跟你第一次吃西瓜一样，那我就随便找个人，找个时间，解决了就完了。”
The best bit of the Shen Fan story is her parents fear of their daughter not only losing competitiveness by losing her virginity, but also having her social status (身价) getting discounted:
沈凡说，“我妈怕我身价打了折扣，错过本可以够得到的婆家。” (* Translator's note: In most Chinese-English dictionaries the Chinese word 身价, which literally means "body price", can also mean "the selling price of a slave".)

The third story (page 3) merges the topic of Christianity and chastity. When chaste Christian Chinese girl Ah Jun's college boyfriend gets aroused he always went to the bathroom and resolved the issue himself: “我一心要守，他有了冲动都去厕所自己解决。”
This boyfriend leaves her later to go live with another woman who helps him resolve his arousal issues, so after graduation Ah Jun marries her first boss. He brags to another staff member about eating watermelon on his wedding night. The marriage ends after little more than a year and Ah Jun then summarizes her view of chastity in China by comparing herself to Gillian Chung and modern Chinese men to Hong Kong celebrity sex tape actor Edison Chen: “在中国的现实就是，陈冠希可以干，但阿娇不能。守贞的‘贞’都放在了女人身上，清纯的淑女们连生殖器都不该有。”

Actually there are thousands of these articles on the Chinese Internet. You can read all kinds of quirky anecdotes and adult reproductive health tips, often accompanied by photos of attractive Western women in "warm-colored clothes". I wonder if Graham Earnshaw has any articles from 1981-83 concerning sex education in China. Those were the wonderfully naive days before the Internet when some married couples in the world's most populous country actually believed that simply sleeping in the same bed could produce a pregnancy.

i am agree with Shen's mother. all women must keep their virginity before got married.

hahaha! that's laughable!

Wow, this whole chastity idea seems so incredibly bizarre to me. How does chastity give you "confidence" when arguing with a husband, how does that make you wrong or right in any way? Sex is just a natural, pleasurable instinct, like eating food, it's no big deal at all. Sex is not the same as love. Love is finding a perfect partner you can have a family with and want a friendship with forever. Sex is just an unstoppable instinctual drive that rewards you with pleasure when you gratify it, again, like eating. I think old-fashion people are terribly confused and living horribly bleak lives with little or no reward in it. So sad. Sex is a gift from God, people treat it like it's some sort of curse...tragic

i agree w/ the mother,
i don't want chinese ppl to end up like
how americans are like these days.

The double-standard is rather breathtaking, but of course not terribly surprising.

It should be noted that in the US teen evangelicals, despite all the years of abstinence "promise keeper" claptrap, engage in sexual activity at a younger age AND with more individuals than with their secular counterparts.

Of course China certainly isn't the US, but I think it's fair to assume that many of these filial, pious daughters are simply lying through their teeth.

The blatant repressiveness and fearfulness toward sexuality doesn't surprise me, because every culture does it, including the West, which usually pretends to be so sexually progressive and superior. I'm glad that in the West our laws have made some progress toward eliminating the double-standard, but let's not entertain the attitude that in the West we are so sexually superior to the Chinese when it comes to fearfulness and repression. We mostly just express these things in different ways.

For example, the understanding of sexuality Stephan Larosels shares above is, ironically, sexually fearful and repressive. He's echoing the popular Western notion that says sex is "no big deal" and "just" a natural drive. But this, too, is repressive and fearful because it insists on reducing human sexuality to much less than it is - to the nice, safe, domesticated level of a mere biological function of which we ought not to make a big deal and don't need to fear. This attitude conspicuously ignores the obvious: that human sexual intimacy is intricately integrated into the core of our beings - psychologically, emotionally, physically - in a profoundly complex and powerful way, which we still understand rather poorly. It's a physical manifestation of a much deeper relational reality that impacts us profoundly, whether we treat it that way or not.

All that to say, I hope we Westerners don't read this article and then feel culturally superiour and look down on China's culture because of it. In the West we ourselves, on both sides of the Sexual Revolution cultural divide, still demonstrate fearfulness and repression toward human sexuality. We just do it in different ways and cover it up with a thin veneer of P.C. self-righteousness or traditional notions of propriety. I'm not saying China's culture doesn't have major problems regarding sexuality, I'm just saying that they aren't alone in that regard.

@Pananamajack - Promise Keepers was for married men, about being faithful husbands and fathers; it wasn't about abstinence. Maybe you're thinking of True Love Waits, which led the evangelical teen abstinence movement. TLW may use 'promise rings,' but I'm not sure about that.