Making Our Own Destiny: Single Women, Opportunity, and Family in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo 9780824891992

Citation preview

MAKING OUR OWN DESTINY

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MAKING OUR OWN DESTINY Single Women, Opportunity, and Family in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo

Lynne Y. Nakano

• University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

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© 2022 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nakano, Lynne Y., author. Title: Making our own destiny : single women, opportunity, and family in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo / Lynne Y. Nakano. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021029512 | ISBN 9780824889968 (hardback) | ISBN 9780824891992 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780824892005 (epub) | ISBN 9780824892012 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Single women—China—Shanghai—Attitudes—Case studies. | Single women—China—Hong Kong—Attitudes—Case studies. | Single women—Japan—Tokyo—Attitudes—Case studies. | Single women—Family relationships—China—Shanghai—Case studies. | Single women—Family relationships—China—Hong Kong—Case studies. | Single women—Family relationships—Japan—Tokyo—Case studies. Classification: LCC HQ800.2 .N36 2022 | DDC 306.81/530951/32—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029512 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Biographical Information of Women Mentioned in This Book Introduction 1 2 3 4 5

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Three Marriage Regimes 34 “When I Went to Graduate School, My Parents Said I Had to Get a Boyfriend”: Managing Educational Expectations 69 “Because I’m a Girl, My Parents Want Me to Find a Stable Job”: Accommodating Work and Caregiving Responsibilities 91 “If I Keep This Up, I Will Never Have a Life of My Own”: Negotiating Family Tensions 118 “Maybe I Just Love Myself Too Much”: Finding Meaning as Single Women 144 Conclusion: Making the Best of Our Special Situation

Notes

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References Index

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207

231

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Acknowledgments

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n researching and writing this book, I relied on the help and generosity of many people. I am indebted to all the single women who participated in my study—who made time on weekends and after work to meet me, answered my questions with openness and humor, introduced me to their friends, and trusted me to take good care of their stories. This book is dedicated to them. I thank Gordon Mathews, Keith L. Brown, Zachary M. Howlett, and two anonymous reviewers at University of Hawai‘i Press for reading the entire manuscript and providing detailed and useful comments. For advice on various portions of this book and help on the research behind it, I am grateful to Candy Lam, Lin Sun, Yajun Wang, Mena Wong, Alana Wong, Wan Fong, Kitty Choi, Timothy Choi, Moeko Wagatsuma, Kinnia Yau, Colin Smith, Peter Skehan, Jan Wang, Mingchang Wang, Maggie Lin, Akiyo Oshima, William Kelly, Eyal Ben-Ari, Glenda Roberts, Satsuki Kawano, Junko Otani, Richard Ronald, Yoshihide Sakurai, Yasemin Soysal, Suk-ying Wong, Hyunjoon Park, Yin Wang, and Laura Dales. I am grateful to Snowy Lai for her encouragement and friendship. I appreciate the comments and questions I received from audience members at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Hawai‘i, University of Pittsburgh, Osaka University, Hokkaido University, Tokyo Metropolitan University, University of Western Australia, National Cheng Kung University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and City University of Hong Kong, and at meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, Japan Anthropology Workshop, International Convention of Asian Scholars, New Zealand Asian Studies Society, East Asian Anthropological Association, European Association of Japanese Studies, the Japan-China Sociological Society, and the Hong Kong Anthropological Society. Major portions of the work described in this book were supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CUHK4018/02H). I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for providing financial support in the form of the Publication Subvention Fund 2021, vii

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which assists faculty members in publishing scholarly monographs in international venues. I appreciate the assistance I received from my colleagues in the Department of Japanese Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, especially Benjamin Wai-Ming Ng, and from the research assistants who have helped me to collect statistical data over the years. I thank my family and friends for tolerating my long hours of sitting inert in front of my computer. Lastly, I thank Eric Cheng, who has seen me through this long process. His sense of humor and joyful way of looking at the world has provided welcome diversion for which I am extremely grateful.

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Biographical Information of Women Mentioned in This Book Below is an alphabetical list of pseudonyms of people quoted or mentioned in this book categorized by the city in which I met them. I did not collect all the biographical information about each person, such as number of siblings or whether they subsequently married. In the interest of consistency, I list their age and the information I had upon our first meeting. I have not included people I interviewed who are not mentioned by name in the book.

Shanghai Amanda, 27, was a bank executive. She had studied for ten years in Canada and lived in an apartment that adjoined her parents’ apartment in Shanghai. Beatrice, 28, came to Shanghai from a village in southern China. She studied at a top foreign language university in the city and worked as an interpreter. She lived by herself in a rented apartment. Cindy, 33, was an executive at a national sporting goods chain in Shanghai. She came to Shanghai after graduating university, obtained an M.B.A. from a university in Singapore, and was living with her sister in a rented apartment in the city. Feng, 27, worked as a commercial chemist. A singleton, she lived in central Shanghai with her parents. Huiling, 28, worked in a Japanese factory in the Shanghai suburbs. A singleton, she lived with her parents and grandmother. Jacky, 35, came to Shanghai from a southern province to become a professional singer. She lived with her boyfriend, a divorced European banker. Jean, 23, came to Shanghai from Anhui Province to attend university and was working as a financial journalist. She was a singleton and lived alone in a rented apartment in the city. Jing, 38, was self-employed. She had obtained an M.A. from a university in the United Kingdom. A native of Nanjing, she lived alone in the city. Her parents also lived in Shanghai, where they had come in order to care for her sister’s children. She was a Christian.

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Karen, 35, worked as an accountant in a French firm. As a child, she arrived in Shanghai with her family from Anhui Province. She lived alone in a condominium that she owned. Her older sister was married and had a child. Kathy, 28, arrived in Shanghai from Nanjing. She worked as a technical support officer in a major bank and lived in an apartment shared with other recent migrants to the city. Lee, 29, was a postdoctoral researcher at a top university in Shanghai. A singleton, she lived with her parents in the city. Luna, 35, worked for a human resources company. She was a singleton, and her parents lived in the city. She lived alone in a rented apartment. Margaret, 27, worked as an office clerk and lived with her parents in Shanghai. She was engaged to be married. Marie, 34, was a manager in a multinational firm. She had come to Shanghai from a nearby province and had obtained an M.B.A. at an overseas university. Marion, 35, worked as an executive in a foreign firm. She lived in a condominium apartment she had purchased in the city. Her parents lived nearby and spent their time caring for her brother’s child. Mingxia, 29, worked as a legal assistant at a U.S. law firm. She held a master’s degree from a prestigious university in Shanghai. Her parents lived in the nearby city of Suzhou. She was engaged to be married. Nicole, 38, worked in human resources at a medium-sized company in Shanghai and had a side career as a corporate trainer. She was a singleton and lived with her parents. Nora, 23, worked for the government. A singleton, she lived with her parents. Penny, 29, came to Shanghai from Nanjing. She worked at a small, foreignowned design firm and lived by herself in a rented apartment in the city. Samantha, 25, was an assistant editor at a textbook publisher. She was a singleton and lived with her mother in Shanghai, as her parents had divorced. Sarah, 34, owned and managed a successful art gallery. Originally from the city of Tianjin, she lived in a condominium apartment she had purchased. Her sister was married and lived in Tianjin. Her parents visited Shanghai frequently and stayed with her in the apartment.

Hong Kong Angel, 28, was preparing to leave for Europe to study for an M.B.A. She lived with her parents and siblings.

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Becky, 29, worked as an administrator at an art gallery. She lived with her brother and her parents. She had recently returned from studying for an M.A. in the United Kingdom. Bernice, 24, was a student at a local university. She lived with her parents and siblings. Bianca, 34, worked as a university lecturer and had obtained a Ph.D. through a correspondence course. She lived in a condominium apartment she had purchased. Eliza, 31, worked as a secretary at a public school. She lived with her mother after her parents divorced. She spent one year living in Canada as a high school exchange student. She was a Christian. Fran, 32, worked in an advertising firm. She lived with her parents but was engaged to be married and planned to move out soon to live with her future husband. Iris, 42, worked as a public relations executive for a large company. She had spent five years in Australia, to which her family immigrated when she was a teenager. She returned to Hong Kong after graduating from university to establish her career. She rented an apartment in the city. Lisa, 38, was a human resources manager for a Japanese firm. She lived alone in a rented apartment. She had lived and worked in Japan for a few years. Maggie, 25, was a Ph.D. student in Hong Kong who planned to return to Shanghai to get married. She was a singleton who grew up in Shanghai. Mei Kwan, 56, worked as a supporting staff member at a Christian charity organization. She lived with her mother, elder brother, his wife, and their children. Melissa, 44, worked as a manager for a charitable foundation. She lived with her sister in a rented apartment after her parents passed away. Ming, 56, worked as an office cleaner. She lived with her mother, brother, and his family. Peggy, 36, was a chef at an Italian restaurant. She lived with her mother in a rented apartment. She had lived in Italy for five years and after returning to Hong Kong had become a Christian. Ronnie, 39, was an assistant professor at a local university. She obtained her Ph.D. in Canada. Her parents spent half the year living with her in her rented apartment in Hong Kong and the other half living with her brother in the United States.

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Ruth, 52, worked as a clerk in a government office. After her parents passed away, she lived by herself in an apartment she purchased through a government home ownership scheme. Sally, 31, worked as a financial consultant and was attending accounting classes in the evenings. She lived with her parents and siblings. Siu Lan, 54, worked as an office clerk at a university. She was living alone in a rented apartment since her parents passed away. Sue, 54, worked as a clerk in a government office. She lived alone in a rented apartment after her parents passed away. Toni, 24, worked as a textbook editor. She lived with her parents and siblings. Trudy, 31, worked for the government. She lived in a condominium apartment she had purchased with her sister. Wing Yee, 48, worked as accounting clerk for a nonprofit organization. She lived in an apartment that she had purchased with her mother.

Tokyo Ayumi, 26, worked for a large employment agency. She came to Tokyo from a regional city in Nagano Prefecture and lived with a friend in a rented apartment. Chisato, 33, was a clerical worker dispatched to various companies through a staffing agency. She lived in a rented apartment not far from her parents’ home in Kamakura, about ninety minutes away from the city. Etsuko, 37, worked as a computer technician. Originally from Osaka, she lived alone in a rented apartment since being posted to Tokyo by her company, a pharmaceutical firm. Gen, 56, worked as a human resources trainer. She had spent part of her youth in the United States. She lived alone in a rented apartment. Kazuko, 32, worked as a travel agent and lived with her parents in the city. Kotoe, 35, worked as a hostess in a nightclub. She lived alone in a rented apartment. Madoka, 29, worked as an executive at an advertising agency. She lived with her parents in the suburbs, not far from the city center. Maki, 54, worked for a travel agency that provided services for a large Japanese firm. She lived in a condominium apartment she had purchased. She came to Tokyo from Kyushu after graduating high school. Miyuki, 34, worked as a personnel trainer for a medium-sized company. She lived with her parents in Tokyo.

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Nami, 30, worked as a manager in an international hotel chain. She lived with her parents in Tokyo. Noriko, 32, worked as a free-lance editor. She worked at her home, a rented apartment, and lived alone. Her parents lived a few hours away from the city. Rika, 42, worked as an accountant for an architectural firm. She lived with her parents in Tokyo. Sachiko, 32, worked as a manager for a large bank and lived in the company dormitory for female workers but she would need to move out soon due to company policy that gave priority to junior employees. Her parents lived in a suburb two hours away from the city. Saki, 34, worked as an administrator in a branch office of a foreign firm. She had studied English in the United States for a year. She lived by herself in a condominium apartment she had purchased in the city. Her parents and brother lived in Yokohama. Sana, 31, helped her mother run the family business. Upon the death of her father, she quit her job working for a firm in Tokyo and moved back to the suburbs to live with her mother. Shiori, 46, was unemployed and living on unemployment insurance while looking for work. She lived in an apartment by herself. She had come to Tokyo to attend university, and her parents lived in northern Japan. Teruko, 43, worked as an employee for a personnel dispatch firm. An only child, she lived with her parents in Tokyo. She had lived in Hong Kong for a year while studying Cantonese. Tomoko, 34, worked as a manager in a major Japanese bank. She lived with her parents in a suburb located two hours away from the city center by train. She had previously been posted to a regional branch office and had recently been reassigned to the Tokyo headquarters. Yasue, 36, worked for a cosmetics firm in the Ginza District. She lived with her parents in a small apartment not far from the city center. Yui, 28, worked as a receptionist for a medium-sized firm in Tokyo. She lived with her parents in the city. She had spent two years in the United States studying English.

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Introduction

I

n East Asia’s major cities, women are remaining single on an unprecedented scale. Hundreds of thousands of women in their thirties and forties living in Tokyo and Hong Kong, and a growing number in Shanghai, have never been married and many never will. In Hong Kong, for example, nearly 38 percent of women aged 30 to 34 were single in the most recent census (Census and Statistics Department 2019).1 Although the trend toward later marriage is occurring on every continent, women in East Asian cities marry later than in almost any other place on earth, with rates similar to, and sometimes surpassing, those in Western Europe (Jones 2005; Jones and Gubhaju 2009). As of this writing, for example, the average age of first marriage for women in Tokyo is just over 30 (Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health 2016).2 Singlehood in East Asia, however, differs from the experience of singlehood in Europe in that, in East Asia, single women are much more likely to be childless and without a partner.3 In East Asia, the number of people who are not involved in romantic relationships—“effectively single” in the words of demographer Gavin Jones (2007, 456–459)—may now be much higher than in many European countries where cohabitation and other forms of partnership are common. In East Asia, living with a romantic partner outside of marriage is rare, the percentage of extramarital childbirths is very low, and same-sex romantic relationships are highly stigmatized; in the region, Taiwan alone recognizes same-sex marriage. In Japan, only 7 percent of unmarried women aged 18 to 34 have ever lived with a male partner (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016).4 In Shanghai and Hong Kong, living together is accepted among couples engaged to be married, but is otherwise generally frowned upon and remains uncommon. In 2015 in Japan, births out of wedlock comprised only 2.29 percent of all births (National Institute of 1

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2

Introduction

Population and Social Security Research 2016). In Hong Kong, 7.52 percent of all births occurred out of wedlock (Hong Kong Council of Social Service 2016), and in China, where it is difficult to obtain relevant statistics, the figures also appear to be extremely low. When starting to research single women nearly twenty years ago, my questions were fairly straightforward: Are single women in East Asian cities embracing new values? It has long been stated that marriage and motherhood form the basis of womanhood in many East Asian societies.5 If women are not marrying, how do they see themselves and their place in the world? What do they find meaningful in their lives? Single women are negatively characterized by the media in their societies as overly choosy or resisting the more responsible life of a married woman. While I was highly suspicious of these claims that blame women in oversimplified ways, I wondered whether single women were rejecting marriage in favor of pursuing careers or living a more independent life. It seemed to me that a demographic transformation with profound implications for these societies was underway but little was known about the single women themselves. My journey to understand the rise of singlehood led me to interview over one hundred single women aged between 30 and 45 in East Asia’s great urban centers of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. I conducted most of the interviews from 2001 to 2009, and to the extent possible, I held follow-up interviews between 2010 and 2017. I found that in all three cities, the great majority of women said that they wanted to marry and raise children even as most also wanted to obtain a good education and succeed in their careers. A small number explicitly said that they did not want to marry, but most said that they would if they met an appropriate person. I also found important differences in women’s experiences specific to each city which can be stated as follows: marriage is seen as a duty for women in Shanghai, as an option for women in Hong Kong, and as a social expectation for women in Tokyo. I set myself the task of explaining these similarities and differences. When looking at the literature on singlehood, I found sociological explanations for singlehood that explain its rise in Western societies. I also found single-society studies that explain singlehood in isolation from regional and global demographic trends. Neither of these literatures explained to my satisfaction the similarities and differences I encountered. I considered each society’s political, economic, legal, and employment systems as a way to explain similarities and differences. These systems shaped women’s lives in important ways, but none sufficiently explained the “marriage regimes” I had found. These marriage regimes—or

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Introduction

3

the ways in which people in each society thought and talked about marriage and family—provided women with opportunities, limited women’s choices, and provided contexts for decision-making. A close study of these marriage regimes led me to see that the similarities I found across the three societies—for a major example, in all three cities, women wanted to marry yet faced difficulty in finding partners—could be explained by the contradictory expectations that all three societies place on women; women are granted freedom in personal decision-making, and they are expected to 1) succeed at education and work and 2) take primary responsibility for domestic labor—referring to childcare, elder care, and other supportive services in the home. I found that the differences in women’s experiences emerged from the different ways in which families in the three cities respond to the contradictory demands placed on women and families. Specifically, I noticed that families in the three societies organize single women’s domestic labor differently, and that these contrasting approaches gave rise to important variations in single women’s experiences across the three societies. In Shanghai, marriage is basically the only path through which single women enter into intergenerational caregiving relationships with family members, and thus marriage is a key symbol of commitment to family values. In Hong Kong, marriage is much less important in directing women into care relationships. Instead, single adult daughters, often even more so than married daughters, provide critical financial and social services to their parents and extended families. As a result, in Hong Kong, indefinite singlehood is normally accepted by families. In Tokyo, marriage is the only legitimate path for women to have children but is increasingly less important in determining women’s provision of elder care services. Instead, families may discuss and negotiate single women’s provision of elder care in exchange for inheritance. In these three societies, marriage has come to have different relationships to family care provision. Marriage is critical to intergenerational family care provision in Shanghai, while in Hong Kong and Tokyo, marriage is linked to childcare but increasingly delinked from elder care. My finding that single women’s experiences are deeply intertwined with their families differs from arguments made by some Western sociologists, such as Anthony Giddens (1991), Ulrich Beck (1992), Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002), and Ron Lesthaeghe (1995, 2014), who argue that increased singlehood, among other changes in Western societies, occurs due to the rise of individualism and a decline in traditional family structures. Many social theorists assume that social and demographic change such as

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Introduction

later marriage begins in the West and diffuses to other societies. 6 I found instead that the radical changes that have occurred in the institution of marriage—such as later marriage, rising divorce rates, and changed views of sexuality—differ in important ways from the experiences of change in North America and Europe.7 Recent studies show that modernity in Chinese societies leaves ample room for the continuity of selected traditional ideas and ways of organizing family—such as patriarchy and filial piety—within and through modern political-economic systems.8 This study provides insight into how and why globally occurring demographic changes—such as later marriage—lead to similar as well as distinctly different kinds of subjective experiences for single women across societies. In Making Our Own Destiny, I show that single women make decisions in the context of their sense of responsibility to their families and family caregiving. As their societies have allowed individuals greater freedom in their personal lives, many single women feel that they need not marry if an appropriate person does not appear. At the same time, their societies require that women participate in the caregiving of family members; thus, while marriage has become optional, caregiving remains mandatory—and a moral obligation— for many single women in the three societies in this study. Many studies on the rise in singlehood have focused on demographic changes. Others have explored single women’s opinions using statistics and surveys. Together these studies provide a powerful portrait of the scale of the growth of singlehood in East Asia. They provide insight into changes in single women’s views of marriage over time, and they contribute to our understanding of what women want in a partner and why they find it difficult to marry. They offer little perspective, however, on the lives of the women experiencing this demographic transition. Missing from the literature is ethnography that explores single women’s lived experience with a view to understanding what single women share in common across societies with similar traditions and how and why their experiences differ. In this book I convey what I learned about the aspirations and views of single women living in the three great East Asian cities of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo who hope to take advantage of opportunities to obtain an education and find meaningful work, while also expecting to perform service roles in their families. I explain how marriage is viewed differently in the three societies under study. I also show how the single women I met addressed competing expectations that they succeed at education and work while maintaining family as a priority, and how single women have addressed the different expectations of family service in the three societies.

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5

Finally, I explore how single women find ways to live meaningfully in societies that assign them value according to their contribution to their society’s economy and family care services.

Research Methods I could have conducted this study in any number of East Asia’s megacities since the age of first marriage for women is high across the region. I decided to compare the experience of singlehood for women in Tokyo and Hong Kong because I know these cities well. I am an anthropologist of Japan by training and have lived and worked in Hong Kong for over two decades. Women in Japan are often portrayed in academic and popular literature as relatively conservative, yet Japanese women marry later than in most other Asian societies. I chose to study Tokyo because women in the nation’s cultural and political capital marry later than in the rest of the country, and there are more single women in Tokyo than in any other place in Japan.9 Hong Kong is often said to provide more opportunities for women to succeed in the workplace than Japan, yet the two societies share similar trends in terms of the percentages of single women in the population and the average ages of first marriage for women. I obtained a research grant from the Hong Kong government to study changing values among single women in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and I began interviewing single women. After I interviewed dozens of single women in the two cities, it was clear to me that women in both cities were not interested in challenging gender roles; they wanted to marry and continue working, and they were looking for an appropriate partner and not finding one. I noticed that women in Hong Kong were open to marriage but most were fairly relaxed about it. In Tokyo, I found that some women were highly eager to marry, while others were hopeful but relaxed, and some thought that they would never marry. In conducting these interviews, I had learned a great deal but had difficulty accounting for the similarities and differences I had encountered. When giving public talks on my findings I was often encouraged by audience members to add a third city to the study: usually the city with which they were most familiar. Audience members suggested that I include Bangkok, Manila, New Delhi, Seoul, Taipei, or New York. I thought that adding a third city to the study would provide a clearer picture of how cities in East Asia shape single women’s experiences. I considered including Singapore, where average ages of marriage for women are high, or Seoul, where women face great pressure to marry. Eventually, I chose Shanghai as the third city.

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Introduction

By the mid-2000s, women were marrying increasingly later in China’s urban centers; women’s average ages of marriage had risen from the early twenties in the 1990s to the mid- to late twenties by 2010. Like Hong Kong, Shanghai is a developed, modern city that is a regional and national center for higher education, technological development, and industry. Shanghai has experienced dramatic social and cultural events over the past half-century: events shared by other cities in the People’s Republic of China, but not experienced by Hong Kong. These events include the Cultural Revolution (1966– 1976) and the explosion of economic growth following economic reforms and the opening of the country launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. In accordance with national directives, the Shanghai government had implemented birth control policies since 1979, the so-called “one-child policy,” until a loosening of regulations in 2016. Although Shanghai is a highly developed, modern city, like the rest of China its media, education, and economy are managed by the central government in Beijing. Hong Kong has had a very different experience. Hong Kong was a British colony for over 150 years (1842–1997) and escaped the social and economic turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. During the 1960s and 1970s, Hong Kong flourished as a market economy and emerged as a global financial service center in the 1980s. Hong Kong’s political, educational, social welfare, judicial, and legal systems were established during the British colonial period and were modeled on the British system. Hong Kong is now governed under the “one country, two systems” policy that holds that for fifty years after reunification with China, which took place in 1997, Hong Kong will maintain its political system inherited from the colonial period and manage its own legal, economic, and financial affairs. Youth-led protest movements in the mid- to late 2010s called for greater democracy and government accountability, and a national security law passed by the central government in Beijing in 2020 has created concern that Hong Kong people’s freedoms will be eroded. Nonetheless, Hong Kong continues to offer freedom of speech, press, assembly, and transnational movement to a much greater degree than mainland China. I wondered why cities with similar Chinese cultural traditions and different political and economic systems would come to share similar patterns of later marriage and increased singlehood. I chose to study cities rather than entire societies because cities attract single women and are centers of singles’ culture. Then, too, as smaller units than societies, cities are easier to compare. The three cities in this study are global cities, a term that describes a handful of the world’s cities that play a

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7

large role in the global economy and have undergone parallel changes in their economic, spatial, and social structures (Sassen 2001, 5). Saskia Sassen points out that global cities are highly competitive environments characterized by increased inequality as a result of the growth of high- and low-skilled sectors (2001, 341). They are educational hubs and provide opportunities for young women to rise into the white-collar professional class but they also create risk as women and men may fall into lower-paid work and poor housing, and suffer from inadequate social and financial support. The main research methods I used in this study were interviews and participant observation. In the interviews, I asked women about their experiences in work, family, education, and friendships. I asked about their hobbies and leisure activities, and what they thought about their futures. I asked how they viewed marriage and starting a family, and what made life meaningful. Whenever possible, I spent time with single women, usually at coffee shops, bars, and restaurants. I also visited women’s homes and offices and, when possible, met their friends, romantic partners, and parents. For most of the period when I was meeting and interviewing women, I was in my thirties and forties and unmarried, having divorced in my early thirties. My marital status and age helped me to get to know many of these women as friends, and I met some of them numerous times over the years. An ethnographic approach allowed me to obtain a sense not only of women’s opinions, but also about how women’s everyday lives compared in the three societies in the study. The women I met for this study mostly spoke as heterosexuals and a handful identified as lesbians. I believe that like any sample of the population, they represented a range of sexual orientations and gender perspectives. Regardless of how they viewed their sexuality or gender identity, they needed to address expectations that they enter heterosexual marriages. Feminist writers in the West, writing before the legalization of same-sex marriages in their societies, emphasized that marriage affects all women regardless of marital status or sexual orientation because all women have relationships to the institution of marriage and are judged in relation to men. “For all women,” wrote Joan Chandler, “marriage casts a long shadow” (1991, 2). Similarly, I found that while some women wished to marry, others hesitated, some resisted, and a very few rejected marriage, all women had a view of marriage. In relaying single women’s views, I do not mean to imply that any woman represents the views of other women in her society or of single women in general; each person represents only herself.10 Nonetheless, single women experienced similar

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Introduction

opportunities and restrictions in their families and in their societies because of their age, gender, and marital status. To this extent, I believe that it is valuable to look at single women’s experiences as a distinct category of analysis. In finding women to interview for my study, I tried to meet never-married women from different walks of life. In each society, I spoke to single women of different educational and family backgrounds. A little less than half of those I met had graduated from two-year colleges or four-year universities and about half were high school graduates. A handful had higher degrees such as a Ph.D. or an M.B.A. Most worked in white-collar or service-sector jobs. At the higher end of the income spectrum were women who worked as managers for international firms, as bankers in the finance industry, and as entrepreneurs running successful small businesses. In Shanghai, at the lower end of the salary scale, I met women who worked as department store clerks and factory workers. In Hong Kong, the lowest-paid women I met worked as cleaners and office clerks. In Tokyo, the lowest-paid women in my study worked as clerks on short-term contracts who were paid by the hour. I did not meet women at the highest echelons of wealth, such as those who did not need to work, nor did I meet women who were impoverished. I interviewed women who identified as “bar hostess” but none who saw themselves as sex workers. By defining my subject as “single women” I may have inadvertently excluded women who were the most impoverished in their societies, as such women may have married out of necessity and therefore would not have been included in my study. By single women, I refer to women who have never been married. I have chosen to focus on this category, rather than on all women who are not married—such as divorced and widowed women—because the category of “nevermarried” is meaningful in the societies under study. Although neutral words that correspond to the English word “single,” such as “danshen” in Chinese and “dokushin” in Japanese, are used with increasing frequency, the local languages of all three societies contain words that describe never-married people as individuals who are expected to marry but have not yet done so: “Weihun” refers to the “not-yet-married” in Standard Chinese. “Meif n” is used in Cantonese, and the word is “mikon” in Japanese.11 In everyday speech in all three societies, single women and men are asked if they have “married yet,” which implies that they should or will eventually marry. Governments of these societies also use these terms in statistics to categorize populations whom they expect will marry and reproduce. To find single women to interview, I used “snowball sampling”— I asked friends and women I interviewed to introduce me to their friends.

