China's Second Wives
China's Second Wives

Author: Lily Liqi Pietryka

Publisher:

Published: 2017-04-30

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 9781520714554

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Why do men cheat? What do their wives put up with it? Who are the women they cheat with? Why do these women choose married men instead of single guys? Is it for money, sex, or love? In modern day China, marital infidelity is rampant and mistresses/second wives are prevalent. China's Second Wives offers an intimate look into China's second wife culture, a modern incarnation of the concubine tradition of feudal China. To uncover the mystery of this social phenomenon, the author infiltrated secret second-wife chatrooms as an undercover. She tracked down a second wife broker and a second wife lawyer. She interviewed friends, family, classmates, and strangers in the street. She mingled in the banquets of the power elite, male bastions where young mistresses were signs of prestige. She traversed big cities and small villages. As we follow the author on her exciting investigation journey, we embark on an unforgettable culture tour of contemporary China. One can't help but contemplate these universal themes in her own life - love and sex, money and power, gender conflict and dependency, marriage and infidelity, and the never ending pressure of life itself.

Leftover Women
Leftover Women

Author: Leta Hong Fincher

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2016-07-31

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1783607912

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‘Scattered with inspiring life-stories of courageous women.’ The Guardian In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China’s post-socialist era. Contrary to the image presented by China’s media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men. In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China’s economy, politics, and development.

A River of Stars
A River of Stars

Author: Vanessa Hua

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0399178791

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In a powerful debut about modern-day motherhood, immigration, and identity, a pregnant Chinese woman stakes a claim to the American dream in California. “Utterly absorbing.”—Celeste Ng • “A marvel of a first novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine • “The most eye-opening literary adventure of the year.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • Real Simple Holed up with other mothers-to-be in a secret maternity home in Los Angeles, Scarlett Chen is far from her native China, where she worked in a factory and fell in love with the married owner, Boss Yeung. Now she’s carrying his baby. To ensure that his child—his first son—has every advantage, Boss Yeung has shipped Scarlett off to give birth on American soil. As Scarlett awaits the baby’s arrival, she spars with her imperious housemates. The only one who fits in even less is Daisy, a spirited, pregnant teenager who is being kept apart from her American boyfriend. Then a new sonogram of Scarlett’s baby reveals the unexpected. Panicked, she goes on the run by hijacking a van—only to discover that she has a stowaway: Daisy, who intends to track down the father of her child. The two flee to San Francisco’s bustling Chinatown, where Scarlett will join countless immigrants desperately trying to seize their piece of the American dream. What Scarlett doesn’t know is that her baby’s father is not far behind her. A River of Stars is a vivid examination of home and belonging and a moving portrayal of a woman determined to build her own future. Praise for A River of Stars “Vanessa Hua’s story spins with wild fervor, with charming protagonists fiercely motivated by maternal and survival instincts.”—USA Today “A River of Stars is the best of all worlds: part buddy cop adventure, part coming-of-age story and part ode to female friendship.”—NPR “Hua’s epic A River of Stars follows a pair of pregnant Chinese immigrant women—two of the more vibrant characters I’ve come across in a while—on the lam from Los Angeles to San Francisco’s Chinatown.”—R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries, in Esquire “A delightful novel of motherhood and Chinese immigration . . . Without wading into policy debates, Ms Hua dramatises the stories and contributions of immigrants who believe in grand ideals and strive to live up to them.”—The Economist

China's Left-Behind Wives
China's Left-Behind Wives

Author: Huifen Shen

Publisher:

Published: 2012-09-30

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13:

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In China's Left-Behind Wives, Huifen Shen tells the extraordinary story of an overlooked group of women who played an important role in one of the largest waves of migration in history. For roughly a century starting around 1850, large numbers of young men from southern China travelled to Southeast Asia in search of work. Some were married and others returned to marry, but they routinely left their wives in China to handle family affairs. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival materials, local gazetteers, newspapers and periodicals, the author describes the experiences of left-behind wives in the Quanzhou region of Fujian from the 1930s to the 1050s, a time when war and political change caused customary practices to break down. Migrant marriages were nearly always arranged, and girls rarely met their husbands before the wedding. Normally a bride lived with her new husband for just a few weeks or months, after which he went abroad. The circumstances in the 1940s and 1950s were such that many of these young women rarely, or never, saw their husbands again. When the Pacific War cut off communications, the loss of remittance money meant that they faced a difficult struggle for survival. The war's end brought a brief respite, but the communist ascendency led to further difficult adjustments. Ultimately, the experiences of the left-behind wives drew them into public life and business, and as Overseas Chinese policies, and attitudes towards women, changed in China, they came to play an increasingly significant part in the processes of development and modernization.

Women Shall Not Rule
Women Shall Not Rule

Author: Keith McMahon

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2013-06-06

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1442222905

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Chinese emperors guaranteed male successors by taking multiple wives, in some cases hundreds and even thousands. Women Shall Not Rule offers a fascinating history of imperial wives and concubines, especially in light of the greatest challenges to polygamous harmony—rivalry between women and their attempts to engage in politics. Besides ambitious empresses and concubines, these vivid stories of the imperial polygamous family are also populated with prolific emperors, wanton women, libertine men, cunning eunuchs, and bizarre cases of intrigue and scandal among rival wives. Keith McMahon, a leading expert on the history of gender in China, draws upon decades of research to describe the values and ideals of imperial polygamy and the ways in which it worked and did not work in real life. His rich sources are both historical and fictional, including poetic accounts and sensational stories told in pornographic detail. Displaying rare historical breadth, his lively and fascinating study will be invaluable as a comprehensive and authoritative resource for all readers interested in the domestic life of royal palaces across the world.

