Society for East Asian Anthropology
American Anthropological Association
By Jing Wang
The landscape of Islam within China has been changing rapidly during the pandemic. Ethnographic fieldwork can map these erasures and disappearances in everyday life.
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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Xisai Song
September 16, 2020
This piece is part of an SEAA series on “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through a lens of everyday ethics.
As a life-sustaining treatment for patients suffering from kidney failure, hemodialysis has been ridden with controversies since its emergence. It is a “half-way technology” that can neither cure the disease nor provide a sense of comfort, but jams patients into a long and torturing status between life and death (see for example, Fox and Swazey 2001; Kaufman 2015). The life quality for patients on hemodialysis is extremely low: they have to constantly practice self-discipline in food and water consumption (only one small cup of water a day) and chronically experience a long list of complications such as itchy skin, sleeping problems, and bone diseases. Unless acquiring kidney transplants, patients have to depend on hemodialysis until death.
In 2019, I conducted fieldwork in the hemodialysis ward of a public hospital in Qiushui, a poor, mountainous county in northeastern Sichuan, China. There were 95 patients suffering from kidney failure who regularly visited the ward for a four-hour hemodialysis treatment two to three times a week. The majority of them were from the county’s rural areas, among whom most were former migrant workers. They used to work as laborers such as factory workers, construction workers, and truck drivers in coastal provinces in China, but returned to their hometown to receive hemodialysis treatments. Half of these patients were under 45 and 10 of them were in their twenties. In spite of their young age, only six patients in this ward were waiting to receive a kidney transplant. Why do so many patients choose the arduous hemodialysis treatment instead of kidney transplant? How is their clinical decision making formulated in the social-historical and political context of China today?
What shocked me when doing fieldwork in the hemodialysis ward was how grateful those patients were to the state, in sharp contrast to what has been documented in anthropological studies in other contexts where poor patients attributed their reluctance to receive kidney transplants to social and structural problems (for example, Hamdy 2012). Coexistent with their indebtedness to the state was patients’ intensive moral anxiety and self-blame. State-sponsored insurance schemes and the “Targeted Measures in Poverty Alleviation” (jing zhun fu pin) program cover 75 to 90 percent of patients’ medical expenses, making hemodialysis financially accessible. These state welfare programs made patients feel included into the political order. At the same time, although migrant workers are constitutive of creating the new socioeconomic landscape of reform-era China (Zhang 2001), they are displaced from it immediately as they lose their ability to work. Unemployment is common among these former migrant workers on hemodialysis because their bodies can no longer handle the heavy labor required to keep their jobs as blue-collar workers. As a result, families, both as a cultural source of support (Kleinman 1980; Yan 2017) and an agent of the biopolitical state (Ma 2020), become the default safety net that patients depend on for financial support and for care. Caring for a sick family member is a long-standing moral norm in China. In poor rural households, however, caring involves meticulous calculations and moral tensions; families strain to coordinate their limited resources including labor, money, opportunities, and life prospects. Consequently, clinical decision making, discursively framed as a private act of family responsibility, is in fact a dilemma of survival. Deciding on treatment options like kidney transplantation entails moral struggles of evaluating and comparing life values among family members.
For Shan, a patient in her early fifties, kidney transplantation was “meaningless.” Instead, her primary concern was her son’s marriage. Shan was from a rural village in Qiushui. She and her husband were factory workers in southern China. In 2013, Shan was suddenly diagnosed with kidney failure and came back to Qiushui to receive hemodialysis treatments. Shan’s husband also quit his job to take care of her, because Shan suffered from serious complications and couldn’t live by herself. Her son, who was 18 then, dropped out of school immediately and started working as a migrant worker to shoulder the financial responsibility of the family. In the past seven years, Shan and her husband had to rely on her son to pay Shan’s medical bills as well as their living expenditures. “I cried every time I received money from my son. I put too much pressure on him,” Shan once said to me. Shan’s son was 25 and remained single, which was absurd in rural areas where the marriage age was early. In Shan’s village, people called her “bottomless pits of trouble” (wu di dong) and no matchmaker ever introduced a girl to her son. Shan’s son also didn’t find a girlfriend in his workplace. Shan was extremely guilty that her son hadn’t finished school and blamed the difficulty of her son getting married on herself. Shan never considered kidney transplantation, refusing to add more burdens to her son. The financial cost of post-transplant medications was comparable to that of hemodialysis, while the possibilities of recurrent hospitalizations and relapse of kidney failure would further their trouble. Shan’s biggest wish was that her son would build a family of his own before her own death. Her family spent a large portion of their savings remodeling their house in 2019. A new house is an important cultural and economic symbol indicating that a family is ready to welcome a daughter-in-law. Bioethical principles of informed consents and patient autonomy have gained plenty of anthropological scrutiny.
In addition to worries over financial and caring burdens, many young patients regarded kidney transplantation as “useless.” The story of Jinwei, a patient in his mid-thirties, is one example. Growing up in a rural village of Qiushui, Jinwei went to Guangdong, a southern province at the age of 16 in 1998. Jinwei aspired to make a fortune and to snatch a good place in China’s emerging market economy. He started as a factory worker, but later became a gang member. Although his income was much higher, he ended up getting imprisoned for three years. After his release, he went back to working in a factory. Jinwei described the 1990s as a golden age of opportunity. Seeing some of his old friends getting rich, Jinwei was determined not to be left behind. He went to Beijing and invested his life savings into running a restaurant. The business failed a few years later, and Jinwei returned to work in a factory. This was where he met his wife, a fellow worker. In 2018, they got married and his wife became pregnant with twin boys. However, in the same year, Jinwei was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease (CKD). His CKD quickly progressed to the end stage and he started hemodialysis in early 2019. His boys were only three months old. Jinwei firmly refused to sign up for a kidney transplant waiting list. People with kidney transplants should still avoid heavy labor. That is to say, transplantation would not change the fact that Jinwei had lost his ability to work. Reflecting on the past 20 years, Jinwei demonstrated a strong sense of regret and failure, thus having no confidence to build a new life with a disabled body if he were to receive a kidney transplant. Jinwei didn’t bother to undertake the risks of a transplantation surgery, but would rather spend the surgery fees on raising his boys. He was immensely remorseful for his inability to provide his boys with an adequate life. Jinwei strictly practiced self-discipline in everyday life in order to maintain his body in a stable condition and to prolong his life, which extended beyond following medical advice to his moral endeavor to be a good father.
Bioethical principles of informed consents and patient autonomy have gained plenty of anthropological scrutiny. Scholars critique bioethics’ underlying liberalism and science-centric frameworks that overlook the complexity of local moral worlds and obscure structural inequalities (see for example, Kleinman 1995; Mol 2008; Pinto 2014; Rapp 2000). For Shan and Jinwei, their treatment choices are neither autonomous nor orient toward themselves. Instead, they gauge the overall well-being of their families and prioritize the benefits of the ones with relatively better life prospects—their children in both cases. Their seemingly intergenerational moral acts such as the sacrifice of Shan’s son, Shan’s motherly love, and Jinwei’s pursuit of good fathering have, however, obscured these poor patients’ predicaments caused by socioeconomic marginalization. For Shan and Jinwei, the chronic effects after transplantation—including the inability to work, long-term medication, and dependence on care—outweigh the benefits that transplantation can bring. Thus, they deem kidney transplantation worthless. Like Shan and Jinwei, most former migrant workers in the hemodialysis ward of the hospital in Qiushui regard kidney transplantation as being of little help to their life hardships, which challenges biomedical standards of medical efficacy. Instead of applying to individual biological bodies, medical efficacy is unevenly distributed to patients of different social statuses.