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9

Most women I met were from the majority ethnic populations in their city. In Shanghai, I interviewed women who were Han Chinese. In Hong Kong, nearly all of the women I met were Han Chinese and the great majority were born and raised in Hong Kong. In Tokyo, all the women I met were Japanese nationals. Some women may have been ethnic minorities but I was not able to identify them if they did not so identify themselves. In general, I found that women were happy to introduce their friends to me in all three cities. In order to obtain a comparative understanding of single women’s perspectives, I interviewed a few single men as well as married and divorced women. As their numbers are small and I did not collect enough information about their perspectives to make generalizations, I do not include information about their experiences in this book. I made an effort to interview women who were migrants to the cities under study as well as those who were “native”—meaning that they had grown up in the city and their parents lived there. In Shanghai and Tokyo, migrants make up a significant proportion of the population and face greater challenges than women who are native residents of the city. In these cities, approximately half of the women I interviewed were migrants. In Hong Kong, while the population consists largely of migrants who came in waves from mainland China over several generations, most young adults living in Hong Kong today have grown up in the city. In Hong Kong, most women I interviewed were born in Hong Kong, a small number were born in mainland China and raised in Hong Kong, and a few had come to the city as adults from mainland China and Japan. Migrants faced especially severe challenges in Shanghai. Migrants to Shanghai had come to the city from other parts of China, and most did not have official residency registration (hukou) in the city. Without residence registration in Shanghai, migrants face many obstacles that prevent their integration into the urban community. Typically, migrants without residence registration in China’s cities are forbidden entry into certain occupations; they are denied work-related entitlements to housing, medical care, pensions, and social security; they are often not allowed to buy or build property; and their children may be excluded from local subsidized education (Jacka and Gaetano 2004, 19–20). These restrictions mean that it is difficult for them to marry and raise a child in the city unless they are very wealthy or else their partner possesses Shanghai residency. Most migrant women I met lacked personal connections that would assist them in finding work, apartments, and spouses. Moreover, while most women who were “native” to Shanghai lived with their

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Introduction

parents—the generally accepted practice in all three cities–migrants had no choice but to live in apartments in a city with very expensive rental prices. Tokyo does not limit the rights of citizens according to residence, but migrants face challenges nonetheless. Migrants to Tokyo, most of whom had arrived from other parts of Japan as university students or as young adults looking for work, could not rely on living with their parents to save on rent and utilities or for social and psychological support. They needed to rent their own place, and although shared rental apartments (sheahausu) had become more acceptable, living with others in such accommodations or with a roommate remains uncommon. Although Hong Kong has been part of the People’s Republic of China since 1997 as a Special Administrative Region under the “one country, twosystems” policy, the Hong Kong government maintains control over its own borders, including its border with mainland China. Mainland China is Hong Kong’s largest source of migrants, but it is not easy for mainland citizens to move to Hong Kong to live and work. The Hong Kong government restricts immigration from mainland China, admitting small numbers of those with family members in the Region along with those who possess wealth or professional skills.12 Hong Kong is home to 325,000 domestic workers from Southeast Asia, primarily women from the Philippines and Indonesia (Research Office, Legislative Council Secretariat 2017, 1–3), but because these workers are not given a path to permanent residency by the Hong Kong government, and their situation differs considerably from local residents, I have not included them in my study. In each city, the majority of women I met did not have romantic partners at the time of the interview. In Shanghai, ten of the forty single women I interviewed had romantic partners. In Hong Kong, seven of the thirty-six women I interviewed had romantic partners, and in Tokyo, a little less than half, fourteen, of the thirty-three single women I interviewed had romantic partners. Of the 109 single women I interviewed, only one lived with a romantic partner, and none had children. The absence of single mothers in my sample is partly a product of the way I found study participants—I asked people to introduce me to single women, and not “single mothers,” as they are often called. The absence of never-married women living with a romantic partner or who had children, however, reflects their small numbers in their societies. As mentioned, in all three cities, never-married women bringing up children are a very small statistical minority, in contrast with many Western societies where they constitute a substantial part of the population of never-married women.13

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11

The majority of single women I met lived with their parents if they could. In Shanghai, of the seventeen women whose parents were also living in Shanghai, fourteen lived with their parents, two lived in rented apartments, and one lived in a condominium she had purchased. In Hong Kong, of twentythree single women who had family in the city, sixteen lived with parents or siblings or both. In Tokyo, of the twenty-five women whose parents lived in the city, twenty-two lived with their parents and three lived in rented apartments. Women who came to the cities from other regions lived in rented apartments, and they usually lived alone, although a very small number lived with siblings or friends.14 A small number in each city—two in Shanghai, six in Hong Kong, and two in Tokyo—lived in condominium apartments they had purchased. Those who had purchased condominiums tended to be older— over 35—and working in fairly well-paid jobs; they included a manager at an international firm, an instructor at a college, and an entrepreneur. In Hong Kong, three of the six women who owned the homes in which they lived had purchased their apartment at a subsidized rate through government-run public housing purchase schemes. In sum, in the three societies, very few had purchased their own apartments. Families do not encourage or assist women to purchase property, as they would for sons, and many women are reluctant to purchase property for fear that this may make it more difficult to marry or signal that they have given up on marrying (see Ronald and Nakano 2013). Failure to purchase property, as Fincher (2014) has pointed out, is a great disadvantage to women, especially in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where property is the principal source of wealth creation. In Tokyo, although property prices fell after the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s, prices have risen steadily since the early 2000s and remain a key means of growing and maintaining wealth. Single women in the three societies are missing out on this critical source of financial security. I conducted most of the interviews using the informant’s native language. My first language is English, and I speak the three main languages spoken by the women I met at various levels of proficiency. In Shanghai the interviews were conducted in Mandarin, also known as Standard Chinese, the official language of the People’s Republic of China, and English. When using Standard Chinese, I occasionally conducted interviews myself but when possible, I obtained help from research assistants who joined me in asking questions. In Shanghai, I interviewed one elderly amateur matchmaker who preferred to speak in the Wu Dialect used by many local families, and in that case a graduate student served as an interpreter. In Hong Kong, the

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Introduction

interviews were conducted in English and/or Cantonese (the native language of most Hong Kongers) according to the preference of the woman interviewed. Women sometimes started speaking in English and changed to Cantonese midway through the interview as they spoke more colloquially about their family relationships and experiences. In Hong Kong I was fortunate to have been occasionally joined by research assistants, who also asked questions and assisted in assembling the transcripts. In Tokyo, I did not have the good fortune of having research assistants, and I conducted the interviews myself. I am fluent in Japanese and nearly all the interviews with women in Japan were conducted in Japanese except in one instance when a woman wanted to practice her English. My own life experience and marital status were both similar to and different from that of my informants. During the period of research, I was a single woman living in Hong Kong, and before coming to Hong Kong, I had lived in Kyoto, Tokyo, and Yokohama. Like many of the women in my study, I was a migrant to the city in which I lived. Like my informants, I also thought about my priorities in managing work, marriage, and my relationships with my natal family. My experience differed from my informants in that I had grown up outside of East Asia—in Honolulu, Hawai‘i—and was educated in the United States. In some ways, my informants’ views of family, work, dating, and romantic relationships were very different from my own, and I felt that I had to learn what these women were thinking. I had various relationships with the women I interviewed. I did not interview women with whom I had established friendships before the start of the project, but some women became friends over the course of multiple meetings. Some saw me as a foreign professor. Some asked me for advice on their relationships, and some confided secrets that I believe they had told no one else, or at least very few people. A few asked me to introduce them to single men, which I did not do. Many asked me to share with them the results of my study as they were curious about what other single women were experiencing. By adopting anthropological research methods, I could get to know the perspectives of a small number of women relatively well. I learned about their concerns, disappointments, hopes, and dreams. In some cases, I met women in different situations such as with their friends, family, colleagues, romantic partners, and at their homes and workplaces. These experiences helped me to place women’s words and perspectives in a larger social context. The disadvantage of in-depth anthropological research, however, is that even after meeting over one hundred women, I have met only a very small number within their

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13

societies. They cannot represent all the single women in those societies, and I can write only about the women I interviewed and let the reader know about the patterns I observed. As I wanted to compare cultures, I was inevitably not able to fully explore the diversity within each society. As I have suggested in this introduction, some of the main differences within societies emerge from women’s status as either migrants or natives to the city, their educational background, income level, age, and generation. I address these differences to some extent in this book. For further exploration of diversity within each society, I direct readers to other studies that have more fully accomplished this task.15 In spite of the limitations of this study, I believe that cross-cultural comparison is an effective approach because of the power of marriage regimes in shaping life for single women in ways that are specific to each society.

Opportunities and Expectations for Young Women Around the world, young women are said to have more power than ever before to choose their life paths, obtain an education and meaningful work, enjoy consumption and leisure, and generally live more fulfilling lives.16 These developments are featured in books, TV shows, and movies—the “chick lit” genre— that celebrate young women’s choices. Famous examples include the Sex in the City TV series and movies, based on Candace Bushnell’s novel (2001), and the Bridget Jones’s Diary movies, based on Helen Fielding’s novel (1996).17 Highprofile sociologists (for example, Beck 1992; Giddens 1991, 1992) argue that young women in Western societies are released from their obligations within families, giving them greater autonomy and choices. To some degree this is true for the women I met. Nearly all felt that they have more choices than women of their mothers’ generation.18 In the three societies I studied, young women are encouraged to obtain an education, participate in the labor force, and consume material goods and services. Women I met had choices in what to study and where, which field or career to enter, where to travel and live, and when and whom to marry. That being said, single women who participated in this study also faced expectations that they choose “correctly” by finding a way to succeed in education and work and fulfill expectations that they prepare to serve as primary caregivers in families. Women in the cities in this study have been highly successful in obtaining an education. In Tokyo, where women’s levels of education are the highest in the nation, 48.5 percent of women aged 30 to 44 had obtained university or two-year college degrees in 2010 (Statistics of Japan 2016). In Japan as a whole, in 2017, women comprised 42 percent of university enrollment (Ministry of

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Introduction

Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology 2019). In Hong Kong, women comprise slightly more than 50 percent of students enrolled in postsecondary institutions (Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 2019, 61). In Shanghai, women comprise 47.6 percent of students enrolled in universities (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 2017) and the figure stands at 52.5 percent in China (People’s Daily 2017). In spite of these educational achievements, in all three societies women are not making equivalent strides at the workplace: women are underrepresented in management positions, fill less prestigious positions than men, are less likely to serve in positions of power, and earn substantially less than men. In China, since the founding of the People’s Republic, the government has made women’s workforce participation a priority—during the Mao era the state famously proposed that “women hold up half the sky.” Since the market-oriented reforms of the 1980s, and particularly after the privatization of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, however, women’s labor force participation rates have declined: Women’s employment rates peaked in the 1980s, with some studies finding more than 90 percent of urban women aged 15 to 55 in the workforce. By the mid-2000s, the rate had fallen some ten percentage points (Chen and Ge 2018), with the steepest declines occurring among women with young children (Liu et al. 2016). In urban China, the gender wage gap has been narrowing but women still earn 22.5 percent less than men (Xinhuanet 2019). In China as a whole, women comprise 25.8 percent of management positions (People’s Daily 2015) and 24.9 percent of the National People’s Congress (Di 2019), the county’s top legislative body. In Hong Kong, women earn 67.5 cents to every dollar earned by men, and only 55.1 percent of women participate in the labor force—the figure is even lower, at 50.8 percent, if foreign domestic workers are excluded— while 68.5 percent of Hong Kong men are employed (Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 2019, 1). Although the percentage of women in the total workforce has gradually increased in recent decades—rising from 37 percent to 45 percent between 1997 and 2018 (Research Office, Legislative Council Secretariat 2019, 3)—women’s labor force participation rates in Hong Kong are the lowest among the three cities in this study. In Shanghai, for example, labor force participation rates for women between the ages of 16 and 64 currently stand at 66.5 percent (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 2017). In Hong Kong, only 56.6 percent of mothers of children under the age of 14 are working (Research Office, Legislative Council Secretariat 2019). Studies find that low labor force participation rates among

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15

Hong Kong women are due to the expense and inflexibility of childcare services, as well as to employer discrimination against pregnant women and women with children (Research Office, Legislative Council Secretariat 2019). Moreover, a high proportion of Hong Kong women are employed in clerical support and low-skill occupations, areas in which women earn significantly less than their male counterparts (Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 2019, 261). At leadership levels in Hong Kong, women are underrepresented; they comprise only 17 percent of legislators, 35.2 percent of managers, and 31 percent of registered doctors (Women’s Commission 2018). In Japan, in spite of women’s increased labor force participation since the 1970s, in recent decades the percentage of women in lower-paid part-time positions has grown while percentages of women in better-paid, career track full-time positions have declined.19 This translates into reduced job stability and lower earnings for women. In 2017, women working full-time earned 73.4 cents on every dollar earned by men, and women aged 50–54 working parttime earned only 43 cents for every dollar earned by full-time male workers (Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare 2017). In Tokyo, and in Japan as a whole, many women leave the workforce temporarily to care for children, disrupting their careers in corporate systems that value continuity.20 In Japan, women are excluded from leadership positions; only 6.3 percent of businesses employ women in the position of section chief or above, and women comprise only 4.4 percent of national government ministry directors (Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office 2018). After 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s second administration (2012–2020)21 promoted the so-called “womenomics” policy that set targets for filling senior positions with women in public and private sectors. The policy has not brought about substantial improvement in women’s ability to achieve leadership posts because it does not impose penalties on institutions that don’t meet its targets, and fails to address the core issue that most women workers are not engaged in elite positions but are employed in part-time work (Dalton 2017). In all three societies, single women have increased opportunities as well as expectations. Discussing Western societies, McRobbie uses the term “double entanglement” (2004, 255; 2009, 19) to describe the coexistence of (1) neoliberal expectations that women fully explore their choices in domestic, sexual, and kinship relationships, and (2) neoconservative values that emphasize marriage and caregiving roles for women (2004, 255). Referring to the newspaper column, book, and movie series Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding 1996),

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Introduction

McRobbie shows how young women are expected to have a life plan, self-regulate, and select the “correct” life path. The women in this study, like those in the West (McRobbie 2004, 2009; see also Sharff 2012), are told that they are free to choose but are expected to “choose well.” The situation for women in the East Asian societies in my study differs, however, from that described by McRobbie. In the societies in this study, marriage and family care service are not only personal decisions but are tied to national aims and agendas that revolve around economic achievements as well as gender-based role assignments. Single women elicit attention in East Asia and elsewhere because they represent the weaknesses of contemporary socioeconomic systems that rely on women to participate in the economy, reproduce, and care for families. Governments rely on a gender-role division for their societies’ economic development yet lack rational justification for making these gender-role assignments; single women emerge as an easy target for the logical contradictions that lie at the heart of their societies’ capitalist developmental models.

The State Withdraws from Personal Decision-Making Only a few generations ago in the societies in this study, marriage was virtually universal and was often arranged by the couple’s parents. Parents routinely helped their adult children find appropriate partners, and a person who met objective criteria of age and educational level and who had a generally acceptable physical appearance, would be appropriate as a spouse. Romantic passion was not necessary, and marriage was seen to consist of relationships between families as much as it involved the relationship between the couple. This approach to marriage has largely disappeared in the three societies under study. While considered an ideal and often taken-for-granted life path, marriage has nonetheless become optional in Hong Kong and to a growing degree in Tokyo as well. In Shanghai, although women face pressure to marry, it is understood that women may choose to remain single. Along with this shift, in the three cities studied here individuals are expected to find partners on their own. Parents, family members, friends, or commercial matchmaking services may provide assistance, but the task and final decision is understood to be the responsibility of the individual who wishes to marry. In China over the past seventy years or so, although reproductive choices have been limited by the state, individuals gained greater freedoms in spouse selection, the timing of dating and marriage, and the ability to divorce. One of the first laws implemented by the Chinese Communist Party, established in 1949, was the 1950 Marriage Law, which aimed to dismantle the traditional

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17

marriage system by prohibiting arranged marriage, polygamy, and concubinage. The law held that marriage should be the decision of an adult man and woman and not be controlled by their families (Cai and Feng 2014, 99; Jacka, Kipness, Sargeson 2013, 41). During the Maoist period, the state intervened in individuals’ life paths by providing work and housing assignments, and it helped young people find marriage partners by promoting a mass-dating culture (Zhang and Sun 2014, 136). In an effort to control population growth and enable economic development, the government implemented birth control policies beginning in 1979. In the same period, the state pushed for greater recognition of individual rights. The 1980 Marriage Law, for example, permitted divorce entirely on the basis of the breakdown of affection between partners even when only one spouse sought the dissolution of the marriage (Davis and Friedman 2014, 12). With the decline of the Maoist state, people in China have been released from traditional structures of family and work, and they have obtained freedoms in their personal lives (Yan 2003, 2010). Mass-dating culture supported by state-run industries no longer assists young people to find spouses. Today, marriage is understood to involve a process of seeking individual happiness through scrutinizing the qualities of the potential spouse (see Zhang and Sun 2014). The state has made spousal choice, marital happiness, and the right to divorce issues that belong to the realm of individual responsibility. Davis and Friedman call this trend the “general privatization of the institution of marriage” (2014, 554). From the state’s perspective, however, individuals who are released from state control—such as where to work and whom to marry—are expected to “take more responsibility and proactive actions for the sake of achieving the wealth and power of the nation-state” (Yan 2010, 509). They are expected, in other words, to use their freedoms to devote themselves to the modernization of the country. In Japan, as well, the government has gradually withdrawn from direct intervention in family decision-making. The New Civil Code of 1947 officially dismantled the stem family (ie) system, which was based on senior male authority over its members, and created a system in which new families are formed through marriage. In practice, the ie system has continued, as eldest sons are often expected to inherit the family home and take on responsibilities such as elder care (Ronald and Alexy 2011, 5). In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the family model in which a full-time working husband supports a stay-at-home wife who raises the children became the social ideal. This model was seen as the basis of Japan’s postwar stability and successful economic development (Aoyama, Dales, and Dasgupta 2015; Ochiai

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1997; Ronald and Alexy 2011; White 2002). In the rapid growth period of the 1960s, the concentration of power and resources among corporations and the state led to the standardization of marriage timing among white-collar workers—nearly everyone married and had children within the same narrow age range. In recent decades, however, this family ideal has weakened and families have become increasingly diverse and fragmented (Ronald and Alexy 2011, 17). The culture of neighborhood matchmakers and paternalistic corporate matchmaking that assisted young people in finding spouses a few decades ago has nearly disappeared. In its place are commercial matchmaking services, but the emphasis lies on the individual’s responsibility to use these services to find the individual uniquely suited to them. In Hong Kong, the British colonial government was selectively involved in the marriage and family practices of Chinese subjects to the extent that this served its interests (Ngo 1999). Until as recently as 1971, the colonial government recognized various kinds of Chinese marriages, including customary marriage, concubinage, and second wives. Following the adoption of the Marriage Reform Ordinance in 1971, only monogamy was recognized, and courts began to recognize no-fault unilateral divorce if a couple lived separately for five years (Davis and Friedman 2014, 13). As Hong Kong developed into an industrial economy in the 1950s and 1960s, families served as the central institution responsible for organizing the social and economic life of individuals. Described as “familism” by Lau (1981) and the “centripetal family” by Salaff (1995 [1981]), this family system also managed marriage timing and guided spousal choice. At the same time, young women’s engagement in paid factory work gave women and their families incentives to delay marriage because early marriage would mean that adult daughters would stop or reduce payments of wages to their parents. By the 1990s, as Hong Kong had become a global financial center, young women could fairly easily ignore requests by family members that they marry. Matchmaking by friends and family members declined. Marriage came to be seen as a personal choice rather than a family or social obligation. With the withdrawal of direct state intervention in individual decisionmaking, ideas about marriage and sexuality in the societies under study have dramatically changed. In the 1980s premarital sexual relations were not condoned in the societies under study but today to a certain degree premarital sex is accepted in all three societies. In Shanghai and China as a whole, virginity for women is still valued by some (Farrer 2006a), but is no longer expected of unmarried women in Hong Kong and Tokyo.22 Divorce rates have risen. In

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19

all three cities, about one in three marriages ends in divorce.23 Transnational relationships have become increasingly common, and among young people there is greater acceptance of LGBTQ sexual orientations and relationships; LGBTQ movements have grown in Hong Kong, Japan, and many other places in East Asia. That being said, the governments of these societies support and control the family system by preventing and undermining family forms that do not conform to the model in which a heterosexual couple cares for children and the elderly. The governments and medical authorities of China, Japan, and Hong Kong restrict single women from using reproductive technologies to conceive.24 In China, the rights of children born out of wedlock are not fully protected (Kam 2020; Liu and Zhang 2019). In East Asia, only Taiwan has recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry.25 In the societies in this study, many LGBTQ couples conceal their relationships, and gays and lesbians commonly enter heterosexual marriages and raise children to meet family expectations (see Chalmers 2002; Cho 2009; Kam 2013; Engebretsen 2017).26 The legal systems of these societies aim to insure that the heterosexual family is the only legally sanctioned arena for intimate relationships and a privileged space in which nonpaid caregiving occurs.

