Low Tech People, High Tech Love 

Thinking of you during the day, missing you during the night, surrounding you in my dream, seeing you in my eyes, holding you in my hands, loving you with my heart (call me back when you get this message)

This declaration of love probably wouldn’t fly with most Americans, but in China thousands, if not millions, of people have texted these exact words to impress their significant others.

Romantic expressions like this, as well as jokes, rhymes, and clever sayings, are published in SMS (short message service) manuals and then passed around via mobile phones. These small inexpensive booklets are especially popular with the country’s migrant workers, who are among the poorest and least educated groups in southern China’s Guangdong province. Although they earn, on average, anywhere from 400 yuan to 800 yuan (~$50-$100) a month, they are willing to spend double or triple their salaries to purchase a phone, according to a 2004 study, “The Use of Cellphones amongst migrant workers in Southern China”. This population uses the mobile phone and SMS to maintain contact with family and friends, to get job market information, to build camaraderie with cohorts and entertain each other, and to aid them in dating and courtship.

To be sure, mobile technology and SMS culture are effecting and being effected by the relationships between men and women in this rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society—where traditional images, norms, and practices of gender, gender roles, and gender relations are undergoing processes of swift change and the institutions of marriage and family are also being transformed by new social and economic processes.

What’s to Read in SMS Manuals?

A pretty lady wearing a T-shirt with the number 99 in the chest; a foreigner wants to praise her, but he forgets how to say 9 in Chinese; so, the foreigner says: Miss, your two “nine-nine” are very beautiful!
—from Love Confession on the Seventh Day of the Seventh Month

(The number &lsquo 9’, when pronounced in English twice as in &lsquo 9-9’, sounds like the pronunciation of the word for ‘tits’ in Mandarin Chinese.)

This “joke” message seems to be meant for sharing a laugh between the SMS sender and recipient. Because most SMS jokes appear to be written from a male perspective and most readily appreciated, recognized, and enjoyed by straight males, it is probable that the majority of readers and consumers of SMS manuals are men. Some might like to share jokes with their male friends through SMS; some might just read them for pleasure.

Found alongside sexual jokes in SMS manuals are romantic expressions. The notion of love as destined by fate and as realized in meeting the one love of your life is a recurrent theme in this category of message.

By destiny, I met you; by fate in life, I liked you; driven by passion, I have fallen in love with you; I cannot help missing you.  I will love you with all my heart.  I love you!
—from Humorous Jokes

While this message seems to encompass both male and female perspectives, others seem to speak from the female position with words like “shed tears”, “tears”, and “no regrets,” words commonly used by women to express deep romantic love in the Chinese language.

Along with sexual jokes and romantic expressions, there are also messages that depict a diverse range of ideologies about romance, sex, marriage, and modern day gender roles and relations.

Expressions of sexual desire, for example, differ from the sexual jokes in that they convey a serious sense of legitimate naturalness about sexual passion.

Love has both the spiritual and physical aspects, which should be equally important; otherwise, love is not complete, because we are not gods, and we are not beasts, either.
—from Group of Fun Makers

Brother is a dragon in heaven, and Sister is a patch of flowers on earth. If the dragon doesn’t turn its body, it won’t rain; if there are no showers of rain on the flowers, the flowers won’t blossom in red.
—from Mini Lover’s Talk

This message draws on the images of dragons, rain showers, and flowers, to signify the pro-active male role (to give) and the reception-oriented female role (to receive) in the sexual act. The use of “Brother” and “Sister” to signify lovers/partners also draws on traditional troupes in folk literature. The images of “heaven, dragon” as male and “earth, flowers” as female are metaphors for traditional Chinese gender hierarchies. While the message suggests a female speaker who boldly explains the complementary male and female roles in the sex act, it also reinforces traditional Chinese women’s subjectivity in gender relations. Men may find this message a sexually pleasurable piece of reading since it expresses sexual desire from the point of view of a traditional, submissive female.

SMS manuals also include pessimistic sayings about love and marriage.

