The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination by Lee Haiyan

Author:Lee, Haiyan [Lee, Haiyan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press

Maids, Tenants, and the Comedies of Stranger Sociality

The founder of the Chicago school of urban sociology, Robert Park, invites us to investigate the city as a way of organizing society on the basis of common economic interests rather than family ties, local affiliations, culture, caste, or status. The city is governed more by positive laws than by mores; its communities are centered on secondary institutions such as schools and civic associations rather than the primary institution of family and lineage; public opinion facilitated by mass media has replaced customs and village gossip as the dominant force of social control; life takes on a superficial and adventitious character: “The art of life is largely reduced to skating on thin surfaces and a scrupulous study of style and manners” (Park 1969, 126). The city promises excitement and adventure because when large crowds congregate in a place “where education is general, where railways, telegraph, and the printing press have become indispensable part of the social economy,” every moment is “a psychological moment” (108–9). Elias locates the psychological turn in the “human self-image” in court society where civility was invented, because that was where “vigilant self-control and perpetual observation of others was among the elementary prerequisites for the preservation of one’s social position” (2000, 400).

Urban modernity in China has been understood in very much the same terms, both socially and psychically, albeit with a heightened sensitivity to the ramifications of semicolonialism. One area that has attracted special attention is the perceived conflict between the Chinese allegiance to family and locality on the one hand, and the casual and mobile forms of urban sociability on the other. Legions of scholars have shown how traditional China is a kinship society in which the individual finds his or her station and self-worth within a web of blood and territorial ties, and has to learn to cope with what Francis Fukuyama calls “the tyranny of cousins” (2011). It would be belaboring the obvious to stress how kinship groups, not individuals, are the basic building blocks of Chinese society. The hegemony of the kinship imaginary is such that, as Redfield notes apropos of the folk society, “groupings which do not arise out of genealogical connection are few, and those that do exist tend to take on the attributes of kinship” (1969, 194). In other words, the bond of nonkin individuals is necessarily conceived of as ritual or fictive kinship, which usually takes the form of blood brotherhood or godparenthood. Even casual relationships are habitually couched in fictitious kinship terms. Kinship sociality, in other words, has always been deployed to overcome stranger sociality.

Closely related to the hegemonic kinship imaginary is the native place sentiment, or the strong attachment to one’s birthplace, hometown, or ancestral land, which is most accentuated in the phenomenon of sojourning. As Bryna Goodman has shown, migration is always regarded as a temporary state of affairs, no matter how lengthy or across how many generations the change of residence may be. It is assumed that the traveler

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