ABSTRACT
Ah Teong looked most startled and waited for a long time before saying anything. Apparently, he was trying hard to come up with an intelligible and polite answer to this rather strange question. After a minute or so, a smile had lit up the rather worried expression on his face and he started to retell a conversation he had with a female relative of his some time ago. She went to Ah Teong and complained to him that her husband drank too much beer, in the hope that Ah Teong maybe could make an impact by talking to him. The family needed money for other things than the husband's drinking habits and she also wanted her husband to be home instead of drinking with his companions. However, Ah Teong was probably not the right person for her to talk to because he understood the situation from, what I in this context clearly would categorise as, a man's point of view and neither does he have much practical understanding
Becoming a man 71
of married life. Ah Teong advised her that she should accept her husbands drinking habit because what is drinking compared to gambling or womanising? He then turned the question directly to me and rhetorically said: AT: What is the worst a man could do out of these three alternatives, gambling,
I never answered the question since I didn't know what to answer and since Ah Teong continued without waiting for my answer. AT: OK, Womanising is no good because it hurts your family very much when
The conclusion was therefore that the woman had to accept her husband's drinking habit as long as he did not turn to womanising or gambling because these masculine traits are potentially much more disastrous. As I gradually found out, these masculine traits were treated as belonging to the 'nature' of men and were therefore not something that could be changed but instead dealt with through various strategies by women. As belonging to the 'natural drives' of men, they constituted a fundamental part of the discourse on masculinity in the Chinese communities. The other parts, which will be dealt with more in detail in the following chapters, are achieved or cultivated manhood or how to become a man by practising believed masculine virtues of 'good' masculinity. These two sides - on the one hand the 'natural', inevitable drives of men and on the other, virtues and practises to achieve manhood - constitute the frame of manhood in the Chinese communities. It is between these two sides that men have to perform their gender. The performance of gender (Butler, 1993) can then in this context be seen as an act of balancing between desired masculine virtues and the perceived inevitable drives of men which sometimes make men strangely irresponsible for their acts referring back to 'nature'. It is through such transformation of culture to 'nature', of social patterns to essentialised 'nature' that men can maintain hegemonic patterns of masculinity (Connell, 1987, 1995, 2000, 2002).
