Page 164 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE FAMILY 151
support them and look after their kids. But I think they should stand alone and look after
themselves.’
Against the normative practices of those four villages, the post-marital residence and
property transmission customs in the fifth case-study village provide an instructive
contrast. The fifth village is highly industrialised, has a thriving private business sector,
and is located 10 kilometres from Hangzhou city. Here, marriage only precipitates
household division in families who have two or more adult children. Given that the
current cohort of newly-weds predominantly belong to one-child families, division is
rarely necessary. In keeping with the ‘orthodox’ paradigm of household formation, most
young couples take up post-marital residence with parents. At odds with the orthodoxy,
though, is that fact that uxorilocal marriage is also relatively common—that is, the man
marries into the woman’s family, for women who are loath to leave their parents can
easily find men who are willing to marry into such a rich community. In both types of
marital union, brides’ housing aspirations are satisfied by their occupation of self-
contained apartments in multi-storeyed family mansions.
What explains these apparently anomalous practices? Before offering an answer this
question, it is worth mentioning a second feature of life in this village that diverges from
the customs of other research sites. Inheritance, rather than marital payments, is the main
mechanism for transmitting wealth between generations in the fifth village. Yet in the
light of Goody’s theory, it is paradoxical that it is precisely this fifth village that offers the
strongest economic incentives for early household division. Villagers have been
compensated generously for Hangzhou city’s resumption of village land and houses. Their
factories employ a large population of immigrant workers who pay premium rent for
rooms. Why, then, do newly-weds forgo the opportunity to earn rental income or
possibly receive compensation for the resumption of their house? Villagers initially
explained both their post-marital residential arrangements and their inheritance practices
as ‘local customs’. But further questioning revealed that these were consequences neither
of cultural conservatism nor of parents’ efforts to bind their son’s allegiance. On the
contrary: unlike other wealthy villages where infants are cared for by non-working
mothers and grandmothers, almost all adult women in this locality work full-time.
Women said that co-residence in a stem household allows all adults to share responsibility
for childcare and maximises family savings and business investment. In short, women’s
concerns for the care and future prosperity of their ‘uterine families’ are decisive in
sustaining stem households, encouraging the formation of uxorilocal unions and building
up family capital that is transferred as inheritance.
The links appear unambiguous. Brides’ marital demands are one of the sources of the
rural housing boom in Zhejiang. Empowered by legislation and employment, an unequal
sex ratio, and a culture of competitive consumption, young women are stipulating the
physical conditions into which they will marry Their demands include personal comfort
and the provision of space for individual privacy, conjugal intimacy and children. As the
size of their houses increase, the size of their households has shrunk. Women’s desire to
create their own household—one in which age cohorts enjoy independence and
opportunities—trumps efforts by patrilineal families to shore up their prestige, solidarity
and authority over the younger generation through the bestowal of marital payments. I