Page 167 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

154 SALLY SARGESON
(Sargeson 1999: 215–19). And I knew that one of Aihua’s main motives for building her
house was to attract a bride for her son Tianshan who, she confided, possessed few
attractive qualities. The village house was also intended to provide Aihua and her
husband, who have neither social security benefits nor savings, with a home to which they
could retire. By 1999, Aihua’s house had grown an extra storey, but it remained
uninhabited. Aihua’s entire family had migrated to work in the sprawling industrial
suburbs of Shanghai. Tianshan’s fiancée, Jieming, was still in the village filling
dressmaking orders. She said she would marry only when she and Tianshan were given
their own apartment in Shanghai.
A Shanghai apartment! Aihua’s husband balked at the prospect of incurring such a huge
debt in his old age, though with an eye to spiralling property prices, he conceded that an
apartment would be a good investment. Aihua, though, was outraged. She insisted that
the money she had saved for Tianshan’s marriage should be spent on jewellery, presents
and feasting for village relatives. Jieming should move into the house Aihua had built and
concentrate on expanding her dressmaking business. How could she and her husband ever
retire back to the village if they had to borrow to buy urban real estate? Yet even someone
as determined as Aihua could not prevail against her daughter-in-law’s wishes. Tianshan
and Jieming now live in a tiny high-rise nest in Pudong. Aihua’s longed-for retirement has
been deferred indefinitely, while she and her husband help Tianshan pay for the
apartment. Nevertheless, Aihua unconsciously refers to the apartment as ‘theirs’, rather
than ‘his’ or ‘ours’. The resolution of Jieming’s housing demands resulted in a reallo-
cation of family wealth among the sexes, as well as among the generations (see also Li
1999:252).
As Hann remarks, ‘To speak of property…is to engage with a range of issues of global
political economy in the contemporary world’ (Hann 1998:2). In the case-study villages,
the necessity to finance construction presses villagers into indebtedness, migration and
work in metropolitan centres. Many sojourners remit the bulk of their earnings to
construct a house intended to provide them with a sanctuary from a life of itinerant wage-
labour. Exposed to advertising and market ‘intelligence’, others are tempted to invest in
urban real estate. Inheritance customs that favour males have not been eliminated by the
ambivalent efforts of the Chinese state, first, to enshrine legally women’s rights to marital
property, and second, to protect the private property relations that are considered central
to the operation of markets. Marriage is one of the moments when young women can
intervene to secure rights to housing. The case of Aihua and Jieming indicates that their
housing ambitions might be achieved at the expense of their parents-in-law.

Rebuilding village cultures
In demanding new mansions, and in purchasing the furnishings, labour-saving appliances,
fittings and ornaments to install in their mansions, women are contributing to the
integration of villages into ever-widening circuits of cultural exchange. A case in point is
the manner in which architectural fashions travel the routes mapped by investment capital
and migrant labour. Respondents delight in the synthesis of architectural styles they have
created in their new mansions. In the rebuilt section of one village, courtyard gates make