In Xiaoshan, Hangzhou, which is known as the "paradise for sons-in-law", there is a marriage agency called "Golden Idea", which is famous for recruiting sons-in-law.
Its founder, Li Jiyan, is 67 years old and started Golden Idea after being laid off in 1998. Different from other matchmaking companies, because he was aware of the local demand for recruitment, in the early days of business, Li Jiyan played a special business of marriage in addition to marriage.
For more than 20 years, Golden Idea has become popular several times. The demolition policy at the beginning of the century, the costume drama "Son-in-law" two years ago, and the "Recruiting Son-in-law" mother-in-law at the Ali Yunqi Conference at the end of October this year attracted the attention of the whole country and even overseas to Xiaoshan, Hangzhou.
Since his career, Li Jiyan has facilitated more than 1,000 marriages with his sons-in-law, and the registration fee for golden ideas has risen from 200 yuan to 15,000 yuan. Relatively strict selection criteria make it possible for less than 10 out of every 100 consulters to sign up.
Once the marriage is successful, it not only means that the bride price and other marriage expenses are exempted, but also the house, car and additional property provided by the woman's family.
However, how can a man become a son-in-law?In the face of the not low registration fee, why is there always an endless stream of men who come to join the money?
01 "How many years were you born?".Height, education, what kind of work do you do?”
After saying hello, Li Jiyan got straight to the point. He started by asking these questions. There is no room for thought, and there is no need to be hesitant, and the other party usually gives an answer within a few words. After the answers were satisfied, Li Jiyan asked: How much is the annual salary?
At the Golden Idea Marriage Agency in Xiaoshan, Hangzhou, the above conversations take place on average thirty or forty times a day. In the past, most of the consulters were called, but now most people will search for and add Li Jiyan's WeChat. "WeChat plus friends can be intercepted and asked first", Li Jiyan found it very convenient.
He has a set of screening criteria, especially for men who come to join him: the age should not be too young, the height should be at least 170, the education should be at least bachelor's degree, the job is stable and in Hangzhou, the annual salary should reach 150,000, and the appearance should be "not fierce". These are the foundations, and they are the end points for more than half of them.
They are stuck in the friend application interface, and they can't even add Li Jiyan's WeChat.
After being rejected, some people continued to beg Li Jiyan for a chance, and some people directly scolded him, saying that he was swindling. Li Jiyan was very helpless, explaining that now that the times have changed, the conditions of girls are good, and the requirements of the woman's family for the son-in-law will naturally not be low, "You go and struggle and come back." ”
After layers of defense, the final pass rate of the consultant is less than 10%. Even so, Golden Ideas has never lacked customers.
Li Jiyan is 67 years old this year, with gray hair, wears a pair of half-rimmed glasses, and is full of energy when he speaks. In 1999, he opened a golden idea marriage agency in an old residential building on Xihe Road in Xiaoshan District. Since then, the golden idea has not been moved, and the decoration style and management model of the last century have also been retained.
When you walk into the building, you will first be attracted by the red background and gold sign on the corner, followed by the banner in the corridor calling for "a new fashion for women to marry men". There are also a number of billboards on the four walls of the office, with Li Jiyan's shouting to young people, "Seize the opportunity of love!."Create happiness in life!There are also his own "love art of war", "mate selection advice", and the reception of visitors over the years.
There are not many members in the marriage agency, and there are only two people on weekdays, Li Jiyan and his wife Sun Jimei. On their desks are hundreds of blue folders, neatly stacked in three rows, each containing the profile of a male or female member. The couple took care of the contact, registration, data storage and other affairs.
Li Jiyan is very busy every day. He got up at 6:30 in the morning, arrived at the company at 8 o'clock to start working, and left work at 9 o'clock in the evening, and then continued to reply to messages and arrange blind dates for members, until 10 o'clock before finishing the day's work, day after day, year after year. He joked to himself, "An old man, busier than a young man." ”
He also considered hiring more staff, but ultimately didn't. The matchmaking industry is mixed, and Li Jiyan is worried that privacy leakage will affect word of mouth, and he is even more worried that customers will be swept away by competitors and lose the most important "assets" of the matchmaking agency. There are not many peers who can hold on for 24 years, and he is no longer surprised by these situations.
In the Golden Idea office, Li Jiyan and his wife Sun Jimei are in Golden Idea, and there is also a perennial errand position called "Love Headhunter", which is composed of three aunts who have worked for more than ten years and have passed retirement age.
