ABSTRACT
In the sun-drenched morning of a typical autumn day in October 2005, Mao You Guang, a 37-year-old bachelor in Yishala, a village in Panzhihua, south-west Sichuan, is cooking brunch for himself and his father in their large yet empty kitchen. (Unlike peasants in rural northern China, villagers in Yishala eat two meals a day, at around 10:00 am and 6:00 pm.) His father is also a ‘bachelor’, but by default, as his wife left him several years ago due to the hardship of living in the village. His father’s wife, who Mao You Guang calls ‘aunt’ (she is his stepmother; his biological mother died), is now living with her lover and her biological children in another village, which is much closer to Panzhihua city. The meal being made is simple as usual, consisting of a bowl of beans and a bucket of rice. At around 9:30 am the father comes back to eat after he has herded their goats up to the mountains. The son sets up two sets of chopsticks and bowls systematically on a dining table that seems to be too big for just the two of them. They begin to eat at 9:45 am, and finish the meal without much talking. While the father smokes, the son cleans the table and washes dishes. The silence continues. Around 10:00 am, they both go to the stable at the same time to finish the
last chore for the morning – making sure the pigs and cattle have enough food for the day. Fifteen minutes later, the son heads out to the steep mountains above the Jinsha River where he, along with his cousin and another village man, quarry ink stones for a businessman who lives in the city of Panzhihua. He got this work through a cousin, who has recently returned from a wage-labor job in Zhejiang. He has been doing this job for only two days, making 20 yuan per day. Because the government has issued strict rules to regulate quarries, he is not sure how long he can keep working. His father also takes off to the mountains again, to watch the goats. They will not be able to come home until 5:00 pm, when their evening routine begins with cooking, tending the animals, eating, and watching TV separately in their own rooms. A couple of years ago, a family relative arranged a mate for Mao You
Guang from a poorer county in inner Sichuan. The girl stayed with his
relative in Yishala for a short time to get to know him and his family. He liked her and planned to marry her. Unfortunately the matchmaking didn’t work out, because the girl felt Yishala was too remote and far from her natal village. Later, Mao You Guang went back to the county again to meet with other girls, but none of the trips ended in success. He discussed the situation with his male lineage members and decided that in order to marry eventually, he would have to focus the search among women who have been married before and perhaps have children from a previous marriage. He tries to be optimistic, but feels distressed by the fact that if he were able to marry soon and have a child, the child would be only a teenager when he himself reaches 50, the age when other village men would already have had many grandchildren. The phenomenon of bachelorhood has long been a social problem in rural
China.1 Among rural Chinese, being able to marry and construct a domestic space is a manifesto of a man’s social status, economic power and personal charisma. Marriage is considered a responsibility that village men normatively assume. Therefore, although not all men are able to marry, they are expected to do so. Not surprisingly, not being able to marry often attracts sympathy as well as ridicule from others. And a future without wife, posterity and affinal allies deeply frightens Chinese farmers, their families, and the rural communities they live in (Liu 2000: 51; Watson 2004). Because of the rising sex ratios, issues associated with bachelors are worsened. This chapter provides an ethnographic account of bachelorhood in
Yishala. It examines the causes of a large number of bachelors, and their effects on family and kinship relatedness in relation to spatial practices of migration and temporal pursuits of modernity, which are increasingly gendered by the post-socialist political economy. It reveals how bachelors are, in a marginalized village space, struggling with living a single life, adapting to social changes brought upon them by disparity and mobility, and challenging the Chinese kinship norms that are deeply rooted in descent, seniority and sex.
