Arranged Marriage in China

校园英语 /
Arranged Marriage in China
University of San Francisco/Ming Zhao
Marriage is an important institution in our society, which binds men and women the most frequently.When men and women are together, the gender relationship becomes obvious. Most societies in the world are patriarchal, so men’s power penetrates everywhere, including the marriage institution. Marriage institution is built on men’s power, and at the same time, it contributes to men’s power.Arranged marriage is a good example to illustrate how men’s power is over women, which was prevailing in China.China also has arranged marriage today, but particularly in rural areas.Urban China develops a new form of arranged marriage recently, but whether traditional arranged marriage or progressive arranged marriage, they both reveal gender inequality and enhance gender inequality.
Traditional arranged marriage, which parents arrange for their child to marry a person that he or she does not even have a chance to know , has been performed less than before because more people are well educated, especially in urban China, but it is replaced by an ideological form of arranged marriage, which I call forced voluntary-marriage.It refers to the phenomenon that some people, always women, who reach marriage age but do not get married, randomly choose a man by themselves to marry, simply because their parents force them to do so.V oluntary forced-marriage starts because of marriage pressure from parents. Parents in urban China no longer arrange their children to marry as before, but since higher education is a strong predictor for delaying marriage, the parents feel anxious about that.Although Chinese people have more choices of whom they want to marry today, marriage is still required rather than optional.Therefore, when children do not marry “on time,” parents begin to worry.
When is “on time?” Currently, the minimum legal marriage age is 22 for males and 20 for females (Li 2012).Parents in rural areas usually expect their children to marry at least at the minimum legal age, while parents in urban areas hope their children could get married right after college graduation.However, the truth is that men and women in the urban areas get married much later than what parents expect.The average marriage age in urban China is 29.2 for males and 27.1 for females (360doc 2013). For years, women who are single in their middle to late 20s have been labeled as “leftover women,” which implies the message that “marry, ideally by 25” (Tatlow 2013).When women are left over, their parents endlessly complain to them why they are still not married yet or constantly tell them that they are supposed to marry.This brings much marriage pressure to women who are at the “late marriage age,” and it is the main reason why many Chinese women commit forced voluntary-marriage.
Exerting pressure is a new way for parents to force their daughters to marry in the urban areas.Many women feel that they have to marry because they believe marriage is a filial
which not only satisfies the aesthetic requirements but also is an important way to convey the theme how to go out of the shadows of slavery history.
In this novel, two sets of time scheme are used to narrate the story.One set is the “present time scheme” which is pointed out at the beginning by author “For years each put up with this spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its own victims.” Another set is the “past time scheme” which appears when the character rememorized (a new word created by Toni Morrison in Beloved, which means the memory appears by itself.) the past, it begins in 1850s when Sethe was bought by Mr.Garner to substitute the old Baby Suggs.They are mingled and mutually interfered with the development of plots which constitutes the “Jigsaw puzzle” narrative structure.A simile is useful to exemplify the structure: the author draws the main events as if on different glasses, then breaks them and blends the fragments together in a dazzling way.The juxtaposition of past and present things or characters at the same time and place in Beloved reflects the special time concept of African people.
The “jigsaw puzzle” narrative structure presents a bizarre co-existence of the past and the present fragments which symbolizes the dilemma of main characters in this novel: they want to remember the past, but the past is too intolerable to be recalled; they should forget the past, but the paste merges by itself.Just as what Sethe says to her daughter Denver: “It’s never going way.Even if the whole farm---every tree and grass blade of it dies.The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there, it will happen again; it will be there waiting for you.”In the “jigsaw puzzle” narrative structure, every character possibly encounters the past ant any point of the present time, no matter how hard they want to escape or forget.
As a writer of highly social responsibility and national consciousness, Morrison reviews the slavery history by employment of magic realism in Beloved.The action has its realistic social significance for the present time.On one hand, the author intends to dispel the slavery shadows haunting black people’s minds by examining the past and reconstructing the history.On the other hand, she alerts the people today that the “real” freedom doesn’t only mean the physical freedom, but also the freedom of the mind.In order to obtain such freedom, people should review history to draw lessons and resist the cultural oppression to maintain their own identities.