Love is a sumptuous meal; marriage is a diarrhea.
—from The Direction of the Heart: New Mobile SMS

The use of the metaphors of a sumptuous meal and diarrhea to describe love and marriage summarizes the pessimistic prediction about marriage: Love is enjoyable, while marriage is the painful and messy aftermath. The following message, on the other hand, has negative views on both love and marriage:

To be in love is to be in a foreign war; to be in a marriage is to be in a civil war.
—from The Direction of the Heart: New Mobile SMS

Some messages go as far as asserting that marriage is only for the foolish.

Stupid man + stupid woman = marriage; stupid man + clever woman = divorce; clever man + stupid woman = extramarital affair; clever man + clever woman = romance
—from Fashionable SMS: An Assembly of Sparkling Discourses of Mobile SMS

Messages about marriage also tend to convey stereotypic gender images. There are some, mainly found in the more expensive manuals, which limn the “modern women” or “new woman” as the following message shows:

To a new woman, the husband is just like a piece of clothing; she does not really like it very much, but she needs it at work every day, and it’ll be even better if it is of a famous brand.
—from The Direction of the Heart: New Mobile SMS

In the above message the “new woman” is not particularly in love with her husband but needs him for social status and for everyday practical reasons. The message takes a strong, female-subject position and projects an image of the independent working woman as someone who is also a bit self-seeking.

Rarely, one might come across a message that presents a more positive view of women. For example, this message focuses more on the woman’s inner qualities rather than her outer appearance:

Only self-pride and self-confidence are women’s best accessories. A woman without confidence and hope, even though she is not ugly, still does not possess the kind of attraction that moves people’s hearts.
—from Popular Password

Many SMS messages convey ideas derived from folk discourses concerning men and women’s discrepant expectations in love and sex relations: Men focus on sex and women focus on physical appearance; men focus on changing partners and searching for ever-new excitement and for virgins (or women who are inexperienced in love and sex), whereas women focus on monogamous love.

Men’s love is like an advertisement, short but brilliant; women’s love is like a soap opera series, long and complicated.
—from The Direction of the Heart: New Mobile SMS

Men want to be women’s first lovers, and women want to be men’s last lovers.
—from Fashionable SMS: An Assemble of Sparkling Discourses of Mobile SMS

Real Women, Real Men

Nowadays young migrant workers are more ready to express their emotions, according to the 2004 study “The Use of Cellphones amongst migrant workers in Southern China.” When a male migrant worker intends to court a female worker, he simply sends SMS messages. Meanwhile, female migrant workers seem to enjoy indulging themselves in the romantic world offered by the virtual/SMS world.

Another female worker told us that she enjoyed logging on to the chat rooms and chatting with male netizens though she had a steady boy friend. The chat rooms she logged on to were mainly designed for workers, for example “Romance in the Workplace.” … Usually, she would chat with the netizens for a while and if she found them interesting, they would exchange cellphone numbers and they would keep in contact by sending messages. Her record for sending messages was 160 in one day to at least 7 different netizens. She knew that the sweet words and honeyed phrases were an illusion, yet she enjoyed chatting as she found their words comforting. Although she had found that relationships developed through chat rooms were not reliable, she had once dated a netizen working in the same village. She had, however, found it hard to develop their relationship because the mystical feeling achieved in cyberspace had disappeared when they met face-to-face. …
    —from “The Use of Cellphones amongst migrant workers in Southern China”

It seems that female migrant workers readily escape into the net and SMS world to find the kind of sweet romance and honeyed messages they desire. The SMS manuals are full of these messages for male migrant workers to draw on and use in this virtual world.  However, many times these sweet romances shatter once the couple leaves the virtual world and meet in real life. SMS manuals in this sense serve a purpose for both male and female workers: Women indulge themselves in soap opera-like romance fiction, as their online male partners play along in co-constructing this romantic virtual/SMS world.

Angel Lin is an associate professor in the Department of English and Communication, City University of Hong Kong. She works in the areas of cultural studies, youth literacy,  language and gender, and feminist media studies.