This could be Rotterdam or anywhere.

I was going to write a story here about a girl who was bought to be a bride. Apparently in China there's a baby trade; girl babies are bought to be daughters or servants and some are bought to be brides. I wonder how that would feel; we think it's barbaric, but is it any more barbaric than pushing a child into another profession? In a culture where women can only be brides, and probably have marriages arranged for them in due course anyway, is it any less humane to designate who will marry whom from birth? It's just a faster route is all.

Though it would definitely be a gilded cage. If you buy a baby with a view to it becoming a bride, you foist all these expectations on it. If it didn't turn out exactly as you wanted it, what would you do? Or maybe you grow to love it no matter how it turns out, because the expectations you have for it grow with the child itself. You'd have to be pretty and clever and all the rest of it if you knew your purpose from the start, or maybe they just shock you with it when you come of age, "By the way, you're intended to be married to him over there".

Or are they all reserves? In case one son doesn't find anyone, they've got an extra out the back, ready and waiting, prepackaged. Would you be part of the family in the meantime? Or just an extra. I suppose it would depend on who bought you. Everyone who adopts a child does it because it does something for them, yes, we might say we adopt children to give them love (in Western society) but really it's so that they fill some void that we have in our lives, or some need to give something. I think adoption is a brilliant thing, and everyone that does it does it for the good of the child (usually), but they have to acknowledge that they are as dependent on the child as it is on them. So really this is just another branch of that, buying a child to suit our needs, though the process is all too consumerist and clinical. Pushy adoptive parents might want their child to become a doctor or professor, but cases are few and far between of children being pushed into marriages. Or are western parents just more subtle about the wishes they have for their children, and inflicting that on them?