Summary of SEAA Reads, session eleven, October 12
Monica Liu 2023 Seeking Western Men: Email-order Brides Under China’s Global Rise
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35148
Our book club discussion was hosted by Ellen Oxfeld and began with readers briefly introducing themselves and giving a few observations or responses to the book. Unlike some sessions that included time with the author, this evening the entire 90 minutes was open for wide-ranging discussion of the several points raised by readers at the start.
To begin, everyone enjoyed learned from the book! It is easy for we academics to start picking things apart and finding the lapses not explored. But it needs to be stressed that all learned a tremendous amount from reading this work and it was impressive long-term research.
Readers brought up several observations. These included comparisons to (pre-email) Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail Order” Marriages written about one generation earlier by Nicole Constable and another reader’s first-hand experiences meeting a few Chinese women in the USA who were very similar to the ones featured in Monica Liu’s account of dating agencies matching prospective Chinese brides and (Western) grooms. The delicate and prominent concern with researcher ethics when building trusting and intimate rapport with the 60+ people she got to know also occupied a lot of the book club conversation since the author’s working principles (stay neutral, be non-judgmental, be supportive) seemed to be tested on several occasions when interviewees did or said things that seemed concerning. In a few instances in the book the young women English translators, many of whom in the urban office came from socially conservative rural origins, also faced ethical questions when speaking on behalf of clients.
Other conversation topics were about things absent from the
book, although perhaps they were taken for granted as being present and not
needing to be addressed: role of elderly parent care when bridge left China,
matters of hierarchy or status differences (by class, race, financial resources
between bride and groom), and the
limited portraits of the women featured among the key informants (not
fully 3-dimensional figures with varied and large or small social networks
giving bigger context to their engagement with the matchmaking agency). There
was discussion from one reader whose course on Family and Marriage had grappled
with the themes in the book, in particular about the variations in
Chinese-Feminism (C-Feminism) that seems subsumed within the existing and
resurgent patriarchies.
Given the central role of translators in brokering the emerging, developing, and sometimes culminating married relationships between Chinese women and Western men, some readers commented on the relative scarcity of Chinese terminology (source terms, translation surplus/deficit meanings creating gaps in the impressions formed by all parties back and forth). A different kind of gap was also pointed out: not in lingua-cultural meanings but on the legality of the services provided by the featured agencies. In the eyes of the central government and earlier marriage service with overseas suitors, the businesses were restricted or deemed illegal, or otherwise were discouraged and restricted. So, the current form of operation carefully abides those limitations while still conducting the business introducing, facilitating, and supporting budding intercultural relationships. None of the readers closely knew the Chinese laws or regulations pertaining to these dating agencies, but it seems that private businesses like these did emerge before the Reform period but were quickly outlawed. They only remerged again in the Reform period).
A few readers observed that this relationship between private initiative in business and the eyes of the central government is not limited to the marriage scene but also can be found in many parts of the rapidly shifting society: only by accident or incidentally does the government bump into a new form of business that it finds harmful or dislikes for some other reason. Then the authorities impose themselves to some degree or they declare it illegal. In other words, there is a working principle of “gray zone” businesses: not licit, nor illicit, but somewhere in-between at the growing, innovating edge of the society.
The lives and the phenomena illustrated in Seeking
Western Men thus tell readers not only about the marriage brokering
business in this Internet/social media generation, but also serves as a mirror
that reflects a picture of changing times in China and the reactions by
a few particular demographic segments against the negative parts of new
society. At the same time, the book indirectly documents the “gray area” that
is so vigorous and resilient between emerging businesses and the controls
exercised by the all-seeing central government as citizens, both rural and
urban, wealthy and of modest means, strive to travel the life course they see
before them.
_________
The next SEAA Reads gathering online is February 2025 and
will feature the announced November 2024 winner of the Francis
L.K. Hsu Book Prize.
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