Visitors to Dalian, China, can hardly travel a block without encountering one of the port city’s thousands of karaoke bars. But the entertainment inside is performed by “hostesses,” not amateur singers, and patrons would be advised not to bring along the family. Since the late 1980s, the bars have evolved from a novelty intended to appeal to Japanese businessmen into a furtive obsession of the post-Maoist era. Dalian’s lengthy occupation by Japan from 1905 to 1945 — and its resulting cultural-identity crisis — kept its citizens relatively aloof from Communist zealotry, including efforts to regulate and suppress what the party considered to be bourgeois recreations. In recent decades, as the Chinese government has shifted its focus to economic growth, Dalian’s sex industry has boomed.
As a Ph.D. student in anthropology at Yale University, Tiantian Zheng, a native of Dalian, went there between 1999 and 2002 to do fieldwork in the bars. Her ethnography, Red Lights: Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press), not only recounts her experiences and interviews with about 200 hostesses, but also explores the culture of masculinity that oppresses the women and keeps them in business.
“There was a time in China when sexual services were the least significant part of a sophisticated interaction between courtesans and the scholars who sought their services,” writes Zheng, now an associate professor at the State University of New York’s College at Cortland. The steady “coarsening of masculine identity” — from the former classical ideal to the present entrepreneurial one — has corresponded to a rising demand for the sort of female companionship that more overtly assuages men’s fears of emasculation and affirms their dominance.
For the hostesses, most of whom are migrant workers from nearby rural areas of Liaoning province, performing their duties is an act of simultaneous submission and subversion, Zheng argues. Men may “possess and humiliate the women, thus displaying their power. But in doing so, they allow the hostesses to practice an aggressive capitalism at their expense,” which the hostesses relish. One woman who had no money for a taxi told her companions, “I am going to tell the driver, ‘You can touch my breasts once. Then I do not owe you anything.’” Her friends urged her not to sell herself short; she should demand change. “Remember, our bodies are our capital!”
Even though hostesses do maintain some control over that capital, they must earn tips. Therefore they cannot show resistance to their clients. And the necessity of seeming virginal and naïve — even as they drain men’s wallets or laugh behind their backs — can lead to “a strong sense of division or schism between true and false selves,” suggests the author. As one young woman tells Zheng, “We have to take all this with a smile. Do you know what kind of feeling that is? Only a hostess can understand.”
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s popularity on college campuses has always been sustained more by students’ adoration for his darkly comic books than by professors’ scholarly interest. It seems fitting, therefore, that a former student of his — who became a lover, briefly, then a friend, lastingly — has written a memoir that honors the man and his works: Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him (Da Capo).
Loree Rackstraw met her mentor in 1965 when he, still little-known, came to teach fiction at the famed Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she was enrolled. He was married, she was divorced. Rackstraw chooses not to dwell on their affair, instead emphasizing the artistic sympathies and affection that drew them together. Their bond, maintained mostly via letters, would remain strong until Vonnegut’s death in 2007.
Vonnegut and Rackstraw’s letters to one another were spontaneous and natural, like their friendship. Rackstraw, now a professor emeritus at the University of Northern Iowa, includes a number of Vonnegut’s, some never before published. He was a great teller of funny stories, but had a propensity to fall into depression when disturbed by setbacks in his writing, family troubles (he divorced, then married again), or humanitarian crises abroad. The last so deeply affected his state of mind that Rackstraw worried about him whenever the United States engaged in military conflicts.
Vonnegut’s desire to write about his own experiences as a soldier in World War II, Rackstraw notes, was the driving force of his early career and resulted in Slaughterhouse-Five. But the author makes it clear that even at his most pessimistic — “Ignorance is the new Black Death,” he writes in one letter — Vonnegut’s respect for human decency overcame his despair at human failings.
“To ‘understand’ our friendship was not something I gave a lot of time to,” Rackstraw writes. “From the beginning, it defied analysis, so I simply accepted it and came to trust it.”
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Americans marry younger, faster, and more frequently than citizens of most other Western nations. The United States has one of the highest rates of both marriage and divorce in the Western world, and Americans who don’t marry tend to live with a greater number of partners, for shorter periods of time. We also spend less time single.
Committing to relationships is easy — we’ve done it hundreds of times.
In The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (Knopf), Andrew J. Cherlin explains that a paradoxical attraction to and rejection of marriage stems from a conflict between two values that are fundamental to the American dream: the sanctity of family life and the freedom of the individual. Cherlin, a professor of sociology at the Johns Hopkins University, acknowledges that living with a series of partners may well be “a 21st-century means for adults to find, through successive approximations, highly fulfilling relationships.” Experimentation is the rule: At every stage of every relationship, people can choose to marry, divorce, cohabit, break up, or remarry. Those options are far more socially acceptable and, in the case of single working women, economically viable than ever before. But because studies have shown that children are often adversely affected by changes in their family situations, the author argues that when kids are involved, adults should proceed with caution.
According to Cherlin, partner hopping “is not a catastrophic problem” because “a majority of children probably can cope with their parents’ series of partnerships.” But he notes that the less stable a child’s family life, the likelier he or she is to have behavioral problems and report unhappiness. The common assumption that children who have “lost” a parent or parental figure to a breakup will benefit from a new person filling the vacant role is ill-founded, he writes. In reality, “lone parents and children create a new family system. Then into that system, with its shared history, intensive relationships, and agreed-upon roles, walks a parent’s new live-in partner.” According to Cherlin, that disruption often cancels out the potential advantages of an increased household income and the presence of an adult who can act as a role model and assist with parenting.
Americans can do themselves, their partners, and their children a favor by stepping clear of the modern whirlwind of lifestyle choices, if only for a moment, suggests Cherlin. The smartest move might be to wait and see.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 28, Page B16