Being Chinese | Where do lonely hearts in China go now? Late-night live streams

For two weeks recently, most of my evenings were spent in Douyin’s live-stream section. On Douyin, TikTok’s sibling platform in China, shopping, entertainment and conversation blur into an endlessly scrollable feed.

The most prominent virtual rooms here are for shopping: live-streaming hosts talking at high speed, shouting out discounts. Then come the talent rooms, where people sing, dance, play the guitar or do anything that might keep you there for a few seconds longer. As I watched, more categories began to surface: streams offering late-night companionship and newer animated-avatar rooms where hosts never show their real faces. They don’t promise cheaper lipstick or furious dancing. What they sell is company.

I didn’t visit these rooms for any clear reason. One evening, while I was swiping past the usual noise, a calm, warm voice, reading a passage from a book I love, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, stopped me. It felt easier to stay than to keep scrolling.

The host’s voice had a tired huskiness, the kind you get from talking to strangers deep into the night. He said his job felt like that of Sisyphus, who has to keep pushing rocks up a hill forever. He had just a few dozen people in his room, so he tried to talk to everyone. It was pleasant and oddly comforting. I even set the alarm so I wouldn’t miss his 9pm stream.

He would sing songs I picked and read paragraphs from a novel I liked. Through the tiny screen, it really felt like I had a friend on the other side of the phone. Sometimes, I wondered if this was what loneliness looked like now: no more dramatic break-ups or grand confessions, just a quiet dependence on a scheduled voice on an app.

My peers in the post-85 demographic are smart enough to know it’s a performance, too busy to build new offline connections, and tired enough to accept such companionship as good enough for a Tuesday night. It asks so little of me: no need to dress up, commute or explain my past. I can drop in and out, buy 10 minutes of digital warmth with a small gift and close the app the moment real life intrudes.