Xisai Song is a PhD candidate at Cornell University. Her study examines how lower-class patients struggle with chronic kidney disease in China. Her research interests include chronicity, medical ethics, health inequality, and the ways in which biomedicine is contextualized into non-Western contexts.
Cite as: Song, Xisai. 2020. “Clinical Decision Making in Rural China.” Anthropology News website, September 16, 2020. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1498
Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Yohko Tsuji
August 13, 2020
The typical inscription on most Japanese tombstones does not show the names of the deceased. It says instead “Ancestral grave of the X family,” reflecting a lingering political heritage of the Meiji oligarchy (1868–1912). The imperial government established the ie (家), or the patrilineal family to which every citizen must belong, and mandated ancestor worship with the family grave as its locus to ensure the ie continuity (Tsuji 2002, 177-199). Hence, generations of family members in the direct line of descent—the family head, his wife, their heir, the heir’s wife, and so on—are buried together. Their descendants are responsible for looking after the family grave and worshipping their ancestors. A tale of two cemeteries in northern Osaka shows us much about recent changes in Japanese mortuary traditions.
The first is a municipal cemetery established in 1969. It had 4,000 graves by 1987 and was expanded to 6,364 in 2000. On the large terraced hillside overlooking the skyscrapers of Osaka City, one can see countless rows of traditional three-tier graves in which the cremains of several generations of family members are interred. Most inscriptions on them say “X family’s ancestral grave.” A few newer gravestones are carved with Chinese characters, such as serenity (寂), dream (夢), and appreciation (感謝).
Yet this cemetery is not quintessentially traditional, because graves were not inherited but newly purchased; it is affiliated with neither Buddhist temples nor neighborhood communities; and it is an individual, not a family, who contracts a cemetery plot, though after the individual’s death the contract is transferable to another individual. This cemetery, like numerous public and commercial cemeteries, sprang up during Japan’s economic growth that began in the 1960s. The mass migration to urban areas at that time caused an acute shortage of graves because newcomers, whose family graves were located far away and hard to visit, tried to find alternative graves near their new homes. In 1971, the shortage and high cost of urban graves resulted in the construction of a columbarium with 552 locker-style repositories, adding another nonconventional feature to this cemetery.
More notable modifications of burial traditions occurred in 2019. The municipal government built a large monument to collectively entomb the cremains of 14,000 unrelated people in order to economize the burial space and to memorialize those entombed, thereby relieving each family from maintaining their own grave and worshipping their ancestors there. This monument helps to solve two major death-related problems in contemporary Japan: an increasing number of deaths as the baby boomer generation ages, and a growing number of people who have no grave or no family members to take care of their grave and afterlife.
The second cemetery, established in 2012 and known as sakurasō (桜葬) or a cherry blossom cemetery, offers a different approach to resolve the same problems. Adopting the principle of jumokusō, or tree burials (Boret 2014), no tomb stones or monuments exist at the park-like site of this cemetery. Instead, cherry trees are planted to signify six burial areas, where unrelated people’s cremains are buried without markers. Each burial area has a few stones with small metal plates on them bearing varying inscriptions: some show the deceased’s names and dates of birth and death, and others include words of thanks or personal messages, such as “Good-bye. It was an interesting life.” A service to commemorate all of the dead is held annually.
Though the land of sakurasōcemetery belongs to a Buddhist temple, it is managed by a nonprofit organization (NPO) and is available to anyone regardless of religious belief. Like the monument at the municipal cemetery, these graves require neither maintenance nor descendants. The NPO offers support both before and after death by performing tasks that have traditionally been undertaken by next of kin but have become harder to do: checking on older people living alone, assisting with hospitalization, serving as the stand-in chief mourner for a funeral, and so on. The NPO also organizes regular meetings of those who will be buried together, creating a community of hakatomo which literally means “grave friends.”
This tale of two cemeteries illustrates the unmistakable transformations in Japanese mortuary tradition (Tsuji 2018, 17-30). They reflect and adapt to the changes in Japanese families, neighborhoods, workplaces, economy, ecology, and demographics that have occurred in the last half a century. Particularly, the family’s central role has diminished. Instead individual choices and decisions have become more important. Despite myriad societal changes however, death continues to be significant in people’s lives. Indeed, over 33 million websites are available to check the cost of a cemetery lot. Choosing a nontraditional grave and entrusting the care of the afterlife to extrafamilial entities, such as the municipal government and the sakurasōcemetery management, provides a tenable means of securing care of death and the afterlife. It does not necessarily mean that people have stopped practicing mortuary rituals. Rather, their nonconventional choices of graves and conformity to mortuary tradition coexist. During biannual religious weeks in the spring and the fall, extra buses are operated to the municipal cemetery for people who worship their ancestors. Some family members regularly visit the sakurasō cemetery, including on death anniversaries of their loved ones.
As Japanese society is rapidly aging, death and dying are becoming even more visible with the mass media constantly featuring pertinent information and people’s concerns about shūkatsu (終活), or preparation for death and the afterlife, escalating. Furthermore, as these cemeteries demonstrate, mortuary tradition is evolving and generating new types of practices.
Another such example is the practice of burial with one’s pet. Traditionally, pets are not allowed to be entombed with humans. Behind this ban is the Buddhist worldview, which places animals and humans in separate stages of the reincarnation cycle. However, in the last few decades, this clear demarcation has been blurred as pets have become increasingly regarded as indispensable family members. Called uchi-no-ko, or “our child,” just like human progeny, the pet shares daily life with many Japanese inside their residences rather than in a kennel outside. Uchi-no-ko is fed pet and human food rather than the leftovers given in the old days. People also clothe their pets with sweaters, caps, and socks and have them groomed regularly. They buy pet medical insurance and take them to veterinarians for illness and injury, not to mention check-ups and shots.
When uchi-no-ko dies, many Japanese have a funeral, hiring a pet funeral operator or asking a Buddhist priest to chant a sutra. They bury their fur child in a pet cemetery and visit it frequently, dismissing a more customary method of calling the health department to have the pets’ remains incinerated or, if the family has a yard, burying them in a hidden corner.
These pet parents suffer the loss of their children and are concerned about their pets’ afterlives as much as their own. Because the burial of pets in human graves is not permitted at most cemeteries, the everlasting separation from their pet and the uncertainty of the pet’s afterlife aggravate their grief. Buddhist priests frequently receive questions, such as: “Can uchi-no-ko rest in peace or go to heaven?” and “Can I and uchi-no-ko meet again after my death?” These pet owners strongly wish to be reunited with their pet in the same grave after their death. To address such sentiments, some cemeteries, including the aforementioned sakurasō cemetery, allow humans and pets to be buried together.
The tale of two cemeteries and the burial with one’s pet attest to the malleability of tradition. For its persistence, tradition must change, adapting to social transformations and accommodating people’s altered needs. Japanese mortuary tradition continues to evolve to handle death, “the supreme and final crisis of life” (Malinowski 1948, 47), in a contemporary world awash with immense changes.
Yohko Tsuji is an adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University and the author of the forthcoming book, Through Japanese Eyes: Thirty Years of Studying Aging in America. She has conducted fieldwork in America, Japan, and Thailand, and published articles on aging, death, conception of time, and social change.
