Intimate Mobilities

Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World

Christian Groes, Nadine T. Fernandez, Christian Groes, Nadine T. Fernandez

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781789208252, 9781785338601
• eBook ISBN: 9781785338618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people's mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.

PART I

Migration Regimes and their Intimate Discontents

CHAPTER
1

Transnational Matchmaking

Marriage Practices of Chinese Migrants from Qingtian Living in Europe

Martina Bofulin

During the 2013 Chinese Spring Festival period, the Oushinet.com (Ouzhou Shibaowang) Internet portal for Chinese migrants living in Europe published an article by a Hangzhou-based journalist with a somewhat curious title: ‘The “Leftovers” Spring Festival: a 36-year-old emigrant businessman from Italy returns to Qingtian to meet eighteen potential spousal candidates’ (Oushinet.com 2013). The article goes on to introduce several cases of ‘leftover’ men and women (shengnan or shengnü) who are over the age of twenty-seven and (still) unmarried. The case of Wang Zheli, which features in the title of the article, is particularly telling. A native of Qingtian, a district in the south-eastern province of Zhejiang, and owner of a small Chinese restaurant enterprise in Italy, returned to his hometown during the Spring Festival festivities not only to vacation and reunite with his family members, but also to find a wife through xiangqin, a practice that could be dubbed as ‘matchmaking’. Following his relatives, Wang left China at the age of twenty-six to work as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant in Vicenza in northern Italy, and gradually established his own restaurant business. Although he experienced success in his professional life, he was not as lucky when it came to matters of the heart. The article said: ‘His “personal problem” became the target of family and friends’ criticism’. While he was in Italy his parents would call him and talk exclusively about who was getting married, who had given birth and who would be getting grandchildren. His parents believed that it would be best for him to marry a girl from home, and knowing he would be returning for Spring Festival they immediately started the search for a suitable marriage candidate. Wang’s one-month holiday thus became a series of eighteen consecutive meetings with potential brides, among them nurses, teachers, clerks and private entrepreneurs. Most of these meetings were unsuccessful, which drove his family members to despair. However, among all the candidates, there was one girl he really liked. But when asked if it might lead somewhere, he responded: ‘I still have a few days and quite a few girls to meet. I have to be sure that there will be no problems in the future’. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘these things cannot be hurried. Meeting potential spouses is not like going to the market to buy food. After successful negotiations you cannot simply exchange money for the goods’ (Oushinet.com 2013).

This vignette is illustrative of the interplay of various elements that concern contemporary marriage patterns in China, particularly in the regions heavily influenced by out-migration. Recently, media across the globe exposed the worrisome attitude that different facets of Chinese society hold towards young adults, particularly women, who fail to fulfil society’s expectations to marry in their mid-twenties. The derogatory term ‘leftovers’ has been coined for these men and women, and is frequently used not only in public and media discourses but also in official parlance (Fincher 2012). In general, in the last decades of rapid social and economic transformation, finding a good marriage partner has become increasingly important since marriages are seen as a vehicle for social mobility (Fan and Li 2002). In the small rural district of Qingtian, where roughly half of the inhabitants have left to work in Europe, Japan, USA and lately Africa and South America, these national trends are given an additional spin. Here marriage can also be a way for young people to migrate legally to different parts of the world, as well as a possibility to lead an economically more prosperous and independent life. In other cases, however, these marriages, once actively sought after, are no longer the preferred option.

Addressing how young people, native to Qingtian, look for and make decisions about their future spouses, this chapter will illustrate how marriage practices are integrated into the social fabric of Chinese migrants’ place of origin, including the role of parents and kin, as well as how these different actors sustain or negotiate transnational migration. In particular, it looks at spousal choice, which is often mediated by kin and friends. This type of marriage selection has been widely problematized in the countries of settlement as supporting segregation and patriarchal structures, as well as serving as a legal but not necessarily legitimate means of immigration (Strasser 2014). Here the matchmaking activities and the resulting conjugal unions are not exposed with the aim of ‘exaggerating cultural difference’ (Khandelwal 2009) or to contrast these practices with purportedly more Western ‘love marriages’, but rather to unveil the intimate economies of Qingtian’s young people, which are shaped by local, national and transnational socio-economic structures as well as their own imaginations and initiatives. Through close ethnographic account, I address the role of matchmaking in the process of out-migration from Qingtian, its changing meaning among the Qingtianese elders and youth, as well as how the complex intertwining of structure and subjectivity produces different responses from the actors to matchmaking activities and subsequent marriages. I have observed marriage practices across national borders – that is, in the place of origin, as well as in the multiple places of settlement. The data for this chapter were gathered as a part of my doctoral research on different aspects of migration between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Slovenia, and my postdoctoral project on the entrepreneurial practices and family lives of Chinese migrants in Belgrade, Serbia. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork was applied in three sets of locations: in different localities in Slovenia and Serbia where migrants from Zhejiang live and work, and in their place of origin in Qingtian district in the south-eastern part of Zhejiang province, PRC.¹

