Globalization in Everyday Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. 258 pp. US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781503633735.
In recent years, increasing globalization in Asia has brought about a surge in cross-border dating and marriage migration. Notably, the post-socialist metropolis of China has witnessed the emergence of a large commercial chain of global marriage-brokering agencies, which has become a socially significant phenomenon. However, unlike women in other countries who are typically fluent in English and independently seek out Western partners, Chinese female clients rely on translator-surrogate dating agencies to seek out Western men due to their limited English-language proficiency. This prompts the questions: what motivates these women to pursue Western spouses, and could this avenue potentially aid in achieving their life goals?
In her book, Seeking Western Men: Mail-Order Brides Under China’s Global Rise, Monica Liu offers a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of Chinese women who seek transnational marriages. Through extensive observations and in-depth interviews with the same group of participants over an eleven-year period, Liu paints a vivid and unique picture of China’s mail-order brides. By presenting readers with an intimate view of their private lives, intimate relationships, values, and gender ideologies, this book enables a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between race, class, gender, age, and sexuality within the context of the fluctuating global economy.
In the opening chapter of her book, Liu poses the question, “Why do Chinese women seek Western men?” Through her investigation of the disempowering effects of China’s economic transformation, Liu expertly portrays a diverse group of Chinese female clients of an international dating agency. These women, who are primarily middle-aged and divorced, come from a range of backgrounds—from ex-wives and mistresses of wealthy businessmen to financially struggling single mothers. They defy the stereotype of Chinese marriage migrants as submissive and exotic young women. They are motivated to pursue marriage migration due to their dissatisfaction with age, gender, and class inequalities resulting from China’s reform and opening up. As the Chinese economy undergoes structural changes, wealth and power are increasingly concentrated among a small group of male elites, leading to a revival of traditional gender ideologies that value feminine youth and domesticity. Middle-aged Chinese women, facing age discrimination in the local marriage market and exclusion from the labour market, turn to overseas dating agencies and view marriage immigration as a means of escaping life’s pressures. As Liu discovered in her study, “In their pursuit of marriage migration, Chinese women are not trying to escape a patriarchal bargain, but rather hoping to find an alternative version that maximizes their interests” (17).
However, the fantasy of provider love and sexual expectations held by Chinese women seeking Western men often do not align with the socioeconomic status of their partners, resulting in conflicts that ultimately lead to relationship failure. In chapters 2 and 3, Liu explores the disappointment and rejection of Western men by financially flexible Chinese women. She reveals that with China’s global economic ascendance and the relative decline of the West, a new global hierarchy of masculinity based on economic distinction has emerged. This hierarchy is embodied by “transnational business masculinity” (95), which represents the ideal of wealthy Chinese elite businessmen in the current market era. On the other hand, in Western countries, the decline of agriculture, manufacturing, and small businesses since the 1980s has led to downward economic mobility for working-class men. While Western men’s whiteness and foreign status may give them increased access to sexual resources, this race-based privilege is not enough to overcome their class-based disadvantages. As evidenced by cases discussed in Liu’s book, men who do not possess the elite masculinity desired by Chinese women are rejected regardless of their race, ethnicity, or nationality. In conclusion, the author posits that in China today, class distinction, rather than race or nationality, plays a dominant role in mate selection.
In chapters 4 and 5, Liu provides a nuanced analysis of the post-migration marital lives of financially burdened Chinese women. The author examines how these women conform to stereotypical perceptions of Asian women as submissive and domesticated. They embrace conventional “emphasized femininity” (120), embodying feminine docility and domesticity in exchange for men’s financial support, which fundamentally reflects the gender ideology and its underlying market logic that emphasizes women’s economic dependence on men and their sexual objectification by men. Resonating with Western feminist critiques of gendered patriarchal bargains (141), Liu argues that these marriages, rather than empowering these women, put them at a structural disadvantage due to their financial dependence, whether they choose to work outside the home or remain homemakers.
Liu ends her book by examining the impact of the global dating industry on its staff, namely, surrogate dating translators. Most translators are young female college graduates who migrated from rural to urban China. In Chapter 6, the author delves into their livelihoods, the challenges and rewards of their jobs, and pressures from social upward mobility, highlighting how these factors incentivize translators to police their client’s moral performance in dating and identifying their emotional labor as a complex and critical aspect of their work.
Throughout her book, Liu masterfully weaves the persona, the socioeconomic, the cultural, and the ideological into a fascinating scene of Chinese women’s love, sex, and marriage against the backdrop of global marriage migration. As Liu notes, her participants are just a unique small subset of the population, “They don’t, by any means, represent the ‘average’ women in China or men in the West, not even represent the typical Chinese marriage migrant” (189). However, they share a commonality in that their life trajectories and intimate relationships have been significantly impacted by societal transformations. Despite actively exercising their gender agency to navigate through their marriage migration, they ultimately find themselves powerless. While readers may initially disagree with or even disapprove of these women’s utilitarian or pragmatic life decisions, this book has the power to evoke a profound sense of gravity and empathy towards their situations, much like the author’s own experience. Overall, Seeking Western Men is a meticulously researched and highly readable work. It will be of interest to a broad range of readers interested in gender, love, marriage, or socioeconomic transition in post-socialist China, as well as those who are curious about global marriage migration.
Linying Hu
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby