My mom had a QR code on her table at Ikea. You wouldn’t have noticed it unless you knew what to look for. It peeked discreetly from under her plate, like a small, secret weapon. Another elderly parent, balancing a plate of meatballs and lingonberry sauce, would walk by and scan it without a word, a quick, quiet transaction.
This wasn’t her first attempt at matchmaking. My mom used to go to Nanjing’s marriage market with an umbrella advertising my name, age, appearance, major, and future career prospects. She’d even written in bold characters that we didn’t care if a man didn’t own an apartment—my parents had already bought one for me.
She was frustrated that I wasn’t dating. I was 27, unmarried, and, according to her, wasting the best years of my life. Once, I hid behind some bushes to watch her in action. It was unsettling. She stood there as other parents glanced at her umbrella, dismissed it, and walked away. Her shoulders tensed each time, but she stayed rooted, waiting for the next passerby.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked her afterward. “I don’t need you to find someone. I’m fine on my own.”
But the dates she arranged kept coming. And they were excruciating—me sitting across from equally uncomfortable men, both of us asking obligatory questions like, “Do you want kids?” Neither of us cared about the answer, but we knew our mothers would.
It was on one of these dates that I met Bajin. Unlike the others, he didn’t take the situation seriously either.
“Your mom uses QR codes too?” he asked, incredulous. He leaned back, his fingers tightening around his glass, as if he could squeeze some sense out of it.
I nodded, and we laughed, swapping stories about awkward encounters and over-the-top profiles curated by our parents. His mom had added a video montage of him volunteering, smiling at babies, and posing with carefully chosen props to suggest success and stability.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I feel like my mom has built this version of me that I can’t live up to.”
I nodded slowly, my gaze drifting to my drink as I twisted the glass in my hands. A sigh escaped before I could stop it. “Same.”
As the night wore on, we vented, mostly about our families. He gave a wry smile and shrugged. “My parents are divorced. Dad’s moved on, but my mom? She’s like a hamster on a wheel, always running in circles trying to fix my life, but hers hasn’t gone anywhere.” He chuckled, though there was a tiredness in his voice that I understood.
I’d had the same thought about my mom. “Maybe we should turn the tables,” I said, half-joking. “What if we tried finding dates for them?”
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re serious?”
“Why not? They’re already spending all this time matchmaking for us. Let’s give them a taste of their own medicine.”
He hesitated, then grinned. “Okay, but if this backfires. I’m blaming you.”
We brainstormed profiles for our moms and strategized about where to find potential matches. My mom spent her afternoons at the gym, so we figured she might be into someone who shared her fitness interests. His mom loved group dancing in a square near his home, but the male participants were few and far between.
The next day, we went to the local gym together. I pointed out a man in his 60s lifting dumbbells. “Think he’s your Mom’s type?”
Bajin grimaced. “Honestly, I don’t want to think about it.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to either.”
Bajing’s eyes brightened, a grin spreading across his face as if the perfect idea had just clicked into place. “What if we swapped? I’ll find someone for your mom, and you find someone for mine.”
It was a practical solution. We exchanged QR codes, and over the next few weeks, we threw ourselves into the bizarre world of elderly matchmaking. It was equal parts ridiculous and fascinating.
My mom’s QR code was a masterpiece of digital overreach. Along with her photos, there was a well-curated video of her jogging on the treadmill, followed by clips of her in yoga class, looking fit and spry. Bajin’s moms wasn’t quite as nice, but he’s still built her an impressive portfolio, including a photo of her at a traditional dance competition, proudly clutching a trophy.
We spent evenings brainstorming different ways to market our moms and how to get them on a date. At one point, Bajin suggested I film my mom at the gym doing squats. “She’ll look so strong,” he said.
I burst out laughing and reached over to scratch the idea off his list.
We learned more about each other than we’d expected. Bajin had a way of asking questions that didn’t feel intrusive, yet always seemed to get to the heart of things. “Do you ever get tired of it?” he asked once, his gaze steady. “The whole matchmaking thing, I mean. The pressure.”
It was a simple question, but it felt like a punch to the gut. “All the time,” I admitted. “But my mom… she doesn’t see it. She just wants me to be happy. She’s stuck in her own way of thinking.”
“That’s what my mom does too,” Bajin said. “She’s stuck in the past, but she thinks if I just marry someone, everything will be fine.”
We both shared a moment of silence, both lost in the same complicated feeling of guilt, love, and frustration.
In the middle of all the madness, I started noticing something. Bajin wasn’t just helping me with my mom’s QR code. I found myself telling him things I hadn’t shared with anyone—about my dad’s death, about the feeling of being caught between two cultures, about my mom’s suffocating expectations.
We didn’t realize it, but somewhere along the way, we’d begun to build something that had nothing to do with QR codes.
One afternoon, I suggested a plan. “What if we go to the park and flash the QR codes at old guys? Just see who’ll take the bait.” We’d started speaking in hunting and fishing terms a lot lately.
“Yeah, let’s do it! We can be like those obnoxious people who shove business cards into doors at night,” Bajin said with a nod. I loved that he was always game for my schemes.
The first test runs were far from perfect. We spent hours at the gym and at the park, watching the elderly men go through their routines. It felt like a weird scavenger hunt, trying to match our moms with their potential partners.
“What do you think of him?” I asked, gesturing to a man in his 60s lifting weights.
Bajin shrugged. “He looks ok…yeah, let’s try it.” He said with growing confidence.
Then, the unexpected happened. We’d been spending so much time on the matchmaking project, we hadn’t realized how much we’d started to rely on each other for support. Bajin and I had become friends, allies in this strange and absurd journey. We’d vented about everything from family pressure to the odd reality of navigating love when all we wanted was to lay in our beds and look at our phones.
But then, my mom pulled me aside. “I know what you’ve been doing,” she said, pulling out the QR code I’d tried to hide in my bag.
I froze. “What?”
“I’m not angry,” she said, smiling a little. “But I’m curious. What’s your plan here?”
I hadn’t expected her to take it so calmly. “I just… I just wanted you to see things from my perspective.”
“And now I do,” she said before handing me my dating profile QR code that she kept in her purse. “But what’s your plan? Because the guy you matched me up with…he seems…well I think I’d like to go out with him.”
It turned out that our little experiment had done more than just find dates for our moms. It had opened up new lines of communication and for the first time in years, my mom and I were talking about something other than MY marriage prospects.
Meanwhile, Bajin and I were texting more frequently, sharing our progress. He’d set up a date for my mom with a man named Mr. Zhang, who was also into fitness and had similar interests as my Mom. My Mom took to the idea way faster than I expected.
“I think she’s this guy might be the one,” Bajin said one evening, texting me the update after helping them to arrange a date at my Mom’s favorite restaurant.
“I’m not sure how I feel about it,” I replied. “I don’t want her to get too attached, but I also want to see where this goes.”
The dating experiment had become something unexpected. Bajin and I had started out trying to play matchmaker for our moms, but somewhere along the way, we’d found ourselves falling for each other.
It wasn’t perfect. Nothing ever is. But it felt real, and for the first time in years, that felt like enough.
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