Deborah Davis and Sara Friedman's Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China opens with a description of a thirty-one-year-old Taiwanese woman who, in an elaborate public ceremony, marries herself. This vignette is followed by reference to a BBC story about a Hong Kong shipping tycoon who recently offered 40 million pounds (about 60 million US dollars) to “any man able to woo and marry his lesbian daughter.” These striking scenarios serve notice that Chinese ideas about marriage and sexuality have changed substantially over the past thirty-some years, and the dozen chapters that make up this volume certainly bear this out. Given these changes, this is a timely and important addition to scholarship on modern China, one whose usefulness is enhanced by its coverage of not only the People's Republic, but of Hong Kong and Taiwan as well.
A unifying theme is borrowed from Andrew Cherlin's thesis that marriage (in the United States) has become deinstitutionalized through the weakening of such previously taken-for-granted norms as near-universal heterosexual marriage at a relatively early age, low rates of divorce, and a strong link between marriage and sexuality. But these norms have lost much of their force in China just as they have in the West.
But China, of course, is not the West. In the PRC, for example, the sometimes heavy-handed intervention of the party-state has resulted in certain distinct individual responses and demographic patterns. One of these patterns was the fluctuation in median age at marriage due to the state's Mao-era effort to discourage adolescent marriages. When legal strictures were withdrawn in 1980, the PRC's median age of marriage suddenly fell, then quickly began to rise again, this time due to changes in individual preferences.
James Farrer's chapter, based on his work in Shanghai, offers a fascinating glimpse at the way young urbanites are rewriting the “cultural scripts” of dating and courtship. The emergence of a dating culture in urban China has helped delink sexuality from marriage, a point revealed in the tendency for most young Shanghainese to go through a series of love relationships before getting married. Interestingly, and despite the widespread acceptance of premarital sex among couples, a significant minority continue to insist on the importance of virginity at marriage. Even more significant is that dating, though now scripted so as to allow for the possibility of an eventual break-up, is still pursued by most with reference to an expectation of marriage, if not with one's current steady, then at least, eventually.
Some of the chapters on Hong Kong and Taiwan describe the effects of the economic imbalance between these locales and the PRC. Businessmen from these relatively prosperous areas often travel to the mainland and establish ties with poor women there, and, in some cases, wind up supporting two families at once. Hsiu-hua Shen's chapter discusses the ways in which some Taiwanese men, spending most of their time in China, fulfill what they regard as their obligation to their families back home in strictly financial terms. For many, this is the essence of paternal responsibility, and in light of this, they regard liaisons with local women as permissible as long as their family in Taiwan is provided for, a view also noted by Petula Sik Ying Ho with regard to some Hong Kong men involved in extramarital affairs. Interestingly, the Taiwanese women whose husbands have abandoned them in all but financial terms sometimes feel thereby liberated and empowered.
Since the authors of this volume represent different disciplines—sociology, anthropology, law, etc.—the chapters vary widely in methodology and style, some relying heavily on interviews and ethnography while others are based on quantitative data. John Nguyet Erni's chapter, for example, on the court case of “W,” a transgender woman, particularly stands out both for its unique focus on LGBT issues and its close attention to a specific individual's struggle with the Hong Kong judiciary—which itself is struggling to deal with changing cultural attitudes. Other chapters provide broad overviews of demographic trends in divorce, age at marriage, fertility, and the like.
A number of the authors, including in particular the editors themselves, contradict to a certain extent Cherlin's deinstitutionalization concept inasmuch as they conclude that marriage and the family still dominate the thinking of contemporary Chinese despite the changing patterns of behavior described here. For one thing, as Davis and Friedman point out, unlike in the West, procreation in Chinese cultural areas continues to be overwhelmingly within the context of marriage. There is also an undeniably powerful link across generations that has its roots in Confucian traditions and that results, for example, in the significant involvement of parents in their children's marriages—a point vividly illustrated in Jun Zhang and Peidong Sun's chapter on Shanghai's “matchmaking corner.”
The focus of this volume is urban China, and in light of this, one might want to ask about parallel or distinct trends that characterize rural China. But such a question should not be taken as criticism of a work that attempts so much and succeeds so well in the attempt. In light of its broad coverage and its varied sources of data, this collection comprises a veritable goldmine of vital information. It represents a solid and important contribution to scholarship on contemporary China and on marriage and the family generally.
