"The Cultural Revolution broke down many taboos and led to more openness and a more liberal attitude towards sex," said Joseph Cheng, a China watcher at City University of Hong Kong.
Today, the Chinese countryside is irreversibly transformed and is catching on to new trends almost as fast as the big cities.
"Eighty percent of the men here go to the cities to work," said Huang Xuefeng, general manager of Zhaode Trading Co.
"They encounter many new ways of thinking, and when they come back, they make the local farmers change, too."
Amid the rustic affection showered on Zhang this weekend, everything was not perfect.
Her 13-year-old daughter from her previous marriage could not attend her wedding and may be gradually slipping out of her life.
"My daughter wants to live with me and my husband, but her mother won't let her," Zhang said. "All we want is a chance to raise her."
Zhang's urge to establish a nuclear family on her own terms could yet collide with surviving Chinese mores.
Although many of the attendants at her wedding approved of transsexual matrimony, they would not welcome it in their own family.
"People here don't really understand what's going on," said He Liying, a woman hugging her 10-year-old daughter Chen Ting as she waited for the bride to appear from her wedding chamber.
"I can kind of accept this kind of marriage, but if my own daughter wanted a sex-change operation, I would definitely oppose it."
RSS