Love headhunters do not need to sit on duty, they have a more important task - every day to go to the community, the countryside or various units to collect single resources, or according to the portraits of registered members, ask around for suitable candidates. If you meet an excellent one, persuade the other party to join the club, especially if you are excellent, "the registration fee can be discounted." ”
Li Jiyan sits in the command center, and the headhunters go deep into the neighborhood and report back to the center once a week. The two sides cooperate in an orderly manner to set up the most efficient love shortcut for single men and women who are looking for love.
02 The most recent time the phenomenon of son-in-law came out of the circle was at the end of October this year, at the Alibaba Yunqi Conference held in Hangzhou.
In addition to IT elites from all over the world, several aunts holding billboards of "Recruiting Sons-in-law" and "Looking for Fate" also came to the scene. The sign clearly states the woman's height and weight, family conditions and requirements for the son-in-law.
One of the girls, born in 1997, is a kindergarten teacher, has 3 suites and 1 set of shops at home, and asks the man to engage in large-scale model work in Ali, "traditional code farmers don't want it". Another "94 years, career editor, home factory, gentle Xiaoshan girl", special note for the man's work "Algorithm" back-end" front-end, Aliyun priority, ** don't".
The rewards for successful investment are quite rich, and they are all valuable real estate and car properties. Someone took a picture of it and posted it on the Internet, stirring the nerves of countless onlookers.
The "recruiting son-in-law" aunt at the Alibaba Yunqi Conference.
For the not low requirements on the brand, Li Jiyan was not surprised. Three or four years ago, the educational and income benchmark of the male members of Golden Idea was a college diploma and an annual salary of 100,000 yuan. But now, with the improvement of the education level and workplace position of local girls, the relevant requirements of the woman's family for the son-in-law have also increased.
In Golden Pips, jobs have a clear order of popularity.
At the top are civil servants, who are "stable, have two days off, and the provident fund is also high";The second is the teacher, who can help children with homework on weekends, winter and summer vacations, and can also save a training class fee;After that, there is the doctor, and there is more protection if the parents are sick;Then there are state-owned enterprises. Others, regardless of industry, position and income level, are at the bottom of the list.
A Jiangxi boy who contracted an express delivery company in Hangzhou contacted Li Jiyan and wanted to be a door-to-door son-in-law, but he decisively refused, citing insufficient education. The boy was very unconvinced, and asked angrily, "My annual salary is three or four hundred thousand, do they earn more than me after graduating from bachelor's and master's degrees?"”
Li Jiyan had seen too much of this kind of scene, and he was not moved at all, and replied: "Our girls here are not inferior to your money, and their family conditions are good enough." But to be honest, it is absolutely impossible to have no education, how do you tutor children?And what if you change jobs in the future, take the public examination, and don't have a diploma?”
What's more", Li Jiyan conveyed the meaning of his parents-in-law, "People don't feel at ease if they earn too much." I have a lot of money on my body, and it's easy to mess around outside. ”
Internet giants may not be popular with Li Jiyan here, and he has turned down several boys who work in Alibaba. "There is a lot of pressure, I stay up late, there are many bald people, and most of them have to be laid off and change careers at the age of 35. ”
Similarly, entrepreneurs are not very popular here. "Too busy to spend time with my family. In Li Jiyan's imagination, a perfect son-in-law should have a stable, 9-to-5 job as a civil servant. The unit is close to home, go home for dinner after work, take my wife, children and parents out for travel on holidays, and the whole family is in harmony.
If the job is not qualified and other conditions are met, Li Jiyan threw out a few local talent networks and asked the other party to find a job and come back.
After Li Jiyan's "Advice on Choosing a Mate" and the above conditions were met, Li Jiyan talked to them about more detailed requirements: temperament, good character, good health, no tattoos, baldness, gambling, alcoholism, addiction to games and other bad habits.
Some of these conditions seem to be invisible and intangible, and Li Jiyan has a way to turn the invisible into tangible, such as "character". In his opinion, integrity is an important component of good character, and Alipay's sesame score is a strong proof of integrity. His standard is that 550 is a passing grade, 600 is good, and more than 650 is considered excellent.
Several times, the other party was secretive when opening Alipay. Li Jiyan immediately felt that something was wrong, and after interrogation, he found that the other party was in debt, and demolished the east wall to make up the west wall. This method seems to work well in golden ideas. In the past three or four years, more men have come with the purpose of settling debts than ever before, and Li Jiyan has refused them one by one.
