Seeing that my Guo Jingjing post from a couple of months ago seems to be getting the most hits out of anything that I’ve written, I’ve decided to completely sell-out and write more about her. Yeah you heard me right. My ego needs the traffic. If I can figure out how to get Google ads showing up right, I could make a dime at it too.
As you might know, she’s getting married to Kenneth Fok (霍启刚); they’ve been dating several years and were waiting for the Olympics to end and Guo to retire (was she planning on retiring right after the Olympics?). It seems Kenneth knows is way around the uptown girls: the girls that he’s dated have all been society-types, the daughters of fairly famous or prestigious men. In 2004 he started dating Guo.
Of course, this kind of thing is not without precedent: Fu Mingxia, another celebrated Chinese diver,also married into Hong Kong wealth.
As for Guo, rumor has it that Fok is going to dish out 100 million RMB for some siheyuan property in Beijing for Guo’s parents.
And her dowry features some gold and silver, and would fetch a fair price on any market, black or otherwise, and that ain’t shabby either.
Not sure what I think about these types of thing: I mean they are as old as human society, this type of “selection”—I’m not saying it’s not love, it almost always is—so in that sense, its no different from how other people find their partners—introductions from people they know in common, etc. But in the end, it’s just access: each person has a limited amount of resources for meeting people. There are some circles you just can’t swim in. And that’s ok, that’s true as much for the rich and social elite as much as for anyone else.
Nonetheless, if one wanted to probe beneath the surface and ask about if there’s anything of cultural or sociological interest regarding such things in Chinese society, well, what could you say?
Are these things more prevalent than before? Is the mixing of worlds (Hong Kong business, mainland sports) more common than before, are there combinations (milieu A and milieu B) that might have been so common before?
Or is this, like all celebrity gossip, just a monumental waste of human time and effort?