The SEAA column is currently accepting submissions. Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu) and Hanna Pickwell (hpickwell@uchicago.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.
Cite as: Tsuji, Yohko. 2020. “Changing Mortuary Practices in Japan.” Anthropology News website, August 13, 2020. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1471
Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association
George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. Rayshard Jones. Elijah McClain. Walter Scott. Eric Garner. Philando Castile. Alton Sterling. Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. Tamir Rice. Riah Milton. Dominique Fells. Sandra Bland. Freddie Gray…We will say their names.
The nation is on fire, literally and figuratively, demanding justice for the many black men, women and even children dying at the hands of the police. The Society for East Asian Anthropology adds its voice to this powerful chorus against anti-black violence and systemic racism in the United States. We stand with Black Lives Matter in condemning brutality by the police and others in positions of power against African-American citizens. And we support the statement of the Association of Black Anthropologists.
In his dying moments during his encounter with the Minneapolis police, George Floyd, like Elijah McClain, Eric Garner and scores of others before them, pleaded, “I can’t breathe.” In trying to understand the common experiences of these black men and women as the victims of state violence in the United States, we see them as linked to the victims of similar acts of violence around the world. The SEAA is committed to trying to understand these national and international connections in the context of our own vocational endeavor. The SEAA understands that racism manifests itself in America in some ways that are different from but, in others, tragically consistent with those we witness in East Asia. In both contexts, deep-seated racism and ethnocentrism motivate the often state-sponsored oppression of minority peoples. The genocide of Uyghurs and persecution of Tibetans and other ethnic and religious groups in China; discrimination against Korean, Chinese, Ainu, Okinawan, burakumin, mixed-race and other minorities in Japan; the xenophobic animus directed towards foreign residents in South Korea: all bear witness to this reality. As ethnographers, our recognition of these realities, and our interrogation of them, are inflected according to the uniqueness of the sociocultural, political and historical dynamics of each context. They are further complicated by an intersectional appreciation of how racial and ethnic discrimination are cross-cut by class, gender, sexual orientation and other vectors of social identity and difference in the region, as can be seen, for example, by the post-WWII American military domination of East and Southeast Asia—the empire without colonies—and its consequences in the Philippine, Okinawan, and Korean camp-towns. The post-WWII American militarism in Asia augmented sexual oppression and violence directed against women in Asian countries, which cannot be separated from racial domination, yet it comes with underlining complexity. For instance, we need to address the mass rape and sexual violence committed by the Japanese military against Asian women in the 1930s and 1940s, while we must not set aside mass rape and sexual violence committed by Korean soldiers deployed in Vietnam. It is no coincidence that the African Americans were disproportionately drafted and killed in the Vietnam War. Transitional justice for unresolved violent past in varying frames of colonialism, military occupation and domination, and nationalism, predicated on racial and sexual discrimination and dehumanization of others still lies ahead and it is our responsibility, as scholars, to critically think about race and racism in East Asia in close proximity with what is happening in the US today.
One key way in which the SEAA enters into dialogue with the Black Lives Matter movement, then, is through recognition of the consistent ways in which discrimination operates within both the African and Asian diasporas, and in the intersections of the two. The scars of colonialism, occupation and other forms of white supremacist domination, so visible in the U.S. today, are also visible in Japan, China and Korea, refuting a persistent and pernicious mythology of the irrelevance of race in East Asia. The biopolitical management of black bodies on slave ships, on plantations, in inner cities and in the American prison system in some ways echo the incarceration of Uyghurs in “re-education camps” in Xinjiang. Reports of the forced sterilization of Uyghur women today echo that of Puerto Rican women between the 1930s and the 1970s. The discrimination faced by Africans in China, racially stigmatized as carriers of the novel coronavirus, echoes the white racist abuse hurled at Asian-Americans accused of spreading the “Kung Flu”. The frictions between Korean Americans and African Americans during the Rodney King uprisings, which witnessed the destruction of Korean American businesses in African American communities, or the seeming indifference of Hmong American police officer Tou Thao as George Floyd died, index existing or even create new rifts between the two sets of communities.
The SEAA seeks to enter into dialogue with the Black Lives Matter movement not only by recognizing those tensions within the Afro-Asian encounter but also potential solidarities. These potential solidarities stand on the firm historical ground, for instance, of the Bandung Conference of 1955, in which newly-born Afro-Asian states met in Indonesia to chart their collective futures. They are also seen in the work of such civil rights activists as Yuri Kochiyama, who spent the early part of her life at a Japanese-American internment camp—another example of America’s biopolitical management of suspect non-white bodies—and who, later in her career as a civil rights activist, stood in solidarity with Malcolm X; or in the intellectual corpus of W.E.B. Du Bois who engaged with relations between Asia and Africa. In the present moment, these solidarities have emerged in perhaps unexpected ways. K-pop boyband BTS, which has drawn on traditions of African-American musical production and performance, gave $1 million to BLM, a figure BTS fans have matched. Thousands of protestors—Japanese, white and other allies and black people themselves—have marched through the streets of Tokyo and Osaka chanting, “No Justice, No Peace” and “Black Lives Matter.” Afro-Asian frictions but also solidarities are understood as part of the global political landscape to which the Black Lives Matter movement now belongs.
In order to bring our scholarship more fully to bear on these realities old and new, the SEAA will strive to be critically conscious of and fight against racial prejudice through its research and organizational practice. We consider this one way to express our solidarity with the fight against systemic racism in this country, and the insidious forms this racism may take within academic societies such as our own. To address these concerns, the SEAA members pledge:
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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jingyi Tian
February 26, 2020
For Hongkongers, kendo offers practice in the pursuit of self-cultivation and ethical work.
This piece is part of the SEAA series “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of moral values and ethical practices in a range of Asian regions. They examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.
“Many people can’t control their egos in kendo. They hit one after one—pong, pong, pong! It’s pointless. This is where kendo mirrors their inner characters,” said a senior Hong Kong practitioner who has been practicing kendo, a Japanese combative martial art, consistently for more than five years. The practitioner told me that kendo helps him to cultivate a strong mind. Many practitioners had similar ethical reflections, which led me to ask, How does kendo serve as a tool of self-cultivation?
Hong Kong fans of Japanese culture are often drawn to the sport by the iconic image of samurai fashion. Although kendo is not the most popular sport in Japan (the All Japan Kendo Federation counted 1.8 million practitioners in 2017), the martial art is noteworthy because its practitioners devote themselves to the practice for years, even decades, in pursuit of moral self-cultivation. Like the man quoted above, many kendo practitioners regard kendo as a life practice (Cantonese: sau hang; Mandarin: xiu xing, 修行). This term has a strong connotation of spiritual exercise in Chinese, and an association with ascetic practices. It accurately reflects a feature of kendo—practitioners engage in a highly intensive, exhausting, and challenging combative activity that forces them to endure hardship and injuries. Yet, many dedicated practitioners are more than willing to endure such rigors.
The ideal status and traits of the better person produced through kendo practice vary from individual to individual. Practitioners have similar physical experiences, but their own interpretations and goals. Kendo works as a tool for personal growth for some practitioners. Others find kendo helpful in learning how to cultivate social relationships. I will highlight three examples to showcase the range of practitioners’ ethical desires: a financial trader who wants to become a person who can make sharp and accurate decisions at work through better control of his ego; a Christian who aims to practice compassion and love through kendo, which helps him to do a better job as a manager; and a young practitioner who seeks self-empowerment to cope with the harsh yet routinized work. They all have a telos in a Foucauldian sense, namely, a goal of pursuing an “ethical self”—a status or a state of being that they wish to achieve.
