{"id":9618,"date":"2018-08-23T19:24:37","date_gmt":"2018-08-23T17:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=9618"},"modified":"2018-08-23T19:24:37","modified_gmt":"2018-08-23T17:24:37","slug":"first-comes-love-then-comes-what-exactly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2018\/08\/first-comes-love-then-comes-what-exactly\/","title":{"rendered":"First Comes Love, Then Comes What Exactly?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

By\u00a0Parul Sehgal<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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Rarely has a newlywed delivered a more withering assessment of marriage than Charlotte Bront\u00eb. \u201cIt is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife,\u201d she wrote to a friend \u2014 fresh off her honeymoon, no less.<\/p>\n

A number of recent books have taken up her argument, looking anew at marriage and how it benefits women (or mostly doesn\u2019t), as well as how our ideas about courtship and intimacy have evolved: \u201cAll the Single Ladies\u201d by Rebecca Traister, \u201cLabor of Love\u201d by Moira Weigel, \u201cSpinster\u201d by Kate Bolick and \u201cFuture Sex\u201d by Emily Witt, to name just a few. They\u2019ve taken a skeptical and lively interest in the public pressures shaping our private bonds. In many cases, they puzzle over one question: Why is this institution, long regarded as desirable, even compulsory, falling out of favor around the world?<\/p>\n

Inspired by a similar curiosity, two new books \u2014 \u201cLeftover in China\u201d and \u201cThe Heart Is a Shifting Sea\u201d \u2014 look to China and India, respectively, to assess how marriage withstands breakneck economic growth, social change and the increasing financial independence of women. (Spoiler: badly.)<\/p>\n

The books take opposite approaches. \u201cLeftover in China,\u201d the flimsier of the two, examines the phenomenon of sheng nu, or \u201cleftover women\u201d \u2014 highly educated, ambitious women who cannot find partners, or so the story goes. The author, Roseann Lake, a correspondent for The Economist, describes the dizzying rise of recent generations of Chinese women with a dizzying tempo of her own.<\/p>\n

Lake zips through history. In 1949, 75 percent of Chinese women were illiterate. Today, China has one of the lowest rates of female illiteracy in the world \u2014 as well as the highest percentage of self-made female billionaires. She explains that the draconian one-child policy meant that families had to pour their resources into their only child, even if that child was a girl (and escaped sex-selective abortion, that is). Those daughters have grown into accomplished, tragically single women. They have so outpaced men professionally they can\u2019t find suitable partners.<\/p>\n

Is that it? Or is it that their ambition itself has rendered them undesirable? Or that dating is such a novel concept in China that men and women don\u2019t know how to talk to each other? Lake entertains all these ideas in a confused fashion. What she doesn\u2019t do is give sufficient space to Chinese women to explain their decisions and desires themselves. When that happens, in a fleeting scene halfway through the book, a more intriguing picture emerges. The female founder of a dating website tells her: \u201cMost of these so-called leftover women have voluntarily chosen their lifestyle.\u201d Lake scarcely grapples with the implication of this statement \u2014 how could she? It\u2019s too at odds with her story, which has so firmly cast her subjects as victims and not agents.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Heart Is a Shifting Sea,\u201d Elizabeth Flock, a reporter for PBS NewsHour, offers a study as patient and careful as Lake\u2019s is cursory. She followed three married couples in Mumbai for almost a decade: one couple is Marwari Hindu, another Muslim, a third Tamil Brahmin. In the mode of Katherine Boo and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Flock absents herself from the narrative, allowing us to enter the lives of her subjects and witness moments of almost unbearable intimacy.<\/p>\n

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Every agony of adulthood is presented with startling frankness \u2014 every miscarriage, every stupid investment, every sexual insecurity. The couples turned over their entire lives to the author; we can sift through their diary fragments, their text messages with their lovers, their bitter Gchats with their spouses. As a result, we learn everything about the couples, or so it seems: how they like to salt their food and part their hair, their pornography habits and preferences, their secret childhood traumas.<\/p>\n

Aside from the voyeuristic pleasures (which are substantial), we get a sense of entering the consciousness of each character. So much of our personal lives can feel like desperate improvisation, but Flock reveals the scripts we consult \u2014 from novels, television, family lore and religion. The couples find coordinates for their stories and desires in Bollywood and James Bond films, Pakistani soap operas, the stories of Jeffrey Eugenides and Kamala Das. One woman defends her infidelity by telling herself that Radha, the god Krishna\u2019s favorite consort, was a married woman. Another, in love with a man of a different religion, finds consolation in \u201cThe God of Small Things,\u201d Arundhati Roy\u2019s novel of an intercaste romance.<\/p>\n

A small armada of books have explored the aspirations of India\u2019s booming middle class, including the excellent\u00a0\u201cThe Beautiful and the Damned\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by Siddhartha Deb and\u00a0\u201cThe End of Karma\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by Somini Sengupta, a reporter at The Times. What distinguishes Flock\u2019s take is her interest in and access to the inner lives of married women who face particular constraints: Divorce is difficult to obtain and highly stigmatized, and fathers are considered the natural guardians of any child over the age of five under the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act.<\/p>\n

Marriage is changing because women are changing \u2014 on this point, both \u201cLeftover in China\u201d and \u201cThe Heart Is a Shifting Sea\u201d agree. We are, as Lake writes, meeting the protagonists of a new global narrative. Flock calls her subjects \u201cromantics and rule breakers,\u201d the women in particular. \u201cThey seemed impatient with the old middle-class morals. And where the established rules for love did not fit their lives, they made up new ones.\u201d They also pay the price.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n