Truth be told

There's nothing like honesty in relationships, and China's most popular dating show has it in spades. Belle Taylor is a big fan.

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.