A financial trader
Edward is a financial trader in his forties. Before he began learning kendo, he read the book Gorinsho (TheBook of Five Rings), which is filled with stories of a famous Japanese swordsman, Musashi Miyamoto. Edward told me that both kendo and his job require making the right decision at the right moment under pressure. In kendo, a combatant needs to practice how to manage their fear or anxiety, which helps to build up inner power. Edward insists that kendo helps him make good decisions. In that sense, he believes that kendoinstills self-control and a tranquil mindset, both of which benefit his career. Although the inner power that practitioners seek is unlikely to solve all their worldly problems, their dedication to developing such power reflects their keen ethical aspirations.
A Christian
Christopher is a pious Christian and entrepreneur who opened his own business when he was in his forties. He adopted kendo as a training regimen that helps him learn how to get along well with his coworkers. Christopher has found that kendo’s moral messages align with his Christian beliefs—especially the call to show love and care in practice. When he spars with less experienced opponents, he tries to help them improve their kendo skills through courtesy, which he sees as another kind of training that he applies in his work life as well.
A young practitioner
Melissa is in her mid-twenties and works as a legal clerk. She told me that her routinized job made her feel powerless for not being able to make a difference. She wants to be more energetic and positive toward life, and kendo offers her a scheme in which she can transform herself.
To reach their goals, kendo combatants seek self-improvement and self-advancement through exhausting bodily practices that challenge their limits. They often trace kendo’s moral codes to Inazo Nitobe’s famous 1905 book, Bushidō:The Soul of Japan, which offers a genealogy of kendo’s moral framework that various practitioners’ find useful. Practitioners regard the moment they are faced with an attack as the moment to transcend their fear like a warrior; when presented with opportunity to initiate an attack, they practice self-control to repress the impulse. They strive to refine their inner selves in combat with a diligent attitude, and such refinement will not happen unless they keep practicing over the long term. In this process, physical combat not only trains the body but also constitutes ethical work, as the moment when one faces a challenge in combat is a good time to train “heart” (心). The written character of the heart is the same in Japanese (kokoro) and Chinese (Mandarin: xin; Cantonese: sam). In kendo culture, the heart represents inner power that can be obtained through training.
Although the inner power that practitioners seek is unlikely to solve all their worldly problems, their dedication to developing such power reflects their keen ethical aspirations. Recalling Michel Foucault’s theoretical reflections on ethics and self-formation, practitioners adopt the moral framework of kendo practice as a “technology of the self” through which they hope to transform themselves and attain an ideal state of being. Practitioners hold that kendo practice helps them find the weaknesses in their own characters and become better people.
The demand for self-cultivation through kendo reflects a larger neoliberal social milieu in Hong Kong where individuals are left to individually cope with intense pressure from their jobs, including finances, harsh demands in the workplace, and routinized work life. Kendo’s moral framework provides a means for practitioners to build up a strong mindset to cope with their anxiety and suggests a culture of the body that emphasizes self-reliance, self-improvement, adaptability, and individualism. Their experiences resonate with similar patterns of self-cultivation among practitioners of yoga, judo, wingchun, and taichi.
Joseph Alter’s study on yoga in India shows that middle-class yoga practitioners adopted yoga practice as a spiritual antidote to the anxiety and pressure in their fast-paced capitalistic lifestyle. This work has inspired other scholars to contextualize bodily practices within a larger socio-moral landscape. The case of Hong Kong kendo practitioners suggests that kendo’s moral framework is particularly appealing to middle-class practitioners who experience extraordinary pressures in daily work life and culture.
Cite as: Tian, Jingyi. 2020. “Cultivating the Ethical Self in the Way of the Sword.” Anthropology News website, February 26, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1356
Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jieun Cho
April 29, 2020
This piece is part of the SEAA series “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of moral values and ethical practices in a range of Asian regions. They examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.
“I chose to not worry about radiation anymore, for as long as I stay living here; to live normally again for my children and my family,” said Kazumi, a mother of two children, who had decided to stop trying to move out of her neighborhood for the time being. Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, I was listening to her confession of choosing to “live normally again” at a tea party for parents who were managing their anxieties in the face of long-term exposure to low-dose radiation in nuclear-affected areas. Employing the term “choice”, which has become all too familiar for people living in conflict-ridden areas that have not been evacuated (cf. Little 2019), Kazumi chose to give up “endless worries” as her own child-raising strategy. But what does this choice do for her in such an extraordinary environment? And what is this new normal life Kazumi is trying to make if it needs to be constantly chosen and confessed as such? Based on my ongoing fieldwork with families living with lingering post-Fukushima radiation, I take such choice as indexing an ethics of what I call balancing. Familial norms fail to provide actionable options when clearly the most effective way to protect children is to relocate to a risk-free elsewhere.
Kazumi lives in Koriyama City, one of the regions slightly outside the officially demarcated evacuation zone in Fukushima. In such a shadow zone, a life amidst unrecognized forms of nuclear risks has been effectively normalized with a newly introduced level of permissible radiation exposure—20 times the pre-disaster level for Fukushima. Although public debates over the long-term effects of low-dose radiation have escalated over time, amounting to what one may call science wars among ministries, academia, and citizens (Kimura 2016; Polleri 2019; Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2018), children’s health from the perspective of radiological protection has come to hold a central place in the imaginaries of biological vulnerability. However, those who have chosen to remain or return are left largely on their own with only limited help from central and local government (Lies 2017; McCurry 2017). Resources available for mitigating nuclear risks are differentially distributed along pre-existing lines of social, political, and economic inequalities; some could afford to leave while others were forced to make do by purchasing food from cleaner areas. Still others could scarcely afford anything. In a prolonged nuclear disaster, the matter at hand is not only the radioactive material itself, but also its construction as social facts, knowledge, and public feelings (see for example, Morris-Suzuki 2014; Hecht 2012; Masco 2008), all bearing on the actual lives of ordinary people.
Without doubt, living in the ruins of nuclear risk is a demoralizing situation for all the parents involved. Operating within the discursive domain of “family’s choice,” familial norms—specifically the injunction that parents should protect children until adulthood (Allison 2013; Borovoy 2005; cf. Doi 1973)—fail to provide actionable options when clearly the most effective way to protect children is to relocate to a risk-free elsewhere. Because they could not do this, the parents I encountered felt stuck and immobilized in the face of unavoidable risk, both physically and socially, and were struggling to raise children with limited resources outside the officially designated evacuation zone. In such moral struggles, “striking a balance” (baransu o toru, or oriai o tsukeru), to keep living, was a phrase I heard time and again in interviews and conversations, as a practical way to live through unwanted nuclear risks.
