Debutante ball bounces back(2)

"The perfect city"

Zhou, 66, is the youngest daughter of Zhou Xinfang, a Peking Opera master, and Qiu Lilin who, Zhou said, certainly would have qualified as a deb if there had been such a thing in 1920s Shanghai. Zhou is known in Hong Kong and the UK as Vivian Chow Wong (adding her husband's family name).

She moved back to Shanghai in 2003 and said she had been thinking since then about reviving the ball tradition, not in its place of origin but on more receptive distant soil.

"Shanghai is the perfect city, if not the only one in China, to have a ball like this," she said. "Shanghai people love dancing, from ballroom dancing to morning dancing in the park, which serves a solid base for our ball."

Young Chinese women on the mainland have yet to warm to the idea of the ball as a matchmaking event. She said they are more used to one-on-one meetings arranged by their parents in restaurants or teahouses.

But Zhou thinks the Shanghai Debutante Ball could provide a connection for English aristocrats and well-off young Chinese women. After all, she said, in the United States in the 1930s, down-and-out English gentlemen traveled overseas to marry the daughters of American magnates.

Zithers and dumplings

But there is a problem: Although she interviewed scores of young women in opulent Yangtze River areas over the past year, she found not one on the mainland who met the conditions for an invitation: Age 17 to 25, competence in English and, preferably, from a family that has contributed to society in a certain way.

"The reason the first ball has no participants from the Chinese mainland is that we didn't find a suitable one," Zhou said. "We would rather go with nobody than someone shoddy, as we know how good people are at digging out others' pasts nowadays."

Zhou, who has a married son in his 30s, defined the perfect debutante as someone "every mother would like her son to marry, but not every son could get".

"Ideally, I would want someone who can stand out as a Chinese zither player or a deft embroiderer, which I think are the most basic skills of Chinese fine ladies, besides a clean (upstanding) family and good upbringing. However, as it turned out, I cannot even find someone who can make dumplings."