Series Epigraph
“I want to tell her ‘Get over it. And whatever you do, please don’t give us a third book about your relationship with your mother. Writing’s supposed to be cathartic, not fixating.’” – an American friend’s words after finishing Amy Tan’s second book, The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991)
Artwork of Shena
Previously I discussed the case of a woman named Jerrie, who insisted on helping her mother-in-law cook when the latter said she needed no help. Jerrie was afraid she would look bad in the eyes of her other in-laws if she were to be seen not “helping.” In contrast to Jerrie stands a young student of mine, Sandy — formerly enrolled in a military academy, now in a police academy — who decided she was going on a three-day trip with her girlfriends, no matter that her mother opposed it.
“I introduced the idea early, and every day I let her talk about how I shouldn’t go and that she won’t let me go. After she’s talked until she’s tired, I tell her I’m still going. Day after day, the same. Finally, I will make her give up. I’ve been doing this for a while with a lot of things, and I always win. You have to train your parents.”
I can’t recall ever meeting a young Taiwanese similarly able and willing to stand up to her mother with Sandy’s combination of firmness and grace. Indeed, when I tell this story to other young Taiwanese women, most of them gawp. After gawping, they forget; no one ever brings up the story again. Young women may run away, escape to work in one of Taiwan’s several large cities, or argue angrily for a while before submitting. But stand tough – and smart and not unkind – until they prevail? It appears that nearly all women of all ages here, no matter how fibrous some of them may be in business or with men, are Jerrie, not Sandy, when it comes to dealing with their mothers and mothers-in-law.
“Ninety percent (are Jerrie),” said T, a smart, quick-minded, wonderfully-grounded Taiwanese ex-colleague of mine, who is divorced from a Taiwanese man and has been married seven years to an American. “The other ten percent will say, for example, that they won’t let their mother-in-law dictate to them, but after they get married, even though their husband doesn’t put pressure on them, they feel pressure to conform – and they do.”
“How about you?”
“I don’t know. My Taiwanese mother-in-law never tried to control me. I was lucky.”
“And if she had?”
T laughed. “People say I’m basically a Westerner now. Deep down, though, a part of me is Chinese.”
As I said, Sandy is young; perhaps she, too, will someday give herself up to the net. I prefer to think she won’t, though – prefer to see her as a fledgling Lysistrata. I like to think she’ll keep using mature and determined ways to assert herself and deepen her independence.
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
“They are going against their parents,” said David, a bright, well-spoken 16-year-old Taiwanese, who estimated that 30-40% of teen urban females disregard their parents’ efforts to control their choices. “Why do they have to openly say no and openly disagree?”
“They don’t have to,” I replied, thinking again of Lysistrata. “But no one ever gained real self-respect and better relationships without risking and leveraging at least some of what they already have. There’s no risk in their approach; thus there can be no real gains.”
“You misunderstood Jerrie’s situation,” a fortyish woman told me. “The mother-in-law will insist that she doesn’t need help, but then if we don’t help her, she’ll complain to her son and he will blame you for causing trouble. It’s the mother-in-law’s standard trick. Jerrie is right and you’re naïve.”
Round and round it goes: instrumental love rendering relationships evasive and tortuous.
Into the next generation it goes, too. YFFM writer Floyd wrote:
I will often ask students (16-30) about their ideal partners and frequently I get the answer from females – rich and from males – beautiful. Indeed here in Taiwan and also (according to my friend in Korea) in other Asian countries there is pressure for the man to pay and possibly give gifts – not though for the woman. Money in exchange for beauty. From males I often get the response that they wouldn’t like it if their wife were more intelligent than them – I guess this is to do with control. My friend in Korea was telling me that some girls wear goofy glasses there to try and look less intelligent to be more of a draw, which is kind of fucked.
It’s important to parse chronology regarding “rich” here. According to a student of mine, an intelligent Taiwanese woman in her mid-30s, few university girls care about a boyfriend’s finances. Fifty percent of 25-year-olds care, though, and ninety percent of women age 30 and up consider a guy’s finances make-or-break.
It is, rather, the charade of “less intelligent,” common in Taiwan as well as Korea, which points toward the real coin in which young women seek to be paid: control and the right to demand favors in exchange for beauty and sex. Female “infirmity” – supposedly poorer brains and therefore license to expect that “security” be provided – is the fig leaf for what is, essentially, a power grab. Not that you can’t find this phenomenon to a degree in the West, too, but in urban Taiwan (70% of Taiwan), it is widespread and rampant. Taiwanese guys call it gongzhu bing – “princess disease.” (The term is also in common use in Hong Kong.) Boyfriends required to give their girlfriends rides whenever asked to; serving as Stepin Fetchit whenever darling is hungry or thirsty; carrying her purse while accompanying her shopping; and placating “cold war” snits with apologies no matter who’s “right”: these are common symptoms of a relationship ridden with gongzhu bing.
“Eighty-five percent of the girls at my university have it,” said R, a young Taiwanese male I teach. “My ex-girlfriend has it. That’s why she’s my ex-girlfriend. I missed one of her calls while riding my scooter. So she didn’t answer my calls for a week. After that, I waited a few weeks until Chinese New Year came. Then I texted, ‘We’re divorced.’ I think she still wants to get back together, but she knows I mean it, and I know she still has princess disease.”
Parenting and Korean Romance
Who teaches Taiwanese girls this princess stuff? Of course, they learn it from each other. “She’s so lucky to have a boyfriend like that” is what a girl unsuccessful in deploying manipulative tactics says of friends who stretch boundaries and score new princess victories. But where did they get these ideas in the first place?
“From Korean TV shows,” another woman in her forties told me. “The boys do everything for their girlfriends in those shows, even take off the girls’ shoes for them when entering an apartment.” R agreed that Korean TV imports are a factor. But this only helps explain why princess disease is more widespread and virulent in Taiwan now than it was ten years ago.
More fundamentally, Taiwanese female elders make young women susceptible — mothers and female relatives to be sure, but most of all, perhaps, female teachers. Again and again I hear from teen female students that they’ve been told by a female teacher that they were too free, too open, too much a tomboy, etc. — and that they had made efforts to change themselves accordingly. (To be fair, sometimes they are taught this catechism by men in authority, too: I know of one young woman who was told by her father to stop being so “aggressive,” meaning stop expecting logical answers to “why?”)
Dragooning young women into roles is a hallmark of instrumental love. Such love comes into play in a second key way, too. “They didn’t get enough attention from their parents, so they are hungry for a lot of attention from their boyfriends,” said the woman in her forties. “And they grew up with fewer brothers and sisters than my generation did, so they have fewer ways to know what’s reasonable and how to get along in close relationships.”
The capacity to know what’s reasonable is intact, however. “We make the boys do everything in my class – clean, throw away the trash, bring lunch, and everything else,” a high-school girl told me. “They don’t dare say no because there are 10 of them and 30 of us.”
The girls do this because they can.
Every fish does get caught in the net. When the percentage-wise-proven advantages of playing the game as it is currently rigged are stacked against the unknown benefits of being a Lysistrata, who but those weaned on unconditional love would have the courage? Only twenty percent of young women today, said a Taiwanese quoted in Part II of this series, are loved unconditionally by their mothers. With the “harmony” value poised to deliver censure from peers to any of the twenty percent who might stand up, all thus far are staying seated. And with Taiwan’s birthrate having declined to where it is today the world’s lowest – meaning ever fewer siblings for the newborn –, how will princess disease and other ills bred by instrumental love become anything but more widespread? Won’t the net just be further woven and strengthened?
Don’t forget Sandy, though. Could her contrasting example be a harbinger of change?
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