The Family and State Developmental Models The governments of the three societies in this study place enormous pressure on families. Opting for developmental models that avoid the expenses of a welfare state, the governments in the societies under study have idealized families as the centerpiece of national development, assigned families the task of caregiving and social welfare, and romanticized families for performing an unequal gendered division of labor in which women engage in paid labor as well as serve as caregivers. Families, and in particular, women in families, have been assigned the tasks of reproducing, nurturing, and supporting the labor force.27 Aihwa Ong writes that in places like Singapore, Malaysia, and China, the state promotes “the romance of the invented Confucian family” (1999, 152)—characterized by feminine domesticity and masculine public life— through ideological pronouncements and educational, housing, and savings policies. The intended effect is to combine a “moral economy of the family with the moral economy of the state” (Ong 1999, 152). In China, state rhetoric in recent decades has focused on improving the “quality” (suzhi in standard Chinese)28 of the population (Anagnost 1997, 137; Yan 2008, 113)—referring to the “somewhat ephemeral qualities of civility,

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self-discipline and modernity” (Yan 2008, 113)—through naturalized gender roles within the family: specifically, “the reproductive woman, charged with reducing the fertility rate, the quality single child, responsible for the future of family and the nation; and the good mother, tasked with nurturing the quality child” (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005, 30; italics in the original). In the 1980s and 1990s, the state shifted responsibility for individual welfare from state-run agricultural cooperatives and business to families. The burdens upon Chinese families have been exacerbated by birth control policies that have left singleton children responsible for the welfare of parents and grandparents. In 2016, the Chinese government loosened birth control regulations, allowing couples to have two children. While this measure may assist adults in caring for their parents in the next generation, it does not greatly change the pressing needs of families today; the generation of women currently in their thirties and forties will need to care for their parents and grandparents without help from siblings. Private care services for the elderly are beginning to emerge as a major industry, but most people in China rely on family members for care services, with women assigned primary caregiving roles. 29 In Hong Kong, both the British colonial government before 1997 and the post-1997 government of the Special Administrative Region have emphasized the family as the bedrock of the society and the means through which care services are provided. In the postwar period, the colonial government provided individuals with minimal social welfare supports, but only when forced to do so, such as following massive rioting in 1966 and 1967.30 Since the handing over of Hong Kong from British colonial rule to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, Hong Kong’s social security expenditure has remained small, as the government encourages families to take care of the elderly and disabled through housing allocation, taxation policies, and limited social service provision (C. K. Chan 2011; R. Chan, 2011, 151–155).31 Direct subsidies from the government such as social welfare provisions have been presented as “charity” rather than as basic rights (Ku and Ngai 2004, 4; Chung and Ngai 2007, 71). In pursuing economic development as the city’s defining aspiration, successive government administrations have encouraged Hong Kong people to be modern, flexible, autonomous, and rational individuals capable of succeeding in the economic environment; in short, the “enterprising individual” (Ku and Ngai 2004, 6; Hui 2004). While women are encouraged to embark on the path of economic achievement alongside men (see Chan 2004 on gender and class differences), the Hong Kong government has nonetheless assumed a gendered division of labor in which women take primary responsibility for

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21

family caregiving. A 2019 research report published by the Legislative Council Secretariat, for example, points to the need for better childcare facilities to assist working mothers (Research Office, Legislative Council Secretariat 2019) but does not challenge assumptions that childcare is a mother’s duty. Over the past few decades, the government has taken a more active role in supporting families by regulating and subsidizing NGOs that provide elder care services (R. Chan, 2011, 161). Private sector elder care services are widely utilized, and many families hire foreign domestic workers to assist with childcare and elder care. Nonetheless, women in the family are held responsible for the quality of care and remain the primary care providers in Hong Kong (R. Chan, 2011). In Japan, government agencies have consistently maintained that women should take responsibility for reproduction and caring for families (Garon 1997, 227). The Japanese government’s postwar mission of economic reconstruction was based on a gendered division of labor in which men contributed to the building of the economy while women managed the home and provided a cheap, flexible labor force (Brinton 1992). In the 1950s and 1960s the Japanese state maintained a policy of relying on families for social welfare while providing very little state support. This policy was possible at the time because the population was still relatively young and the nation was experiencing rapid economic growth (Peng 2002). By the 1980s, however, a “textbook case of the family care crisis” (Peng 2002, 419) had developed in which the number of elderly in need of care was rising as more women worked outside the home, state spending on institutional and public care services was reduced, and private care was nonexistent. Rather than create a modern welfare system, the Japanese government of the 1980s attempted to bolster the family system based on a gendered division of labor that had emerged in the early postwar period (Ochiai 2014a). Women’s role in the home today continues to be supported by taxation policies that penalize married women who earn more than a part-time wage.32 In the 1990s, the government’s approach to social welfare shifted from nonintervention to providing substantive support for families through childcare and elder care programs (Peng 2016, 281). In 2000, the government launched a national long-term care insurance scheme, which provides benefits that include institutional, home, and community-care services to persons aged 65 years and older. In spite of these interventions, as in Shanghai and Hong Kong the family in Japan remains the primary unit of care services, and women comprise the great majority of caretakers (see Long, Campbell, and Nishimura 2009).

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The governments of the societies in this study idealized families during periods of high economic growth with relatively young populations. Many East Asian societies, however, including the three in this study, have entered a period of slow economic growth and population aging. Japan’s population is the oldest in the world, with approximately 27 percent of the population aged 65 or older (Statistics Bureau of Japan 2018). In Hong Kong, the percentage of elderly aged 65 and above is expected to double between 2018 and 2038, when elderly persons will constitute 31.9 percent of the population (Wong and Yeung 2019). In China, it is estimated that one-third of the population will be over the age of 60 by 2050 (Zhang 2019). Families are now seen to be in peril (Chang 2010a, 2010b, 2014). Sociologist of Korean society Kyung-Sup Chang writes that the very success of East Asian families as “an engine of compressed modernity” has led to their becoming “functionally overloaded and socially risk ridden” (2014, 38).33 Chang argues that families in South Korea and in East Asia as a whole have been asked to take on too many complex functions, leading individuals to distance themselves from the pressures of families through low fertility, divorce, and later marriage (2014, 38). Failure to reproduce is a central concern to all the societies in this study. Birthrates in Hong Kong and Shanghai are among the lowest in the world.34 While low fertility is particularly threatening to countries such as Singapore and Japan that have resisted opening the country to immigration, the governments of China and Hong Kong are also concerned with the reproduction of the population, especially the urban middle class. In Japan, single women are seen by the state as the only route to reproduction due to political unwillingness to welcome immigration and to stigma against births outside of wedlock (Hertog 2009). As birthrates in Japan have fallen, conservative commentators and politicians emphasize women’s responsibilities to reproduce and assume childcare duties.35 In China, as mentioned, the state focuses on reproducing a “high quality” population by pressuring educated, urban women to marry and give birth in a heterosexual marriage, and Hong Kong government policies focus on maintaining stable families that produce highly educated children and provide care for the elderly. In these societies, certain forms of reproduction are desirable while other forms are unwanted and at times actively prevented.36 The societies in this study developed with young populations and fastgrowing economies but are now experiencing population aging and economic slowdown characteristic of mature economies. In the increasingly fluid and competitive global economy, they now experience precarious job markets,

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spiraling housing prices, and high costs of education, childcare and elder care that place unprecedented burdens on families. Yet the definition of the family that emerged during the earlier developmental period remains basically unchanged. Their governments have not adequately addressed contradictions between expectations that women actively participate in the economy while simultaneously taking primary responsibility for domestic duties. Alternative forms of families such as queer and single-parent formats have not been accommodated. These macro-level problems are not of single women’s making, but single women are often blamed; it is as if their marriages would resolve the larger problems that their societies and the global economy have created. Single women are seen as disruptive in their societies because they symbolize the weaknesses of their societies’ developmental models.

Negative Stereotypes: Leftovers and Losers In all three societies the rise in the numbers of single women generates anxiety, and this anxiety can be seen in negative stereotypes. In Shanghai, single women are described as “shengnü” meaning “leftover women,” a term that has been promoted by the state-run All-China Women’s Federation (Fincher 2014, 2–3; To 2015, 1). The Chinese Ministry of Education defines shengnü as “urban professional women who are over 27 years old who have high educational level, high salary, high intelligence, and attractive appearance but also overly high expectations for marriage partners, and hence are ‘left behind’ in the marriage market” (To 2015, 1). The term has a pejorative connotation suggesting that the woman has missed the opportunity to marry, and in popular usage, also suggesting that she is not sufficiently attractive to find a partner or has been too picky (Luo and Sun 2015, 244). The term is used to show that “remaining single is abnormal and represents failure as a woman” (Zhang and Sun 2014, 125). Shengnü are discussed at length in online forums, used to promote matchmaking services, and are featured in TV dramas as well as in an extremely popular matchmaking TV show, Fei cheng wu rao (If you are the one), produced by Jiangsu TV, in which twenty-four women compete for one man.37 In local speech, the term “lao gu niang,” literally “old girl,” continues to be used in Shanghai (Kam 2013, 64), depicting overage unmarried women as unattractive, unskilled in interpersonal relationships, and suffering from poor health and personality defects (Kam 2013, 65; Engebretsen 2017, 170). In Hong Kong, popular and social media label Hong Kong women, both married and single, as “gong neuih” (literally, Hong Kong woman) and zung neuih (middle-aged woman),38 suggesting that Hong Kong women are

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materialistic, temperamental, and selfish. Hong Kong’s main Cantoneselanguage broadcaster, TVB, produced a series of popular primetime documentaries39 that helped launch these new Cantonese terms. Many of the programs present Hong Kong women as educated, independent, and successful in their careers, yet unable to marry, and thus unfulfilled. Some programs featured clueless single women learning how to please a man culminating in a finale in which she goes on a date. Crasser portrayals of single women on the internet depict them as self-centered, shallow, brand-obsessed, critical of men, unreasonable, and demanding. The 2019 youth-led protest movements that began peacefully but led to violent confrontations between protestors and police created a twist to the stereotype. Young women arrested by police or photographed alongside men on the frontlines were labeled “gong neuih” in newspaper headlines that suggested that while their bodies may be vulnerable, they possess a fighting spirit equal to that of men. TV programs and internet forums target single men as well, creating the nickname in Cantonese “gong naamh” (Hong Kong man), and criticizing Hong Kong men for being unsuccessful in their careers, immature, obsessed with computer games, comics, and Japanese pornography, unattractive, and having low career potential. Although both women and men are criticized in popular media, single women are more often targeted, reflecting society-wide ambivalence about women’s financial independence, and anxiety about Hong Kong women’s supposed disinterest in pleasing men and serving in subservient, supportive roles. In Japan, not all words representing single women are negative. In the latter half of the 2000s, the word “arafo” has been used to describe single and married women. A combination of the English words, “around 40,” the term appeared in popular TV dramas, some of which suggested that marriage and family may not be the only path to happiness for women.40 The word “ohitorisama,” coined by the late journalist Kumiko Iwashita (2001) and used by Tokyo University sociologist and feminist Chizuko Ueno (2007), suggests that marriage is no longer inevitable and that women may enjoy acting independently (Dales 2014, 227; 2015, 28).41 More often, however, unmarried women and men have been described in negative terms. In the 1990s, they were described as the “unmarried aristocracy” (dokushin kizoku; Miyamoto, Iwagami, and Yamada 1997) and linked to marriage postponement (bankonka) and decreasing birthrates (shoshika; Coulmas 2007, 10). In the 2000s, single women have been called “parasites” following the publication of the book “The Age of Parasite Singles” (Parasaito shinguru no jidai) by sociologist Masahiro Yamada (1999). Yamada pointed out that unmarried adult

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children who live with their parents contribute relatively little toward housing and utility expenses and are financially comfortable. He argued that they spend on luxury items for themselves rather than establish families and purchase more expensive household appliances. Although his book explained that large numbers of both women and men may be characterized as “parasites,” the media primarily used the term to describe women. The publication of the popular book by Junko Sakai, “The Distant Cry of Loser Dogs” (Makeinu no t boe), in 2003 led to the widespread use of the term “loser dogs” to describe single women in popular media and in everyday conversation. A single woman herself, Sakai argued that single women are stronger and truer to themselves than women who marry, as she contends that many women enter marriages primarily for security and self-protection. Sakai wrote that single women are “losers” because they struggle in the labor market as they age while married women may rely on the social status and financial support of their husbands. Although Sakai used the term as an ironic, tongue-in-cheek commentary on the negative views of single women in society, the term was taken up by the media devoid of ironic sympathy and merely as a negative descriptor of single women.42 In 2008 Masahiro Yamada, the same sociologist who wrote “The Age of Parasite Singles,” along with journalist Touko Shirakawa, launched a new term into popular vocabulary, “marriage hunting,” following the publication of their book “The Age of ‘Marriage Hunting’” (Konkatsu jidai) in 2008. The book argues that the economic environment has made it more difficult for young men to find well-paying, secure jobs while women still look for potential spouses able to support them as full-time housewives. Given these discrepancies in expectations, the authors argue, women and men must make a concerted effort to find marriage partners.43 The term “marriage hunting” is a play on the Japanese word for “job hunting” and suggests that one must have a strategy, planning, and professional execution to find the right match. The word has been used to promote matchmaking services as well as TV dramas, guidebooks, and consumer products.44 The enormous amount of negative commentary on single women contrasts with the relative lack of attention paid to single men. Single men are sometimes described in negative terms such as guanggun (literally, “bare branches,” referring to a lower-class man unable to reproduce) in China. In Hong Kong, low-achieving men may be described as “lou,” referring to men of lower socioeconomic status (see Ho 2014). In Japan, some men—both married and single—are characterized as “otaku,” referring to men who are obsessed with anime and video games and lack social skills but in recent years the term

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is also used in a more neutral way to describe men and women with specialized knowledge and interests. In general, single men are not discussed nearly as much in the popular media as single women. Zhang and Sun (2014, 125) point out that young, attractive and wealthy single men in China are admired as “golden bachelors” or “diamond single men.” Young men may be criticized for their lack of ambition, sex drive, or ability to succeed in society but they are generally not criticized for being single. The media’s focus on single women would make one think that single women are solely responsible for the rising age of marriage. Yet this is far from the truth. In all three societies, single men greatly outnumber single women. In Tokyo in the 30- to 34-year-old age range in 2016, for example, 50.3 percent of men had never been married compared to 39.5 percent of women (Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health 2016). In Hong Kong in 2016, 49.4 percent of men of this age group had never been married compared to 37.4 percent of women (Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 2018a). Single women are seen as highly threatening to the social order in ways that single men are not: singlehood in women raises fears that women may be unwilling to fulfill their caregiving responsibilities to families; responsibilities that are not expected of men.

Solutions and Approach When I first started this project, I was impressed by the similarities in the setting and atmosphere of the interviews across the three societies. In all three cities, I met women at places like Starbucks coffee shops in city centers or shopping malls, or at casual restaurants for dinner after work. The women I met on the whole were sociable and attractive, and most were curious about my research and open to answering my questions. They told me about their jobs, families, current and past romantic relationships, hobbies, leisure activities, and dreams for the future. They shared similar concerns about facing challenges at work, and many were worried about getting married but had different approaches to marriage. Some women said that they were not particularly interested in marriage, some very much wanted to marry, and many others said that they had assumed that they would marry and found themselves unexpectedly single. As I met more women in the three cities, I was struck by differences in their approaches to marriage and life that were specific to each city. In Shanghai, many women spoke about marriage as if it were inevitable. Many assumed that they would marry regardless of their feelings for their partner

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even as they hoped to find a partner for whom they had feelings. The “inevitability” of marriage is reflected in statistics that show that women in China, including Shanghai, marry in a narrower age range than elsewhere in Asia, basically through their twenties, and only a tiny portion remain single at age 30 (Jones and Gubhaju 2009, 240; Zhang and Gu 2007, 136). In Shanghai, women said they felt pressure to marry, and nearly all women I met said that they intended to marry. In Hong Kong, women were in general much more relaxed when they spoke about marriage. They would marry, many said, only if the appropriate person appeared, and they saw singlehood as an acceptable way for a woman to live a happy and fulfilling life. In Tokyo, single women I met saw marriage as the “normal” path to happiness for women, but there was considerable diversity in how they spoke about marriage. Some were eager to marry and anxious to find a partner before it became too late according to local marriage markets. Others were relaxed about marriage and thought they would only marry if they met an appropriate partner. Although individual views of marriage differed, there were, nonetheless, clear differences in the overall patterns in the three cities. In Shanghai, single women told me that there was basically only one life path expected of women. That is, they were expected to marry, have children, and find happiness through an intergenerational family. Even if women rejected this life path, they understood that it was the dominant path and it would be a struggle to live any other life. In Hong Kong, single women saw their lives as part of their natal and extended families. Their educations, careers, and family care services occurred in the context of the support they gave and received in these family relationships. Because extended family relationships were women’s main source of meaning and support, many women and their families in Hong Kong saw marriage as optional. In Tokyo, single women thought that they were expected to marry and create a new family by having children, and if they remained single, they were often puzzled about how to articulate life meanings. At the same time, many single women in Tokyo felt that it was their responsibility to care for aging parents, especially if they were living with or near their parents and were suitably situated—by geography, temperament, or family situation—to provide such care. In trying to make sense of the many differences and similarities I found in women’s lives across the three cities, I draw on an approach that Michael Burawoy calls “extended case study” (1991b) in which ethnography is used to compare similar situations, with a view to understanding differences between the cases (1991a, 1991b). The usual social science approach, taken by

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sociologists such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, attempts to generate social theory by discovering commonalities among societies. In his extended case study approach, Burawoy contends instead that we may look at differences among similar cases (1991b, 281) as a way to question existing explanations for social situations (1991a). Following this approach, I focus on identifying differences in the experiences of single women in the three cities and the reasons for these differences.45 Comparing the societies in this way led me to conclude that the immediate source of differences between single women’s experiences in the three societies lies not in political or economic systems but in the ways that families organize to provide social, economic, and moral support to its members. The governments of these societies expect families, and specifically women, to perform complex duties including participating in the labor force, acting as consumers, and providing care services for their families. Global capitalism and neoliberal policies of the 1990s intensified pressures placed on families as East Asian governments resisted developing systematic welfare systems. In East Asia, the exploitation of gendered differences has been central to many societies’ developmental models, perhaps due to the compressed nature of modernization in these societies (Chang 2014).46 In any case, governments in the societies under study have decided to depend on women’s labor in families rather than develop social welfare systems. Single women’s experiences in the three cities differ, I argue, because states provide minimal social welfare provisions and emphasize the responsibility of families to provide social welfare for its members.47 With limited state support, families in this study shoulder heavy economic and social obligations. In response, families in the three cities have adopted distinctive ways of organizing women’s labor. These different styles of family organization have had an enormous impact on the lives and experiences of single women. In Shanghai, the main form of family is the intergenerational family in which grandparents provide extensive care for grandchildren while the young adult couple focuses on employment (Chen, Liu, and Mair 2011). Relationships of care in which grandparents care for grandchildren—and in turn expect to receive care from their children and grandchildren—are organized through marriage. As described by Fong, women who grew up in urban China in the 1980s and 1990s as singleton daughters without siblings have been expected to be “the main source of their parents’ post-retirement income, medical payments, and nursing care” (Fong 2004, 28). Parents invested most of their resources into their only children, who in turn have been expected to

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support parents, grandparents, parents-in-law, and grandparents-in-law (2004, 28) By remaining unmarried, single women prevent their parents from entering into what Croll describes as an “inter-generational contract” (2006) of reciprocal care. In Shanghai, pressure on women to marry may be the greatest among the three cities because marriage is seen as the only entry point into caregiving relationships. In Hong Kong, most adult women have siblings with whom they share elder care and, sometimes, childcare duties. Siblings and extended family may jointly shoulder the financial costs of educating children and providing housing and care services for elderly parents. In Hong Kong, it is not necessary for a woman to marry to enter into care duties because unmarried women have their own, clearly demarcated path to providing care services and making financial contributions to their natal families. Women who marry would be expected to provide care services for the family of procreation— her husband and children and possibly her husband’s family members—and marriage might lead families to excuse married daughters from providing caregiving services and financial transfers to her natal family. In other words, compared to women in the other two cities, Hong Kong women may be freer from expectations that they marry, but they are not free from expectations that they serve their natal and extended family members. Pressures to marry in Hong Kong are low, perhaps in part because marriage commonly leads to a reduction of a woman’s caregiving duties to her natal and extended family; single women are more reliable care service providers to their natal families than their married sisters. In Tokyo today, and Japan as a whole, marriage is the only way for women to raise a child and become involved in childcare provision, and many women said that they wanted to marry because they wanted to have a child. The path to elder care services, however, has become more varied. In the early postwar period, the ideal model of family care involved a three-generational family in which the eldest son and his wife provided care for the elderly couple, with actual care delivered by the son’s wife (Sodei 1995). This model remains ideal for some, but today with small families, fewer available caretakers, and considerable geographical mobility that takes adults away from their parents’ place of residence, it is less clear who should provide elder care services. Studies also show that many elderly people prefer that their spouse or their own child provide elder care rather than an in-law (K. S. Lee 2016, 144). With the breakdown in cultural consensus regarding who should provide elder care, adult daughters, including single women, emerge as possible caregivers.

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In this book, I am not greatly concerned with answering the question of why singlehood is increasing in the societies under study. The reasons for delayed marriage in these societies and around the world are complex and related to global changes such as rising levels of education for women, smaller families, urbanization, and the neoliberal systems that encourage individual choice. In my interviews, I did not ask women “why are you single?” because the question contains the assumption that women should be married, an assumption that I did not wish to introduce into the interviews. That being said, in the course of conversation, women often told me stories of their romantic experiences and they sometimes supplied explanations for their singlehood. Most of the explanations had to do with simply not meeting a person whom they thought they could marry. Women also pointed to structural factors—that their work kept them too busy to find time to date and marry, and that men’s overinvolvement in their work made them unavailable for serious relationships. Some pointed out that men their age were interested in women who were less educated and younger than themselves, and that their “marriageable age” (usually referring to their twenties through their mid-thirties) had passed and it had become difficult to find a spouse since men are not interested in women their age. Sociologists have addressed the question of why women remain single in the societies under study. Studies of singlehood in Japan find that gender inequality and discriminatory expectations of women in marriage (Tsuya 2017; Yoshida 2017) make it difficult for women to find partners as men look for younger and less accomplished women. Some studies find that single women in Japan are unwilling to accept domineering, sexist, or unpleasant partners (see Nakano 2011; Nemoto 2008, 226). Other studies show single women in Japan wish to delay marriage and enjoy a longer period of autonomy before marriage, which will require them to serve in a subordinate and domestic role (Tsuya and Mason 1995, 161; Ohashi 1993, 8). Yamada argues that Japan’s economy and shrinking employment opportunities for men have led to a situation in which women are unable to find male partners whose income would enable them to become full-time housewives (1999). Yoshida proposes that gender segregation at work and long working hours for men result in poor social skills that make such men unattractive partners (2011, 221–224; 2017, 60). A few studies have looked at marriage from men’s perspectives. Nemoto, Fuwa, and Ishiguro (2013) argue that men in stable employment in Japan see marriage as involving a gendered division of labor in which women support their husbands, yet they are unconvinced that marriage would benefit them.

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Cook (2016) points out that some underemployed men in Japan are reluctant or unable to marry due to their insecure employment prospects (see also Tsuya 2017, 2–3). Studies of single women in Hong Kong and China show that single women are generally conservative and want to marry but are discouraged by the unattractive gendered expectations of marriage.48 Ng and Ng (2004) find that in Hong Kong, women prefer to marry, but their “pragmatic individualized” strategies (2004, 13), which help them to succeed at work, do not help them to find romantic partners because the realm of romance and family is dominated by conventional social codes which they do not challenge. Wong concludes that single women in Hong Kong are postponing, not abandoning, marriage, and that women with higher levels of education tend to marry later but also express a strong inclination toward marriage (2003; 2005). In Shanghai, Sandra To finds that educated single women give up opportunities to marry because men and their families make harsh patriarchal demands that they give up their careers and “follow their husbands” (2015, 79). These studies show a pattern that single women struggle in discriminatory marriage and family systems in their societies. In this respect, single women in the three societies have much in common. My purpose in this book is to build on these studies to consider single women’s views—not only of marriage— but also to understand how they view themselves as moral persons, what they find meaningful in their lives, and how they contribute to their families and their societies. In discussing the state’s withdrawal from intervening in individual decision-making, I am not suggesting that state power has weakened in East Asia.49 As sociologist Youyenn Teo has written of Singapore (2010; 2013), state policies have failed to reverse fertility decline or encourage marriage. Fertility continues to decline in countries where women have expanded opportunities combined with a “traditional” gendered division of labor (McDonald 2000; 2013). Nonetheless, in the case of Singapore, Teo argues, family policies generate important “latent effects” (2013, 2); in the process of responding to society’s rules and regulations that attempt to manage family life, Singaporeans develop collective habits, norms, and beliefs (Teo 2013, 2). In the societies in this study, a similar argument can be made. Profamily policies do not convince women to marry, but they create widespread acceptance of expectations that women should obtain an education and decent work and provide care services for family members if the need arises. Women in the three societies accepted that their value in their families and in society could be negotiated through

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their performance of family service. In the intimate spaces of their relationships with their parents, siblings, and significant others, some women questioned the timing and format in which they would provide such services and some challenged gender inequality in their own families. Yet nearly all the women I met accepted the gendered division of labor in their societies and their moral obligations to provide care services to family members.50 Mark Padilla et al. write that Padilla and many of his colleagues have come to think of families as “simultaneously sites of pleasure, intimacy, sharing and [emphasis in original] exploitation, oppression and inequality” (2007, xv).51 I adopt a similar approach in this book. Families provide single women with emotional comfort. They financially and psychologically support women’s education and entry into the workforce. Although Western literature in the Marxist tradition often describes families as a conservative force, I found that parents often supported their adult daughters’ indefinitely delayed marriage because they supported their education and career success. But parents also reproduced gender inequality when they channeled adult daughters into gendered social and economic roles of prospective brides or elder caregivers.52 In writing about families, I draw on Teo’s treatment of the family in Singapore as the place where meanings of being Singaporean are produced (2010, 353; 2013). Through relationships in families, “‘society’ and ‘state’ come to take specific form and content” (2010, 338), writes Teo. In the societies in this study as well, policies and slogans did not convince women to marry, but they generated widely held feelings and beliefs about duty, responsibility, filial piety, and the sense of belonging to family, community, and nation-state. When giving talks on this topic, I am often asked whether single women are choosing to remain single or whether they are single against their will. In my view, single women are making choices of whether or not to marry particular persons, but many are not making the choice to remain indefinitely single; most would prefer to marry. Single women’s difficulties in making the transition to marriage are caused by factors beyond their control, such as hypergamy, or the practice in which women marry men who are older and who possess a better financial and educational background than themselves. Women face challenges because men their age and educational level are looking for younger, less-educated women, resulting in a situation that social scientists call a “marriage squeeze” (Jones and Gubhaju 2009, 251; Gaetano 2010, 4–5).53 Hypergamy pushes women to marry in a shorter time period than men, as women feel they need to find men who are older and more qualified than themselves.

