Conventionally, marriage and family in Chinese societies, defined as a husband and wife with children, have been a sacred institution most central to one’s psychic totality and social integration. The main purpose of marriage is said to ensure the continuation of a family lineage and its economic welfare. However, in contemporary Hong Kong society, the meaning and function of marriage has been challenged when the old cultural tradition can offer no satisfactory guidance for the modern way of life. This paper will explore the issues revolving around marriage through the analysis of a Hong Kong film, My Prince Edward 金都 (2019). To understand the evolving aspect of marriage in Hong Kong under the influx of western ideologies, the notions of Simone de Beauvoir’s transcendence and Judith Butler’s performativity will be introduced in relation to marriage and womanhood. In particular, this paper will look at the tribulation of the leading character, Cheung Lai-fong (Fong) before getting married to highlight the challenges faced by women in a male authoritarian rhetoric and conventional code. Through this, I aim at demonstrating an alternative image of a female’s expectations as a reflection of their resistance against the traditional patterns. In the conclusive remark, this paper calls for a re-evaluation of marriage within contemporary society, in the struggle to reconcile the belief system and social experience, as exemplified by Fong at the end who has been through thin and thick to realize that she can make her own choices.
This chapter interprets how a Norwegian version of the Book of Changes, published in 1995 by Chinese-born-Norwegian fortune teller Henning Hai Lee Yang, has been rendered into an ancient philosophical work with specific propagations to enter marriage. By adopting Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons,” Yang’s rendering will be juxtaposed with the surge in Norwegian divorces and the increasing social and political acceptance for couples to enter cohabitation instead of abiding by traditional norms of getting married. Although Yang has a positive attitude towards marriage, this chapter argues that he re-invents marriage’s traditional form by emphasizing sincere love and providing more decision-making power to the female. In effect, Yang blends Norwegian individualist thinking with the traditional collectivist importance of matrimony to create a modern idea of marriage. His propagation of marriage attempts to alleviate its connection with patriarchy in aspiration to adjust Norwegian’s desisting marriage behavior. In the analysis, Yang’s rendering of the hexagram, which is often considered to portray a marriage situation (hexagram 31 which is known in pinyin as Xian 咸), will be compared with an earlier Norwegian Changes rendered by Eva Skodin in 1988. Additionally, Yang’s version of the 31st hexagram will be compared with the most well-known Western translation of the classic by Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes published in 1967.
May Fourth Chinese intellectuals celebrated women’s free choice of partners as one of the Western notions closely tied to gender equality and modernity. Previous studies have shown that The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi, 1915–1931) championed freedom of love, marriage, and divorce under Zhang Xichen’s (1889–1969) editorship from 1921 to 1925. This chapter introduces an underexplored perspective on these issues from Laura M. White (1867–1937), the founding editor of The Woman’s Messenger (Nüduo, 1912–1951) and a Protestant American missionary woman. In her twin roles as an educator and an editor in China since 1891, she wrote numerous articles to teach Chinese women certain Western concepts on womanhood she perceived suitable for them. When the Chinese yearned for Western models to emulate, American missionary women such as White, who closely interacted with Chinese women, might have been viewed as exemplars. However, this chapter illustrates that White’s ideas were much more conservative than the Western ideas reformist writers had described. By juxtaposing the concepts of love and marriage prescribed by an American missionary woman with those described and campaigned by Chinese writers, predominantly male intellectuals represented by Zhang Xichen, this study aims to portray how Chinese women were positioned as the subject of this dynamic discussion of conjugal relationships from two groups other than themselves in the rapidly changing social and cultural landscapes of the 1920s.
The decade following the founding of Republican China witnessed intense public debate about marriage reform and free divorce. Did freedom in love guarantee individual satisfaction and marital happiness? Were couples in arranged marriages capable of creating romantic relations? Was it unethical for an educated man to divorce his illiterate old-style wife to pursue his “true love” and happiness? This paper explores and contextualizes the competing discourses about free divorce in early Republican China and examines how different literary genres interacted in advocating, questioning, and complicating the morality of modernity in the arenas of courtship, marriage, and divorce. I will first examine the essays collected in the Shanghai-based women’s press on marriage and divorce in the early 1920s, which presented divorce as a social problem while endeavoring to propose possible solutions. I will then scrutinize a controversy that appeared in the women’s press in 1923 concerning the case of Zheng Zhenxun, a Chinese professor who decided to divorce his old-style, uneducated wife, who was considered not compatible with him. Zheng’s personal account of his marital problem and the subsequent public debate about his divorce posed questions regarding the new ideas of individual freedom and romantic love. They also problematized the traditional understanding of the marriage institution and representations of femininity and masculinity, revealing how the discourse of marriage reform was inextricably tied to the changing notions of morality, individualism, and gender relations that signaled China’s transition to modernity.
