First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes divorce. It’s a tired joke about the American marriage institution, which sees couples joining for companionship, declining to have babies and getting divorced at a rising rate.
Over the last 20 years, the same trends have begun to characterize Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, three societies discussed together in Wives, Husbands and Lovers because they share a Confucian legacy. But while marriage in the East does resemble its US counterpart, this new volume offers a scholarly account of a distinctly quirky state of the union.
Edited by Deborah S. Davis and Sara L. Friedman, Wives, Husbands and Lovers is 12 English-language essays, mainly by top local academics presenting original research.
Chapters have the diction and copious statistics of academic writing, though at the core, each is an intriguing story about a small particular.
One chapter explores Shanghai youth attitudes toward premarital sex (a very conflicted embrace). In another, ethnographers record Hong Kong men’s updated definition of a “good guy” (eg. he gives the wife his paycheck, he admits his mistakes) in an era when it’s become common to cross the border into mainland China for business and pleasure.
Although the volume generally strikes a dry tone, it’s interwoven with comic accounts of things people do in the name of love. In When Are You Going to Get Married?, Zhang Jun (張珺) and Sun Peidong (孫培棟) probe the “parental matchmaking corner” of People’s Park in Shanghai. On weekends, parents arrive with a sheet of paper filled with details about their single children, who are predominately women. Then they wait — for other parents to come by and inquire — or they walk around and browse.
Some observers have said this practice is an old Chinese matchmaking tradition reactivated to deal with the rising ranks of “surplus women” (剩女) — a derogatory term for unmarried women born in the 1970s or earlier.
Zhang and Sun, however, in a whirlwind journey through census data and interviews with parents, claim that in reality women have the advantage in the Chinese marriage market, as men still outnumber women due to the one-child policy. Parental matchmaking isn’t an old social mechanism triggered by actual bad odds, they say. Instead, it is a novel phenomenon driven by the one-child policy (urban parents have poured unprecedented investment into their daughters) and by a uniquely socialist anxiety that the state is not intervening enough in the dating scene.
INCREASINGLY LAX LAWS OF ATTRACTION
Chapters are grouped by geography and as you move through China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, you get a clear sense that legislation on romantic relationships is loosening in all three.
Davis, in a long introduction to the China section, writes that the People’s Republic of China has been on a steady retreat over the last 20 years, enacting freeing changes to rules about marriage “unilaterally with little role for citizen input.” Gone are the days of mass dating events, and since 2002, registering a marriage or getting a divorce has not required written permission from the village head or employer.
Law in Taiwan, too, has adopted a progressive approach to marriage and family, though mainly due to the bottom-up influence of social movements, writes Taiwanese law professor Grace Kuo (郭書琴).
Recent interpretations of family law have become quite sensitive to their contemporary social contexts, Kuo argues, in a study of court interpretations made during Taiwan’s feminist movement of 1990s. In this decade, forceful momentum from civil society struck down two laws, one that gave fathers the right to final decisions about children and another that gave husbands the right to decide where the family lived.
Yet in surprising ways, the practice of marriage still holds fast to traditional Confucian norms.
Children remain the sacred province of legal marriage and comparatively few are delivered out of wedlock, write the editors. Academia Sinica’s Yu Ruoh-rong (于若蓉) and Liu Yu-sheng (劉育昇) run a regression analysis on housework distribution, to conclude that women still do most of the housework — even when they also work outside the home.
And in Taiwanese families with a husband working in China, the man commonly behaves as little other than a breadwinner and the woman as homemaker. One chapter argues that ironically, it is these highly gender-specific commitments that allow couples to hold on to their marriage.
These episodes come together to form a picture that’s wonder-inducing and complicated. At under 350 pages, Wives, Husbands and Lovers is one of the quickest ways to grasp the current state of Confucian unions: liberal and conservative, public and private, fragile yet able to withstand the political tides that have turned China into a superpower, Hong Kong into a special administrative region and Taiwan into a post-dictatorial democratic country. As each scrambles to adapt for an uncertain future, the marriage institution changes too, but lives on.
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