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Much of the discussion on single women, especially in popular media, assumes that women are completely free and autonomous and that they make decisions in their lives without constraints.54 This perspective ignores the fact that most single women do not have a choice when they are unable to obtain work at the same pay scale as that of men, discriminated in marriage markets due to age and educational qualifications, prevented from purchasing property due to lack of social and economic support, and expected to curtail their careers in order to provide care service for family members. The opposite extreme regarding the question of women’s agency—the term used by social scientists referring to the ability of people to make choices and control their lives—holds that women have very little or no agency; that they are victims due to the various kinds of discrimination that they face in their lives. This perspective is also problematic, as feminists of color have pointed out, because it lumps all women into the category of victims without taking into consideration the differences in levels of resources and privileges according to ethnicity, race, class, disability, sexuality, and other factors. It also ignores the perspectives of women who see themselves as having choices although these choices may be circumscribed. My view is that the single women I met make choices based on personal beliefs and desires, and use various resources to create their own life paths. Single women’s choices are limited and channeled by their families and social institutions that encourage women to succeed in education and work and provide family services. Single women’s agency is affected by their status as natives or newcomers to the cities in which they live, their socioeconomic background and educational level, and the support they receive from their families. Single women I met do not see themselves as totally free and autonomous nor do they see themselves as victims or rebels. They understand that their choices occur in the context of their families’ wishes and needs, even if they choose to ignore such familial expectations, and they understand that their actions will be judged in a moral framework that values women according to their provision of family services.

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CHAPTER 1

Three Marriage Regimes

O

n a rainy evening in early summer in Shanghai in 2009, I sit at a HaagenDazs café on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River sipping tea with Cindy Zhang. She is wearing casual sportswear and no makeup. Cindy tells me how difficult it is to find a husband, a task that she feels she must urgently accomplish given her age of 33. Cindy has done everything right in her life. She studied hard at school in her native Guizhou Province, came to Shanghai in her early twenties, performed well at her job, and recently had obtained an M.B.A. from a university in Singapore. After completing the M.B.A., she returned to Shanghai and was hired as an executive at one of the country’s largest sporting goods companies. She says that she is too old for the marriage market in Shanghai and therefore must use various methods to find a partner. When she was younger, men would find her, she says, but she now feels that she needs to make an effort. Because she did not grow up in Shanghai, she lacks local networks to meet men in the city. Unlike some companies, her company does not prohibit dating among employees, but the few men in her company are either married or too young: in their early to mid-twenties. To meet eligible partners, she has joined hobby groups and registered on dating apps. “People my age don’t go out after work to socialize; they work eight hours and then go home. There are few channels for us to find a man,” she says. She would like her future partner to be older than she is, but men in their thirties are already married, she says. The last two men she dated, both met through dating apps, were younger than she, and she felt that neither was sufficiently mature. Cindy explains her expectations for a partner as follows: “When thinking about marriage, the financial background is important. We have to think about where we will live, and we will need to have a house, and have a good life. Then we can have kids. Our parents say that the person’s background should be similar to our own.” Yet financial background alone is not sufficient. She continues: “A soul mate is important. He has to have something that touches me [emotionally].” 34

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Cindy impresses me as a successful and confident young professional. To find a husband, she is using a practical approach that has served her well in her career; she is methodically exploring a number of available avenues. Although she is franker in her discussion of socioeconomic criteria than many other single women I have met, her general approach to marriage is familiar; she wants a partner with good financial standing and one with whom she has an emotional connection. In all three cities, women who want to marry generally think that the man should ideally be older and possess greater social and financial capital than themselves. Some women tell me that it is preferable that the man be able to provide a home upon marriage: a feat increasingly difficult given the exorbitant property prices, particularly in Hong Kong and Shanghai, which have risen far beyond what an average young person can afford.1 No one I have met has said outright that she wants a rich man. Instead, many have told me that they want a man whose financial situation is not worse than their own. Women talk about the importance of financial stability; marriage should not lead to hardships, but should allow them to raise a family comfortably. At the same time, most women I have met expect that their marriage will involve love and emotional intimacy. The companionate ideal of marriage, or the idea that emotional closeness should be one of the primary measures of success in marriage, first emerged in Euro-America and is now seen around the world (Hirsch and Wardlow 2006, 4).2 Women I know distinguish between romance and love. When I ask if they expect “romance” from potential partners, most say that they do not. They do expect, however, that they will have a “feeling” for their partner; there should be an emotional spark that derives from a combination of attraction and respect. They expect that love will grow after spending time together and that the relationship will provide long-term, stable emotional comfort and support. Women I met were familiar with Western ideas that link romance with consumption (Illouz 1997). In the ideal romantic scenario, men are expected to provide gifts, buy dinners, and drive women around in expensive cars. The women I met were also familiar with romantic narratives from U.S. TV shows such as Sex in the City as well as from Japanese, Korean, and locally produced TV dramas. These women distinguished between magical romantic experiences and the actual prosaic experience of having a relationship over a long period, a distinction mentioned by Swidler (2001) in her study of views of romantic love in the United States. Swidler argues that these two very different ways of viewing romantic love emerge from the realities of social institutions;

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the all-or-nothing legal arrangement of marriage leads to expressions of marriage as magical and contrasts with the reality that romantic relationships are often ambivalent, confused, and fragile (2001, 114). In Shanghai, I heard frequent mention of the magical aspects of romantic love; women spoke of “prince charming,” a “man on a white horse,” “a soul mate,” and “the one.” Although these references were made in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion, they reflect the all-or-nothing legal arrangements of marriage and the faith one needs to enter marriage in that city. I believe that Swidler’s “talk of love” analysis is useful in understanding why some women in Shanghai mentioned the magical aspects of love; Shanghai women are more likely than the women in the other two cities studied in this book to enter marriage to meet marriage deadlines without a lengthy amount of time to get to know their future spouse. They need, therefore, to place their faith in their partner, in what people say about him, and in the institution of marriage. In the three cities, unspoken assumptions pervaded talk about marriage partners. Because same-sex marriage was not a legal option in any of these societies, women assumed that marriage must involve a heterosexual partner. Even those women I met who preferred a same-sex romantic partner nonetheless also considered entering into a heterosexual marriage as a way to have children or fulfill parental or general social expectations. Although transnational marriage has become more common, most women who were under thirty assumed that they would marry locally and within their own ethnic group. Women in all three cities understand that their value in marriage markets declines sharply after the age of 30. Men may marry later than women because men’s value in the marriage market is based on their social status and financial ability as well as on their age. In searching for spouses, women and men need to evaluate themselves in terms of the marriage markets of their societies. These markets value women for youth and beauty. As stated, women find it difficult to marry as they age and their financial and social resources increase while men of their same age prefer to marry younger and less accomplished women. By using the term “marriage markets” I do not mean that women and men evaluate potential marriage partners only according to external criteria such as age, status, income, and appearance. As I have outlined, emotions and compatibility are central to the process of finding a spouse. In her study of transnational relationships between Asian women and Western men, Constable focused on how “love and emotion are intertwined with political economy through cultural logics of desire” (2003, 119).3 Similarly, I have found that

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assessments of others and one’s own place in marriage markets and feelings of attraction to potential partners are a product of an inseparable combination of external criteria and emotions such as love and attraction. Inter-regional and international mobility in recent decades have profoundly reshaped marriage markets for certain segments of the population (Jones and Shen 2008). This reshaping, however, has primarily benefitted men who struggle to find partners in their local marriage markets and has arguably negatively impacted marriage markets for urban women.4 In China, international marriage rates remain low—in Shanghai in 2018, less than 1.3 percent of marriages involved a foreign spouse (China Bureau of Statistics 2019). Yet inter-regional marriages involving women from rural areas of China marrying urban men have expanded urban men’s partner choices.5 In 2015 in Japan, only 3.3 percent of marriages involved a Japanese national and a foreigner, a drop from 8 percent in 2012. Of these marriages, slightly over 70 percent involved a Japanese man marrying a foreign bride—Chinese and Filipino women constituting the largest groups—and only 30 percent involved a Japanese woman marrying a foreign groom, with Korean men constituting the largest category (K seir d sh 2017). In Hong Kong, the opportunity for transborder relationships has had a profound impact on marriage markets as it has provided a pool of brides and mistresses for Hong Kong men. In Hong Kong in 2016, 27.55 percent of all marriages involved a Hong Kong groom and a mainland bride while only 11.3 percent of marriages involved a Hong Kong woman marrying a mainland man (Census and Statistics Department 2018a: FB11). These marriage patterns can be explained by hypergamy—the idea in all three cities that urban women should marry local bachelors with greater resources than they themselves have while urban men may search for brides from the city as well as from less wealthy regions and countries. In effect, transnational and inter-regional marriages have not improved marriage markets for urban women. Rather, they have made marriage more difficult by expanding urban men’s choices without providing similar options for urban women. Urban lore in Japan and China romanticizes marriage with Western men; Western men are sometimes described as more open-minded, civilized, and romantic than local men (see Farrer 2012; Jones and Shen 2008; Kelsky 2001).6 The wealth of the cities in this study has attracted professionals from Western countries, and online matchmaking industries assist women— including many who are older and divorced—in making international connections (see Liu 2017; Constable 2003). A few women I met in the three cities said they would consider marriage to a Western man. Western men,

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some women told me, are not as concerned about women’s ages as local men. Nonetheless, women interested in Western men constituted a small number of my sample—one or two in each city were dating or had dated Western men— and the number of marriages between local women and Westerners in the cities under study is low.7 A second area of change in marriage markets in recent years, given the rise in the number of divorces, is the increased numbers of divorced persons who may wish to remarry. The market of divorced persons is more accessible for single women than international marriages due to the large number of divorcees in the population (see introduction, note 23).8 A few women I knew were dating divorced men and over the course of my fieldwork, two women married divorced men. Women I knew did not specifically mention divorced men in either a positive or negative light. Some said that they would not want to marry a man who already had children. Nonetheless, researchers point out that even in the divorce market, single women over marriageable deadlines may struggle to find partners. In China, divorced men with resources prefer younger single women and would be able to find such a partner among the large numbers of rural migrants who seek to marry older, financially established men (Liu 2017, 35). In Hong Kong, divorced men with education and resources may choose local never-married women as well as women from across the Chinese border. Divorced men in Japan may find partners among local never-married women as well as women from other parts of Asia through marriage brokers (see Yamaura 2019). In other words, divorced men may not necessarily provide a ready market for single women who are past marriageable age due to the availability of these alternative markets for urban men in developed societies. It is well known that China’s birth control policy has led to a gender imbalance in which men outnumber women; there were 33.59 million more men than women in China in 2016 (Tatlow 2017). One would think that the marriage market for women in China would be extremely good. This is not the case for the urban women in this study because men who are unable to find wives are generally poor and living in rural areas while men living in urban areas have advantages in local marriage markets and access to multiple alternative markets. Regardless of sexual orientation or personal views toward marriage, all women are affected by the marriage markets of their societies, just as Holland and Eisenhart found that in American universities, women could not totally remove themselves from the “sexual auction block” that pervaded peer culture (1992, 214). Women in this study would be reminded of their position in

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the local marriage markets by family members and peers. Even if they rejected marriage and marriage markets, they needed to make decisions in the context of these markets. In spite of the many similarities among women across the three cities— particularly in their hopes for a companionate marriage and concerns about finding an appropriate partner—I also found clear differences. I noticed a sense of urgency and worry about marriage among women in Shanghai and a lack of urgency in Hong Kong, and I found that Tokyo fell somewhere between the two cities in this regard. I realized that I was looking at three very distinct marriage regimes, each with its own set of beliefs and economic and social expectations about marriage. To distinguish between the marriage regimes in the three societies, I consider marriage through two models that dominated the narratives of women in this study: a duty model and a companionate model.9 The duty model is associated with (1) greater pressure to marry, (2) finding someone with appropriate socioeconomic standing, (3) entering marriage in the time frame expected by society, (4) childbirth soon after marriage, and (5) marriage life involving the fulfillment of gendered caregiving roles by the wife and financial support roles by the husband. The companionate model is associated with (1) less pressure to marry on schedule, (2) individual preference regarding whether or not to marry at all, (3) an emphasis on compatibility when selecting a partner, and (4) belief that the main reason for marriage is that it will bring increased happiness.10 I find that distinguishing between the two models is useful in comparing the three societies, but it is also clear that both models are present in all three societies and women I interviewed commonly referenced both models over the course of an interview, as we can see in Cindy’s example. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to state that the duty model is strong in Shanghai, the companionate model dominates in Hong Kong, and both models have strong presences in Tokyo. In Shanghai, where the duty model dominates, women openly talked about the financial background of potential partners much more so than in the other two cities. This is not because single women in Shanghai are more materialistic than women in Hong Kong and Tokyo. I believe that in all three societies both material and nonmaterial factors are important when women consider marriage. Rather, the strength of the duty model of marriage in Shanghai creates conditions that allow financial and material factors to be discussed in a more transparent way than in the other cities.11 I also do not believe that marriages in the three societies in this study are more materialistic

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and calculated than marriages in the United States or European countries. Studies of romance in the United States show that socioeconomic factors are integral to romantic engagements in those societies as well. Illouz points out that in the United States, during their initial stages, romantic relationships are likely to be based on the social, cultural, and economic assets of the partner and that socioeconomic factors are mixed into feelings of attraction (1997, 247; see also Padilla et al. 2007, xviii). Illouz argues that only later in romantic relationships are feelings of selfless giving expected to dominate (1997, 242).12 I believe that in the East Asian societies of this study, romantic love, marriage, and capitalism are deeply interconnected, just as they are in the United States and elsewhere. My aim in this chapter is to show how single women’s views of marriage differed in the three cities and the difficulties women encountered in making the transition to marriage.

Shanghai: A Duty Model of Marriage In Shanghai, although single women are increasingly visible and accepted, basically everyone is expected to marry. Women are expected to marry by age 30 and men can marry a little later. Most people follow through with these marriage deadlines. In the latest available figures for the 30- to 34-year-old age group in Shanghai, only 5.8 percent of women had never married (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 2017). This figure is considerably higher than the national average of 2.3 percent (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2017). In the 40- to 44-year-old age group in 2015, only 2.5 percent of women were never married (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 2017), slightly higher than the figure of 1 percent nationally (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2017). These figures are bound to rise, however, as the average age of marriage in Shanghai has risen dramatically in the past decade to a high of 28.4 in 2015 (Xinhuanet 2018). The percentage of single women over 30 in Shanghai is lower than in Tokyo and Hong Kong, but it is significantly higher than it was in Shanghai even five years ago. A major problem with the official figures released by the Shanghai government is that they include only women who possess Shanghai residency registration and omit millions of women who have come to Shanghai as immigrants. In my experience, immigrants to Shanghai come primarily for work or education, and they are more likely than native women of the same age to be single.13 In other words, the actual numbers of single women in Shanghai are significantly higher than the official figures. Among urban women in China, the ideal life path is straightforward: one should attend a good university, obtain a stable job, and by age 25, find a

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marriage partner from an appropriate socioeconomic background. One should marry by age 27, move into an apartment owned by one’s husband or his family, and produce a child soon thereafter. Marriage is seen as basically the only way to enter into a successful life, a “natural” life stage, and the only path toward happiness for women. When I asked Shanghai women if they would marry, many women answered “of course” or “I must.” Not everyone I met, however, said they would marry; a very small number said that they thought that marriage would be difficult for them due to their age, personality, or sexual orientation. Yet they agreed that the general expectation is that everyone will marry, and they will be viewed with suspicion or pity if they remain single. Marriage also represents a transformation in lifestyle and housing arrangements. Single women who grew up in Shanghai live with their parents because it is the general practice and the high price of housing makes it difficult for young people to buy or even rent housing on their own. Marriage means changing residences, from living with one’s parents to living with a husband and possibly his family as well. For migrants to Shanghai, marriage may mean moving from a rented apartment into a husband’s home. For some women, marriage may require moving to another city or even another country. Parents, usually mothers, but also well-meaning friends, relatives, and colleagues remind women of these marriage deadlines and urge them to meet them. Women are typically told that if they do not marry by their late twenties they may never find a good partner. Meeting marriage deadlines, however, is difficult and stressful for many young women. In contrast to societies such as the United States—where dating is an accepted part of adolescent culture and promoted through school events such as dances and proms—in China, dating among high school students is often prohibited by schools. Even while at university, parents may discourage their daughters from dating, as they worry that romantic relationships may divert women from their studies. Serial dating or extensive romantic experience is seen to damage women’s reputations. But sexual norms have changed dramatically in China in recent decades such that premarital sex has become common among young people (Farrer 2002, 2006a) and a dating culture is emerging (Lai and Choi 2021). At the same time, many young women abide by school rules and parents’ wishes that they refrain from romantic relationships while in school and emerge in their early twenties with very little or no dating experience (Zhang and Sun 2014, 123–124). Women told stories of being asked by their parents to return home before 10 p.m. while they were students at university, but when they turned 23 or 24, their parents suddenly asked them why they came home early when they should be out

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dating a boyfriend. Women in Shanghai had a very small window of opportunity to find an appropriate partner as they were expected to begin dating at age 22 and be engaged by age 25. Single women understood the marriage deadlines and worried, as they approached age 30, whether they would find an appropriate partner in time. Amanda, a 27-year-old bank executive, expressed her understanding of how society views women as follows: “My parents worry that if a girl can’t find someone to take care of her, and she has passed a certain age, she will be left on the shelf; she won’t be able to get a good man. When I was young, in high school, a guy said to me that girls after 25 are like bread in a bakery after 7 p.m.; nobody wants to buy them. Then I laughed but now I think that I may be one of them. As women mature, we lose our value.” The marriage market for women in Shanghai is poor due to discrimination against age and accomplishments in women. As in the other cities, women are expected to “marry up” in terms of socioeconomic background.14 If women start to search for a partner after spending several years obtaining an education and working in a career, men of their same age with similar qualifications are looking for women who are younger and less qualified than themselves. This structure in the marriage market makes women feel they need to rush to meet marriage deadlines. Accomplished men who “marry down” have a wide age range of women from which to choose while women who marry up have a smaller pool. Fincher (2014) argues that the pressure placed upon women to marry on schedule in urban China results in their choosing men who are inappropriate for them, and at worst, results in women agreeing to financially disadvantageous arrangements with men and their families. Women in my study past their late twenties said that men their same age were married or were looking for women younger and less accomplished than themselves. Marie, an attractive and fashionable 34-year-old, had recently completed an executive M.B.A. program overseas and worked as a manager in a multinational firm in Shanghai. She explained, “It’s not that we [women] want to be single but society has created a special situation for us. We want to maintain our status and our lifestyles. We want a man with a higher status, money, and shared values. We enjoy the kind of life we are living and [if the man’s standard of living is worse than ours] then we better not go there [into that kind of marriage].” Many young women in their early to mid-twenties discussed their upcoming marriages with worry. Twenty-three-year-old Jean, for example, came to Shanghai from Anhui Province to attend university, and after graduating had

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been working as a financial journalist. She explained that she did not feel any great need to marry for herself but planned to marry on schedule according to her parents’ advice. She said, “I am afraid that one day my parents will want me to marry quickly and I will choose a man easily and quickly. In fact, I am not interested in marriage. I don’t think a man will love me so much nor will I love him, but we’ll feel that we must marry at that time. I don’t think marriage will change my life. It may make it harder, in fact. I see some friends and their marriages are not happy. Some of my friends are divorced. Everyone has a sad story.” Maggie, 25, also wondered whether marriage would bring happiness. She told me, “When thinking about marriage, the man’s financial background is important. We have to think about where we will live, and we should have a house, and a good life. Then we can have children. My friends are thinking of marriage but we are afraid to do it. We need to marry but divorce is a reality. This makes us afraid.” In spite of their concerns, most young women planned to marry. They worried that if they did not marry, a host of negative consequences would ensue: their parents would be disappointed, they would be seen as social pariahs, their life quality would be poor, and they would be lonely in their old age. Single women I met in Shanghai felt that practical considerations such as socioeconomic status and personal compatibility were important when considering a marriage partner. No one said that a potential husband needed to possess “a car, house, and money” (chezi fanzi piaozu) in a common turn of phrase, but some spoke of the importance of having a “similar background” (mendang hudui; see To 2015, 37), referring to equivalence in income and family status. Jean said, “If our backgrounds are different, then when we are together we will have a lot of problems. For example, when buying the house, who will pay?” Women also spoke about the importance of having “feelings” (ganjue) for the person or described the appropriate person using the English term “Mr. Right.” Twenty-five-year-old Samantha lives in Shanghai with her mother, as her parents have recently divorced, and works as an assistant editor at a textbook publisher. She dated a young man for a year, but he broke up with her saying that he didn’t think they were right for each other. While this, her only experience with romantic love, was confusing and painful, she stays hopeful and maintains high expectations. She tells me: I hope to marry before 30 because I want to have a child. I want my future husband to be healthy, tall, and handsome. Most important is that I

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should have feelings for him. I hope he has similar views on life and is warmhearted and cares greatly about feelings and not just money. Money is not the most important thing. We may meet lots of difficulties and I want someone to face these with me. I want to find someone to share my happiness and also my problems. I want to love someone for a lifetime. I want to rely on him and I want us to trust each other. It is very difficult to find the proper one. I worry about whether Mr. Right will come.

Women and their parents understand the difficulties of finding a man who meets these multiple criteria.15 Friends, colleagues, and parents commonly offer to introduce potential partners to single women in their mid-to-late twenties. Some women use online dating services, particularly if they are not from Shanghai and lack social networks that usually operate to match young people with partners. Some asked friends for help in meeting potential spouses. Amateur and professional matchmakers may be consulted. Since the mid-2000s, a face-to-face “marriage market” takes place every weekend in People’s Park, Shanghai’s central green space, where parents and matchmakers exchange information on young people searching for partners. Here one finds row upon row of one-page profiles of single persons, providing their age, height, educational background, notable achievements such as English or piano certificates in the case of women, and the address of the apartment in the case of men. Zhang and Sun point out that parental involvement in matchmaking in Shanghai is not a revival of traditional practices, but a response to contemporary pressures faced by young people. In their youth, their parents were protected by the socialist system, which helped them to find jobs, assigned housing, and helped them to find a spouse. Parents see that their young adult children need to find their way on their own and try to help (2014, 119). Nicole is enthusiastic, personable, and quick-witted. She very much would like to marry, yet at age 38, she is far beyond marriageable age in Shanghai. She has had ten xiangqin (arranged meetings with a view to marriage). When I asked what was wrong with the men she met in this way, she said: Most of them were a little bit ugly. I think that appearances (waibiao) are not important but if I cannot accept his face, how can I get close to his mind and heart? The first impression is important. Jamie [referring to our common friend] said to me: “Nicole, how come my boyfriends are all ugly guys, but they have a clever mind?” She may be right [that I should

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not pay attention to appearances so much] but I’m not interested in searching for a great mind and kind heart if he is ugly. Also, at this stage, I need a man who has a good job. I don’t need him to have too much money, but he must have more than me. If I was young, say 25, then I could say, “I will wait and let him develop his potential!” But at this age, we date men who are 40 and if you are still poor at 40, it means that you don’t have ability. Some men I’ve met are very rich and maybe their appearance is not so bad but they have a low spiritual/mental ( jingshen) level. I could not stay with this kind of man either.

