By now, most of you are trying to recover from the excesses of the Chinese New Year holiday and are perhaps setting ambitious fitness goals to regain a slim waistline lost to a week of excessive eating, popping pills to get over a lingering cold brought on by the stress of travel or reeling from the utter loss of privacy and dignity suffered at the hands of visiting too many relatives.

Of the trials and tribulations that come with Chinese New Year gatherings, I find the latter the most difficult, especially in a small city where your business is everybody's business. And the most important business in the life of a young Chinese woman (and to some extent, a young man) is love, of course.

Here in Beijing, like everywhere else, singles suffer the obsessive matchmaking efforts and prying questions of their parents, parents' friends, and elderly neighbors all year round. But in a small city - like the one where I spent the New Year - the pressure to fall in love, marry and procreate is truly unbearable.