The individual act of marriage is often perceived as carrying collective implications, ranging from kinship continuity to communal progress and national well-being. As a result, cross-cultural marriage carries the significance of questioning one’s loyalty to the state and sacrificing self-identity by expanding progeny beyond the level of the state. This chapter analyses how the experience of migration and homecoming can further complicate these possible interpretations. In the short story “Amy Foster” (1901) by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), a shipwreck accidentally brings the protagonist, Yanko, from his home in Eastern Europe to the English shore. Despite hostile responses from locals and the language barrier he faces in the new community, Yanko becomes involved in a romantic relationship with a local inhabitant named Amy Foster. While Amy’s love motivates Yanko to try to integrate with the hostile local community, her mistrust of him once the two are married leads to his heartbroken frustration. Ha Jin (1956–) portrays the homecoming voyage of Chen Jinli in “The Woman from New York” (2000). Far from the traditional Chinese portrayal of a glorious homecoming, Jinli’s return to her native land after a four-year absence brings the recognition that she is ostracised by her townsfolk as a traitor to her Chinese identity and to the gender roles she is expected to fulfil as a wife and mother. Yanko’s conjugal relations with Amy fail to give him a proper identity in Britain, and Jinli’s choice to return to China has a disastrous effect on her family and friends.
The art of Cantonese opera features a variety of representations of love through various performance forms and works, irrespective of their distinctive spatial and temporal settings in China. Compared with Western contexts, the traditional Chinese mentality toward depictions of love, whether in literature or any other art form, was delicate and subtle, due to its alignment with conventional Confucian teachings stemming from the past. In this sense, it is feasible to relate the elusive lyrics of Cantonese opera to classical poetry, a connection that can be demonstrated by tracing the refined borrowings of the former from the latter. In relation to this delicacy in the presentation of love, the narration of stories in Cantonese opera associated with conjugal relationships, especially those pertaining to the issue of remarriage, is worth scrutinizing because remarriage (particularly of women) was seen as disgraceful in pre-modern China. There were very infrequent cases of divorce, which was only available to husbands (the action of “xiu” 休 in Chinese). Prominent Cantonese opera plots involving divorce and remarriage include The Phoenix Hairpin [Chai tou feng 釵頭鳳] and The Return of Lady Wenji [Wenji gui Han 文姬歸漢], which are derived from an account of a poet couple in the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) and historical records of the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220), respectively. These two stories share a desperate, tantalizing hope by their female characters to be with their true loves (their first husbands), but they are prevented by strong external forces from achieving satisfying conjugal relationships. The slim possibility of divorce from the women’s side has demonstrated different levels of feminine resistance against the established patriarchal norms of dominance.
This chapter explores how the cultural self and other are represented in Chinese women’s discourse on transnational remarriage by applying a netnographic approach. A total of 118 videos posted by three Chinese women vloggers and 15,140 viewer comments were gathered for participant observation and thematic analysis. All vloggers, aged mid-30s to late 50s, were once divorced, remarried to an American or Japanese, and currently living in their foreign husband’s home country. Their videos were autobiographical accounts of personal lived experiences that conveyed not only their private thoughts and emotions but also valuable information and insights relevant to the understanding of different cultural norms and expectations, particularly from a comparative intercultural perspective as both insiders and outsiders. Three major themes were generated from the video data: (1) creation of a positive self-image; (2) differentiation between past and present selves; and (3) preservation and reassertion of cultural identity. The discussion addresses the prevalence of stereotypical thinking about the cultural self and other in the discourse co-produced by the vloggers and their viewers around these themes and related issues, focusing on their language practice and the linguistic and cultural resources they brought into the discourse.