As Nicole told this story to a friend and me over iced coffees at a Starbucks coffee shop on a hot summer afternoon, the relaxed atmosphere may have led her to exaggerate somewhat for our amusement. But she was basically serious and her sense of pressure to find an appropriate spouse amid the difficulties was palpable. Nicole’s last boyfriend was a German man six years her senior. At one point they were engaged to be married but there were several problems. His first language was German and Nicole’s is Chinese so they could only speak to one another in English, a language in which neither felt completely comfortable. Another problem was that he came to Shanghai because of his engineering work and he otherwise did not like Chinese culture or food. In the end, the differences seemed too great and they split up. While finding a spouse is difficult for women who grew up in Shanghai, the task is much harder for migrants. Half of my informants were migrants without Shanghai residency registration (hukou). In 2015, migrants without residency registration comprised approximately 40 percent of Shanghai’s 24.15 million residents (Zuo 2018). Women who were native to Shanghai had a much better chance finding a partner because their parents had connections and networks within the city and could ask friends, relatives, and colleagues to help find potential partners for their daughters. Women from outside of Shanghai could not depend on their parents’ connections. Their parents might try to help to arrange meetings for their daughters, but their connections were located in their hometowns. One woman complained to her friends and me that all her parents could do was introduce her to her former classmates from elementary school. Men introduced by one’s parents usually lived in one’s hometown, and most women were not interested in leaving Shanghai. But for most migrant women, marrying Shanghai men was also not an option. Shanghai men prefer to marry local women, perhaps because they belong to the majority culture and have higher social status. Some Shanghai natives

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mentioned cultural reasons for not wanting to marry a migrant, such as preferring to speak the dialect of Shanghai (wu dialect) with their partners instead of Standard Chinese. A third category of persons whom migrant women could marry were fellow migrants, which was the most practical option. If a migrant woman marries a migrant man, however, the couple will have difficulty living in Shanghai as both most likely will not possess Shanghai residency registration, and as such would be denied access to subsidized health care and education for their children.16 Living far from their parents, migrant women do not need to face daily questioning about whom they are dating and when they will marry. Yet many say that they nevertheless face pressure that they marry as soon as possible. Thirty-five-year-old Jacky, who came to Shanghai from a southern province to pursue a dream of becoming a professional singer, is living with a European banker who is divorced and not interested in remarrying. Jacky feels pressure to marry to please her mother. “Maybe this is too dark,” she tells me, “but if my mother dies and I haven’t married, I would feel like I haven’t given her peace.” Even if their parents did not mention marriage repeatedly, women I interviewed commonly mentioned that they would be asked about marriage by their relatives when they returned to their hometown for holidays. The media reports that some women hire boyfriends to bring back with them to their hometowns to avoid relatives’ questioning (Lake 2018, 53), and studies show that sexual minorities arrange contract marriages—between gay men and lesbian women—to relieve the overwhelming pressure to conform to family and societal expectations (Choi and Luo 2016; Engebretsen 2017; Kam 2013, 2020). In Shanghai at the higher end of the socioeconomic scale, I met a financial journalist, a legal assistant, a successful art dealer, and executives at large companies. At the lower end, I interviewed high-school educated factory workers, department store clerks, and small-scale entrepreneurs. At the higher end, women still needed to marry on schedule if they wanted to marry a man of their own age with reasonable earning capacity. Yet they could also afford to wait if they were able to support themselves financially. At the lower end, women needed to marry for economic reasons. A factory worker, for example, who earned around US$400 a month planned to marry on schedule according to her parents’ wishes when the time came. She lived with her parents and passed the entirety of her salary to her mother, as she said her mother was saving the money for her future. A department store clerk who came to Shanghai from a western province earned US$300 per month and paid

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US$150 for rent for a room she shared with other clerks. She planned to yield to her parents’ requests to return to her hometown to marry. When I gave a talk in a regional city in China, I was reminded by audience members that women who live in Shanghai and who delay marriage are highly privileged; they represent the upper tier of women in China, those who have the financial and social resources to support themselves. Women with fewer socioeconomic resources certainly face great pressures to marry on schedule. A few women in Shanghai told me that they did not need to marry. Women’s reasons for not marrying in Shanghai varied. Some said that they were waiting to find an appropriate partner in terms that suggest the companionate model. Others said that they could not accommodate the duty model. Thirty-eight-year-old Jing, who did not have a partner, was one of the handful of Christians I met in Shanghai. She said that marriage should be based on love, and if God wanted her to marry, the appropriate person would appear. She also referenced the duty model as an explanation for her singlehood. She said that she was not an appropriate candidate for marriage because she could not fulfill the obligations expected of a wife—she explained that she is too independent and could not serve a man. “A woman becomes a wife upon the man’s request, and a man would not choose me,” she said. When I asked her why, she said: “A man would expect that a wife will work but will spend more time looking after the family and support her husband’s work. Also, she won’t spend too much money, and she will respect and look after her husband’s parents.” I asked, “What kind of person are you?” She said: “I am just like a man. When I am interested in something, I put all my concentration and focus on that. I have lots of creativity and I don’t need a boring husband.” She felt that due to her character, she could not possibly comply with the expectations that a man would make of a wife, and her family understood her to be ill-suited to marriage. Although the duty model dominates in Shanghai, it does not mean that marriage is inevitable. I found that women with economic resources were able to extend singlehood into their thirties. This may be for a number of reasons. For one, women with economic resources could afford to live apart from their parents, thus lessening the immediacy of parental pressure. Another reason is that their economic success derived from jobs that gave them a broad exposure to different ideas and possibilities and boosted their confidence to resist parental and social pressures. Karen, in her mid-thirties, told me that working among French expatriate colleagues contributed to a process of personal growth that led to the realization that she could be happy as a single woman.

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Economic success could also be used to demonstrate to family members that one could survive financially without marrying. Studies of lesbian women in urban China have found that economic self-sufficiency is highly important to these women as a means to obtain family acceptance of their single lifestyle or same-sex relationship. Lucetta Kam found that some lesbian women in Shanghai overachieved in obtaining material success to compensate their parents for failing to give them a “normal” life surrounded by grandchildren and a son-in-law (2013, 69). The duty model that dominates in Shanghai has an impact on women’s lives in a number of ways. The most important is that it encourages women to marry on schedule. Women feel that they should marry because their parents and others expect them to do so and it is a responsible action that shows respect of one’s parents. The model also shapes the kinds of relationships that women imagine to be possible. The only legitimate options for romantic relationships are heterosexual matches in which women play a supportive role. A few women admitted to “one-night stands” and affairs with men who were not appropriate marriage partners such as younger men and married men. Only one-third of the women—13 of 36—said that they were involved in a romantic relationship at the time of the interview. The low number may be a result of women’s lack of experience in romantic relationships, but I believe that the duty model may also be responsible for keeping many women out of relationships because it restricts relationships to either marriage-oriented heterosexual relationships or illicit “inappropriate” relationships. The duty model imposes a narrow version of marriage and applies pressure on women to meet its requirements.

Hong Kong: Marriage as a Personal Choice Marriage is a well-respected institution in Hong Kong.17 Commercial advertisements and government campaigns invariably represent Hong Kong families as nuclear or as three-generational, suggesting that everyone marries. As in the other cities, most women I met wished to marry and many young women in their twenties assumed that they would do so. Yet, in Hong Kong, more so than in the other societies in this study, marriage is seen as a personal choice.18 Single women I met in Hong Kong commonly told me that marriage might bring happiness for some women but remaining single might also bring a happy and fulfilled life. In Hong Kong, basically every family, workplace, and friendship group include women who are single beyond marriageable age. In 2016, 37.4 percent of women aged 30 to 34 and 22.3 percent of

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women aged 35 to 39 had never married (Census and Statistics Department 2018a, FB5).19 These numbers have grown steadily over time. In 1991, only 18.2 percent of women in the 30- to 34-year-old age group and 9.3 percent of women in the 35- to 39-year-old age group had never married (Census and Statistics Department 2018a, FB7). Never-married men outnumber nevermarried women in all three societies but the percentages of single men in Hong Kong is particularly high. In 2016, 49.4 percent of men in the 30- to 34-yearold age group and 28.7 percent of men in the 35- to 39-year-old age group had never been married (Census and Statistics Department 2018a, FB5). These figures cast doubt on the often-expressed view that women are responsible for the decline in marriage and fertility. In Hong Kong, parents may ask their adult single daughters about boyfriends or marriage, particularly as the latter reach their late twenties, but most parents would not relentlessly bring up the topic or feel that they had a responsibility to arrange marriages for their children, as frequently occurs in Shanghai and sometimes in Tokyo. While most women I met in Shanghai had tried an arranged meeting (xiangqin in Standard Chinese) or a blind date arranged by their friends or family members, none of the women I met in Hong Kong admitted to having tried an arranged meeting to find a marital partner (seungtai in Cantonese). When I mentioned such arranged meetings in Hong Kong, many women laughed and said that they would never try it or that it was very old-fashioned. Many women in Shanghai, especially those who were not Shanghai natives, had tried using online dating services to meet potential partners. In Hong Kong, very few women I met admitted to using professional matchmaking services, although such services are available. Hong Kong women who wanted to marry preferred to meet partners “naturally” at work or at gatherings with friends. In Hong Kong, some women used the term “destiny” (yyuhnfahn in Cantonese) to explain why they did not have partners, saying that they were not destined to marry any of the men they had known so far in their lives. Some women in Shanghai also used the term “destiny” (yuanfen in Mandarin) but in a different way: to explain why women needed to make an effort to create the conditions for destiny to operate. They said that destiny in Chinese refers to both fate beyond one’s control and the product of one’s own efforts, in a “God helps those who helps themselves” interpretation of how the will of the universe operates.20 Marriage markets for women in Hong Kong may be the worst of the three cities. One reason for this is Hong Kong men’s practice of taking brides and mistresses from mainland China. As mentioned, in 2016, around 27 percent of

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all marriages registered in the city involved Hong Kong men marrying mainland women (Census and Statistics Department 2018a, FB11). Cross-border relationships between mainland Chinese women and Hong Kong men greatly increased with reforms of the Chinese economy in the 1980s. These reforms included the opening up of foreign investment in newly industrializing areas of southern China in Special Economic Zones, three of which are located in Guangdong, the mainland province closest to Hong Kong. Economic reform in the Chinese countryside led to the release of agricultural land to profitmaking production units, creating surplus labor. The rapid industrialization of southern China then brought together two kinds of migrants: young single women from the countryside and men from Hong Kong who crossed the border regularly on business (Lang and Smart 2002). In the 1980s and 1990s, most Hong Kong men marrying mainland wives were older and from lowerclass backgrounds; these men may have had difficulty finding wives in Hong Kong. Many were introduced to women on the mainland through friends and relatives (Newendorp 2008, 72). Over time, the men who marry mainland women have become younger and better educated and more likely to have met their wives while working on the mainland (Newendorp 2008, 73–74). Crossborder marriages continued after the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, even though men often need to wait months or years for the Hong Kong government to grant their spouses permission to join them in Hong Kong. In effect, the availability of large numbers of young women with few resources in neighboring Chinese industrial areas has provided Hong Kong men of various economic classes and ages an alternative, additional pool of women from which to choose brides or mistresses. In contrast, Hong Kong women who want to marry men with greater resources than themselves have a limited pool of potential spouses in Hong Kong, given the increase in women’s educational levels and men’s preference for younger and less-educated women. With the growth of the Chinese economy, the percentage of Hong Kong women who marry mainland men has been steadily growing, but as mentioned, the numbers remain relatively small compared to the numbers of Hong Kong men marrying mainland women. Hong Kong women are not generally interested in marrying mainland men, who are viewed as having fewer resources than themselves; median wages in Hong Kong are several times higher than in neighboring China. Most adult single women living in Hong Kong were born and raised in the city and live with their parents and adult siblings. In Hong Kong, as in

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Shanghai, marriage often means that adult daughters move from their parents’ home to live with their husband. With the rise in property prices, however, some couples are forced to live in a room in their parents’ apartments. As mentioned, currently Hong Kong’s housing market is the world’s least affordable, with the average price of a home twenty times higher than the median household income.21 While marriage and residence with a husband is the conventional housing path for women, Hong Kong women I knew did not feel that marriage was the only housing and lifestyle path. Women discussed a variety of living arrangements, including continuing to live with their parents, purchasing their own apartments, or living with siblings. Some Hong Kong women I met were wary about relying on men financially and emotionally because dependence would make women vulnerable when they entered middle age. Twenty-four-year-old university graduate Toni lived with her parents and worked as a textbook editor. She did not have a partner but wanted to marry in the future. She told me, My strategy is to look for a good guy who can take care of me. He should be someone aggressive at work, and mature. When talking with my friends, we sometimes think that love is more important, and sometimes we think that money is more important. I don’t want to marry too early. Some of my friends want to find a rich guy, marry early, and have a stable life. But for me—I think we can’t rely on men. I want to make sure that I have my own career first.

When her colleague, a 36-year-old single man, said that he thought a woman should take care of her baby until the child reaches the age of three, Toni replied, “You don’t understand women’s problems! If you become a housewife (sinaai), you become afraid of losing your husband. If women become fat and ugly and lose contact with society, it’s easy to become outdated so you can’t communicate with your husband. Then your husband could find a lover outside, say, a young girl from the company. This would be most horrible.” In their focus group discussions with young adult women in Hong Kong and Britain, Jackson and Ho also found that Hong Kong women were highly concerned about infidelity of husbands in the imagined future, much more so than British women (2020, 197). Jackson and Ho point out that this is not because British women are more tolerant of infidelity, but because Hong Kong men’s sexual and romantic relationships with mainland women, and in particular, their behaviors such as taking mistresses (bao ernai), figure prominently

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in the Hong Kong media and the public imagination. Studies show a gender divide on the issue in Hong Kong, as men tend to view male infidelity as a minor and excusable marital offense (Ho 2014; see also Lang and Smart 2002, 554). Hong Kong women of all ages reported that they knew women— mothers, sisters, and friends—whose husbands had taken mistresses, causing great misery. The fear of such a predicament led some of the women I knew, such as Toni, to insist that a woman needs to obtain financial independence before marrying. Some single women I met made it clear that similar interests, tastes, and sensibilities generally required a similar educational and socioeconomic background. Twenty-four-year-old Bernice, a university student, was dating a man two years her junior who did not attend university. She explained the problem between them as follows: “He treats me well but you could say that he’s not my cup of tea. We have different values, different ways of thinking. We have different views of issues, like the political situation. We have difficulty communicating. Sometimes I can’t understand the way he thinks.” Bernice found it frustrating that her boyfriend uncritically accepted Hong Kong government positions while she viewed the government with distrust. A recent incident on Valentine’s Day, however, was what confirmed her feeling that they were ill-suited for each other. Unlike Valentine’s Day in Japan, where women give gifts—usually chocolate—to men, in Hong Kong men are supposed to buy flowers and demonstrate their romantic feelings to their partners. Bernice’s partner invited her to see a movie, but he had not purchased reserved seats in advance according to the usual system in Hong Kong. They arrived at the theater and could only buy tickets in the same row but not next to each other. Her boyfriend asked the people seated between them to move over so that they could sit together, and they complied. When the rightful ticketholders appeared, however, everyone in the row had to move back to their original seats and they were once again seated apart. This was enormously embarrassing, she said, and in Illouz (1997) terms, represented his failure to demonstrate mastery of the symbols of romance. Bernice could not see how they could stay together. Single women I met in Hong Kong commonly told me that they wanted their future spouse to be a source of emotional support. Thirty-one-year-old Trudy, a university graduate who worked for the government, explained, “I don’t need someone to support me financially. I want someone who can help me in my daily life. When you face difficulties, he should stand by you, share with you, and share your burdens spiritually. He can say something to support

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you; that’s enough.” Trudy had purchased an apartment in the New Territories in northern Hong Kong and lived there with her sister. She was financially stable and could afford to look beyond the man’s earning capacity when thinking about marriage. Thirty-three-year-old Lori, a university graduate and an executive at a Japanese firm, wanted to marry as a way to live a happier life. She explained her criteria: “I prefer a partner who is my age or older. I want someone who is caring, has a good social standing and he must have a good job. I don’t think it matters whether or not he has gone to university. It depends on his mentality and his knowledge. And most important is that we are very happy when we are together.” Bianca, a 34-year-old university lecturer, would like to marry if a suitable partner appears, but like many Hong Kong single women, she feels that her life is also perfectly acceptable without a husband: “When I was approaching 30, I felt strongly that I would like to marry. After passing thirty, I felt better. Since I live by myself, I can concentrate on work. I don’t feel uncomfortable or unhappy. Life is okay. If I can’t meet someone in the course of everyday life, I won’t waste my time looking. In the past, women felt that they had to marry but not now. We don’t need to rely on anyone. We can just do things ourselves.” Bianca recently ended a relationship with a man ten years her senior. She explained, “He once told me, ‘Since you’re ten years younger, even when I retire, you can still take care of children.’ I thought this was shocking. It made me realize that even men are calculating. Because he is a civil servant, he thought that at 55, he would retire but I would still be working, so we would be okay in terms of money.” Bianca was annoyed that her ex-boyfriend expected to rely on her financially after his retirement and perhaps expected her to take care of children as well. Her irritation may stem in part from her acceptance of the duty model of marriage that values men for their financial contribution to the family. She saw little merit in marriage if the husband failed to provide financial support, and viewed marriage with a man who tried to live off his wife as even less appealing. The small number of Hong Kong women who admitted taking action to try to find a partner reported that there are very few good men. Thirty-oneyear-old Eliza is a technical school graduate and works as a secretary at a private school. As a Christian, she thinks that she has a duty to marry, and her future husband should be a Christian. About 10 percent of the Hong Kong population are Christians,22 and Christianity holds a disproportionate influence on sex education in schools and sexual morality in Hong Kong (Kwok

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2018). The Christian community in Hong Kong tends to emphasize conservative sexual practices and family values as central to social stability and Chinese identity (Jackson and Ho 2020, 177).23 Eliza believes, for example, that young women and men should not touch one another because touching might lead to premature sexual relations. Eliza at first tried to find a man at church, but the church gatherings she attended, she said, consisted of large numbers of women and very few single men. Hong Kong is home to large populations of nonlocal professional men with whom local women have opportunities to work and socialize. Some informants over the marriageable age indicated that they would prefer to marry a foreigner, referring to Western men. As the Hong Kong marriage market privileges youth in women, it would be difficult for women over 35 to find a Hong Kong man as a husband. Thirty-one-year-old Sally, a financial advisor, felt that she could not find an appropriate person among Hong Kong men. She told me, “I want someone who is open-minded, has a big heart, and who can accommodate different kinds of thinking. This is lacking in Hong Kong men. That’s why it’s easier to find a foreigner. Foreign men become independent at 18 and have to work their way through school. Hong Kong men are brought up with an easy life, living with their families, and they are dominated by their families. They don’t know how to make decisions on their own.” As Sally spoke English well and worked and socialized with foreigners, this route seemed possible for her. Other women thought that they might seek a husband outside of Hong Kong. Hong Kong residents have migrated in large numbers to Canada, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom in the decades leading up to the return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. Migration continues to be viewed by Hong Kong people as a possible lifestyle choice, and although it usually occurs as a family decision, it may also involve individuals emigrating due to work, school, or marriage. Unlike Shanghai, where most single women are under 35, in Hong Kong single women are found in all age groups, and large numbers of middle-aged women are single. This is because Hong Kong has a long history of singlehood as a lifestyle choice, starting during the 1960s and 1970s when girls and young women worked in factories and contributed their wages to their families (see Salaff 1995 [1981]). Many older single women I met in Hong Kong said that when they reached the end of the marriageable period—in their late twenties—they resisted their families’ requests that they marry by emphasizing their ability to make their own decisions. When factories in Hong Kong closed in the 1980s, most women I met of this generation managed to find

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work in the service sector, yet they remained vulnerable in the employment market due to age and gender discrimination and their lack of computer and English skills. They generally had low incomes—between US$900 to $1,900 per month—and most said that they were satisfied with their lives. Many said that they would consider marriage if an appropriate person appeared who matched their lifestyle and personality. That being said, most were not actively seeking a relationship. They pointed to the fact that many of their married friends were not happy in their relationships, and that marriage carried economic and social risks. Fifty-six-year-old Mei Kwan lived with her mother and her elder brother, his wife, and their two children. She had worked in factories as a teenager and obtained her high school diploma by attending night school. She enjoyed her job at a Christian charity organization, as she was able to provide clients with information about Christianity. Regarding marriage, she said, “I wouldn’t marry just for material security. He would have to be someone whom I respect and who respects me and who shares my faith. I think spiritual happiness is more important than material life. If I got married it would have to be with a suitable person.” Fifty-four-year-old Siu Lan, an office clerk at a university, explained that she could not marry easily because she was highly romantic. Like Mei Kwan, she had also left school to work in a factory as a teenager. She came from a family of ten brothers and sisters, and after her parents passed away, she lived by herself in a rented apartment in Tin Shui Wai, in a low-rent housing estate far from the center of the city. She told me, I’ve known some men for many years, but I wouldn’t choose them. I wouldn’t marry for money because I’ve lived like this for all these years. I was poor but I didn’t die! So I know that I can survive. When I was in secondary school, I had experience with puppy love. He was tall, good at sports, and good at school, but ugly. When my sister saw him, she laughed and said how come you like such an ugly guy! I want someone with whom I can communicate, someone who matches me. I’ve read many love stories so I have romantic ideas. I must have a feeling for him first. If I don’t have this feeling, then I won’t choose him. I haven’t met anyone who gives me that feeling and I’m used to making choices on my own.

Other single women in this age and income group also told me that marriage involved responsibilities and pressures that would reduce their quality of life.

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Fifty-two-year-old Ruth, a clerk in a government office, said, “Many of my friends are married and they tell me about unhappy things, so I know that marriage isn’t always easy. When you are married, you may not be able to do the things you want. You have to take care of others. I can see this from the example of my sister-in-law. She not only has to take care of herself and her family, but also my brother and his children, and even me. It’s as if she married into three families.” In Hong Kong, I interviewed women who were executives at large firms, civil servants, and financial analysts. Women I met at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale worked as low-level office clerks whose duties included preparing tea and delivering internal mail. In comparing women of different income levels and family backgrounds, I found that women I knew who were more economically vulnerable tended to be cautious about relationships with men and marriage. One woman told me that when she was young, in the 1980s, she rejected all meetings with men set up by family members because she did not want to give men the impression that she would consider marrying them. She emphasized independence, referring to her ability to decide how to live her life. She did not mean, however, that she was totally self-reliant. Rather, she maintained financial and social independence in the context of her interdependent relationships with her parents and siblings. The family system in Hong Kong, as I will discuss in chapter 4, allows even those women with very low incomes, below US$1,300 per month, to remain single. Women with the lowest incomes felt that they had a great deal to lose if they married a man who was unfaithful, addicted to gambling, or abusive. Many lower-earning women I met were wary of the dangers of marriage and tended to espouse the companionate model, stating that they would only marry if the man matched them on an emotional level. Two women I met in Hong Kong felt that they need not marry and engaged in serial monogamous relationships with men. Both of these women, not by coincidence I believe, were well-educated and financially self-sufficient. Iris, in her early forties, said that she did not want to marry because it would take away her freedom to travel and have a variety of friends, including male friends. When her romantic relationships started to get serious, she said, she gently ended the relationship. Lisa, a human resources manager in her late thirties, said that she did not want to marry because marriage was “too serious” and she did not want to have a child, which she thought would cause premature aging. She had broken up with her previous boyfriend, with whom she had been living, because she did not love him and they were not getting along

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well. She was now dating another man but she did not think she would marry him because he was seven years her junior (in his early thirties) and he said that he did not have the money to marry. Both Iris and Lisa view marriage as restrictive and associated with childbirth, service, and lack of autonomy. Older generations of women who served their families through factory work referred to the companionate model to reject family pressures to marry. Some middle-aged women used the model to emphasize their independence and resistance to marriage. Younger generations of women with higher levels of education also referred to the model to explain their singlehood. Most single women I knew in Hong Kong denied that they wanted to marry a “rich man”; most downplayed the importance of the man’s financial background in discussing marriage partners.24 That being said, their narratives reflect concern with class and educational hierarchies in that they reject men whose cultural level is below their own in terms of consumer tastes, political astuteness, level of conversation, and public manners. In spite of the strength of the companionate model, most single women in Hong Kong did not have romantic partners. Only about one in five Hong Kong women I interviewed had romantic partners at the time of the interview. Most of those who did have romantic partners were younger and planning to marry soon. In Hong Kong, as in Shanghai, there were really no socially acceptable forms of intimate relationships for women outside of marriage. A few women I met were having “inappropriate” relationships—defined here as relationships that could not lead to marriage—because the man was much younger and unprepared for marriage or already married. In Hong Kong, the idea that life is only meaningful with a “soul mate” is relatively weak and women I met had strong relationships with their families and same-sex friends. I found that although women in Hong Kong said that they wanted to marry, they made little effort to find a partner. However, this may not be due to lack of interest, but perhaps due to the lack of structures that would help women in Hong Kong find partners and the poor marriage market discussed earlier. Many single women I met in Hong Kong critiqued the duty model of marriage as unreliable given the lack of certainty that men would follow through in their roles. The duty model may leave women stranded; after they have fulfilled their roles of taking care of children, a husband, in-laws, and the home, the man may fail to fulfill his responsibilities, leaving the wife without an independent income. More so than in the other cities, women I knew in Hong Kong recounted stories of friends and sisters who found themselves in bad marriages with husbands who gambled or took mistresses. Others said

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that they lacked confidence to raise a child given the high costs of education and the heavy responsibilities. They pitied married women who needed to take on burdens of caring for a nuclear family, their own parents, as well as their husband’s parents and extended family. Although Hong Kong women I met rejected the duty model of marriage, they did not reject duty in relation to family service toward their natal families. Many single women I met in Hong Kong felt that service and commitment to one’s siblings and parents were duties that they should fulfill whereas devotion to a husband and his family was a personal choice that contained its own pleasures as well as added work and risk.

