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Filial Piety

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Tables and Figures...................................................................................................................................viiList of Contributors.........................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction CHARLOTTE IKELS................................................................................................................................11. Ritualistic Coresidence and the Weakening of Filial Practice in Rural China DANYU WANG..................................................................162. Filial Daughters, Filial Sons: Comparisons from Rural North China ERIC T. MILLER........................................................................343. Meal Rotation and Filial Piety JUN JING.................................................................................................................534. "Living Alone" and the Rural Elderly: Strategy and Agency in Post-Mao Rural China HONG ZHANG............................................................635. Serving the Ancestors, Serving the State: Filial Piety and Death Ritual in Contemporary Guangzhou CHARLOTTE IKELS.......................................886. Filial Obligations in Chinese Families: Paradoxes of Modernization MARTIN KING WHYTE....................................................................1067. The Transformation of Filial Piety in Contemporary South Korea ROGER L. JANELLI AND DAWNHEE YIM.........................................................1288. Filial Piety in Contemporary Urban Southeast Korea: Practices and Discourses CLARK SORENSEN AND SUNG-CHUL KIM...........................................1539. Culture, Power, and the Discourse of Filial Piety in Japan: The Disempowerment of Youth and Its Social Consequences AKIKO HASHIMOTO.....................18210. Curse of the Successor: Filial Piety vs. Marriage Among Rural Japanese JOHN W. TRAPHAGAN................................................................19811. Alone in the Family: Great-grandparenthood in Urban Japan BRENDA ROBB JENIKE............................................................................217Glossary.....................................................................................................................................................245Notes........................................................................................................................................................251References...................................................................................................................................................267Index........................................................................................................................................................291

Chapter One

DANYU WANG

The process of household formation for newlywed couples in rural China has changed drastically in the past fifty years. In the past, living with the parents and joining the parental household economy was a matter of course for newlyweds. Since the 1980s, instead of pursuing the old ideal of a large complex household, rural families have turned to a new practice-early household division.

The practice of early household division is exemplified in the case of Lun of Stone Mill, a village in northeastern China where the research for this chapter was conducted. Lun is a typical young man who married in the 1990s. Upon his wedding, Lun's parents had prepared for him and his bride a separate housing unit of three rooms within the family house. The bridal room, which was festively decorated with red paper cutouts of the Chinese symbol for happiness, was set up in their new apartment by Lun's parents. Although they lived in their own apartment, Lun and his wife were not considered to have their own household before the formal household division. After the wedding, the couple ate at their parents' apartment, an important symbol that the couple were members of the parental household. A month after the wedding, Lun and his wife hosted a stove-warming party, which marked and celebrated the beginning of their new household. Unlike the traditional household division, which involved a complex division of the joint family property, this division simply served as a formal recognition of the conjugal assets-from large pieces of furniture and modern electric appliances to small items, such as utensils-that had been set aside for the newlyweds at the time of their wedding. (Examples of division contracts are presented in detail in the following chapter.)

In Stone Mill since the 1950s, the tradition of newlyweds settling in the parental household has gradually lost its status as a normative practice, and the once-cherished ideal of a multigenerational household has increasingly become a faded memory (Wang 2000a). Since the 1980s, an increasing number of newlyweds in Stone Mill have lived with their parents only for a very short time. In the 1990s, the majority of the newly married couples in the village moved out of the parental household within a year. The village of Stone Mill was not alone in shifting to a new practice of early household division. Ethnographic studies in villages in northern, central, and southern China (Cohen 1992, 1998; Harrell 1993; Johnson 1983; Judd 1994: 173-81; Parish and Whyte 1978: 131-34; Potter and Potter 1990: 196-224; Selden 1993; Danyu Wang 1999; Yan 1996: 176-209, 1997) have demonstrated the recent practice of early household division to be widespread. At the national level, demographic studies have shown a substantial decline in the duration of postmarital coresidence since the 1980s in many rural areas of China (Lavely and Ren 1992; Zeng et al. 1994). What was noticeably consistent in these radical departures from the custom of settling in the parental household was the retention of a short period of coresidence with parents after marriage. That this short coresidence lacked any real practical function or economic advantage revealed it to be primarily ritualistic.

Six decades ago, before the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, having generations of family members living under the same roof had been a symbol of social-familial success and self-fulfillment. Complex households were the embodiment of the sons' filial loyalty, as well as the family living regime in which filial practice could be carried out through everyday life. The understanding and practice of filial piety in contemporary rural China have changed substantially. With early household division putting an end to the old regime of practicing filial piety within the household, how did rural families find new ways to address and practice filial piety in this particular stage of family transition?

In this study, using the village of Stone Mill as an ethnographic case, I examine, in the context of the Chinese family tradition and the state's reformation of the family, the changing intergenerational dynamics of rural families, as well as their complex views on intergenerational relationships. Even though the ideal of filial piety has remained constant in a general sense, the means of achieving filial piety have changed in the postsocialist period. Rituals and ritualistic performance have...