This chapter introduces the idea of miraculous birth (gansheng 感生) in ancient Chinese culture and discusses the dominance of Heaven in relation to the mortal mothers who give birth to the ancient sage-kings miraculously. The article begins with a summary of twentieth-century scholars’ discussions about the matrilineal origin of the idea of gansheng before 3000 B.C.E. and analyzes the anachronism of their evidence. It then focuses on Wang Fu’s Qianfu lun 潛夫論, a text dated back to the second century as a treatise of “Wude zhi” 五德志. This text presented a sophisticated scheme of ancient monarchical genealogy within which the mothers had no conjugal relations or husbands. The miraculous births of fatherless sages also point to the passivity of the mortal mothers, who were pregnant without being informed. Thus, Heaven remained dominant in the narrative of the legendary miraculous births. This chapter, therefore, aims to reexamine the relationship between Heaven and human beings in ancient context.
髑髅,作为人死之后所遗留的尸骨,一直被当作死亡的象征.按《说文解字》:"髑,髑髅,顶也.从骨蜀声."髑髅应指死人的头骨.髑髅这一意象在先秦典籍中只出现在《庄子》以及《列子·天瑞》中.在《庄子》中出现了两次,均在《至乐》中.而《列子》中的内容与《庄子》中的第二段大致相似.
一 在孔子的视界中,君子和小人是两种对立的存在.一般人认为孔子是从"仁",也即是从道德的维度定义君子,并将君子与小人二者区分开来的.比如,孔子说:"君子去仁,恶乎成名?君子无终食之间违仁,造次必于是,颠沛必于是"(《论语·里仁》),表达的即是此意.因为孔子此语无非是说,君子之所以是君子,就在于其拥有"仁",是仁的化身、仁的践行者.相应地,小人之所以是小人,就在于其并不真正拥有仁,也不践行仁,是仁的违背者、破坏者.
在宋朝时期,儒家面临着来自佛教和道教的挑战.为了应对这一挑战,朱熹重新诠释了《论语》中的"礼",并将其推至一个全新的境界.他深入研究了从先秦到汉、唐、宋等各个历史时期的礼学思想,对传统的"礼"进行了深度梳理和创新性改革.在继承和发展张载、程颢、程颐等人的思想基础之上,朱熹将理学与礼学更紧密地联系在一起,强调了"礼"与"天理"的紧密联系.
由西北大学和黄帝陵基金会共同主办的"黄帝陵祭祀与中国式现代化"学术论坛于2023年4月4日在陕西省黄陵县隆重举行.来自中国大陆与港台地区的六十余名学者围绕着"黄帝与黄帝文化"、"中华优秀传统文化的传承与创新"、"中华优秀传统文化与中国式现代化"等论题,展开了深入而热烈的研讨.
天命一直以来是儒家关注的重要概念,也是先秦诸子集中讨论的话题.孔子受西周时期天命观的影响,他认为"天"是世间万物的主宰,拥有绝对权威的力量,说"获罪于天,无所祷也"(《论语·八佾》)"生死有命,富贵在天"(《论语·颜渊》),主张"畏天",但个体在面对"天命"时,也并不是无所作为,正如孔子所讲的"为仁由己,而由人乎哉?"(《论语·颜渊》)这说明孔子也十分注重人的主观能动性,认为个体能够通过自身努力达到"知天"的目的,但孔子对鬼神之事敬而远之,因此将目光转移到人身上,以上种种观点都对孟子有所启发.
云南位于祖国的西南边陲,自古以来就是多民族聚集地,自汉代以降,便被纳入中央王朝的管辖范围.然而,从严格意义上讲,元明以前的云南地区,始终处于一种较为松散的羁縻管理之下,内地对这里的影响十分有限,致使云南大部分地区,无论是社会结构还是经济文化,都滞后于中国内地.
"舟"因虚空,故可济水渡人,然舟之"用"为儒释道所共同阐发,又略为不同.儒以舟为"器",重其"实用",又主人伦礼乐之秩序,故明心于"君臣舟水"之喻;佛教则讲"空灭",言万法俱弃,故澄心于"舍筏登岸"之境,且以弥陀为舟师,以超死生之厄;道家道教则体贴出舟之"虚无",奉"长生久视之道",乘心于"不系不死之舟"的无待与逍遥.
