I’m struggling to breathe. I pause for breath, and as a cover, squint a bit and imagine the hoards from Mongolia bearing down. “Come at me! King of the North” I imagine myself bellowing at the approaching army. “You will never conquer this Kingdom!”

Out loud I say: “Does anyone else want to take a bit of a break? I think I’m going to faint.”

We are climbing an un-restored section of the Great Wall near the Chenjiapu valley. The bricks are loose, crumbling and many parts have been almost entirely overtaken by the thick shrubbery. It’s been a wet summer and everything is green, lush and beautiful – snakes hiss in the thick undergrowth as we trudge past.

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A couple got married in the lobby of the China Daily today.

The groom works for the paper as a copy editor (in Australia he would be called a sub editor). He is from the US and his bride is from a town in China about five hours away from Beijing, although someone told me she was from Tianjin, which is 30 minutes away, so I’m not quite sure. Anyway, they are in love and they got married and did it on a Thursday afternoon in the office lobby because I guess why the hell not?

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This is a column I wrote that was originally published in the China Daily on July 4, 2014, all copyright belongs to China Daily.

A few minutes after my plane touched down in China, the woman who picked me up from the airport looked at me very seriously and said: “You are very beautiful.” “Thank you”, I said, bewildered. “I think I’m going to like China.” Don’t worry, it didn’t go to my head, because not long after that I was also told my hair was a mess and my skin terrible. One new friend asked what sort of fashion labels I was interested in, before looking me up and down, patting me on the arm and saying: “I think you like comfortable clothes.” My language teacher taught me the grammatical structure for “become” with the sample sentence: “Belle is becoming fat”.

It may have been upsetting, but luckily obsessive viewing of China’s most popular dating show, If You Are the One, had prepared me for this sort of brutal honesty, which is by no means unique to China, but it’s certainly foreign to me.

For the uninitiated, If You Are the One, or Fei Cheng Wu Rao, is one of the most popular dating shows in China and it enjoys a cult following in Australia where it is aired with subtitles.

The reality TV program follows a game-show type format in which a single man faces 24 women standing on lit-up podiums. Each of the women has a light, which they can turn off if they decide they are not interested in the man. They are quick to hit that switch, which makes a noise that’s somewhere around the icky mid-point between stomach-dropping rejection and bone-crushing humiliation.

Too short? POW! Too tall? POW! Pursuing a passion career? POW! POW! POW! POW!

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