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
Princesses Eternal or Extinction Burst?
Let me begin Part V by partly correcting a point stressed in Part IV: that young Taiwanese women contract princess disease foremost from older women. I said that they especially got it from instruction from female teachers – that mostly PD is a reaction to being over-controlled and to being socialized into “feminine” roles. Columnist Dave at YFFM, however, in an upcoming article there, says that family female elders, not teachers, are the chief inculcators. He suggests that PD is taught mostly by family:
Here’s what I have heard: Many women wait until the man has spent NT$100,000 on them before they give it up …
Seems this advice has been passed down from both grandmothers, who remember the tough years after 1949, and mothers, who cashed in during the boom years of the late 70s and the 80’s. Single women born in the 70s are now hitting and staring 40 in the face, and are likely enough to have their own money from good careers, but women born in the 80’s are 20-30-something, and accounting seems to them like a hell of a good idea. When they talk about freedom from their parents, maybe it sometimes means “It’s your turn to pick up the tab for my lifestyle.”
Anyway, whatever the etiology, Part IV of this series depicted the majority of young Taiwanese women as zealous carriers of princess disease. Ed en Vadrouille sees them quite differently, though:
To smooth this transition to positions of power and independence, many women have adopted a recent Japanese import: high-pitched voice, pink handbags, and girlish poses – often going over-the-top with this stuff to a point most would consider caricature. This infantilisation of attitude is just there to hide the fact that they are becoming economically equal to men. This is essentially a parade of dependence and weakness to pretend that they are still the frail and poor things of yesteryear and thus to lure the traditional male chauvinist into believing that he is still getting the same deal.
Yes, yes – but a pretense of dependence hardly reflects independence. If subterfuge is not just a sometimes-tool but a longtime approach, what power is this but that which night and darkness gives burglars? Aren’t real personal power and independence achieved only by replacing the desire to control others with self-assertion and self-control?
Pigeons and princesses pecking frantically
Yet Ed may still have a point; to understand how, it’s important to remember the mutual support that cultural memes lend each other. It’s true that many guys are playing the instrumental love game, too; they don’t carry princess’s purse in public to level distinctions between the sexes; they do it, rather, to carve out a role for themselves as protector of the dainty and delicate.
In assuming that women are weak and singularly in need of security, guys also presume rights to try to control: plenty try to tell their girlfriends how to dress; some call nightly to home phones to make sure their gal isn’t out; and, according to one smart university female, about 40% of university guys are not OK with their girlfriend having had sex before meeting them (despite knowing that the chance she hasn’t is 10% or less) – and it’s often impossible to guess which guys will harbor this attitude. Arguably then, on average, young guys, as much girls, depend on princess disease to reassure themselves that nothing has changed.
Structurally, of course, the ancient patriarchy is still intact, too; and not just regarding a wife being expected to follow her mother-in-law. It’s still males, not females, who share the inheritance in Taiwanese families (though daughters may be legally saddled with debts that their dead parents accrued while alive!).
Despite PD and intact structure, though, patriarchy is taking it on the chin. Taiwanese women’s increasing economic independence and power has been noted by nearly all in Taiwanese society, and some men candidly admit that women are better workers – are, on average, more responsible, and can multi-task better. Further, there’s Sandy standing up to her mother and R dumping his girlfriend for being a princess. According to the high-school girl in Part IV, who along with her classmates makes outnumbered male classmates do all classroom chores, “Probably after university, we’ll meet more and more guys who don’t have time for serving us. A lot of guys will keep doing it, but a lot of others will feel they’re too busy and won’t care.”
Superficially, then, the increase over the past ten years in the incidence of princess disease suggests a resurgence of social conservatism in Taiwanese society. Behavioral psychology, however, offers an alternative explanation: removing the economic need for women to conform to patriarchy – removing the stimulus — does not remove the conditioned desire for accustomed rewards. When loss of rewards looms, the phenomenon of “extinction burst” comes into play: rather than taper off as the strength of the stimulus declines, efforts to obtain rewards redouble: the pigeon pecks harder in efforts to trigger the suddenly-problematic food reward.
Taiwanese women – and I mean mothers and grandmothers as much as princesses themselves — of course understand on some level that economic independence threatens to sweep away the psychological certainties of a social structure built on rigidly-defined roles and instrumental love. An uptick in prevalence and vehemence of princess disease, a behaviorist would say, is thus a natural and expected response. Reward this extinction-burst response and the behavior will continue. Thwart it consistently and the behavior will cease.
The question is which will happen first: women no longer seeking the “reward” or men no longer supplying it? Likely both social vectors will come into play, but my guess is that women, though princess disease yields them gains, will drive the change more because (a) some of them are still victims of the favoritism that Confucianism-derived instrumental love bestows on boys and (b) a lot of cognitive dissonance results from switching back and forth between PD and the hyper-responsible performance necessary to hold a better job in today’s globalized economy. Princesses may weave nets a while longer, but eventually one, then another and another will break their looms.