Tokyo: Marriage as a Social Expectation In contrast to the nearly ubiquitous sense of urgency toward marriage in Shanghai and the assertion that marriage is optional in Hong Kong, views toward marriage in Tokyo were mixed. In Tokyo, some women said that they would like to marry as soon as possible; that marriage is a necessary step in life without which it is difficult to imagine a future. Others said that they felt little pressure to marry and would do so only if they met the right person. The situation in Tokyo is similar to that in Shanghai in that most people feel that marriage is the best path for women to live a meaningful and happy life. Yet Tokyo is similar to Hong Kong in that there is general agreement that marriage is not necessarily suitable for everyone and should be subject to individual preference. In other words, single women in Tokyo told me that marriage is the expected life path for women but is nonetheless a personal choice. As in the other cities, most women I met in Tokyo said that they would like to marry if they found an appropriate person. National surveys also have found that most women say that they want to marry. According to the 2015 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research survey, only 8 percent of never-married women between the ages of 18 and 34 said that they intended to remain single their entire lives (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016). Of the three cities, however, Tokyo has the highest percentage of never-married women in their thirties, at 33.7 percent (Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health 2018). Hong Kong follows, at 29.85 percent (Census and Statistics Department 2018a), and in Shanghai the figure is only 9.6 percent (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 2017). Women in Tokyo are also more likely than women in the other two cities to remain unmarried into their forties and beyond. In Tokyo, 22.5 percent of women in their forties were never married (Bureau of Social Welfare and

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Public Health 2018),25 compared to 15.9 in Hong Kong (Census and Statistics Department 2018a) and less than 2 percent in Shanghai (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 2017). Women I met in Tokyo did not say that they resisted marriage because of childcare responsibilities. Most said they wanted to marry because they wanted to become mothers and raise children. While some wanted to continue working after childbirth, others said that they hoped to quit their jobs and become housewives. In other words, women I met in Tokyo did not critique the gendered role of a married woman. Rather, they criticized the quality of potential marriage partners, stating that they had yet to find a man whom they would like to marry. National surveys of women in Japan routinely find that when asked why they are single, the most common response among never-married women aged 25 to 34, selected by 51.2 percent of respondents, is that they have “not been lucky enough to meet an appropriate person” (tekit na aite ni meguriawanai) (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016). Finding the right person is important because the stakes of marriage are high; marriage may require risking one’s career and independence. In Tokyo, women spoke of marriage using both the duty and the companionate models. A man’s income and financial ability were important to the women I met. The companionate model, however, is also important, as we can see that women remained single because they wanted to wait for the appropriate person. The companionate model has risen in Japan in recent decades as “arranged marriages” have declined. In the early postwar period through the 1980s, when marriage was universally expected, matchmaking was widely practiced. Couples commonly married through introductions (omiai) by relatives, family friends, and amateur or professional matchmakers, but these have fallen off in popularity as young people now prefer to meet potential spouses through more spontaneous and informal arrangements. 26 While nearly all the women I met in Tokyo said that they did not want to marry through an arranged meeting, a substantial number had tried it. In previous decades the person who introduced the couple and their parents would attend the first meeting, after which the couple would go off by themselves on a date. Today such meetings are more likely to be “blind dates,” in which a date is arranged by well-meaning friends, relatives, or amateur or professional matchmakers. Some women I knew had tried group dating, such as “g kon” involving parties or dinners that might be organized either commercially or by friends. Women claimed that the men they met through such meetings, particularly through omiai, were invariably flawed and inappropriate; they were

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men who were unable to socialize properly and who thus had to resort to such meetings to find a spouse. Many women were pessimistic about the chances of meeting an appropriate person for marriage in this way. Marriage markets in Tokyo are similar to those in Hong Kong and Shanghai in their emphasis on youth, beauty, and fertility in women (see Nakano 2014). In the 1970s and 1980s, the appropriate age of marriage for women in Japan was said to be 25, as popular expressions compared women to Christmas cakes, which in Japan are in great demand on December 25 but subsequently lose value (Brinton 1992). Today phrases such as “appropriate age of marriage” (tekireiki) are no longer used in everyday conversation. Nonetheless, most women feel pressure to marry from their late twenties through their mid-thirties. The cultural expectation of hypergamy in which women “marry up” and men “marry down” creates problems in Tokyo marriage markets, as in Hong Kong and Shanghai, due to women’s rising levels of education and income. In Japan, “marrying up” is made even more difficult due to the decades-long economic recession and slow economic growth that have diminished men’s ability to obtain levels of income that would support a family.27 Most women I met in Tokyo hoped to achieve a lifestyle in which they married, had children, and balanced work and family. National surveys show that the majority of women between the ages of 18 to 34, or 66.9 percent, would ideally like to marry and return to work while caring for a family, while only 18.2 percent would like to become full-time housewives (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016). Women with aspirations to marry were aware of marriage deadlines and were eager to meet them. Thirty-two-year-old Sachiko graduated from an elite university and works in the management track (s g shoku) of a large Japanese bank. She found herself pushing up her marriage deadline as she developed her career: “I have traditional attitudes. I’ve always wanted to get married and have children. At first I thought that I would have children by age 30 but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve moved up the age every year. Now I’m thinking that I will have children by age 35. I think that marriage brings happiness for women, and for men as well. I grew up in a family of four persons and that was a good thing for me, so I think that people should have families.” Sachiko had been dating her boyfriend for a year and felt that it was not the right time to marry, but she hoped that the relationship would move in that direction. Women remarked that the marriage market involved many factors beyond their control, and that trying one’s best in finding a partner did not mean that one could find such a person. Men their age were busy developing their careers, and men could wait longer

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to marry as their value in the marriage market was based on their income as well as their age. Women such as 30-year-old Nami saw marriage as both a personal goal and a social expectation. In an earlier publication, I introduced her words as follows: “It would be sad if I were to stay single for the rest of my life. It’s probably my mother’s influence. She thinks that a woman’s happiness comes from having a family. Also, if you don’t marry and have a family, you won’t be seen as a full member of society. I don’t need to have children so quickly. I don’t mind having children when I’m 39. But it’s another thing to raise them. I want to raise them when I’m young” (Nakano 2011, 134). In searching for a partner, she mentioned conventional criteria such as income, height, and worldliness: “I don’t want to marry into a situation in which my lifestyle is below that which I was accustomed to growing up. Also, as I’ve lived abroad, I want someone who has exposure to the outside world. People say that men are generally seven years less mature than women. And I want someone who can protect me.” Her words suggested that she would like a marriage based on a gendereddivision of labor in which the man earned a living and the woman cared for the family. Yet Nami would not marry anyone just for the sake of marrying and having children. She had tried an arranged meeting but the man was completely unsuitable and she vowed never to do it again: “I thought anyone would be OK, but anyone is not OK!” In other words, Nami discovered that in spite of her great and pressing desire to marry, she would only marry someone for whom she had feelings of attraction and respect, and not just a man who met conventional requirements of income and social status. A popular turn of phrase in the 1980s stated that women wanted the “three highs” (height, education, and income) in potential marriage partners, but since the 1990s, it is said that women want a man with the “three Cs” (comfortable income, communicative, and cooperative with housework and childcare) (Mathews 2003, 116; Ogura 2003, 36).28 Marriage for women in Tokyo is closely tied to fertility and childcare. Single women I met addressed this link in various ways. Most women, such as Sachiko, described earlier, wanted to marry in order to have children. Some women wanted children but were ambivalent about marriage. Noriko had studied feminism at university and thought that marriage imposed too many restrictions on women. She explained: I was influenced by feminist ideas when I was at university. I read about how the idea of romantic love is an ideology, and that stuck with me. At

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the time I was having some strange experiences in my relationships that I didn’t understand and the feminist literature suddenly made things clear to me. For example, at that time I was seeing a man who thought that it was his duty to protect me. It made me feel uncomfortable; it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. After reading feminist literature I suddenly realized that I wanted someone who is independent and who would recognize my own independence. That kind of person is better for me.

As time passed, however, she started to want to have children: For a long time, I was totally against marriage but recently I’ve changed my mind. Partly it’s seeing my friends who have children and they seem to like it and their children are cute. Also, I’m beginning to realize that through marrying and having children you can expand your social networks. When I get together with my cousins, a lot of them are married and they bring their spouses to family gatherings. I can see that it brings in new ideas and makes things more interesting. That has made me start thinking that there may be good things about marriage as well. I think that it would be a good experience to raise a child. It would be interesting to take responsibility for another person as that person is growing up. There are many children in Japan who are abused by their parents. When I hear of that I think, “You can give that child to me to raise!” I’m afraid of the childbirth process and I don’t think the child has to come from my own body. But I think that raising a child is a good way to communicate with other people in the society.

In Japan, adoption is rare and seen in a negative light due to an emphasis on “blood ties” as the basis of parent-child relationships (Goldfarb 2019). 29 As mentioned earlier, childbirths out of wedlock are also very rare; only 2 percent of births occur outside of marriage, as mothers feel that such children would be disadvantaged in society without a father (Hertog 2009).30 In Hong Kong, single women may become intimately involved in caring for, raising, and financially supporting siblings, nieces, and nephews. In Japan, basically the only way for a woman to raise children is through marrying and giving birth herself. Women over the age of 35 are no longer pressed by the marriage deadlines because they are considered too old for the market. Those to whom I spoke wanted to find companions who shared their interests. Forty-three-year-old temporary worker Teruko explained that she had been to five or six arranged

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meetings and each was unsuccessful. She told me, “Because my parents made me go, the whole time I was saying, ‘I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.’ It was a little rude to the men because I went there thinking ‘I hate this.’ But the men who come to such meetings are never any good. I would try my best to have a conversation but he would have nothing to say. I’d get exhausted trying to keep up the cheerful atmosphere. I see no point in going out with people with whom I have nothing in common when I can go out with my group of friends, with whom I share similar interests.” Teruko was still open to marriage if the man shared her interests in travelling to cities around Asia, watching films, and sampling local cuisines. But marriage for its own sake was not attractive to her. Similarly, 42-year-old Etsuko, a computer technician working as temporary staff, explained that she would not marry unless she met the right person: I don’t reject marriage. If I can get along well with the person then that would be fine. But it would be troublesome to be married. If the person were the type to complain about things, about housekeeping or my cooking, for example, it would be a lot of trouble. Maybe it would be a good thing to be married but not have to live together! Lots of women want a husband who brings in a high income. But in a partner I want someone who I can talk with and who has a lot of curiosity. If I can find this kind of person, I’d be interested in getting married.

Etsuko is not resisting the role of women in marriage, but rather resisting the obligation to marry someone for whom this sacrifice would not be worthwhile. A small number of women I interviewed in Tokyo were dating or spending time with foreign men who had come to Tokyo from North America and Europe. These men worked in the financial sector, for trading companies, or were English teachers. They were well-educated, had relatively high incomes, and had a range of choices if they wanted a romantic partner. The women I knew who were dating foreign men said that they did not expect to marry them but were just having fun with the relationship, either because the man was married or because he was posted temporarily in Japan and would eventually leave for another country. These women were all beyond “marriage deadlines”; that is, they were all over thirty and were no longer seen as attractive on the domestic marriage market. I first met Chisato, who was 33 at the time of our meeting, at a bar frequented by Western men and Japanese women. She explained: “I would like to find the right guy and get married but Japanese men are not interested in me because I’m already too old. Japanese

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men immediately ask, ‘How old are you?’ and they only want women who are young. Foreign men are different—they never ask how old you are.” When I met Chisato again a few years later she had met a man through an online dating site, a divorced man who lived in Osaka and who had a teenage daughter, and they planned to marry. The divorce market accommodates older women because it does not require women’s fertility as many divorced men already have children and are not necessarily looking to have more. The two Tokyo women I met who married during the course of my study both married divorced men who had children from prior relationships. The strength of the duty and companionate models varied according to age and class. A number of college-educated women who were under thirty and working in good jobs—such as corporate executives, bank managers, and civil servants—adopted a duty model of marriage; they wanted to find a partner with stable earning capacity to allow a financially comfortable family life. They hoped that their husband would provide a financial situation in which they were not forced to work, but could choose whether or not to work based on their inclination. Many women I knew who at 35 or older had passed optimal marriageable ages and also women from working-class families adopted a companionate model; they said that they would remain indefinitely single until they met a suitable person. Most women were not interested in social climbing through marriage. Rather, they wanted a partner who could provide a stable income that would allow for children while maintaining their current lifestyle. Okano found similar views among working-class women who felt that they needed to marry as they approached marriageable deadlines, but they did not want to marry above or below their current financial and social situation; they wanted to live with a sense of “comfort” (igokochi no yosa) (2009). Marriage provides social status to women in Tokyo and monopolizes legitimate relationships of sexual intimacy and companionship. Single women see marriage as a path to social security and support in their old age, and a means of obtaining personal happiness. In Tokyo, as in Hong Kong, most single women I knew who were over the age of 35 did not have romantic partners. This is probably due to the ways that relationships are limited by the expectation of marriage. As in the other two cities, in Tokyo as well, basically the only legitimate romantic relationship is that of marriage or a relationship leading to marriage. A few women I knew in Tokyo had romantic relationships with married men but most other women said that they would not enter into such a relationship because they would not want to share a man with another

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woman. According to my observations, single women in Tokyo seemed fairly satisfied with their lives without romantic partners. They were busy with work on weekdays and spent their weekends enjoying hobbies, travelling, or seeing friends. Japan does not have a strong “couples’ culture,” such as that found in the United States, where people feel that everyday activities should be conducted with a romantic partner. In Japan, married couples typically do not feel that they need to spend leisure time together. Tokyo contrasts with Hong Kong and Shanghai, where families have meals and outings together on a regular basis; in these latter cities, it is not unusual for a young married couple to eat dinner with their parents or in-laws several times a week, for example. Some single women in Shanghai told me that they felt sad upon seeing families walking together on weekends, wondering when they would have such an experience. Single women in Tokyo did not say they longed for the company of a husband. A few even suggested that if they married, they would prefer living apart from their husband, and one woman said that if they lived together, then ideally they would live in separate rooms or at least sleep in separate beds. One woman referenced Heian Period (794–1185) marriages—in which husbands visited their wives for the night but otherwise lived separate lives—as ideal. “I wouldn’t need to cook and clean for him, and live together in a small Tokyo apartment,” she explained, laughing. Although this was not a typical response, the work-centered culture that demands men’s total commitment and the long commuting times in Tokyo meant that women did not expect to spend a great deal of time even with their imagined future husbands.

Family-Oriented Yet Unable to Make the Transition to Marriage Many women I met in all three cities wanted a companion in marriage but were also willing to accept service-oriented gender roles. They were willing to set aside their careers and make family caregiving their priority in life. Most did not expect that a potential husband would sweep them off their feet: he need only inspire “feelings” or give one confidence about the potential for love. The problem, for many, was finding such a partner. Women’s troubles in finding a partner emerge from a number of factors. Women expect to find a partner who meets socioeconomic criteria and is personally appealing. He should spark a feeling of attraction if not desire. In addition to the challenge of meeting such a person, the timing of the meeting is critical. He should appear in the woman’s life in her mid- to late twenties. During this key period, women are also expected to obtain an education and develop their careers. Many women found that they could not rely on men of

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a similar age to meet their marriage deadline expectations because men marry later than women. They would need to seek older men, but men who were older and successful in their work were looking for younger and less successful women. Women with high levels of education struggled to find partners due to discrimination in marriage markets. The numbers of single women migrants to cities have increased, and these women also faced difficulties finding partners. Previous generations of women married with similar time constraints but had greater institutional supports for finding marriage partners. Today, however, governments and companies are generally not involved in assisting young people to find partners. In Shanghai, parents have stepped in to help, but in Hong Kong and Tokyo, women are more likely to rely on meeting people through work and casual gatherings. In all three cities, some women use commercial services such as online dating apps or agencies to meet potential partners. In Tokyo, the “marriage hunting” (konkatsu) movement promotes the idea that women—much more so than men—are responsible for using commercial and other consumer services to find a partner. Yet women I met were reluctant to use such commercial matchmaking and those who did reported that the men who used such services were not appealing. Such services introduced them to men who met “duty-model” criteria in terms of income and education but were not suitable as lifetime companions. In popular culture and in Western sociological literature, the rise of singlehood is often blamed on the growth of individualism.31 I did not find, however, that single women in the three societies under study were rejecting marriage because they embraced individualism. On the contrary, most women wanted to live a conventional life according to gendered expectations: they wanted to marry, and most were willing to curtail work while caring for children. In these three societies, the duty model of marriage remains strong and marriage is relatively narrowly defined as requiring fertility and childcare from women and housing and income from men. Individualism, however, at least in the version that appears in neoliberal capitalism, does play a role in women’s lives. In the model of development adopted by the governments of the three societies, the individual is responsible for her or his own private life, including dating, marriage, and divorce. In this environment, the process of finding partners is left to individuals rather than supported by social institutions. Individuals may think more about constructing personal happiness through intimate relationships and take greater care in selecting a spouse than in the past. But in the cities in this study, this

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move toward self-responsibility in personal life is not equivalent to the abandonment of family responsibilities. To the contrary, single women are finding new ways to support their families. This is not entirely surprising, as researchers have shown that neoliberal policies have meant that families need to take on greater responsibilities for social welfare provision. The governments of the societies in this study retain a rigid definition of the family as involving a heterosexual couple and the production of children. As mentioned, same-sex marriage is not recognized in any of these societies and births out of wedlock are uncommon. When I have given public talks on single women’s views of marriage, I am often asked whether single women use reproductive technologies to have a child. Newspapers occasionally carry stories of women in China and Hong Kong who freeze their eggs so that they may have a child later in life when they find a partner.32 As mentioned earlier, however, laws and regulations in the societies under study prevent single women from using reproductive technology to become pregnant. Although some women in my study considered having a child without marrying, none had actually taken steps to conceive a child in this way, perhaps because of the stigma attached to such a child, and because the cost of raising a child in these cities—which includes providing housing, childcare, and a good education—is beyond what most single working women would be able to afford. A small number of women told me that they had had abortions. Abortions are relatively commonplace, especially in Shanghai, where they are easily accessible and relatively inexpensive. They are more expensive in Tokyo but are affordable for most women. In Hong Kong, abortions are legally available at public and private hospitals only if two doctors agree that the pregnancy endangers the life of the mother. These requirements and the expense lead low-income women and girls in Hong Kong who may wish to conceal the pregnancy from their families to cross the border to China to obtain abortions, and some women attempt to obtain an illegal abortion locally in Hong Kong (Hung 2010). Women had abortions because the man with whom they were involved was not someone whom they thought they could marry either because they were not compatible or because the man was already married.33 Although abortion in the cities under study does not have the political implications it does in the United States related to interpretations of Christianity, the abortion experience took a heavy emotional toll on the women I met who had had one. The suffering of women who have abortions may be the price paid for the rigidity and narrowness of the marriage regimes in which marriage is the only legitimate path to fertility and intimacy.

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The governments of these societies want fertility but a particular kind of fertility—fertility that occurs in middle-class families in which children are raised by heterosexual married couples. Most women in my study wanted children but thought that they would follow society’s rules in having them or not have them at all. Women I knew saw marriage and family as a package. “I want children but first I need a husband,” or “I haven’t thought of children since I don’t have a boyfriend,” were common responses to my questions to women about whether they wanted children. The three societies have been successful in maintaining “stable” families defined as heterosexual couples raising children with women fulfilling genderbased supporting roles. The price of maintaining such families, however, has been steep. These marriage regimes restrict women’s independence and ability to contribute to the economy. Women who would like to marry and have children find it difficult to find an appropriate partner at the right time, and many remain indefinitely single and childless. Others who might choose to bear children without a partner or without a heterosexual partner feel obliged to avoid doing so under society’s model of successful womanhood and moral prescriptions for behavior. My sense is that the desire to have children is widespread and many more single women would have children outside of marriage if such a path seemed socially acceptable and financially viable.

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CHAPTER 2

“When I Went to Graduate School, My Parents Said I Had to Get a Boyfriend” Managing Educational Expectations

T

wenty-six-year-old Maggie Chan told me matter-of-factly that her educational achievements were an obstacle to marriage. “Ph.D. holders are a ‘third kind of human being [di san zhong],’” she said, referencing the common phrase bandied about in Chinese cities that holds that highly educated women, consequently unable to marry, are no longer women, nor are they men, but are an abnormal third category.1 She had first-hand experience of the difficulty of dating as she obtained higher degrees: When she was an M.A. student, there were many men whom she could date, but as a Ph.D. student, the choices were fewer. The quality of men declined, she explained, adding that, for example, the men still available didn’t have a sense of humor, couldn’t tell jokes, and lacked social skills. She had tried, unsuccessfully, to use online dating sites to meet men. She met two men in this way, but she could tell at once that she wasn’t interested in them. In her latest experience, the man suddenly grabbed her arm while walking in a dark underpass, a gesture that she found startling and impolite. She planned to return after graduating to Shanghai, where her parents would introduce her to potential marriage partners (xiangqin). “This is the best way for a woman in China to find a partner because parents help screen the men, and make sure that their family backgrounds, educational level, and personalities match our own. All that is left is for the young people to meet and decide whether or not they like each other.” Maggie was unusual among the women in my study because of her high level of education,2 yet her story of trying to negotiate obtaining an education

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amid pressures to marry was one that I heard in various versions from other women. Many of the women in my study were encouraged by their families to perform well in school and obtain a good education. Women and their families in the three cities understood that education leads to more choices and opportunities. Yet education is thought to be less important for women than for men, as families often expect that as adults, women will continue to work but will place more attention on their families while men will be excused from caregiving and will focus on work. In Shanghai, as in other urban centers in China, the singleton generation of only children born in the 1980s was raised to succeed in life usually through academic achievement (Fong 2004, 28). The prevalence of such aspirations has led to intense competition in the education system and in the job market (Fong 2004, 28). In China as a whole, women have made great strides in education and slightly outnumber men at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. At the Ph.D. level, however, women comprise only 38.63 percent of all such students in China (Shen 2018). In Hong Kong, families frequently pool their resources to pay for tuition and educational expenses for their children. In the 1970s and 1980s, some daughters were educated as part of family strategy and as family budgets allowed. Hong Kong families today have few children, and most parents are able to support the education of both daughters and sons. In recent years, women have obtained university places at rates that exceed those of their male counterparts. Women outnumber men in postsecondary educational programs with the largest numbers of women enrolled in arts and humanities programs (73.8 percent of all students enrolled), and women also obtain over 50 percent of places in programs previously dominated by men such as business and medicine (Census and Statistics Department 2019, 64). In Japan, women’s levels of education have risen throughout the postwar period but women remain under-represented at the highest levels of educational achievement. At the university level, only 50.1 percent of women attend university, compared to 56.3 percent for men (Asahi Shimbun 2018). At the lower, junior-college level, women outnumber men nine to one (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology 2019). In Japanese graduate schools, men outnumber women three to one (Asahi Shimbun 2018) and at the University of Tokyo, the nation’s premier institution of higher learning, which produces elites for business, government, and prestigious professions, men outnumber women four to one (University of Tokyo 2019).3

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This chapter explores how single women and their families navigate competing expectations that young adult women succeed in education and prepare to serve as family caregivers. Families have done their best to educate daughters as they try to imagine and plan for the young woman’s future. I found that in comparing the three societies, the two major concerns in relation to women’s educational achievements were (1) that women obtain an education while keeping in mind the need to secure a marriage partner before their value in the local marriage markets declines and (2) that women find a way to use education to establish a career that would accommodate caregiving responsibilities in the future. I found that single women and their families often tried to maximize women’s opportunities in education without damaging paths to marriage and childcare. Before representing the voices of the women themselves, I draw the reader’s attention to a few observations that contradict the usual assumptions about single women and education in the societies in this study. First, it is not necessarily the case that higher levels of education lead women to reject marriage.4 Rather it is more likely that highly educated women have difficulty marrying. Single women may struggle to marry because the period in which they are obtaining an education overlaps with the age range in which they are expected to find a partner. As discussed earlier, as women become more educated, they face difficulty finding marriage partners who have obtained a similar or higher educational and income level as they seek to follow the practice of “marrying up” for women. In Japan and Hong Kong, studies show that university-educated women marry later than less-educated women, but there is no evidence that they are less interested in marrying.5 In Shanghai, universityeducated women marry later than women with lower levels of education, but the vast majority of university-educated women eventually marry. In China, nearly all college-educated women and men along with their non-collegeeducated peers have married by their late thirties (Davis and Friedman 2014, 8). In Shanghai, in 2015, only 2.9 percent of men and 1.2 percent of women in the 45- to 49-year-old age range had never married (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 2017). Second, most single women I met responded to the pressures to become educated and provide family care services by striving to achieve as much as they could in education and employment until the time when they needed to take care of family. In all three societies, most women prepared to curb their higher education as they understood that it would interfere with plans to marry or

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would be unnecessary in their future as a family-care provider. Others hoped to find a way to balance education and family responsibilities while delaying marriage. A very small minority attempted to achieve educational goals at the expense of marriage. In other words, the single women I met were not rebelling or resisting the gendered model but were trying to work within the limits of this model to both obtain an education and meet family service expectations. Third, I found that single women in this study were not struggling to succeed at education while their parents urged them to give up and focus on marriage. Very often, single women and their parents together tried to figure out a way for daughters to navigate education successfully. Certainly, some women wanted to study further and their parents objected to their plans. But there were also many cases in which one or both parents strongly supported their daughter’s education, sometimes even more so than the daughter herself. There were also instances in which one parent supported a daughter’s education while another abstained from commenting. In a previous publication, I discussed a Tokyo family in which the adult daughter preferred to marry but her mother pushed her to continue with her education (Nakano and Wagatsuma 2004, 143–146). Single women are often blamed for choosiness, as we have seen in “leftover” stereotypes, but I found instead that single women more often work with their families to consider their life paths, and some women delay marriage because they are following the advice of their parents to obtain more education to better secure their future before entering marriage. Fourth, to understand how and why single women’s experiences of obtaining an education differed in the three societies, I have found it useful to consider how families commonly provide caregiving for family members in each of the societies. In Shanghai, where marriage is the critical entry point into caregiving roles, women I met were likely to abandon or moderate plans for education if it interfered with marriage. Those who continued to pursue education considered ways to marry, and, as mentioned, statistics show that most eventually do marry. In Hong Kong, where marriage is not the only entry point into caregiving roles, some single women wrestled with conflicts between the demands of higher education and expectations that they spend time and resources on their natal and extended families. In Tokyo, where marriage is the only path to childcare, and where childcare requires a mother’s total commitment at least for the first few years of her child’s life, some single women I knew tried to pack their educational endeavors into their twenties if they wished to have children. Others, who gave up on having children, felt

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that they needed to continue to educate themselves to remain relevant in the job market, as they considered that they might remain indefinitely, and sometimes unwillingly, single.

