One day in the summer of 2008, I was having a family dinner with relatives in Shenyang. A few days later, I would be leaving for Shanghai for my undergraduate studies. It was going to be the first time I ever visited southern China, which felt like a completely strange place to me. At the table, my aunts and uncles were keen to tell me about the distinctiveness of the Shanghai young men that I would encounter:

Most of these characteristics sounded alien to me and to most of my relatives. In Shenyang – a typical north-eastern Chinese city – men are usually the opposite of these descriptions. They are relatively tall, assertive, rugged, macho, generous and careless, and they would certainly buy a bunch of spring onions. As far back as I can remember, I have been very familiar with everyday scenes in which my father talks and laughs very loudly with his ‘bros’, young men swear at friends to display their familiarity and intimacy, and crowds of men stripped to the waist swallow cold noodles at messy outdoor stalls during the summer. My relatives thus tended to relay these differences in a joking tone and found many of these behaviours hilarious. Somehow, the topic ended up with my aunt telling me: “You should find a Shanghai boyfriend. You’ll be looked after very well.”

Probably because of this experience, Shanghai men did leave me with a first impression that they were not masculine enough. Their soft accent sounded very unmacho compared with that of north-eastern men. Moreover, the fact that I was taller than many local Shanghai men made me feel slightly awkward. After all, a man's height seems to be an essential part of appropriate masculinity in Shenyang.