It was 10pm on New Year’s Eve and the pavements were so crowded that traffic wardens were posted on every corner, shouting and waving as they herded us along. Late-night shopping kept the malls busy but most visitors came to browse rather than to buy, and were enjoying a cheap night out ahead of a day off work.
I was on my way to my friend Song’s for a countdown party that had been exciting and worrying him for days, although all he was offering us to eat was salami, cheese and bread. He had invited 15 people, almost all of them women but also including a male friend from art school whom he had not seen for years. “His nickname was Bitchy Bitchy,” he said.
Most of the guests had been there since 7pm, but when I arrived Song dragged me through the door, telling me he was at the end of his tether. His guests, arranged in a half circle on a long sofa and a few stools, had spent the past three hours ignoring his efforts to get a general conversation going. “They’re all introverts. Talk to them,” he said.
I started with Bitchy Bitchy, asking how he felt about the nickname which everyone at the party was still using for him. He said there was nothing he could do about it, giving me a bitchy look that told me that the question was unwelcome and that our conversation was at an end.
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I asked what everyone was hoping for from 2025, and Song opened his diary to read a list of resolutions that included learning Spanish, cooking more, having more parties and going out more. His friend Lilli, an investment banker and a Buddhist, said she wanted to work less and to have fewer sleepless nights.
“I want a boyfriend,” said Xiaowei, an elegantly dressed woman in her mid-30s. “It’s not important what he looks like or how tall he is. I want him to be kind.”
The woman next to Xiaowei said she wanted a boyfriend too, and Bitchy Bitchy said he wanted more money and more success in general.
Next to him was Mei Ling, a jewellery designer who told me a few weeks ago about how she had broken up with her boyfriend after 11 months.
They had met when she rented some office space from the property company where he worked, and after she signed the contract he pestered her with messages until she agreed to go on a date. They fell into a pattern of meeting once a week or once a fortnight, usually on weekdays because she spent most weekends showing her jewellery at trade shows all over China.
After a few months he told her that he loved her and wanted to marry her but she became so busy with work that they were now usually meeting only once a month. Then one day she saw a WeChat conversation on his phone with a woman he appeared to be having an affair with.
Mei Ling checked his TikTok and found the woman among his friends and somehow contacted her through the app, telling her that they appeared to be dating the same man. The woman agreed that this seemed to be the case, and they compared their WeChat histories to establish when he was lying to one or the other of them.
The other woman had met him on the subway after they spotted one another on the same route at the same time a few times. She was married but her husband spent most of his time outside Beijing so she was happy to start another relationship.
When Mei Ling confronted her boyfriend he at first denied everything, saying his phone had been hacked. But when she presented her evidence he changed tack, telling her he had been unfaithful only because Mei Ling was so busy with her work that she wasn’t giving him the love he needed.
She dumped him but after a couple of weeks she began to question her judgment, wondering if he might not have been right in blaming her for the failure of their relationship. They got back together but the feeling was not the same, and she was annoyed by how smug he seemed after he had worked his way back into her affections.
She decided to end it for good but first she booked a five-day trip to Qingdao, during which they spent the whole time in their hotel room having what she described as the best sex of their relationship. The night they got back to Beijing she blocked his number and deleted him from WeChat and all the other apps.
Two months on, as Mei Ling looked ahead to 2025, she said she too was hoping to find a boyfriend in the new year. “I should get a better one this time,” she said.