Shanghai: Curbing Education When the Time Comes Educational opportunities for women in China have grown at an extraordinary pace. In 1980, women comprised only 23.4 percent of university students, but by 2010, they held 50.8 percent of university places (Liu, Ling, and Chunyu 2016, 37). The gap in average years of schooling for men and women narrowed from 1.9 years (7.4 years for men, 5.5 years for women) in 1990 to 0.8 years (9.2 years for men, 8.4 years for women) in 2010 (Liu, Ling, and Chunyu 2016, 37). Although enrollment rates of rural women are low, women in urban China have generally achieved equal access to education at all levels. As one of the premier educational centers in the nation, Shanghai has a high concentration of elite universities that attract women and men from around the country. Education is highly valued and encouraged for women in Shanghai; it is seen as the primary means to success in life, and educational opportunities have become widely available for urban women and men over the course of a single generation.6 In China during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, many schools closed, college and high schools ceased giving entrance exams, political struggle replaced academic lessons, and many urban children were sent to the countryside, where they did not receive education (Fong 2004, 90). The revival of educational systems began with economic reforms in China initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. In 1986, the government enacted the Law of Compulsory Education, which required all children to complete nine years of education, and in 1999, the government asked institutions of higher learning to increase admissions by 50 percent (OECD 2010). In the eleven years between 1998 and 2009, enrollment in higher education rose from 6 million to 29.8 million, an increase of over 400 percent (OECD 2010). Many of the parents of the women I interviewed experienced disruption to their education due to the Cultural Revolution, but my informants’ generation—women in their late twenties through forty—benefitted from the educational reforms of the 1990s and 2000s. Most of the women I interviewed were “singletons”—only children without siblings—born in the 1970s and 1980s. As stated earlier, parents invested heavily in educating their daughters and expected them to achieve elite positions in society. Singleton daughters, in Fong’s words, are “their parents’ only

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hope for the future, and received all the encouragement, investment, and pressure their parents could muster” (2004, 107). Upon reaching adulthood, singletons needed to have elite jobs in order to support many dependents. Families therefore invested their resources in their daughters to give them every advantage in the competitive education system. The stakes were high, Fong notes, because if the singletons were unsuccessful, their parents had no other children upon whom they could rely (2004, 28). In addition to educational success, upon reaching adulthood, singletons are expected to marry and have children. By doing so, they provide their parents with the title of grandparents, a role which brings joy and pride, as well as triggers reciprocal relationships of care in which grandparents care for grandchildren and may expect to receive care in turn. Therefore, the balance of education and marriage in Shanghai has been not merely a personal concern but a matter involving the entire family. That said, women in Shanghai were more explicit than women in the other cities in stating that higher levels of education diminished their chances of marrying. They said that men were simply not interested in highly educated women. Also, obtaining an education delayed women’s entry into the marriage market, placing them at a double disadvantage deriving from both their high educational level and age. Education conflicts with marriage in another way; it often precludes dating. While attending secondary school and sometimes even during university, girls and young women were often expected to refrain from having romantic relationships. Farrer notes that Chinese educational authorities have long promoted mixed-gender education and have maintained that study is incompatible with dating (2006b, 105–106). Farrer reports that throughout the 1990s, school rules prohibited sexual intercourse among students and universities expelled students for violating these rules (2006b, 107).7 Even women who had been involved with a romantic partner at university were often not experienced in dating or selecting partners. This lack of experience in dating was problematic for women with higher education because they were enrolled in school until approximately age 22, then expected to find a partner in a two- to three-year period. Women and their families hoped for an engagement by age 25 and marriage by age 27. Women with postgraduate degrees who had not dated while studying for their degree would enter the marriage market well beyond the optimal marriage age. University-educated men did not face the same difficulties because men’s ability to marry rises with higher education, and age is less important particularly if the man has wealth and property.

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Higher education drew women away from their hometowns, where they had the social networks that would help them to marry. As a national educational hub, Shanghai drew women from around the country. Some of the most ambitious and resourceful hoped to use Shanghai as a stepping-stone to study overseas. Fong found that Chinese transnational students studying overseas reported that it was harder to find suitable spouses abroad than it would be in China, where they could draw on “gossip networks” to learn about the reputation of a potential date or spouse (2011, 123). Single women I met in Shanghai did not feel that they were negotiating the contradictions between marriage and education alone; their parents were on their side, supporting, encouraging, and advising. Many single women I met discussed education and marriage in similar terms; they desired both education and marriage out of personal ambition and as a way to fulfill filial duty. It is thus not the case that education represents neoliberalism while marriage represents conventional gender roles, or that education represents the goals of the young while marriage represents traditional pressure from parents. Educational achievement and marriage are valued by both parents and daughters; both generations want adult daughters to successfully navigate the contradictions between obtaining an education and getting married. Moreover, further education, particularly education overseas, is a dream held by many women and their families regardless of their educational level. Twenty-nine-year-old Mingxia worked as a legal assistant in a U.S. law firm in Shanghai. She had met her fiancé at work, and she felt lucky to have done so because many of her friends were looking for partners. She had attended a good university in her home city, where she had majored in law, and she had come to Shanghai to study for a master’s degree in law at one of the nation’s best universities. While an undergraduate, she did not date or have boyfriends, but focused on her studies. When she entered graduate school in Shanghai, however, her parents urged her to find a boyfriend. She said, “As an undergraduate, I led a quiet life. I read books, went to classes, and went back to the dormitory. I didn’t go out to have fun with boys. I was missing the best years for dating! Then I went to graduate school and my parents said that I had to get a boyfriend. My parents pushed me. Then I dated one or two boys. But it was because I felt that I had to date them, not because I wanted to. So we ended up breaking up.” Mingxia’s parents worried that their daughter’s future status as a graduate of a top university in a high-status subject placed her at a disadvantage in marriage markets, and they lacked networks in Shanghai to help

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introduce their daughter to men of a commensurate status. In other words, performing well in school and finding a boyfriend were both ways of satisfying Mingxia’s parents’ requests and expectations, and her parents helped to lay out strategies that would help her to achieve both goals. Mingxia and other women in my study emphasized the ease of finding boyfriends while attending school, and the difficulty after they graduated. Before graduating, finding partners was a woman’s market in which women had many choices, but women I knew found it difficult to date after graduating, because of their age, lack of time, and narrowing social networks. Mingxia said that she better understood her parents’ concerns after she started working and wanted to find a spouse. “At school we have friends so we don’t feel lonely but by about 30 we start longing for marriage, and at least want a boyfriend,” she said. “Many people feel pressure to marry before thirty. After graduating, there is pressure to find a boyfriend quickly, marry, and have a baby, and to finish this all in one or two years.”8 Mingxia expected that after marrying and having a child, her mother would come from Suzhou to stay with her and help her care for the baby. Her father was 55 and would continue working for five more years until his retirement at age 60. Her experience is an example of how marriage and the birth of a child set the stage for the reorganization of caregiving arrangements in which parents of adult children will continue to play an integral part. While most single women I met attempted to negotiate both education and marriage, a small number intended to delay marriage until after achieving educational goals. Shanghai-native Lee was a postdoctoral researcher at a top university in the city. Except for occasionally giggling when speaking to my graduate student, she was serious when making her points. Spending a year in London as an exchange student led to the decision to become a researcher, and she aimed to be the best in her field. Her goal was to work with researchers in the United States, where she felt the best work was being done. She found a research partner, a professor at a prestigious university in the United States, and she hoped this would lead to a chance to work in the United States and publish in top-tier international academic journals. The decision to aim high in her career came at a cost; it led to the breakdown of her relationship with her boyfriend and threatened her ability to marry. Lee explained the ending of her relationship with her boyfriend as follows: Before I went to London [for an exchange program] I had a boyfriend who was a university classmate. He was a normal person, very normal. He

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was always thinking about marriage and babies. After London, I began to think that I should spend more time on my research. When two people come together, it can’t be just because they [both happen to] live in the same world, but it has to be because they value the same things. He was thinking about marriage and babies, and I value my research. We were living in two different worlds, and the differences were too much for him so we broke up. After that, I put more effort into my career.

Although only 29, Lee was approaching the end of the marriageable period for women in Shanghai. Her father supported her decision to become a researcher. When she was a child, he pushed her to study, she said, because he was not able to obtain an education himself. Her parents had devoted themselves to supporting her education, and now they were concerned about her marriage. Lee’s parents urged her to marry, but she firmly resisted: “When my mother meets small children in the park, she’ll say that she wants to be a grandmother. I say, ‘Stop it.’ I tell her that if she wants a grandchild so badly, she should adopt one.” She added, though, that her parents were reasonable in their demands. “My parents always think that marriage is a lifetime commitment so they will not push me. They understand that [marrying] is taking a big risk,” she said. Lee acknowledged that she was blessed with opportunities and supportive parents. Yet she still felt that she had to make a decision between pursuing her education and having a partner and family. The time period in which she needed to focus on her education and career was the same time period in which she was expected to marry, and the strict deadlines for marriage in Shanghai forced her to make a choice. If she missed the deadlines, she understood that she might be permanently single. In Shanghai, obtaining success in education is the primary path to success in life. The single women I interviewed belong to a generation who feel that they are given access to enormous possibilities to achieve a successful and interesting life through their own efforts. As Fong (2004) has pointed out, success in education is also a means of providing for one’s family members because singletons will bear responsibility for their families’ financial and nursing support. Obtaining an education is thus both a personal achievement and a source of satisfaction to one’s parents. Nonetheless, in Shanghai, intense educational competition conflicts with aspirations to marry. By their mid to late twenties, single women have found that they have to choose between the two. In most cases, women choose to curb their education to meet marriage deadlines. Maggie and Mingxia tried to follow their parents’ advice in

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achieving both education and marriage by attaining as much as they could of their educational aims while taking measures to secure a husband. Mingxia at first resisted her parents’ entreaties to marry but later understood that it was indeed very difficult to find a husband after leaving school. Lee, on the other hand, resisted curbing her educational ambitions and chose education ahead of marriage although she still hoped that she might marry one day. Lee’s decision to delay marriage in order to pursue her Ph.D. is more than a personal decision but affects her mother’s aspirations to become a grandmother and possibly jeopardizes her parents’ elder care and her own. While the emphasis on marriage may seem like a throwback to a previous era, both marriage and educational achievement are cornerstones of the good life in modern Shanghai.

Hong Kong: Obtaining an Education and Repaying One’s Family For much of its colonial history, the British government in Hong Kong offered very little in the way of public education for the local population. Before the 1960s, the government provided financial assistance to a limited number of nongovernmental schools run by churches and charitable associations. Starting from the mid-1960s, the government expanded educational services in response to the needs of business sectors for an educated workforce (Lee 2003, 5). In 1971, a six-year compulsory education system was implemented followed by a nine-year system in 1978. These changes greatly improved the educational opportunities available to women and girls and the gap between the genders has been closing ever since (Lee 2003, 5). Changes in the society such as increasing wealth, declining birthrates, and smaller families of one to two children led families to place greater value on girls’ educations (Mak 2012). By the late 1980s, nearly 100 percent enrollment in secondary school was achieved, benefitting girls, who previously lagged behind boys in enrollment. In the early 1990s, the government met its target of expanding university places to accommodate 18 percent of secondary school graduates. As mentioned earlier, although on average men have higher levels of education than women in the general population, in recent years women have surpassed men in enrollment at university and postgraduate programs. Many Hong Kongers aspire to send their children overseas to obtain an education. Families with the financial means commonly send children, both boys and girls, overseas—typically to the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, starting from the secondary school level. In recent decades, women whose families cannot afford to send them overseas, but who have aspirations to study

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abroad, participate in overseas exchange programs at a university or attend a variety of educational programs overseas, often with their family’s financial support. The single women I interviewed in Hong Kong came from two generations with very different experiences in the education system.9 The generation of single women born in the 1950s and 1960s left school as teenagers to start work, usually in factories. They sacrificed their education to provide income to fund the education of siblings. The next generation, born in the 1970s and 1980s, reached adolescence when the manufacturing industry in Hong Kong had moved across the border to China, and educational opportunities and white-collar work for women in Hong Kong were expanding. For the older generation born in the 1950s and 1960s, the conflict between family responsibilities and education was obvious. Income levels in the territory were low and women commonly came from relatively large families of five or six siblings. Some women said that their parents did not ask them to leave school, but they volunteered to do so upon understanding their family’s financial situation. Other girls their age were also leaving school to work in the factories and it felt responsible and grown up to be able to pass their salaries to their parents. Many women gave their entire salaries to their parents. The generation of single women born in the 1970s and 1980s faced much less obvious conflict between family responsibilities and education. In their generation, families had fewer children and could afford to put resources into their education, and such education could help young women obtain white-collar work as the territory became a global financial services center. As in Shanghai, further education, especially education overseas, remains an aspiration of many Hong Kong women regardless of their educational level.10 Women who did not possess university education considered going overseas for nondegree or specialist programs such as in cooking, fashion, and design. Women who held university degrees talked about obtaining further education overseas in pursuit of advanced degrees. In 1971 at the age of 12, like many girls of her generation, Wing Yee left school to work in a textile factory. She was the second child in a family of five children and her income helped pay for the university education of her older sister. At 17, after five years of working full-time, she started studying again at night school with other girls who worked in the same factory. At age 20, she received her family’s permission to quit work and return to school full-time. “There was still much that I did not know about the world,” she told me. It took her six years of study to complete her high school degree:

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I didn’t like studying when I was young, but later I felt that I wanted to study more. When I first quit school [at age 12], I was too young and didn’t know anything. My older sister did well in school so I thought that I didn’t need to study [because she could represent the family ambitions]. When I left school after elementary school my mother wanted me to continue studying but she let me go to work when I insisted. Then when I wanted to go back to school, she understood—she’s open-minded—and she allowed me to do so. Now I’m nearsighted because I used to read under the covers with a flashlight—I didn’t want to disturb the others who were sleeping by turning on the light to read.

Wing Yee is typical of women of her generation in her leaving school to work in a factory to support her family. It was also common for factory girls to attend classes in the evening with other girls. In returning to school full-time, although she was already 20 years old at the time, she needed the permission of her family because leaving school meant that the family would not only lose her income but would need to support her, as she continued to live under their roof. In Wing Yee’s case, as was typical in Hong Kong of that era, daughters were educated according to the overall strategies of the family. Salaff ’s study of working daughters in Hong Kong (1995 [1981]) has shown that although their earnings were controlled by their families, earning an income provided daughters with a measure of status in the family. The work that Wing Yee did as a teenager gave her leverage in making decisions about her life. When Wing Yee told her family that she did not want to marry, her mother and relatives accepted her decision. Wing Yee’s mother had been a second wife, a common practice as polygamy was legal in Hong Kong until 1971. Wing Yee reminded her family members that her mother’s marriage was not happy, and she did not believe that marriage would bring her happiness either. Hong Kong women born after the mid-1960s grew up in smaller families that were better able to afford providing their daughters with an education. Women of this generation were able to obtain higher levels of education, and with the decline of the manufacturing industry in Hong Kong, there was no pressure on them to leave school early to begin factory work. Single women valued individual achievement and pursuit of their own interests which they tried to balance against expectations that they, as daughters, remain committed and close to their natal and extended family. Born in 1974, Ronnie felt lucky to have been sent by her parents to a Christian school that was more

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expensive and of a higher quality than many other schools in Hong Kong at that time. Ronnie’s parents had come to Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1948. Her mother and father had both left school at age 15 to work in textile factories, but they thought that the best way for their children to succeed was through education. As her family was not wealthy, her parents’ friends and relatives questioned why they would spend so much money on a daughter. Her family’s investment in her education paid off, however, and Ronnie was able to study for a Ph.D. in Canada. She explained: “My parents were liberal for their generation. They let me follow my interests. Everyone in Hong Kong thinks that it’s better to go away to study. In their generation, everyone believed that the best way to improve your situation in life is through education.” Upon completing her Ph.D. degree, Ronnie returned to Hong Kong, where she obtained a position as an assistant professor at a local university with heavy demands on her time. At age 39, however, she wanted to marry and did not have a partner. While in Canada she had dated a local man and found that he was not thinking about marriage. She puzzled over the situation in which Chinese women think that relationships should progress from dating to marriage, but her Canadian boyfriend did not agree. She thought it was important to have an intimate relationship with a partner and was less concerned about the legal status of marriage. Although she did not intend to be single at 39, the experience living in Canada and the requirements of her job as an assistant professor made it difficult for her to find the time to meet potential partners. Hong Kong native Angel was born in the 1980s and attended university in Hong Kong. Her life changed in her late twenties when she took a leadership course from a U.S.-based motivational speaker on how to find one’s passion in life. The speaker asked: “If you knew that tomorrow will be your last day on earth, what would you regret not doing?” This questioning led Angel to decide that she wanted to travel. She quit her job and spent three months travelling to New York, London, and Italy. She thought that the trip would satisfy her travel bug, but she found herself thinking of travel again after returning to Hong Kong. She decided that she would use her savings and attend business school in Europe. Her mother, who had always encouraged her to study hard and have a successful career, supported her decision. Her sister lent her money, and her brother pledged to help financially if needed. Her father, however, who was recovering from cancer, did not want Angel to leave Hong Kong. “He thought that I was leaving him,” she explained. Her family conspired to keep her plans a secret from her father. They informed him only after everything was decided, four weeks before her scheduled departure. She told me: “I

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told him that it’s such a short time and I’m coming back.” The main source of conflict for Angel was not between marriage and education, as we have seen in Shanghai, but between her father’s wishes that she remain geographically close and her educational aspirations that would take her overseas. For many single women I knew in Hong Kong, pressure to serve the natal family was much stronger than the pressure to marry. In the end, Angel’s father need not have worried about her commitment to her natal family, as her decision to study overseas strengthened bonds between siblings who provided financial and emotional support and Angel was committed to returning to Hong Kong. Women of Angel’s generation born in the 1980s in Hong Kong felt that it was natural that they try to pursue their dreams and careers. In Hong Kong, the pressures to marry were less intense than in Shanghai, in part because families in Hong Kong, not affected by the one-child policy, generally had many children. Hong Kong families relied on and provided a place for unmarried daughters to continue to belong to and contribute to the natal family. Like many daughters, Angel paid a “family contribution” (ga yuhng, to be discussed further in chapter 4) to her family, handing over about one-quarter of her monthly earnings to her mother—in my interviews the contribution Hong Kong informants paid to their parents ranged from one-quarter to one-half of earnings. For Angel, contributing to her natal family financially demonstrated her filial commitment. Beyond that, she wanted to live her life on her own terms. She set the tone at the start of our interview, stating: “The world is so big, and I’ve always felt that we should go out and see it.” In Hong Kong, single women I knew described tensions between education and commitment to the natal family, not between education and marriage. Many Hong Kong women born in the 1950s and 1960s sacrificed their educations for their natal families. Others benefitted from their siblings’ income and were able to obtain an education as a result. Many families at that time supported daughters to continue in their education. If their families could not afford to have daughters withdraw from work, many women studied at night after work or returned to school whenever family finances allowed. Due to their experience working and contributing to their families, some single women reported that they felt that they had established the authority and maturity to decide for themselves when and whether or not to marry. Education became more widely available in the 1980s and 1990s, and women born after the 1970s no longer saw education as a privilege, but as essential to their careers and self-development. In most cases, families viewed daughters’ education positively and provided financial and social support. It

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continues to be fairly common for siblings to contribute financial support to single women who wish to further their education overseas. Although I also heard of cases of married women leaving their families for short periods to pursue overseas education, single women were much freer to do so. After receiving support from their natal families, however, women felt an obligation to eventually return to Hong Kong to work and repay their families by providing them with social and financial support. In this sense, families in Hong Kong have enabled, directed, and constrained single women’s access to education. Although Hong Kong women did not say that education interfered with marriage, I met many women like Ronnie who concentrated on obtaining an education in their twenties and found it difficult to find a partner when they wanted to marry in their thirties. This was especially true if they had spent time away from Hong Kong for their studies during their twenties, a time in which many Hong Kong women were finding partners. When they returned to Hong Kong in their thirties, they were in the midst of establishing careers which required their attention and energy. Thus, although Hong Kongers did not recognize “marriage deadlines” such as we have seen in Shanghai, the marriage market in Hong Kong also held de facto deadlines for women.

Tokyo: Education as Personal Challenge Since the early twentieth century, the Japanese government has provided primary education for both girls and boys, and it achieved nearly universal advancement into high school by the 1970s. At the tertiary level, however, women have been tracked into gender-based curricula; two-year colleges overwhelmingly enroll women, and four-year universities enroll more men than women. The gender tracking in the education system supports the gendered division of labor in the society, which in turn reinforces the continuation of gender inequalities in the tertiary education system. Parents and even some elite educational institutions resist educating women for the highest positions in society, with the argument that women will eventually quit their jobs to care for families. Women’s withdrawal from the workforce, however, is a product of discrimination, lack of adequate childcare, beliefs that mothers should be the primary caretakers of young children, and other obstacles that women encounter when attempting to pursue full-time jobs and professional careers. In Tokyo, as in Hong Kong, I found generational differences among single women. Most of the Tokyo women I met who were born in the 1960s and 1970s had graduated from junior colleges or technical schools and worked

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in clerical positions. They had expected to marry but contrary to their plans, remained single because an appropriate person did not appear. They did not have opportunities for further formal education in part because the education system in Japan has not provided flexible opportunities for reentering educational institutions in midcareer. The lack of educational opportunities has reflected the lack of good employment opportunities for career changers; although the lack of educational opportunities may be as much an effect of poor employment market opportunities as a cause. In Tokyo, perhaps because women have understood that further education might not lead to better career opportunities, most women I knew had not aspired to furthering their formal education. Rather, many hoped to attend study or training courses overseas, usually in Western countries. Every year, tens of thousands of young adult Japanese women venture overseas. Government statistics show that approximately 1.34 million Japanese nationals live overseas, with women slightly outnumbering men (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2016). Of the thirty-three women I interviewed in Tokyo, seven had studied overseas. One had obtained an M.A. degree from a university in the United Kingdom. The remaining six, either because they did not possess an undergraduate degree or because their English-language skills were insufficient for admission to degree courses, studied English as a second language or attended training courses in fashion or design in Western countries, and one studied Cantonese in Hong Kong. Women who studied overseas were not necessarily the most highly educated among the women I interviewed.11 Rather, a number of women in Tokyo turned to overseas study as an option when they saw that their careers were not moving forward as successfully as they had hoped. Women I knew who were born in the 1960s and 1970s said that their parents did not agree that they should obtain further education because they did not see how it contributed to their life plans. Many of these women had gone overseas to study in their late twenties or early thirties after accumulating savings to pay for the trip themselves. Most held junior-college degrees (tanki daigaku) and their intention was not to obtain professional qualifications but to expand their experience and acquire skills. Some women I knew who were born in the 1980s had studied overseas when they were in their early to midtwenties with financial support from their parents. Similarly, their aims in studying overseas were not to obtain professional qualifications, but to pursue dreams of living overseas and developing skills that might help their careers.

