Goodbye Granny Wang – viral matchmaker to take a break

Granny Wang, factory worker turned human dating app, was supposed to be no more than a sideshow at a theme park dedicated to kung fu.

Her Blind Date-style act, in which she dragged young women on stage and forced shy young men in the crowd to compete for their attention, was a simple concept.

Unfortunately for her, she was good at it, combining arch humour with an apparently genuine concern to help lonely young Chinese find love.

After the livestream of her show went viral, attracting millions of followers – and prompting thousands of people to pour into the central Chinese province of Henan to take part – the theme park has had to issue an appeal for restraint.

Then Granny Wang – real name Zhao Mei – announced this week that she was taking a month off to recuperate from the sudden attention. “I’ve lost 20kg,” she told newspapers. “This is due to mental stress.”

Wang’s act, a twist on the “village aunties” who traditionally provided matchmaking services for China’s young people, was named after Wang Po, a character from classic Chinese novel The Water Margin.

Matchmaking has declined in recent decades as China has urbanised and modernised, and young people decided they could find their own mates. But falling marriage rates suggest they are not always successful.

Wang took a circuitous route to the fame that struck at the age of 61: she started adult life working in a glass factory, joined its amateur dramatic society and ended up as compere for a travelling troupe.

A minor slot in the Ten Thousand Years Martial Arts Theme Park in Henan, the historic home of kung fu, should have been a fitting conclusion to that career, and until last month that was how it seemed likely to be. Then the livestream took off.

On March 15, her account on Douyin, the Chinese sister of TikTok, had 218,000 followers. Then, she said, things went crazy. By this week, she had more than seven and a half million.

Young people began travelling to Henan to take part. In the past fortnight, hotel bookings in the city of Kaifeng, where the park is situated, have risen by almost 50% on last year. Visits to the park itself have increased by a factor of ten. Her show, it turned out, had tapped into not only the worldwide search for an “in real life” relationship beyond the remit of internet algorithms but a Chinese love of novelty.

Popularity has brought predictable problems. Wang, and the park, were proud of the fact they had helped 50 couples to find love in a year. However, online sleuths discovered one man who – no surprises here – was already married.

Her success spawned fake accounts featuring fake Granny Wangs. After a particularly good-looking male participant said he worked at a hospital in a nearby city, young women threatened to storm it to find him.

But worst of all was the sheer overcrowding. Under the park’s new rules, the area in front of the stage had to be divided into “hopeful women”, “hopeful men” and “onlookers” sections to control access.

Wang, who dressed in the traditional robes of a village matchmaker, demanded that the young men in the audience be less timid, and challenged them with slogans such as “If you don’t put yourself out there, how will you meet someone?”

In an interview with Chinese radio, Wang said she was grateful to all her fans for “helping me light the fire of youth again”. But her focus now was on how to prevent her show from being “knocked off course”. – The Times