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校园英语 /
piety, which is an essential part of Chinese culture (Reese 2003). Filial piety requires children to respect their parents extremely, because parents give children everything and children should repay their goodness (Reese 2003).Since parents strongly express that they expect their daughters to marry as soon as possible, their daughters finally find a way to meet their expectation by marrying a man who is available rather than lovable.To fulfill filial piety, women neglect their own happiness.Women probably will be not happy after marrying a man they do not love.Although psychologist Pamela Regan found that arranged marriage members, like free marriage members, also have “high rates of love, satisfaction and commitment” about their marriage, the results need more evidence to be proved.More importantly, even if arranged marriages could be happy, the happiness should not be built on the deprivation of willingness.
Besides the commitment to forced voluntary-marriage, marriage pressure from parents also reduces the chance that children connect with their parents, and encourages children to lie to their parents.When parents give their children too much pressure, children are afraid of encountering their parents or they do not know how to encounter their parents.For example, because parents talk about marriage too much, many children do not even go back home during the Chinese New Year, which is the most important festival in China.Xiaoxiao, who was 29 years old, comes from Jinzhou and has been a white collar in Shenzhen for six years (Dayuenet 2013).She went back home each year to celebrate the Chinese New Year, but this year, she did not, because her parents, relatives, and neighbors always asked her when she could have a boyfriend or when she could get married (Dayuenet 2013).She had had already three blind dates even before she went back.She did not plan to go back home because she did not want to be urged to marry by other people (Dayuenet 2013).
Another example is that many children who are single go back home to celebrate the Chinese Yew Year, but they choose to lie to their parents saying that they have a girlfriend or boyfriend.How do they lie to their parents? They rent a boyfriend or a girlfriend to go back home with them.Ding Na, who was almost 30 and still single, planned to use this strategy to comfort her parents or avoid her parents’complaint (Hatton 2013).Every demand can be met.Some men posted the rental fees of a boyfriend: “charging $5 an hour to accompany a girl to dinner and $8 for a kiss on the cheek.If the fake boyfriend stays overnight with his client’s family for Chinese New Year, he charged $80 a night to sleep in his own bed, and $95 to sleep on the couch” (Hatton 2013).Li Le, who was a boyfriend to be hired, said, “I might find someone who shares my interests and it would make both of us happy” (Hatton 2013).This is how children deal with the marriage pressure from their parents.It seems an extreme method, but this extreme method lives up to the extreme pressure.
Why do parents insist to press their children, particularly their daughters, to marry at an “early” age? It can be explained by the cultural gender roles in China, at the most parts.China is a patriarchal society.Men have power over women, so women have to comply with men.Men are supposed to support their family to maintain their status, while women are supposed to take care of their husbands and their children to trap them in the lower status. Since Chinese men and women have different tasks, they receive different expectations.In the ancient time, men were supposed to farm to feed their family members and women were supposed to weave to provide daily necessities.It is clear that men should work outside of the home, and women should work inside of the home. They were fixed to their own roles, and were not allowed to cross. There is an old saying that “ignorance is a women’s virtue,”which means women are expected to do nothing except being inferior.However, men are a family’s hope, so they are expected to do anything to show their superiority.As a consequence, in a traditional perspective, women’s only commitment is to their family, while men could do almost whatever they want.
Gender roles reveal gender inequality through arranged marriage.Gender roles indicate that men should be powerful and strong and then to support their families and women should be soft and submissive and then to serve men, which fix men to masculinity while fix women to femininity.Arranged marriage is based on the relationship between masculinity and femininity, which forces women to step in the relationship and to practice femininity.The relationship of masculinity and femininity itself is unequal, because it is established on distribution of power.Social institutions assign men more power than women through their different social roles.Marriage is a way to display the inequality through gender roles.Arranged marriage is more severe because women are completely thrown into passivity.
Gender roles do not only reveal gender inequality but also contribute to gender inequality.Different gender roles lead to different gender expectations, then lead to different source distributions, and finally lead to gender inequality.For example, women are supposed to be a housewife, then they are expected to learn housework, next they are not given a chance to go to school, and finally they are less likely to be educated than men. Take arranged marriage as an example.Arranged marriage reveals women’s lower social status than men, but at the same time, it enhanced the relationship between men and women. Arranged marriage is a strategy used to maintain men’s social status.Because men have higher social status, arranged marriage emerges as a sign to differentiate men and women social status. When arranged marriage is practiced, it is based on higher social status of men and lower social status of women, so the more arranged marriage is practiced, the more clear the relationship between men and women is, or specifically, the more growing the polarization between men and women’s social status is.That is to say gender roles contribute to gender inequality.
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