Like hundreds of thousands of others, Kazumi fled to the home of a relative in another city in Fukushima Prefecture after the disaster. As revealed by data that had been published over the following months, both her home and that of her relatives were exposed to the fallouts of radioactive iodine, which was recognized as the cause of childhood thyroid cancers after the Chernobyl disaster by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1996 (for more on knowledge production surrounding Chernobyl, see Brown 2017). After returning home under a new standard of permissible airborne radiation (note here that other material forms of radioactivity like soil are discounted), she found with the help of an NGO that parts of her living environment measured 100 times the radiation of a pre-disaster estimate. Because she did not know what this would mean for her children’s health, Kazumi searched for information about the effects of long-term exposure to radiation on children of her son’s age, only to become more frustrated. Although experts diverge on how or even if prolonged exposure in shadow zones leads to ill health constituting the need for relocation (Normile 2011), all agree that distancing from the source of exposure is the best way to remain safe—an option unavailable to her due to her husband’s local business. After years of failed attempts to move out, she was left with “nothing but stress” and a deep sense of guilt towards her children. Her sons, then entering puberty, had started retreating into their own worlds. According to her, she was “infectious,” spreading “depression” in her family.
Kazumi decided to break off from this state by no longer worrying about how to live somewhere else, and instead, “to actually live.” As a parent, this meant accepting the premise that insulating her children entirely from any kind of radiation exposure, let alone removing the exposure that had already happened, was impossible. A risk-free body is out of reach, but a reasonably healthy body may be realizable, depending on how this is defined and pursued. What she could do was to “strike a balance” by, for example, not stopping her children from volunteering to help struggling farmers in more contaminated areas. Kazumi evaluated the change in her own children as “learning to be proud as children of Fukushima (by helping farmers)”—something that made them “healthier.” The mind (kokoro) here was less an individual psyche, but more a state of well-being gained from ongoing interactions with others. I heard many other parents echo this emphasis on balance “between the mind and the body” as they struggled to find a livable definition of health while staying in or returning to Fukushima for work, aging parents, children’s education, etc. The mind and the body are interconnected, and the connection is facilitated through engagement with the outside world (which entails risks for further exposure). Might one call this a form of “life lived as itself”? That is, life as “actualities” in which the means (action) and ends (health) are “one and the same?” (Lambek 2010). From Kazumi’s determination that her children can live well and even “healthier,” I see less the prospect of ill health, but more a striving for actively inhabiting a place of one’s own.
What strikes me is the vitality Kazumi gained from her choice to “actually live.” If she was static in her previous, demoralized view about her own situation, her new normal life is forged by her own acts of balancing like giving permission to her children to do various things—what she calls “compromise” (dakyō) in a somewhat self-deprecating manner. These gestures in the everyday bring forth a worldview that in turn orients her to the everyday amidst nuclear risks. Forging a way forward like this has gotten Kazumi out of her house after a period of dormancy, both physically and socially, experienced by so many parents after the disaster who “caged” their own children (Bird 2013; Hanai and Lies 2014).
Such a form of life may be helpful in considering alternative approaches to the two extremes of reproducing the assumptions of false consciousness and placing relentless faith in scientific truth claims, as is often observed in political debates surrounding environmental uncertainty (see for example, Ahmann 2019; Hochschild 2016; Taussig 2019). In the bipolarized discourses of human rights, state failure, or scientific causality in post-Fukushima Japan, people like Kazumi appear to embody a position that is overdetermined by multiple trajectories of injustice. However, this emphasis on her victimhood says little about how Kazumi’s own choice leads her to new points of struggle in her daily efforts to live through the very conditions of overdetermination. From Kazumi’s determination that her children can live well and even “healthier,” I see less the prospect of ill health, but more a striving for actively inhabiting a place of one’s own (see for example, Allison 2013; Mahmood 2005), despite all in the life of Kazumi and her children that cannot be lived properly. At least this form of life she has chosen is livable; a child can have a future within this life, albeit outside the prospect of a pure body.
Jieun Cho is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Duke University. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, her dissertation research concerns middle-class families who are trying to raise healthy children while living amidst low-dose radiation in post-nuclear Japan.
Cite as: Cho, Jieun. 2020. “Family in the Ruins of Nuclear Risk.” Anthropology News website, April 29, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1397
Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Zhe Yan
May 29, 2020
This piece is part of an SEAA series on “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.
My conversation with care manager Zhang, the woman supervising the care workers among whom I conducted my fieldwork, came to a halt when she said, “Most care workers are here because they have no better options. They could easily be migrant workers shining shoes on the street today, and just as easily come to work in a nursing home tomorrow if they wanted!” Although she was being dramatic, her remark is representative of widely held perceptions of care workers in China. Despite such a demeaning portrayal of care workers as dirty and unskilled laborers, their daily practice of care reveals an agency which empowers their work.
Public policies for eldercare in China have been predicated on the premise that up to 90 percent of older adults will be cared for at home. However, this scenario is challenged when aging people become physically reliant and cognitively dysfunctional. Social attitudes toward institutionalized care are becoming more favorable as it increasingly becomes clear that adult children can no longer provide direct care for their parents. When constant supervision and intensive care are needed, they are increasingly being sought in nursing homes.
Because of the incongruence between the burgeoning care needs of an aging population and prejudicial attitudes toward care work itself, it becomes necessary to examine how care workers exercise agency in performing their tasks while coping with the social stigma surrounding them. To illustrate care workers’ agency in navigating the demands of care work, I have identified a set of techniques they developed to achieve caring goals and remain committed to the welfare of residents. In short, care workers exercise agency through encounters both with residents and with each other. These include identity work for self-empowerment, emotional labor to engage and detach, and boundary work to categorize residents and their relatives.
Care workers realize self-empowerment by presenting a caring and professional self in order to counterbalance stigmatized portrayals of care work. Most care workers are either rural to urban migrant workers or urban workers who were laid off in the restructuring of state-owned enterprises. In both cases, during the years that China’s economy was rapidly being reformed, there was a lack of reemployment mechanisms to reintegrate these workers into the formal economy. Consequently, many entered the care sector, in which the level of skill necessary for employment was relatively low.
However, by narrating the meticulous and attentive care they deliver to elderly residents, and in contrast to the availability of immediate family members for direct caregiving, care workers are increasingly constructing a moral standing as fictive kin. But as articulated by care worker Lin, having an empathetic relationship with clients is not enough to provide good care: “Compassion alone is inadequate. Not many residents are happy to live here, but they have no other option. We need to understand their psychological state and provide needed comfort for both the elderly and their families so that they can slowly adjust to institutionalized care. It’s not as easy as you think!” Lin’s closing comment reveals the need for professionalism as well as the capacity for empathy in caring for a vulnerable aging population.
To improve the professionalization of care work, national policies encourage the skill advancement of care workers through training programs. Zuo, a certified care worker, said that she is upset to still be called ayi (auntie, a kinship term also used to refer to domestic helpers). She carefully maintains a distinctive boundary between a common helper in a family home and a certified care worker in a care facility. “It feels different when people address me by my professional title, huliyuan (care worker). It’s like we are being formally recognized as professionals, and not everyone can be a qualified and effective care worker!” Care workers’ professional identity and commitment to care processes help them to mitigate low status and navigate the monotony of the many unpleasant and mundane tasks of care work. Exercising autonomy through detachment shields care workers from escalating emotional tensions.