Wives, Husbands, and Lovers
Wives, Husbands, and Lovers

Author: Deborah S. Davis

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2014-07-09

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0804791856

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What is the state of intimate romantic relationships and marriage in urban China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan? Since the 1980's, the character of intimate life in these urban settings has changed dramatically. While many speculate about the 21st century as Asia's century, this book turns to the more intimate territory of sexuality and marriage—and observes the unprecedented changes in the law and popular expectations for romantic bonds and the creation of new families. Wives, Husbands, and Lovers examines how sexual relationships and marriage are perceived and practiced under new developments within each urban location, including the establishment of no fault divorce laws, lower rates of childbearing within marriage, and the increased tolerance for non-marital and non-heterosexual intimate relationships. The authors also chronicle what happens when states remove themselves from direct involvement in some features of marriage but not others. Tracing how the marital "rules of the game" have changed substantially across the region, this book challenges long-standing assumptions that marriage is the universally preferred status for all men and women, that extramarital sexuality is incompatible with marriage, or that marriage necessarily unites a man and a woman. This book illustrates the wide range of potential futures for marriage, sexuality, and family across these societies.

Leftover in China
Leftover in China

Author: Roseann Lake

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2018-02-13

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0393254631

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Factory Girls meets The Vagina Monologues in this fascinating narrative on China’s single women—and why they could be the source of its economic future. Forty years ago, China enacted the one-child policy, only recently relaxed. Among many other unintended consequences, it resulted in both an enormous gender imbalance—with a predicted twenty million more men than women of marriage age by 2020—and China’s first generations of only-daughters. Given the resources normally reserved for boys, these girls were pushed to study, excel in college, and succeed in careers, as if they were sons. Now living in an economic powerhouse, enough of these women have decided to postpone marriage—or not marry at all—to spawn a label: "leftovers." Unprecedentedly well-educated and goal-oriented, they struggle to find partners in a society where gender roles have not evolved as vigorously as society itself, and where new professional opportunities have made women less willing to compromise their careers or concede to marriage for the sake of being wed. Further complicating their search for a mate, the vast majority of China’s single men reside in and are tied to the rural areas where they were raised. This makes them geographically, economically, and educationally incompatible with city-dwelling “leftovers,” who also face difficulty in partnering with urban men, given the urban men’s general preference for more dutiful, domesticated wives. Part critique of China’s paternalistic ideals, part playful portrait of the romantic travails of China’s trailblazing women and their well-meaning parents who are anxious to see their daughters snuggled into traditional wedlock, Roseann Lake’s Leftover in China focuses on the lives of four individual women against a backdrop of colorful anecdotes, hundreds of interviews, and rigorous historical and demographic research to show how these "leftovers" are the linchpin to China’s future.

The Ugly Wife Is a Treasure at Home
The Ugly Wife Is a Treasure at Home

Author: Melissa Margaret Schneider

Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.

Published: 2014-08-15

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1612346944

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"The ugly wife is a treasure at home" is not just an idle expression in China. For centuries, Chinese marriage involved matchmakers, child brides, dowries, and concubines, until the People's Republic of China was established by Mao Zedong and his Communist Party in 1949. Initially encouraging citizens to reject traditional arranged marriages and instead wed for love, the party soon spurned "the sin of putting love first," fearful that romantic love would distract good Communists from selflessly carrying out the State's agenda. Under Mao the party established the power to approve or reject proposed marriages, dictate where couples would live, and even determine if spouses would live together. By the 1960s and 1970s romantic love became a counterrevolutionary act punishable by "struggle sessions" or even imprisonment. The importance of Chinese sons, however, did not wane during Mao's thirty-year regime. As such, in a world where nobody spoke of love, 99 percent of young women still married. The Ugly Wife Is a Treasure at Home draws the reader into the world of love in Communist China through the personal memories of those who endured the Cultural Revolution and the generations that followed. This collection of intimate and remarkable stories gives readers a rare view of Chinese history, social customs, and Communism from the perspective of today's ordinary citizens.

Chinese Comfort Women
Chinese Comfort Women

Author: Peipei Qiu

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-05-01

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0199373914

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During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into "comfort stations" where they were repeatedly raped and tortured. Japanese imperial forces claimed they recruited women to join these stations in order to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, these women were kidnapped and coerced into sexual slavery. Comfort stations institutionalized rape, and these "comfort women" were subjected to atrocities that have only recently become the subject of international debate. Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. Beginning with their prewar lives and continuing through their enslavement to their postwar struggles for justice, these interviews reveal that the prolonged suffering of the comfort station survivors was not contained to wartime atrocities but was rather a lifelong condition resulting from various social, political, and cultural factors. In addition, their stories bring to light several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system: the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and the sheer scope of the military sexual slavery-much larger than previously assumed. The personal narratives of these survivors combined with the testimonies of witnesses, investigative reports, and local histories also reveal a correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan's military offensive. The first English-language account of its kind, Chinese Comfort Women exposes the full extent of the injustices suffered by these women and the conditions that caused them.