Xinran is a British Chinese journalist who has lived in UK for more than two decades. She has recorded the stories of literally hundreds of women in China, and given voice to the trials and tribulations, sufferings and sorrows of subalterns who would otherwise have gone unheard, their experiences unrecorded, their stories unknown, forgotten, passed over.
A petite, engaging woman, Xinran came to Durham University at my invitation many years ago to give a lecture on her writings, and after a lively Q&A, I had one more question for her – why did she have a single fingernail painted in red? What was its significance? She laughed and said one day, she was chopping vegetables, when she had to rush out for some errand, unaware she had a tiny piece of pepper sticking to her face. The responses she received to that made her realise that incongruity triggers communication between strangers [my words, not hers], and so thereafter, she sported a single red nail to start conversations. Xinran is certainly skilled at persuading women to speak (even when reluctant), to tell their stories to her, and to render them sympathetically into print.
Her latest book, The Promise, is an exploration of love and romance amongst Chinese, and how this differs considerably from Western, Hollywood conceptualisations of love and romance. The Promise records stories of women from 4 generations of a family telling of their husbands and marriages; the passage through time is key, because Xinran is able to illustrate how love is ideological, more an attitude than merely being an emotion.
Her women’s experience pre-date the Cultural Revolution, demonstrating how romances between men and women in China changed radically across the 20th century, against a radically changing political backdrop, how the political becomes personal. Their relationships were heavily and very directly influenced by their notions of national identity, and personal identity construction was informed by national identity to an extent difficult perhaps for those who have not lived through similar times and regimes to even imagine. Class and background is a big factor in these narratives, as is poetry and a shared love for literature. Writing letters and the written word also played key roles in many of these relationships and romances.
Xinran’s first interview is with a woman called Red, born in 1920, who was contracted in marriage by her family, as was the norm at the time. She had no children, but many younger siblings, and Xinran’s next interview was with Green, Red’s sister. Green who has 5 children, set up an interview with her middle child, a daughter called Crane. Crane (born in 1958) married in 1987, and her daughter, Lili was born in 1988. Xinran’s last set of interviews were with 3 members of the next generation, children and nieces of Crane.
Crane explains the changing modes of communications between couples thus:
“My grandparents rooted their love in ancient poetry. My parents understood each other through classic Western literature and da-you poetry. The China I was born into didn’t have literature and romance. It didn’t even have movies, books or theatre. It had slogans.”
Xinran’s interviews showed how for much of China’s history, intimacy was structured, prohibited, regulated, and dictated by fairly rigid social norms, and traditions. It was anything but a permissive society, even through its political upheavals. These women’s stories also show how the narrative of romance is a function of the ideologies of the society, rather than necessarily a universal or organic inevitability.
Indeed, in the present day, it would seem the romantic landscape in China has changed out of recognition, with China’s dizzyingly swift, rampant, wide spread, deep-reaching socio-economic changes. The last generation Xinran interviewed regard romance and love extremely differently from all the generations who had preceded them. Yo Yo, niece to Crane, calls herself a ‘backpacker of love’, and has experimented with flash marriage, rented marriage, lesbianism, and a whole host of other ‘romance’ relationships, particularly online, often keeping multiple lovers simultaneously. (This is apparently common practice.) Her parents may not even have touched hands in public, but Yo Yo’s generation apparently find pre-extra-non-marital sexual encounters the norm.
As Xinran records, in a single generation, Chinese love, or at least intimacy, has come to be expressed, engaged in, performed very differently than ever before.
Xinran does fleetingly mention how love and materialism increasingly go hand in hand for the young women today, and even suggests that this is because they lack security, and try to seek it in being promised material goods by lovers. However, one could only wish she had delved into this angle far more, a fascinating one, and not unique to young women of China by any means, common to many of the Chinese diaspora world wide, and perhaps to other ethnicities and cultures also, perhaps a symptom of our age of capitalism.
That said, Xinran’s The Promise has been an interesting read in its own right, faithfully recording these remarkable tales which are iconic of their generations and times, offering a fairly unusual window into 20th century real life Chinese romances and relationships.
The Promise, by Xinran Xue. Translated by William Spence. I.B.Tauris, 2019
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