If a Lysistrata emboldens them to do so, that is.
The museum and tradition
I found myself last fall in the Taichung Folk Park on a weekday with an attractive ex-student who would soon be heading to Australia for a year on a working holiday. It was a sunny day of moderate temperature; the place was nearly deserted, and it was pleasant to walk around beneath tall trees in the clear November sunshine, wandering in and out of wooden reconstructions of haute-bourgeois Qing Dynasty houses. In one house, we looked at a bedroom. There was no one around; and no one was likely to happen by soon. Though I had never kissed this girl, imaginings of concupiscent acts on the wood-canopied four-poster arose in my mind.
And subsided. Though she was beautiful, polite, friendly, and kind – and though I liked her and cared about her — this girl was annoying the hell out of me. She was seeking at every step to serve me; to please me; and to keep conversation going, as if the roof would fall in if she didn’t. Even princess disease was better than this.
I began not kissing her but challenging her. She and her boyfriend never had fights, she said; she couldn’t recall a single one in their years together. This was unhealthy, I said; there could be no self-growth in this type of relationship anymore than in one where two people fight about the same things again and again.
I kept pushing, and she admitted she was terrified that her very-handsome boyfriend would leave her if she ever upset him. I pushed further, and was surprised to see her eyes moistening. Suddenly, she turned away from me, put a hand to her face, shook her head, and suppressed a sob. “My mother …,” she said in a quaking voice. “She always controls me.”
I put a hand on her shoulder to reassure her. I didn’t retract, though. “Sometimes it’s nice to see girls cry,” I said.
“I’m a strong person, you know,” she said, still keeping herself turned away.
“I believe that,” I said. “I believe you are.”
Then she strode away, head down, her hand still a visor over her eyes.
Four days later, I got an E-mail from her. It said that she could never relax because she worried too much what others thought of her and that she wanted to change. Thanking me for the push, she wrote “seems like a orientation of study abroad… ha ha this time, i will tell myself- Fuck everybody thinking!! everything just let it go!”
I called her a couple days later to say that her E-mail had impressed me and to encourage her on her year abroad.
“Other foreign guys all tried to have sex with me,” she said. “You didn’t. Thank you.”
She laughed when I said maybe I wanted to now, too. But I wondered if her newly-minted independence would last. A couple days later she left, embarking on the adventure for which she had saved up for several years and had spent a year studying English full-time. And a month later, she was back. She had discovered she was pregnant – a consequence of her last night with her boyfriend in Taiwan. She’s now married and soon will be a mother.
Unlucky coincidence? Most would think so, but a family therapist would assume otherwise. I would, too. Coincidence doesn’t come close to explaining the frequency with which illness or accidents happen to those on the verge of change (or else to their family members who don’t want them to change). And really: How hard is it to use protection? To quote an eloquent Canadian friend in Taiwan, “Nearly everyone sooner or later gets a glimmer that their life could be much more. A door then appears before them, and they walk toward it. They open the door and stand on the threshold, looking out at an uncertain world rife with possibility. Then most step back from the threshold and close the door forever.”
“I’ll raise my hand”
So: a fish has returned to repair and keep weaving the net; in the classroom these days, though, I’m often enough seeing something receptive, fresh, and unafraid — an interest among some young women in going beyond museums and tradition.
Last week, I talked with two university girls I teach, pointing out to them the near-futility of Taiwanese parents’ hopes that their children will obtain stable and secure jobs in the economy of today and of the future. The best career move a smart post-university unmarried young woman here could make, I suggested, is to read up on feminism and then be the first to stand up against the meme of daughters-in-law obeying and serving mothers-in-law. “Write a book against the idea, then start an organization to fight against it: Won’t the first young woman who does this become famous, become a public figure for years – and attract an open-minded boyfriend, too? I just don’t believe some other young women wouldn’t raise their hands, too, and say ‘I’m with you; I’m joining you.’”
Their eyes widened as I said this.
“I’ll join,” one said. “I’ll raise my hand.”
“Me, too,” the other enthused.
Every meme has every other meme’s back. Here, though, is the weak link. For unmarried young women, many of whom plan to have no children if they marry, “following” a mother-in-law who may never be needed as a babysitter is a clear-cut lose-lose proposition. Some pulses quicken at the prospect of taking down this meme. And if young women take out wives “following” the mother-in-law, will princess disease and anachronistic patriarchy still be able to stand?
All that’s needed in is a Lysistrata. Confusion sown by instrumental love and its henchman, the “harmony” value,” are the only things standing in the way of her appearing.
Next: Part VI: Different Cultures, Different Love? (I): “That’s Your Definition!”
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