Marriage Practices in the Chinese Context

The transnational turn in social studies and migration studies has highlighted the presence of practices, institutions and modes of belonging across national borders and the creation of concomitant transnational social spaces (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1994; Faist 2000; Levitt 2001), while feminist perspectives not only revealed the gendered and racialized nature of migration but also challenged the prevailing view of migrants pursuing only economic gains (Kofman at al. 2000). Moreover, scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds provided foundational work for overcoming some of the binaries that seemed to hinder a deeper analysis of the human condition and social processes in migration research including: local/global (Massey 1994) mobility/immobility (Urry 2007), economic transactions/intimate relationships (Zelizer 2007), family (private)/work (public) (Hochschild 1997). All this is reflected in the recent proliferation of research on marriages and migration that, according to Charsley (2012), examines several distinct aspects of migration studies: transnationalism, gender and power (Ballard 1990; Piper and Roces 2003; Constable 2005), regulating marriage migration (Wray 2012) and marriage, migration and integration (Alba and Nee 2003; Khoo 2011).

In the context of China, the literature on the marriage migration nexus covers mostly two areas: rural to urban marriage migration within China (Min and Eades 1995; Gaetano and Jacka 2004; Davis 2007) and Chinese women’s transnational marriages to husbands from economically prosperous countries, mostly Taiwan and Japan (Liu and Liu 2008; Friedman 2010; Lu 2012). Much less attention is paid to marriages between members of Chinese diasporas or migrant communities and between them and Chinese living in PRC, which can also be seen as a form of transnational marriage. Among notable exceptions are contributions by Oxfeld (2005) and Schein (2005), who focus on transnational marriage networks of the Hakka and Miao minority populations living in PRC and other countries of settlement, and by Bao (2005) looking at Chinese diaspora in Thailand.

In China, it was daughters who traditionally married ‘out’ and had to be integrated into the new family (Baker 1979). Also, Davin (2007) writes that marrying outside the village was the general rule in much of China, although different communities observed this rule with various degrees of strictness. Oxfeld (2005) has thus observed that marriage was always a form of migration in the Chinese context, at least for the women. For them, marriage was also the main route to socio-economic mobility, hence the economic conditions in the husband’s village were seen as important, and spatial hypergamy (marrying someone in a more affluent area) was prevalent (Lavely 1991). Furthermore, Fan and Li (2002: 623) argued that the role of location as one of the attributes for consideration in the spouse selection process increased during the period of socialist transition, marked by increased household opportunities and risks as well as the widening gap between regions within China, making marriage choices more crucial than in the pre-reform era.

In the distant past, arranged marriages had been a dominant tradition in China, which applied equally across social classes. In most cases, parents were the exclusive marriage decision makers to the extent that the couple often met for the first time on the day of their wedding (Xu and King Whyte 1990). At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the practice came under heavy criticism from revolutionaries and reformists alike. After the Communists took power in 1949, they started to propagate ‘free love’ (ziyou lian’ai) and partner selection that did not involve parents or other intermediaries. However, Xu and King Whyte’s (1990: 716) study showed that although the role of the parents consequently declined, 30–50 per cent of younger female respondents never or rarely dated their future husbands (in the sense of meeting in a private setting), and even for those who did, the dates almost always came after the decision to marry had been made. Hence, the role of ‘introducers’ (jieshao ren), if not professional matchmakers (hongniang), as go-betweens for the prospective partners, remained important. Together with relatives, they strived to find a good match by evaluating each candidate’s personal attributes (tiaojian) including age, education, occupation, income, family background, physical characteristics (especially height for men and appearance for women), personality, health and resources (Fan 2000).

Chu and Yu’s (2009) study showed that in contemporary China marriage patterns have changed considerably in the post-reform decades. Regarding the marriage decision-making process, they found a substantial decline in marriages arranged by relatives and parents (14.40 per cent of marriages before 1970, to 7.37 per cent after 1990), but only a slight increase in marriages where the spouses met on their own (14.55 per cent before 1970 to 21.82 per cent after 1990). The surprising aspect was that the percentage of marriages arranged by a matchmaker remained high (36.64 per cent before 1970 to 24.75 per cent after 1990), but when reviewed for geographical distribution, the number of marriages that were the result of spouses meeting on their own was considerably higher in urban areas than in rural areas. These data also confirm numerous media reports that matchmaking practices are still widespread in China. In the big cities, people attend large-scale matchmaking parties, which are often organized for the parents rather than the unmarried men and women. Parents come en masse to the parks and other venues with homemade posters detailing their child’s age, occupation, education and other ‘marketable’ characteristics, hoping to find a suitable candidate for a blind date (Jiang 2007; Jing 2010). The other, somewhat more low-key version of matchmaking is xiangqin, a meeting of potential partners organized by parents or close family members and friends. In the past, xiangqin referred to the meeting of potential partners and heads of households (jiazhang) before the arranged marriage took place. Contemporary versions of this practice may range from non-binding suggestions of marital candidates by family members, to more forceful persuasions. Although parents’ total control of their child’s marital choice is increasingly rare, a study by Riley (1994) confirmed that parents remained involved in the decision-making process, especially in rural areas where young people are more segregated and there is less dating culture.