How can there be such a good thing in the world", he felt funny, and admitted that he did not have a so-called rich girl here, "After the epidemic, many girls' family businesses went bankrupt." ”
Before getting married, you also need to sign a prenuptial agreement with the Civil Affairs Bureau. Li Jiyan quickly took it. In the end, he did not forget to warn the other party, "Don't think about coming over and lying down, everyone in society is competing now, and the pressure after marriage is even greater, and it is impossible to be idle." ”
Li Jiyan is very confident in his strict control. In the industry for more than 20 years, he has facilitated more than 1,000 marriages with sons-in-law. Among these recruited sons-in-law, he thinks 95% are more reliable.
Golden idea billboard 03 is not a golden idea that brings fire to the son-in-law, Hangzhou Xiaoshan has always had the name of "the capital of the son-in-law".
In the fifties and sixties of the last century, Li Jiyan went to the countryside to join the queue for 4 years, which was when he first discovered the phenomenon of local recruitment.
At that time, every family earned food on the basis of work-sharing pay, "boys could get 10 points, and girls could only get 6." Li Jiyan recalled that the total of six jobs was less than 1 cent, and he couldn't even buy a bowl of wontons. Later, farmland contracting was promoted, and daughters could not be assigned responsibility fields, but sons-in-law who were rich could be shared, which increased the motivation for families with women and no children to recruit wealth.
After the reform and opening up, Xiaoshan's private economy has flourished, and its per capita income has jumped, occupying the first place in Zhejiang's county economy for many years. At the same time, the family planning policy was implemented, and Xiaoshan, as a "family planning red flag county", had many single-woman households.
This poses a considerable challenge to the traditional concepts of the patriarchal society, such as the succession of the son and the inheritance of property, and the recruitment of redundancy has become a convenient solution.
After entering the family, the next generation needs to take the woman's surname, and the man is exempted from the bride price, and can also get the car, house and other property provided by the woman's family.
A banner in the corridor of the Golden Idea Marriage Agency, Li Jiyan worked in a state-owned enterprise and a school when he was young. Outside of work, colleagues often get together to drink and play cards, and he doesn't like to join in the excitement. There are many young single men and women in the unit, and Li Jiyan has nothing to do, and occasionally helps others in the middle, which can be regarded as his only hobby.
After being laid off in 1998, Li Jiyan worried about his livelihood. He felt that he had good abilities and was unwilling to work for the boss of a private company. Thinking of the hobby of "matchmaking", I planned to open a marriage agency. It just so happened that at that time, he successfully facilitated the marriage of a friend's daughter's son-in-law, and found that there was a lot of demand for local recruitment, so he made the introduction of a son-in-law a special business of the marriage agency.
When it first opened, most of the customers were introduced by relatives and friends, but there were still not many of them. Li Jiyan began to advertise, newspapers, small cards, and all the channels he could think of. He had a habit of keeping materials, and deliberately copied the newspapers of that year, which have survived to this day.
After all, the threshold for opening a marriage agency in the newspaper advertised in the newspaper 20 years ago was not high, and among the laid-off workers of the same period, Li Jiyan was far more than the only one who chose this business. But a few years later, the peers were scattered, and only the golden idea survived. He attributes it to his integrity, professionalism, and unique business. After communicating with the visitors a lot, Li Jiyan picked out two words and concluded, "This is called differentiated competition and corner overtaking!"”
In fact, the golden idea not only survived, but also became popular all over the country.
After the turn of the millennium, according to Xinhua News Agency, Southern Weekly and other reports, Xiao Shan's son-in-law received widespread attention for the first time, and the golden idea also entered the public eye. At that time, the son-in-law fever was related to Hangzhou's demolition policy, and the daughter moved with her husband after marriage, which would shrink the area of the house allocated by the mother's family. But if you recruit a son-in-law, you can cover the share of the son-in-law and divide it to dozens of square meters.
According to the housing prices of more than 20,000 yuan in most communities in Xiaoshan today, dozens of square meters are already millions of income. Even if marriage is still the mainstream of marriage and love, recruitment has become an option that many single-daughter families seriously consider. Around 2005, Golden Idea ushered in the first wave of small peaks in the number of consultations.
