Introduction
Regardless of the CCP’s initial intentions or expectations for marriage, the outcome of the Party’s rise to power was generations of people who had no conceptualization of romantic love and viewed marriage as a national duty and moral obligation, rather than something personal or desirable. Much of this shift was owed to a sudden change in priorities by Mao Zedong and the CCP. Marriage was part of Mao’s plan, but it was never his ultimate goal. What Mao truly wanted was a socialist economy and passionate supporters of his cause, and when romance posed a threat to his vision, he sought to cut it off. Like the demanding parents from the traditional Confucian household, the CCP wanted the complete devotion of the married couple, and romantic love would only get in the way.
To understand how this attitude shift affected marriage and related facets of daily life for the people, we turn to several real accounts of life in Mao’s Communist China. The first, Spider Eaters, is a memoir by Rae Chang, and the rest are assorted stories from many interviews, collected in The Ugly Wife is a Treasure at Home by Melissa Schneider. |
Spider Eaters
Rae Yang's Spider Eaters recounts her experience surrounding the Cultural Revolution. The revolution lasted from 1966 to 1976 and sought to, among other things, uproot tradition through Mao Zedong’s “Four Olds Campaign" (the "Four Olds" being old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits). As a member of Mao’s army of Red Guards, Yang and her peers left school to traverse the country and rid it of any semblance of bourgeois activity, fueled by a strong sense of national pride. The Red Guard’s commitment to the CCP’s revolutionary ideology drastically altered China's generation of youth’s perception of marriage, sexual experiences, and gender roles.
One of the realities of Communist China was a newfound obsession with purity. Mao Zedong, in his famous speech “Serve the People,” stated that a revolutionary should be a “pure person, a noble person, a virtuous person, a person who is free of vulgar desires, a person who is valuable to the people” (Yang 136). The young people of the Red Guard, caught up in their patriotic zeal, could only come to one conclusion: “Sex was bourgeois… something very dirty and ugly” (136). More than just dirty, the people began to view sex as dangerous. It was something to be avoided, not thought about and certainly not desired. Often, the Red Guard would behave as though sex was not a possibility, bunking males and females together without so much as a sheet to separate them. As for love, a young Yang’s perception of love was exactly this: “When revolutionaries fell in love, they loved with their hearts. They didn’t even touch hands” (136). The CCP’s emphasis on purity managed to eradicate the sexual, and along with it, the romantic desires of an entire generation, replacing it with pure revolutionary fervor. |
More than just romantic feelings, the Cultural Revolution forcibly stripped away even gender identity. Red Guards on the streets took scissors to hair, claiming that long hair was “bourgeois stuff” (125). The only choice offered to people was whether they would cut their hair at home or whether they would face public humiliation by having their hair cut in the open by the Red Guard. For some women, this requirement was terrifying. Their hair was a sign of elegance and beauty but also of status and identity. Yang describes the varied hairstyles of her Aunty: “Before she was married, it was a long, thick braid. Then a bun, for a married woman” (126). This reduction of femininity contributed to the elimination of sexual desire as the line began to blur between male and female. For a brief time and for a select number of individuals, transformation from female to “male” was desirable. Yang records a moment of triumph upon hearing a kid refer to herself as “Uncle Red Guard” (131). In this way, the idea of marriage became even more estranged from the loving couple ideal Mao initially pushed for; instead of the match between masculine and feminine, it became the match between revolutionary and revolutionary.
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The Ugly Wife is a Treasure at Home
Many of the stories contained in The Ugly Wife is a Treasure at Home tell more directly the effects of the Cultural Revolution on marriage. In particular, the people belonging to the earlier generation spoke of having no basis for love. Born in the 1950s-1960s, those that were lucky enough to grow up with both parents in the household recounted their parents’ marriage as affection-less, but several also had parents who were separated by their work unit. In such scenarios, the man might return to see his family maybe a few times a year. The only love that most of this generation knew was familial love; for them, romantic love was completely unknown. While some people were able to happily share their own successful love stories, there was still a lot of reliance on matchmakers and semi-arranged marriages, and age played a large determining factor in marriage: People were expected to marry by a certain age, and this societal pressure resulted in a high marriage rate despite many being completely clueless on marriage before getting married. One man said of his first wife, “I didn’t understand why I had to marry at all, or what purpose marriage served” (Schneider 52). These loveless marriages were in direct opposition to everything Mao initially advocated for, but they served his ultimate purpose and so ultimately came to define the family structure for many decades following the Communist victory in 1949.
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