In addition to identity work for self-empowerment, care workers calibrate their emotional labor. While care workers must observe mandates of care, ethics, and moral guidelines in ensuring basic needs are met, they remain autonomous in emotional attachment. For example, care workers are more willing to work with residents who show gratitude and respect for their work. The rewarding aspects of care promote the formation of relationships and allow care workers to find meaning in their work (see Stacey 2005). Care workers also detach emotionally from care delivery when residents only consider them to be servants. Exercising autonomy through detachment shields care workers from escalating emotional tensions. Migrant care worker Xu explains, “I do what I can to help them with feeding, bathing, and toileting; all the basics. But if the relatives or the elderly residents are mean to me, I won’t spend extra time on them. If they don’t respect me and my work, why should I care?” In the daily practice of care, cultivating authentic emotions with residents can be challenging due to heavy workloads and chronic understaffing. Care is routinized and standardized, often dictating that care workers care for instead of care about their elderly clients. In this pressurized environment, care workers’ use of emotions individualizes routine care for elderly residents. By calibrating their emotional attachment in their caring processes, care workers are able to both maintain the energy needed to provide quality care and harness those energies to balance the competing interest of residents, their relatives, and the nursing home.
Emotional labor can also promote processes beyond the simple dyad of care worker and care recipient. It creates the space for care workers to reflect on their own impending need for eldercare and to renew their determination to remain in the eldercare sector. “Their today is our tomorrow!” is a saying reiterated many times by care workers as they think of what awaits them in old age. There is widespread concern about both the mushrooming cost of care and the ability of their own family to later provide care for them, as many care workers belong to the one-child generation. Catalyzed by these concerns, care workers can be more accepting and tolerant of the demanding aspects of care work because they hope that their current commitment to care will be rewarded in part by others caring for them in the future.
Care workers also sometimes categorize residents and their relatives as possessing high or low suzhi (quality) (Yan 2003, Kipnis 2006). Care workers use this term to illustrate the degree of respect received from their clients. Through the boundary work of categorization, care workers create a buffer to counterbalance negative encounters with some residents who are demanding and unreasonable. This phenomenon is also reinforced by nursing homes’ organization of care work, which rotationally assigns residents and working shifts to care workers so that they interact with a large pool of residents over time. Care workers’ strategy to distinguish between high and low suzhi groups helps to ameliorate the impact of unpleasant individual encounters. With the construction of this agency, care workers regulate the environment for the performance of ongoing quality care.
Care workers apply a similar strategy to deal with residents’ relatives. Care workers consider some relatives’ visits to be sporadic and not very interactive, and so the emotional needs of their elderly residents are left unmet. In one extreme case, care worker Wang disdained the utilitarian intention of some relatives’ visits, claiming that they came only to reach the required number of visits to earn them a discount for care expenses from the nursing home. Combined with the disrespect they sometimes receive from relatives, care workers categorize some of these families as being of “low quality” and insulate themselves from unpleasant encounters without blaming themselves, the elderly, or the institution. Exercising agency through categorization is a viable strategy for care workers in some situations, but it also can mask deeper structural problems that need to be addressed. These include an absence of codes of conduct for families, codes of behavior for residents, and formal mechanisms for care workers to voice their concerns to management.
The many and sometimes competing demands of care work make it necessary for care workers to actively exercise agency to achieve caring goals and to guarantee care quality. The three modes of agency developed by care workers and identified in this essay—cultivating self-empowerment, calibrating emotional labor, and categorizing clients and relatives based on suzhi—sustain care workers’ agency in the performance of the full range of tasks required by the elderly in long-term care.
Zhe Yan is a doctoral candidate at University of Würzburg. His research delves into the experiences and social organization of care work in China, focusing on long-term care residential facilities. His research interests include aging and eldercare, and how processes of aging and care are shaped by socio-political conditions.
Cite as: Yan, Zhe. 2020. “Glimpses into Care Work in Chinese Nursing Homes.” Anthropology News website, May 29, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1409
Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Shuang L. Frost and Hanna M. Pickwell
February 13, 2020
At this year’s Annual Meeting, the Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) hosted a range of activities, presentations, and events. Highlights included 35 panels (including four co-sponsored invited sessions), the annual Business Meeting, a faculty-student mentoring workshop, and a student dinner.
SEAA panels
The SEAA program consisted of 35 panels, including four invited sessions, 23 volunteered sessions, and sessions built from 10 individual papers, and two posters. Of these, 12 were sessions with papers featuring research on different regions of East Asia. The panels explored a range of topics including politics, climate change, gender, activism, demographic transitions, popular culture, and intimacy.
This year, SEAA featured the following four invited sessions that were co-sponsored with other AAA sections:
Business Meeting
SEAA members gathered for the annual Business Meeting, where the Board reviewed the activities throughout 2019 and announced prize recipients. Sasha Su-Ling Welland was awarded the Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize for Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (2018). Graduate student Victoria Nguyen won Best Student Paper with her article titled “Designing Sustainability: Containment, Circulation, and Contingency in Beijing.” Honorable mention was given to Kaitlin Banfill’s “When the Han Came: Intergenerational Memory and History Making in Butuo County, Southeast China.”
Sonia Ryang took over the “rice paddle” from former president Glenda Roberts and assumed the responsibility of SEAA president; and president-elect Ellen Oxfeld will assume this role at the end of Ryang’s term. We said goodbye to several outgoing members: Susan Brownell (treasurer 2016–2019), Shao-hua Liu (councilor 2016–19), Ayako Takamori (councilor 2016–19), Jing Wang (student councilor 2016–19), and Heidi Lam (Anthropology News SEAA section news contributing editor 2013–19). We welcomed five new board members to the SEAA team: Isaac Gagne as treasurer, Jie Yang and Marvin D. Sterling as councilors, Yifan Wang as student councilor, and Hanna Pickwell as SEAA section news contributing editor. SEAA thanked these members for volunteering their time and energy to keep SEAA a thriving forum for intellectual exchange.
Student activities
This year SEAA hosted a mentoring workshop centered on the challenge of “Rethinking East Asia.” More than 25 members, including graduate students and early-career scholars, participated in the event. Professors Sonia Ryang and Beth Notar offered their insights and mentorship on researching across Asian contexts, applying to jobs, teaching and pedagogy, and the importance of rethinking the politics and genealogies of area studies today. Participants reported satisfaction not only with the workshop, but also with the delicious breakfast catered by the section.
For several years, SEAA’s student committee has organized a social gathering for students whose research interests fall under the broad category of East Asian anthropology. It offers an opportunity for graduate students to socialize with other young scholars from various institutions over food and drink. This year approximately 25 students joined the informal dinner, where they reunited with old friends and made new connections across diverse regional and theoretical research interests.
Hanna M. Pickwell is a contributing editor for the SEAA section news column. She is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include material culture, time, everyday life, and popular religion in China.
Shuang L. Frost is a contributing editor for the SEAA section news column. She is a PhD candidate in social anthropology and science and technology studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include platform ethics, digital economy, social policymaking, and urban studies.
Cite as: Frost, Shuang L., and Hanna M. Pickwell. 2020. “SEAA Highlights at the 2019 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting.” Anthropology News website, February 13, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1345
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Aaron Su
October 10, 2019
This piece is part of an SEAA series on “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of moral values and ethical practices in a range of Asian regions. They examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.
Last year in Shanghai, I was taken by my friend Mei to an affluent corner of Songjiang District, an hour away from the city center. To our surprise, we encountered a poster of Lei Feng, a deceased People’s Liberation Army soldier known for his thrift and selflessness, hanging on the front gate of a housing community. I had been rambling about jobs and other frustrations when she seized the opportunity to stage a witty comeback by pointing and reading the text on the poster: “Xuexi Lei Feng, kuaile zhiyuan” (Learn from Lei Feng, a happy volunteer). She laughed a bit, and in that moment revealed to me the complex relationship between an ethical claim—one that is issued by the state, on full public display—and the less straightforward way that it came to be interpreted. Laughter, more precisely, bore the trace of Mei’s perception and interpretation, but it was also an opaque utterance that lacked the grounding of a defined conclusion.