But the hottest is in 2021. At the beginning of that year, the costume drama "Son-in-law" starring Guo Qilin and Song Yi was launched, which sparked a wave of discussion about the son-in-law in reality. More and more people are discovering that joining a wealthy family and struggling for less than 20 years may not be just a plot in **.
The Golden Idea Marriage Agency was quickly sent to the hot search, and the entries emerged in endlessly, such as "young men marry in Xiaoshan", "The marriage agency has recruited more than 300 sons-in-law", and "The number of applicants has skyrocketed tenfold".
There were too many men who signed up, and Li Jiyan had to suspend his son-in-law's business (picture source thelivings in the world) In the past few months, two or three hundred ** people came every day, most of them were young men who consulted to be sons-in-law. There are various backgrounds such as doctoral students in famous universities in Beijing, programmers in large factories, overseas Chinese, etc., and their age has crossed from 20 to 40 years old. There is also a billion-dollar entrepreneur in Guangdong Province who called, saying that he hoped to join a "woman's family with hundreds of millions of assets".
Li Jiyan's business volume skyrocketed, and the 5 mobile phones and 1 landline in the store rang non-stop, and his voice was hoarse at the end of the day. He had to post a notice at the door: "The company's quota for recruiting sons-in-law is full, suspended." Weddings and marriages are open as usual. ”
It took about half a year for the crowds to gradually return to normal.
04 Today, more than a dozen men still come to the door every day to ask for money.
With their ID cards, household registration books, academic certificates, labor contracts, marital status certificates, and an application fee of 15,000 yuan, they were examined from beginning to end, replacing the existing "conditions" one by one with more generous material returns.
On the day of our conversation, a 23-year-old boy also came to Li Jiyan to sign up for a son-in-law. As soon as he heard the age, Li Jiyan rejected him, explaining that the youngest girls here were older than him. The other party still did not give up, saying that his "family conditions are not good, and it is okay for girls to be older", and he is not "looking for shortcuts and not working hard", but just wants to "start a family as soon as possible and live a stable life".
Li Jiyan didn't beat around the bush and told him that the girls here like older ones, so wait.
The boy insisted, "Good resources, you have to prepare first." ”
In Li Jiyan's view, compared with traditional marriage, the marriage of son-in-law has its own unique advantages.
For example, it not only meets the needs of the woman's family, but also greatly reduces the man's financial pressure. He advised those boys who couldn't let go of their children, "After getting rich, I have a car and a house, and I don't have to worry about my children going to school, and I can get career support." ”
The men who came to sign up for a son-in-law showed a different mentality. Many people are still secretive, and some rural areas in Zhejiang have given rise to "two-headed marriages". This kind of name is more equal in face and more acceptable to the man. The characteristics of two-headed marriage are that both men and women do not need to give bride price and dowry, give birth to two children, and follow the surname of each parent, and at the same time avoid the title of grandparents, and both sides are called grandparents.
Li Jiyan observed that in practice, the so-called two-headed marriage in the local area is still the marriage of a man with poor family conditions to a woman.
Now, there are also many men who have a good economic foundation and actively seek to come to the door. Li Jiyan just received an 88-year-old unmarried boy with a height of 180, a master's degree, a company job, an annual salary of 300,000 yuan, and a full purchase in Hangzhou, and soon signed up. This kind of marriage was called "a strong marriage and the icing on the cake" by Li Jiyan.
The two sides are not only matched, but more importantly, "the bride price here is at least 18."80,000, 28 if the conditions are good80,000, 3880,000, or even 5880,000, the redundancy is omitted. ”
Avoiding the contradiction between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is another big reason for Li Jiyan to advocate the marriage of his son-in-law.
In the traditional marriage of the billboard of the Golden Idea Office, the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is a problem that has not been solved for thousands of years, and there are complex reasons behind it, such as generational differences, gender inequality, and inaction by the man, which can easily lead to the disintegration of small families.
Correspondingly, the contradiction between the mother and son-in-law is less discussed. Even if both the son-in-law and the daughter-in-law are "outsiders" from the other family, the relationship between the former and the previous generation seems to be easier to handle. Whenever a son-in-law marriage is promoted, Li Jiyan teaches the man the secret of maintaining the marriage, "Be diligent at home, have a gentle temper, have a sweet mouth, shout more about your parents, and your mother-in-law will definitely like her son-in-law." "It's one thing to get married, firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea", Li Jiyan sighed again and again, "This society is very realistic." "Who wouldn't want to have an easier life in the decades of life?Everybody is smart. ”