Local Matchmaking for Global Audiences: Qingtian County and its Transnational Community

The relatively private and family-oriented nature of xiangqin matchmaking seems to be very well suited for this small rural district in Zhejiang province, which has had strong out-migration for more than a century. Qingtian’s mountainous location with deposits of semi-precious green steatite stone, and its proximity to the port of Wenzhou,² initiated at the turn of the twentieth century a chain migration process not only to various places within China, but especially to foreign countries, both far and near (Ye 1986; Thunø 1999). Through peddling stone carvings and other miscellaneous objects, the Qingtianese managed to form communities across Europe as early as 1910 (Ye 1986; Thunø 1999; Beltrán 2003). Large-scale emigration, though, began in the 1980s with China’s opening-up reforms. Local sources estimate that out of the half a million inhabitants roughly 42 per cent emigrated – mostly to Europe, but also to the Americas, and to parts of Asia and Africa (Zhou 2006). Consequently, emigration became the prevalent economic activity and the migrants became the ‘main production force’ (shengchan li) in the district. Migrants from this part of Zhejiang province are not only the main driving force of development locally, but are also responsible for internationalizing the ‘Wenzhou economic model’ based on labour-intensive family firms with a strong emphasis on manufacturing export goods (Tomba 1999). In short, emigration and the subsequent return flow of people, objects, information and money has thoroughly transformed a once backward region, and has shaped local mentality such that migration is perceived as a prestigious career option; and, despite the recent economic development within China, for many it is still the only career option.

If marriages in wider Chinese society are a vehicle for social and geographic mobility (usually the woman’s) as mentioned earlier, in Qingtian this phenomenon is only more accentuated. Marriages connected to out-migration are particularly sought after since they not only offer material security and remittances but also spatial mobility, which is seen in Qingtian as integral to social mobility, affluence and access to foreign travel. During my fieldwork in China and Europe, I met many couples who became married through xiangqin. While this was openly discussed in Qingtian, my interlocutors in Europe were at first more apprehensive to explain how they had met their spouse. If I discretely suggested that it might have been through xiangqin, they often wondered how I might have known about that, but then relaxed and told me more about it. A person can participate in a number of these meetings with various potential candidates, and depending on the circumstances, they will either meet alone at a public venue (restaurant or coffee bar) or, less often, in the presence of a friend or a younger relative. As I will show, communication technologies are becoming an increasingly important part of this practice. The following stories illustrate how xiangqin fits into the everyday practices of the Qingtianese, and what the connection is between this practice and migration. While both cases feature women, this is not the rule. Men also, albeit in smaller numbers, partake in xiangqin with migrant women, get married and then join them in the country of settlement. The first case shows the rather typical pattern of matchmaking performed by friends that results in marriage, and also reveals the strong and geographically dispersed social networks among the Qingtianese. The second case portrays an unsuccessful xiangqin, which is the result of the young woman’s strong standpoint that goes against her parents’ wishes. Both cases thus convey the wide range of responses among young people taking part in these matchmaking activities, as well as how these responses are conditioned by an individual’s social location and the changing structures in the world around them.

The Case of Lan: From Worker to Boss through Marriage

I met twenty-eight-year-old Lan, a mother of two, during my fieldwork at the Chinese market in New Belgrade, Serbia. Two decades ago, the relatively high immigration levels of Chinese nationals resulted in the formation of a vast wholesale and retail market for inexpensive goods in the suburbs of Serbia’s capital (Chang 2012). Lan was a native of Qingtian, which she left at the age of sixteen to find work (da gong) in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province. One of her acquaintances, a fellow townsman (laoxiang ren), secured her a job in a large department store in the northern province of Shandong. There she met Weiwei, also a native of Qingtian, and the two became good friends. After some time, Weiwei returned to her village of birth for a visit and met a young man who had just returned...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: Intimate Mobilities and Mobile Intimacies
• Part I. Migration Regimes and their Intimate Discontents
• Part II. Circuits of Sex, Race and Gendered Bodies
• Part III. Moralities of Money, Mobility and Intimacy
• Index