Since May this year, many people in Hong Kong have been transfixed by the public family saga involving a couple known as “Mr and Mrs Ho”. While the authorities – especially the Housing Department – want to find out more about the couple’s assets and their eligibility for public housing, given their extravagant spending, the rest of Hong Kong is more interested in the complicated family dynamics involving 76-year-old Mr Ho, his five adult children, and their stepmother Mrs Ho, who is 43. I am pretty sure the Chinese phrase “old bulls eating young grass” has been said many times over drinks or by the office cooler.
It describes a romantic relationship where the male partner is considerably older than the female. A Cantonese expression for the opposite, where the woman is much older than the man, is “boiling the old lotus root”, the etymology of which I have yet to determine. The Chinese painter Qi Baishi (1864–1957) was 55 when he, with his wife’s encouragement, took as his concubine 17-year-old Hu Baozhu, who bore him seven children, the last of which was born when Qi was 74.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Yang Chen-ning married Weng Fan in 2004. He was 82 and she was 28. There is the well-known story of Chinese poet Zhang Xian (990–1078), who took an 18-year-old woman as his concubine when he was 80.
He was so happy that he composed the following verse that incorporates a word play on their respective ages: I’m bashi [80]; you’re shiba [18]. You, in the bloom of youth; me, with my head of white. Bashi and shiba – it’s the same number in reverse, With only a cycle of sixty years between us.
The 62-year age gap was too outrageous for Zhang Xian’s contemporary, the great Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo (1037–1101), who wrote a poem to tease him: A bride of eighteen; a groom of eighty. His white hair before her blushing beauty. Under the wedding quilt, they spend the night together, where a tree of pear blossoms crushes a begonia.
Su Dongpo could laugh, but the old pear tree managed to sire four children with his blushing begonia. Relationships where the woman is much older than the man are much less common. Such relationships were rare, not only in China but most parts of the world, because a woman’s desirability as a marriage partner was traditionally linked to her child-bearing ability, which obviously put older women at a disadvantage.
This remains true in many places today. Even in the most liberal societies, there is considerably less revulsion against older men with much younger wives than older women with much younger husbands. May-December romances remain provocative to many people, but to them I say: mind your own business.
And to those who may be considering such a relationship: follow your heart. Age is really just a number..
