Page 24 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

INTRODUCTION 11
Furthermore, the young women wanted a particular sort of configuration of space within
the new residence. Their standard requirements were for a space for the young couple to
enjoy marital intimacy and a separate space for the parents-in-law. Multi-floor residences
often combine a series of self-contained units for the couple, the parents-in-law, and
empty space for the children to be.
Her findings concerning the motives for the boom in household construction in this region
have important implications for our understanding of how China’s market reforms have
changed marriage customs and traditional methods of the transmission of property within
families. The economic consequences are startling: as Sargeson argues, ‘women’s housing
aspirations are also propelling credit circulation, rural-urban migration and the
redistribution of family wealth’. The burden of providing the mansion for the bride falls
very heavily on her parents-in-law. Sargeson interviewed elderly parents who hasten from
one job to another, working double shifts to pay for their son’s mansion. Young men
migrate from rural to urban areas in search of lucrative work and remit funds back to their
family for housing. When the multi-storey mansion is built, the parents might well move
into the ground floor and live within ‘unpainted concrete walls’ while the son and his wife
inhabit a grandly furnished unit on an upper floor.
Young women are also increasingly dictating the architectural style, internal design and
furnishing of their mansions. New housing reflects a flamboyant pastiche of different
styles, ranging from an echo of the curled-up tile roofs of the past to baroque architraves,
courtyards, water features and garden beds modelled on Western suburban ‘utopias’. In
spite of the expense lavished on the external appearance of the dwelling, construction safety
and sanitation regulations are rarely observed. Villagers appear to feel little nostalgia for
the courtyards and verandahs of the past, which provided for intimate interaction with their
neighbours. Inside the mansions, the ‘ritual and social-structural hierarchies’ that
governed the demarcation of domestic space in the Chinese tradition have been
transformed into spatial arrangements that prioritise the residents as consumers rather
than as producers and that divide public from private space. The ‘modern’ mansions of
Zhejiang are bereft of the ancestral altars of the past and instead are stocked with sofas,
VCR, karaoke, TV, exercise equipment, aquariums and the like.
Sargeson argues that the major beneficiary in this massive investment in housing by the
family is probably the son rather than the married couple. Chinese property legislation
tends towards the ‘individualisation’ of property rights; that is, property brought into a
marriage remains the personal property of the individual unless the couple sign a written
agreement to the contrary However, she notes that the adverse effect on the wife is
mitigated somewhat by other legislation which prioritises the right of spouses to inherit
property over children and other family members. The issue of who benefits most is thus
a complex one. The parents of the groom benefit from preservation of the patriline, but
often at the expense of their own personal interests. Sargeson concludes that the
remarkable bargaining power that young women exercise in the Zhejiang marriage
market gives the lie to the usual assumptions that women are simply ‘the objects of marital
exchange’ and ‘victims’ of exploitation in the patrilineal marriage system.
In her study of women’s labour in the home and ritual space in China, Anne McLaren
returns to the issue of shifting notions of ‘women’s work’ in the imperial and