I wanted her to explain to me the elements behind that humor, since comedy can tell so much about the perceived order of things, especially through implicit judgments about what the real or the serious actually is (Berlant and Ngai 2017). She started with a brief history: Lei Feng was a soldier in the early days of the socialist state, prized for his altruism and revolutionary allegiance. After losing his life from a truck accident at age 22, he became a mythic figure and the subject of a large-scale propaganda campaign. His life stories were substantiated by a diary, published in 1963, replete with praise for Chairman Mao. “I’m not sure why, but he’s still here today, and there’s so much of him around here,” she concluded. As the day progressed, this mismatch she was insinuating between history and the present grew more and more pronounced. Lei Feng’s face graced the front of murals, billboards, and banners everywhere in the wealthy suburbs. There seemed to be an underlying logic that persisted beneath the surface, but in practice it was dismissed by a brief chuckle and cast aside.Humor has traction in post-socialist China, as literary and journalistic sources corroborate. It slows politics down, pauses the drive toward conclusive judgments, and serves as a medium for critique in moments where ethical claims made by the state need to be contested or negotiated.I continued to wonder why Mei met the situation with an ambivalent affect such as humor, rather than the possible range of more direct, more conclusive judgments—approval, disdain, disengagement—so I continued to probe about the posters and about experiencing street propaganda more generally. A haziness loomed over her response, again accompanied by a laugh: “I usually don’t have the time to look, but it feels like the historical campaigns are much stronger recently.” Her observation was reminiscent of my friend Allen’s comments a week earlier, who noted too that recent campaigns “are so blatantly of the past” to the point that their incongruence with the present comes off as “funny.” Allen’s and Mei’s statements share much in common: they both sidestep the quest for comprehension, making a diversion to comedy to fill in the gaps where a conclusive understanding of a political phenomenon doesn’t yet appear to be possible. Humor has traction in post-socialist China, as literary and journalistic sources corroborate. It slows politics down, pauses the drive toward conclusive judgments, and serves as a medium for critique in moments where ethical claims made by the state need to be contested or negotiated.
Recourse to history is a growing trend in China, with Lei Feng representing just one instance in an emergent pattern of the state invoking history in order to stage ethical claims. As Angela Zito (2016) has observed, themes of Confucian filiality that were once not part of PRC dogma have made their way back into political campaigns, perhaps as a way to encourage forms of familial and elderly care that had been neglected in years past. On a similar note, Confucius has returned as a cultural theme and a mechanism of soft power, both in the expansion of mainland campaigns (Xi 2015) and in initiatives to establish educational institutions outside of China, although not without its discontents, some of whom are from the discipline of anthropology (Sahlins 2015).
But for many of those who experience these historically-inflected campaigns on a daily basis, attention is seldom devoted to contemplating their magnitude or political origin. On the contrary, my interlocutors spend more time considering how they should interpret and respond to these ethical pleas, producing indirect responses such as laughter and humor, which play with narrative space afforded by ambiguity. As Mei pulled out a trove of experiences with past political campaigns, she could not summon up strong feelings for or against their injunctions; she didn’t experience responses that matched up to the ethical charge of what she was being faced with. The campaigns were quite straightforward in content, but there was a level of confusion about how she or other individuals would interpret them and incorporate them into their own daily practices. This fundamental ambiguity took the shape of a Chinese idiom she muttered to me at the end of our conversation—sidongfeidong (denoting something along the lines of “seeming to understand something at face value is to really not understand it at all”).
Consider the Core Socialist Values and Chinese Dream campaigns of recent years, which permeate Chinese streets to a greater extent than any other government initiatives. As Christopher Connery’s (2019: 9) analysis demonstrates, the message is clear-cut: these billboards feature both dynastic and socialist graphics, and they link the ideal Chinese life to ethical values “whose historical scope is civilizational.” At the same time, public responses to these displays of ideal ethical virtue (responses that are formed out of brief, real-time encounters, rather than detached analysis) are not as easily reducible to the straightforward messages they convey. Mei talked to me about these posters, with roundabout statements interspersed with chuckles or shifts in her tone. She alternated between earnest, knowledgeable analyses—“it wants to keep a memory going of national history”—with other more fleeting and rhetorical comments—“it feels like an advertisement.” Despite these vicissitudes, there remained a deeper uncertainty about what to do with the broad ethical imperatives placed in front of her eyes. As my informants’ responses to these campaigns reveal, laughter and moments of comedic relief shift the register of conversation to one less tied to reality, where a direct political judgment need not be made and where closure need not be immediately attained. It therefore seems appropriate that an op-ed in response to recent protests written by a mother to her child in the People’s Daily begins with, “In these tumultuous times in Hong Kong, only your innocent laughter can give me a brief moment of calm and peace.” Laughter, like its varied uses in twentieth-century China (Rea 2015; Zhu, Wang, and McGrath 2019), serves as an expressive device that opens up and sustains a space of indecision, inside of which ambivalences and frustrations can dwell during moments of transformative political change.
Such a space exists now perhaps because of the dramatic shifts in lifestyle and subjectivity borne out of postsocialist transformation in China (Rofel 2007, Zhang and Ong 2008). These changes have widened the gap between the past and the present—unlike these posters, which seem to reconcile it so effortlessly—and scholars have often been left wondering how to bridge the so-called gap in ethics during this time of transition and volatility (Ci 2014, Lee 2014). In practice, as my interlocutors have demonstrated, the gap is often deliberately held open, without a need for resolution, through humor and rhetoric that refuses any concrete determination of the status of ethical claims made by the state. Holding this interregnum open through alternative forms of emotional engagement may even serve as a wellspring of agency.
Ethical values are at once too easy to identify and too difficult to decisively settle in contemporary China. Because of government campaigns that plaster every corner of the street, ethical claims often take the form of spectacles, readily accessible at the glance of an eye. But such visual noise might also conceal how they are interpreted and negotiated by the people who encounter them, in ways that may be ambivalent to political imperatives. Humor and other rhetorical tools are means by which the demand for political and ethical certainties can be suspended temporarily, without defaulting to conclusions too hastily. Because affects, emotions, and expressions are useful ways to understand how ethical engagements play out on the ground, they serve as important sites for anthropology to continue expanding its analytical work.
Aaron Su is a doctoral student at Princeton University whose research focuses on post-socialist China, with an attention to the afterlives of the twentieth century. His interests include social theory, visual culture, modern intellectual history, and gender studies.
“An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia” series is currently accepting submissions. Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu), Hanna Pickwell (hpickwell@uchicago.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.
Cite as: Su, Aaron. 2019. “A Space for Laughter in Contemporary China.” Anthropology News website, October 10, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1277
Copyright [2019] American Anthropological Association
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jacqueline Zhenru Lin
December 23, 2019
This piece is part of an SEAA series on “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.
Mao Yu was a 91-year-old man who lived in a remote village in the westernmost region of Hunan province in south-central China. As a peasant without children or relatives in his local community, he relied on a group of volunteers who had recognized him as a national hero in 2012, for his service in the National Revolutionary Army in the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945). In September of 2015, Mao suffered a seizure. The volunteers cooperated with the media to publicize his life story and launch a public fundraiser for his medical expenses. When Mao Yu awoke from his surgery, he was surprised to be surrounded by more than 20 journalists and visitors who glorified him as “a modern Guan Gong.”
Guan Gong (an honorific for Guan Yu) is a legendary figure worshipped as a deity in Chinese folk culture, who exemplifies masculinity, righteousness between rulers and ministers, and the respect for patriarchal hierarchy (Louie 2002). How could a peasant who had made a living by farming for over 70 years suddenly become “modern Guan Gong” overnight? To answer that question, it is necessary to understand both Mao Yu’s life story and the historical story of Guan Gong, which is essential to the root metaphor (Ortner 1973) of the authenticity of Mao Yu’s masculinity. The gendered moral code it emphasizes—restraint of sexuality—is key in the construction of an ideal national hero in today’s China.
From 2012 until now, I have been investigating a grassroots hero-making movement self-described as “searching for the authentic national heroes,” which was initiated by civic organizations and local communities in the late 1990s. Major activities of the participants include seeking and assisting local veterans of the Second World War, recording their experiences during and after the war, and publicizing their stories and images as heroes to the public. While the conventional images of national heroes relate to brave fighting with invaders and selfless sacrifices for the country, Mao Yu’s case sheds light on a rarely explored site of national heroics: their sexuality and private life.
A closer look at the publicity and various promotional materials about Mao Yu shows us that the righteousness ascribed to Mao Yu was, to a very large extent, due to his relationship with a woman who resided with him for nearly 70 years. However, their relationship was an unconventional one, because the two were never married nor believed to be sexually intimate.Mao Yu promised to safeguard the colonel’s family no matter how long it would take, and he kept his promise, even though the colonel never returned to the Mainland until his death in 1988.In 1938, the 14-year-old Mao Yu was captured by the Nationalist government and forced to join the army. He was assigned to manage the logistics for an elder colonel, whose wife and two sons were living in Hunan. Around 1949, when the Communist Party began to govern, the colonel followed the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) army to Taiwan alone, entrusting his family to Mao Yu. Mao Yu promised to safeguard the colonel’s family no matter how long it would take, and he kept his promise, even though the colonel did not return to mainland China until his death in 1988. His wife, whose picture hung on Mao Yu’s wall, died in 2009. During the six decades that the colonel was absent, Mao Yu kept his promise, caring for the colonel’s wife and raising her two children.
Most of the newspaper headlines for this story were quite similar, such as “Modern Guan Gong: Veteran Guarded His ‘Sister-in-Law’ for 60 Years to Keep his Promise,” (Xinhua News 2015); and “Veteran Never Married and Helped to Take Care of His Comrade’s Wife and Sons for 66 Years” (CNR News 2016). The content generally consisted of three major sections. The first section was his promise to take care of this “sister-in-law” and his two “nephews” for life. The second was about giving his own food to them at the most difficult time of the famine. The third was his remaining a bachelor and not marrying his sister-in-law and thus not betraying the colonel.
In my interaction with the volunteers, the above three points in Mao Yu’s story were the key reasons that moved them to tears and increased their respect for the veteran. In narrating Mao’s story in daily conversation, my informants would elaborate on the second part about Mao fulfilling the promise. They added that during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Yu bore great suffering and was about to be expelled from the province and sent back to his hometown. The colonel’s wife stood up and said that her husband would never return and that Mao Yu was her family member.
Through their narratives, the volunteers drew a parallel between Mao Yu’s life history and Guan Gong’s legendary stories. Most frequently represented with an image of a red face and wielding a weapon called the Green Dragon Crescent Falchion, the historical character of Guan Yu lived in the Three Kingdom Period (AD 220–228). He was a military general serving under Liu Bei, the King of Shu. His fictionalized and popularized life stories were mainly found in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which portrayed his loyalty. After his death, Guan Yu became a religious figure and was often reverently called Emperor Guan or Guan Gong. His acclaim was so great that he has been revered as a saint in Chinese culture. In his work on Chinese masculinity, Louie (2002) highlighted wu (martial valor) masculinity in the Chinese context and Guan Gong was considered the wu masculinity incarnate. Guan Gong’s chivalry and his model masculinity has inspired several key operas and metaphors. In Louie’s analysis, Guan Gong was first a sexualized general, and his red face is a symbol of yang, referring to masculine power. “Beautiful-beard man” referred to the masculine appeal of men with long beards (Louie 2002:28).
Guan Gong’s masculinity was also shaped by his relations with women (Louie 2002:47). When escorting the two wives of Liu Bei (Guan Gong’s ritual brother and the king), Guan Gong had a terrible dream that he had killed Liu Bei and committed incest with his two sisters-in-law, and he awoke in a cold sweat from fear (Louie 2002:49). Then, when many possible occasions to have sexual relations with his two sisters-in-law occurred, Guan Gong tried hard to restrain himself, and this restraint became a widespread story.
Therefore, Mao Yu, presented as a modern Guan Gong, won praise for his controlled masculinity and heroic image. The war experience and the 70 sexless years of living with a woman corresponded to Guan Gong’s restraint toward his sisters-in-law. Resistance to illicit sexual relationships was the source of Mao Yu’s masculine authenticity.The qualities of grandpa Mao reflect what we cannot find among our youth any longer: valiance, loyalty to the faith, and discipline in private life. Young men today are lost in money-centered and hedonist lives. That’s why people love my story.The head of the hero-making movement in Hunan province, Hui, is a media expert in his late 50s. He works in the most influential provincial television station in mainland China known for its entertaining programs. For a fundraising campaign in 2015, he designed the “Guan Gong and his ‘sister-in-law’” theme, which was very successful. During an interview, Hui stated proudly to a reporter, “The qualities of grandpa Mao reflect what we cannot find among our youth any longer: valiance, loyalty to the faith, and discipline in private life. Young men today are lost in money-centered and hedonist lives. That’s why people love my story.”
Hui’s observation reflects the desire for contemporary Chinese to promote “missing” moral values related to masculinity and sexuality in post-socialist China. Contrary to scholarship on “the desiring China” (Rofel 2007) that emphasizes an ethos of sexual freedom, individualism and neoliberalism (Kleinman, Yan, Jun, et al. 2011), this case study sheds light on voices of the urban middle class who continue to value sexual constraint, the sacrifice of individual pleasure for the collective unit, and loyalty to authority. The legacy of collectivism and communism has been revived in the construction of a modern Guan Gong, a hero who embodies socially-desired moral codes and concepts of masculinity. From the volunteers’ points of view, what made Mao Yu, this elderly peasant, a moral exemplar was his service in the war and his sexual discipline in his post-war life with a woman “left by” and “belonging to” a senior in a patriarchal power relation. By presenting Mao Yu as a model of loyalty and restraint and linking him to the legendary Guan Gong of the Three Kingdom Era, not only is a forgotten veteran remembered, but so, too, is a legendary past.
Jacqueline Zhenru Lin is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. Her dissertation sheds light on a historical-redress movement aiming at re-evaluating the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) in contemporary China. Through an anthropological lens, her work examines the relationships between memory and heroism, civic engagement and volunteerism, and charity and activism.
Cite as: Lin, Jacqueline Zhenru. 2019. “Gendered Moral Codes in China.” Anthropology News website, December 23, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1334
Copyright [2019] American Anthropological Association