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Because the Japanese education system generally does not allow for reentry into formal or professional courses of study, women who were born in the 1960s and 1970s who were interested in studying or advancing their careers had little opportunity to do so. They saw study as a way to further their interests rather than their careers. Further study, especially if it involved study overseas, was seen to disrupt a woman’s opportunities to marry. In the late 1990s, when she was in her late twenties, Tokyo-native Teruko decided to quit her job as a regular employee (seishain) with full company benefits and go to Hong Kong to study Cantonese—the variety of the Chinese language spoken in Hong Kong. Her friends applauded her for pursuing her dream, but her father was against it: “My friends knew that I liked Hong Kong so they said, ‘You always said that you really like Hong Kong and now you’re going!’ It was only my father who didn’t want me to go. I’m an only child so he really wanted me to marry. He said, ‘What about getting married and your job? Stop that nonsense and stay here.’ My mother didn’t say anything because she knows that ‘It’s no use saying anything to that girl once she’s got something on her mind.’” Teruko’s father’s objections emerged from two concerns. First, he was worried that Teruko would be away from Japan while she was in her late twenties, the prime age for securing a marriage partner. The second issue was that she would be leaving a job in which she had regular employment status with full benefits, a status that is increasingly difficult to obtain due to changes in corporate hiring practices as a result of economic stagnation combined with gender and age discrimination. Unlike studying English in an Englishspeaking country, it was unclear whether learning Cantonese could provide any career advantages. Women I knew of Teruko’s generation who dreamed of studying or living overseas had already worked for several years in Tokyo. After saving some money for the trip, they wanted to try to live their dream while they were still relatively young. Kelsky (2001) has pointed out that many Japanese women leave Japan because they realize the obstacles they will encounter in developing careers in Japan. Japanese women I met who left Japan to live overseas commonly said that they were experiencing problems at work at that time, and as they were ready to quit their jobs, they thought that it would be a good time to make the move. After studying Cantonese at a language school for six months in Hong Kong, Teruko tried to find a job in the city but found that she did not have sufficient English- or Chinese-language ability to find a job in the local

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employment market. Satisfied that she had done her best in her adventure in Hong Kong, she returned to Tokyo. The timing of her return, however, was poor in terms of job market conditions, and she was unable to find a job as a regular employee. She took a part-time position as a dispatched worker sent to different companies on short-term assignments by an employment agency (haken shain). After a few years she obtained a full-time job, although still under contract status rather than as a regular-term employee with full benefits. In her case, the education she obtained was not related to her work, as knowing Cantonese could not help her in the job market in Japan. Her trip to Hong Kong was a journey of self-fulfillment and adventure, which she did not regret even though it temporarily strained her relationships with her father, dampened her career prospects, and made marriage unlikely. Women who were born after the 1960s and who had obtained university educations were in a position to take advantage of management track jobs that became available to women in the late 1980s and 1990s with the passing of the 1986 Equal Employment Opportunity Law. The law asked companies to provide women with equal opportunities, and companies responded by opening a small number of management positions earmarked for women. Women who took these positions, however, found it difficult to marry and maintain their careers. I met many women with four-year degrees from good universities who held positions as bank managers, editors, and company executives. They felt that they had to choose between their jobs and marriage. Their four-year education at good universities provided them with options to have careers, yet the structure of Japanese corporate culture and expectations that women provide full-time care to children led many women to delay marriage while considering how to reconcile these two competing life aims. Women born after the 1980s had even greater opportunities for a variety of educational experiences, but these did not necessarily lead to greater work opportunities. This may be because Japanese companies have emphasized the status of the first undergraduate degree and prefer to develop their workers’ skills and abilities through in-house training. Women instead tried to improve their employment security by obtaining certifications and by studying on their own in areas such as accounting, music, and language. Yui, for example, convinced her parents to pay for her to study English in San Francisco and Honolulu for two years: “My mother was against it at first. At that time I didn’t speak any English. Even though today many people can speak English, I thought that English is an important skill that I should develop. My father worked at a foreign firm and he didn’t speak English, but he knew its value. So

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he supported my decision. He said that if you are going to learn a foreign language, you’d better do it while you’re young.” After the two years in the United States, Yui returned to Tokyo, where she worked for several years as a receptionist at a human resources training company. She wanted to marry, but as she was still 27, she felt that she could wait until her thirties to think about it seriously. Before then, Yui hoped to develop a career. She said she would change companies if the opportunity arose, and thought that she should develop a specialized skill. Some single women I knew who had passed marriage deadlines—and knew that they might remain indefinitely single—sought to improve their chances in the job market through obtaining certificates in a variety of fields such as real estate, travel, accounting, music, language, and translation. A large certification industry provides online and self-study courses on a range of subjects that may or may not lead to better job prospects but seems to relieve anxiety. Women I knew invested in themselves as a practical measure to improve their position at work and to survive if they lost their current positions. They understood that the employment market discriminated against older women, and they needed to be prepared to support themselves. Thirty-four-year-old Saki, for example, used her own money to study English as a second language at a community college in the United States, against the wishes of her parents, who wanted her to stay in Tokyo and get married. After returning to Tokyo, she found a job at a small trading company where she sometimes used English in company email. When searching for a job at age 33, she sent out around one hundred letters in response to job advertisements but only a few companies responded. She said: “I am qualified so it doesn’t make sense that so few companies responded to my application. Some wrote back stating, ‘Thank you for your interest in our company.’ I’m pretty sure that most of them only looked at my age on my CV and immediately threw away my application.” This worried her as she thought about how much worse she would fare in the job market when she turned 40 or 50. When she looked through advertisements in the newspapers, she told me, many stated explicitly that they were interested only in women under the age of 35. Saki provided clerical support for the men in her office and worried that, as a generalist, she was not developing specialist knowledge that would allow her to find another job if she lost this one. She was planning to take an online course in a practical trade—perhaps real estate or accounting—that would allow her to develop her own business in the future. The harsh realities of the job market in Tokyo shaped the ways that some women and their families viewed education. I found that parents were willing

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to invest in women’s education through junior college or university but more reluctant to support their daughters’ education beyond university.12 Women I interviewed told me that their parents doubted that their educations would help them in their careers and thought that studying might actively damage their daughters’ ability to marry, especially if their study plans involved leaving Japan. Other women, particularly those over marriageable ages, sought education precisely because they understood that they were marginalized from mainstream job markets. They saw education as the only way to equip themselves to survive as single women in an employment market that rewards ability and competence, or “ability-ism” ( jitsuryokushugi) (Borovoy 2010, 174).13 That said, because the Japanese employment market and workplaces have not been receptive to promoting women, many single women have found that their post-tertiary education did not significantly advance their careers. Teruko’s Cantonese and Yui’s English have so far not helped them in their careers, as Teruko works as a clerical staff and Yui as a receptionist. For younger women, who could still marry, the failure of education to lead to careers may well have encouraged women to abandon their careers to marry. Older women felt that education was necessary in a changing employment market even though the usefulness of education in securing work remains to be seen, given discriminatory hiring practices and Japan’s sluggish economy.

Knowing How Much Education Is Enough Single women I knew in all three cities expected to obtain education and participate in the labor market but many also understood the need to approach education with caution. They understood that too much education entailed risks for women, as it encroached on their opportunities to marry and high levels of education might not necessarily produce commensurate income and career success, due to gender discrimination in workplaces and employment markets. Many women in my study tried to obtain as much education as possible without jeopardizing family responsibilities. In Shanghai, many women cut short their education to focus on work and marriage. Maggie planned to finish her Ph.D. quickly and return to Shanghai to find a marriage partner. In Hong Kong, women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s commonly left school early to help their families by working in factories, or they decided not to study abroad in order to be close to and support their natal families. Others considered limiting the length of their studies so that they could start work to repay and support family members. In Tokyo, some women abandoned plans

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for further education or overseas study in order to accommodate family expectations that they live a conventional life that included marriage and children. In all three societies, however, a minority of women struggled to obtain an education even at the expense of family duties. These women often used the language of self-development and self-fulfillment to express their desire for further education; Lee in Shanghai, Angel in Hong Kong, and Teruko in Tokyo intended to relinquish marriage to achieve their dreams. Although they turned their backs on marriage to pursue an education, they did not necessarily reject family service. Lee was aware of her parents’ expectation that she marry, and she hoped that they would understand her decision to delay marriage. She thought that she might still marry and give birth in her thirties, thus fulfilling family obligations. Angel planned to see the world, but she would most likely return to Hong Kong and could still provide services to her family. Teruko, as I will discuss in chapter 4, intended to provide elder care for her parents, and in return, she, rather than her brother, would inherit their parents’ home. Single women’s approaches to education were shaped by the marriage regimes in their societies. Of the three cities, the pressures to obtain an education and to marry were greatest in Shanghai. Women and their families tried to address these pressures by planning for both. Compared to obtaining an education, however, marriage was less amenable to preparation. Single women and their families sometimes scrambled to find a partner in a short time period after spending many years investing in education. In Hong Kong, perhaps because marriage has been seen as optional, women felt less pressure to curtail their education to meet marriage deadlines. Some women, however, who had invested in education in their twenties found it difficult to find a marital partner in the midst of establishing careers in their thirties. Moreover, in Hong Kong, single women’s domestic responsibilities were not organized around marriage but around duties to support their natal families. In Tokyo, some women felt pressure to meet marriage deadlines and limited their educations to meet these deadlines. Others, who felt that they would not marry, decided to invest in further education in order to survive as single women in the employment market. Men who obtained education would rarely be penalized in the marriage market or have to choose education over marriage. For men, education might delay their marriages as they would have little income while obtaining an education, but they could be rewarded at the end by using the education to obtain better work. In Shanghai, men who wished to study overseas were sometimes

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advised to marry before they left because of the difficulty of finding a spouse overseas. Nonetheless, obtaining a degree from an overseas university was an advantage for men in the local marriage market, whereas it would disadvantage women. Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart found that in the United States, university women faced peer pressure to become involved in heterosexual romantic relationships or risk being labeled as unattractive to men. They found that such relationships took women’s time and energy away from their studies (1992, 213). Just as these university women studied by Holland and Eisenhart found that they could not escape the “sexual auction block” by which women are judged (1992, 8), women in my study could not escape the “marriage auction block” upon which they were evaluated as women. Many women I knew were prepared to put down their educational dreams to insure a path to marriage. Holland and Eisenhart note that “when combating race and class discrimination, groups of students oppose and resist.” When facing gender discrimination, however, they found that “individual women oppose and resist” (1992, 20). I also found that single women needed to negotiate the balance between education and marriage without help from their peers. Unlike the American women in Holland and Eisenhart’s study, however, the women I knew negotiated various educational strategies with their families. Together they tried to navigate expectations that women obtain education but not to the extent that it would interfere with responsibilities to provide family care services in their futures. In Hong Kong and Shanghai, in particular, the educational success of young women was a dream held by the entire family. In all three societies, however, too much education invited risks. If an adult daughter was considerably past her early twenties, overseas study could also be seen as selfish and lacking in filial appreciation. In Hong Kong, a filial daughter should stay emotionally and geographically close to her parents, preferably living with them or in an apartment nearby. In Tokyo, single women’s advanced study was seen not so much as lacking in filial piety as lacking in common sense. Further study would interfere with marriage and might not be practical or helpful for one’s career due to limitations in the employment market for women. Education for women was thus often seen as frivolous, selfish, and unreasonable. Curbing one’s ambitions in education would be respected as a more culturally reasonable, mature, and considerate decision.

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CHAPTER 3

“Because I’m a Girl, My Parents Want Me to Find a Stable Job” Accommodating Work and Caregiving Responsibilities

I

asked Tomoko, 34, a manager at a major Japanese bank, whether she felt pressure to marry. “Actually, it’s been the reverse,” she said. “There’s pressure on me not to marry.” When she started working as a management trainee, of the 130 fresh graduates hired that year only six were women. Of those six only two remained. The rest had married and quit. Her bosses told her “Don’t get married now!”1 Tomoko belonged to one of the first generations of women hired as a manager following the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Legislation (EEOL) in Japan in 1986. She had struggled in a male-dominated corporate culture. Customers sometimes commented, “Are they hiring girls now at your bank?” and a particularly difficult boss belittled her work. “They thought it strange that I asked a lot of questions—men usually just say ‘Yes.’ Maybe that’s why he didn’t like me,” she said. When a senior manager heard that she was having problems at the regional office where she had been posted, he arranged for her to be transferred back to the Tokyo headquarters. Tomoko wanted to marry, but she did not have a partner and wondered whether marriage was possible given her schedule; she returned home from work near midnight, after making the two-hour commute from her office in central Tokyo to her parents’ home in the suburbs. She had little time for dating, much less for raising a family. Tomoko’s experience resonates with the experiences of many single women in this study in the sense that she wanted to marry yet puzzled over how to combine work and family. This difficulty seemed particularly acute in Japan, where long working hours and commuting times make work all-consuming. 91

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It is often assumed that single women are not marrying because they are freed by their income to enjoy life as they please. I found instead that in all three cities women faced contradictory expectations that they obtain an income at work and that they marry and care for a family. In spite of the opportunities that have become available to some women in the workforce, many single women in my study were willing to put aside work and make family their first priority if they could find an appropriate partner. In other words, work was necessary, and, in some cases, interesting and inspiring for single women I met, but it was rarely a reason for remaining indefinitely single. Rather, most single women worked while keeping in mind present and future domestic responsibilities. That being said, some women used work and the income it provided to obtain independence: work allowed some women to view themselves as successful individuals, to obtain freedoms to spend time and money as they saw fit, and provided resources to negotiate with their families about marriage and caregiving responsibilities. In the three cities, single women anticipated having to take up two kinds of domestic responsibilities: (1) marrying and caring for children, husband, and a household and (2) providing financial support and nursing care for their parents and other family members. If they married, particularly in Shanghai and Tokyo, single women understood that they would be expected to give birth soon after. Although childcare arrangements vary considerably in the three cities, 2 women are expected to place the needs of their families above their own careers and personal aspirations. If they engage in paid employment, it should be in a way that does not detract from their ability to care for their families. For many single women I met, childbirth and childcare were highly attractive aspects of marriage. At the same time, many women in the three cities said that the expectation of childbirth and the responsibilities of motherhood led them to delay marriage until they had achieved more at work. The second kind of domestic responsibility expected of women, that of caring for parents and family members, might occur at various times and ways in a woman’s life course. In Shanghai, a filial daughter is expected to visit her parents regularly and provide monetary gifts on special occasions such as the Chinese Spring Festival. If parents require health care, daughters, as the only child, are expected to take responsibility for negotiating the hospital system, arranging domestic care, or providing the care themselves if required. In Hong Kong, adult daughters are expected to financially support their parents and sometimes their siblings through “family contribution” (ga yuhng) payments, usually made on a monthly basis. Adult daughters are expected to spend time

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with their parents, take them out for meals, and accompany them on medical appointments. Taking one’s parents on overseas trips (see Jackson and Ho 2020) is seen as a particularly warm and generous filial gesture. In Tokyo, women are not expected to financially support their parents because the older generation, who benefitted from Japan’s economic growth period, is often financially better off than adult daughters who came of age during Japan’s long recession starting in the 1990s. If their parents become ill, however, adult daughters in Japan, along with siblings, would be expected to organize care services, using various private and public health services, or provide nursing themselves if necessary. Domestic duties are not shared evenly by women and men anywhere in the world, but the gendered imbalance is more severe in the societies in this study than in many other advanced societies. In the United States in 2015, men spent an average of 150 minutes per day doing unpaid work compared to 243 minutes for women (OECD 2018). In 2015, Japanese men did only 41 minutes of unpaid work per day compared to 224 for women (OECD 2018). In 2015, men in China contributed 91 minutes of unpaid work per day compared to 232 for women (OECD 2018). Shanghai men, compared to men from other regions in China, have a reputation for being “good husbands” who do housework, cook, and shop for groceries, and Hong Kong men are said to help with cooking and housework as well, but this is seen as a personal choice for men and not a general expectation.3 Although many middle-class families in Hong Kong and some in Shanghai hire domestic workers,4 studies show that women are expected to train and supervise domestic employees, and if problems arise in the family, women are held responsible (Lee 2002, 248). In all three cities, women are expected to take responsibility for children’s success in education and for the smooth operation of domestic life regardless of whether or not they are engaged in full-time employment. The single women I met did not believe that work was more important than family. Rather, they hoped to gain recognition and suitable pay for their work while keeping in mind their domestic commitments in the long term. Single women I knew considered the changes that would occur if they married or if their parents required elder care and how these changes would affect their ability to commit to work. I also found that there were differences in women’s strategies that could be mapped across the three cities. These differences emerged from the ways that families organized women’s domestic labor. In Shanghai, many women deliberately limited their career paths in preparation for marital life. Some worked as much as they could in anticipation of having

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to reduce the time and energy spent at work when they married and had children. In Hong Kong, women I met managed their work commitments while considering their responsibilities to their natal families. Hong Kong women I knew who had high levels of education and who wanted to marry, like women in Shanghai, delayed marriage so that they could accomplish as much as they could before taking up the commitments of marriage. Women who were not particularly anxious to marry in Hong Kong managed their jobs in ways that allowed them to contribute to their natal and extended families. In Tokyo, all but a few single women who hoped to marry expected that they would resign from their positions when they had children. Some with professional skills looked for companies that had flexible policies for mothers. Women who were over the marriageable age felt that they needed to work to support themselves and, as they entered middle age, worried about how to continue to work if their parents required elder care.

Shanghai: Taking Advantage of Opportunities before Marriage and Buying Time Over the past two decades, China has seen an explosion of economic growth, creating jobs and enormous wealth, as well as dramatic material improvements in the lives of Chinese citizens. Shanghai has been at the forefront of China’s economic development. The city attracts billions of dollars in foreign capital and investment and is the regional headquarters of hundreds of multinational corporations. In 2017, Shanghai had the nation’s highest per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of US$19,671, twice the national average of US$9,311 (Babones 2018). Since the start of China’s open door policy and economic reforms launched by the central government in 1978, Shanghai has rapidly developed as a global manufacturing, trade, finance, and shipping center. As such, Shanghai attracts single women from around China who want to improve their lives and take advantage of opportunities to further their education or career, or who just want to live a more interesting life. Since the 1990s, China’s economy has grown faster than that of any other nation in the world, with an average 10 percent annual growth rate in GDP until the 2010s, when its growth rate hovered around 6 to 8 percent.5 Although women in China are working in large numbers, as mentioned in the introduction of this book, women are underrepresented in leadership positions in business, government, and educational fields. In Shanghai, as in other parts of China, women on average earn less than men. The wage gap was relatively small during the era of the planned economy, as pay was based on uniform state regulations that

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controlled wage standards and pay scales. The gap has widened in the era of economic reform, when the state has given greater autonomy to private firms to control the wages and employment standards of its employees (Liu, Ling, and Chunyu 2016, 31). Women are concentrated in jobs that are related to family roles such as health care, hospitality, education, and culture, suggesting that women have fewer employment opportunities that can bring prestige and higher income (Liu, Ling, and Chunyu 2016, 29). Women I met in Shanghai told me that women might achieve successful careers if they were resourceful, capable, and hardworking. Nicole, 38, had worked for a number of companies as a manager and then discovered that she could develop a side career as a management and communications trainer; a job that paid in four days the same amount that she earned at her regular job in a month. She summarized her career trajectory as follows: After graduating from university, I became an assistant to a manager at a small company. Then I went to work for an advertising agency and changed my specialization to media management. Next I joined a company that made electronic dictionaries and worked in the planning and advertising section. At night I went to school and got an M.B.A. Later I changed to a small company and worked under the president of that company and my job was general manager. Two years after that, I returned to the first firm and worked in human relations and administration. In my spare time I became a trainer specializing in management and communication skills. Some people think I spend my spare time teaching English, but actually I’ve been learning management and communication training!

Nicole’s parents assisted her in developing her career. They provided a comfortable place for her to live, and her mother took care of the housework and cooking. Nicole’s best friend, who was from Singapore and did not have such domestic support, teased Nicole, stating, “Nicole’s parents’ full-time job is taking care of Nicole.” That being said, Nicole and her parents were now anxious because Nicole was approaching forty and had yet to find a suitable marriage partner. When I asked her what she would like to be doing in ten years, she said: The perfect life for me is marriage. I should have a husband and we will love each other and have one or two babies. In ten years I hope that I can live in a house, and maybe in front of the house there will be a small

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garden with flowers and vegetables. It would be beautiful. I hope I can be a mother. I would still like to be a professional woman but maybe I will not need to go to the office every day. I’d like to be able to choose which work to take on. I’d like to work four or five days a month and have a good salary. I want to live a relaxed life. I don’t want to work hard. I want a simple life. I want to be a writer. In ten years maybe I will be a consultant, I will travel, and I will be a writer although my only readers will be my girlfriends (laughs).

Nicole’s statement of her dreams was clearly a fantasy—the most improbable part was not that she would become a writer but that she would live in a stand-alone house with a garden; a near impossibility in the densely packed and expensive city. Her statement nonetheless reflected that Nicole’s working life was not an end in itself, but part of a long-term plan that involved shifting to a more leisurely domestic life with a husband and children. Her success at work was one way of performing filial duty, and marrying and having a child was the second step. As explained in chapter 1, Nicole had dated a few men and had even been engaged. At age 38, she had passed the local marriage age and was unable to marry according to the usual market of single men in Shanghai. Although Nicole did not mention a direct conflict between work and finding a marriage partner, we can imagine that her busy schedule at work made dating and finding a partner difficult. Her commitment to work while in her youth— also a way of pleasing her parents—may have resulted in her being unable to transition into the domestic life of which she dreamed. Some younger women limited their career options upon the advice of their parents. A recent university graduate and Shanghai native, 23-year-old Nora, for example, was an only child who lived with her parents and did not have a romantic partner. For her first job upon graduating university, Nora told her parents that she wanted to work for a multinational company, but her parents asked her to take the civil servant examination instead. They thought that working for the government would be a good job for a woman because of the regular hours and job security. Nora passed the exam and obtained a civil service position. Although the pay was low, compared to the private sector, and the work itself was not interesting—as she primarily answered telephones and did routine clerical tasks—she was generally satisfied: “Because I’m a girl, my parents wanted me to find a stable job; one that is more relaxed (qing song). I’ll continue in this job because it is hard for fresh graduates to find suitable jobs. I have to adjust to the job; I can’t expect the job to adjust to me.” The strategy for

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Nora’s career and marriage adopted by her parents made sense in the context of the competitive marriage and employment markets faced by young women in Shanghai today. Nora had thus far followed her parents’ instructions. As a student, she studied hard, did not date, and obeyed their 10 p.m. curfew. Now, at the prompting of her parents, she was trying to find a boyfriend. It remained to be seen, however, whether she would fulfill her parents’ plan that she marry as soon as possible. Nora had her own ideas about marriage in that she preferred to meet a man on her own, instead of through her parents’ introductions, and while she described marriage as “inevitable” she also stated that she would marry only if she met “Mr. Right.” Twenty-nine-year-old Mingxia earned a good salary for her work as a paralegal in a U.S. law firm, but she was disappointed that after all her schooling, she was still not a lawyer, and could not become one as long as she stayed with the U.S. firm. To become a lawyer, she would need to move to a Chinese law firm and practice Chinese law. She had recently become engaged to her boyfriend, a Shanghai native, and planned to marry him in the following year. Because she wanted to have a baby, she felt that she must stay at her current firm at least until she gave birth: This firm doesn’t offer any career development. Because I don’t have a background in U.S. law, if I stay here, I will remain a paralegal. If I were younger, I would immediately try to change jobs. But the job market is not good these days. I plan to marry this year and want to give birth next year so it is not good to change to a new company right now. I don’t want to delay this career move, but at a new company, I would have to work very hard. My life plan is to have a baby, and then I definitely want to leave this firm.

Mingxia explained that men and women pursue different kinds of legal careers: Men who worked really hard in a local law firm might become a partner in ten years and earn US$140,000 a year. Women could not work continuously that hard for ten years. If she had a family, she would prefer to leave the firm to do in-house [legal] work. “But at a company, we would have to arrive at a fixed time and follow many rules and regulations. At law firms, we have more freedom. After two years, I would like to move to a Fortune 500 company. If not, then I’d like to work at a good local firm.” By the time her legal education was completed, Mingxia was 25. The critical years in developing her career fell in the time period also important for

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marriage and having children. Like many of her friends, she decided to choose to have a family and her mother would come to live with her to help her raise the child. She hoped that there would be a chance to continue to practice law later, but in a less ambitious form. All the women I met in Shanghai acknowledged the pressures and expectations that they marry, but some women seemed more comfortable with their single status than others. I found that those who seemed most comfortable shared an important feature in common: they had obtained financial security. I knew from friends that 35-year-old Sarah was a successful businesswoman, so before meeting her, I had mistakenly assumed that she would be tough or even domineering in her manner. Instead, she had a gentleness and softness in her speech and appearance. Sarah ran a business selling paintings to wealthy business people and their families. Originally from the city of Tianjin, Sarah had come to Shanghai seven years earlier and started her business by renting a 200-square-foot space to show paintings. At first, she could not afford to purchase paintings from the artists and instead showed paintings to customers and gave the artists money when their paintings sold. As her customers increased and the business grew, she bought a small exhibition space that doubled as an office in what had recently become a trendy shopping and dining district. She now employed three assistants, freeing her to attend exhibitions where she bought paintings from artists across China and the world. She said: I love art. I have worked with art since I was in Tianjin, where I had the opportunity to view paintings, mostly watercolors. In Shanghai people prefer oil paintings, so I have switched to oil paintings. Shanghai people also love sculptures, because they can be easily matched with their apartment decor. In the beginning it was quite hard. This area was not well known. After four years, the business began to improve and now I have many regular customers. Business is good. People say that if you want to make money, don’t go into the art business! We must love art to do this work. I enjoy my work. It’s boring to work in an office from 9 to 5. Here in the gallery there are always beautiful things to look at, and it’s always fresh because we constantly change the paintings on display. I studied English at school and using English, I can talk with people from around the world. These days, customers want to know about the culture and the background of the artist. At auctions, Chinese art can sell for high prices. Chinese people enjoy better economic conditions today compared to our parents’ generation; they were very poor and had to work hard to support

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a family. The young generation today not only want to have good food and a good apartment, but also to collect paintings and sculptures.

Sarah told me that she never pushed customers to buy artwork, and I noticed that she and her assistants paid little attention to the people who walked in and out of the gallery. Sarah’s work was clearly very important to her, but she also hoped to marry. She had become a Christian a few years ago and was serious in practicing her faith, joining Bible study groups each weekend. As a Christian, she thought that she should marry. “Marriage is a beautiful thing that I want to try, but unfortunately, I have not yet found the right person,” she said. I asked her if she would marry a younger man and she answered, “Not for me. I’m a traditional woman who wants to lean on the shoulder of a man. According to Christianity, the man is the head of the family and the woman should follow the man.” Given her success in managing her life and business on her own, I asked whether she could really follow a man. She replied, “I am a Christian so I should do so. I pray for this. I shouldn’t be so proud. I don’t want to be the stronger one.” She explained that her approach to finding a husband was similar to her approach to her business: I believe that God offers opportunities. Not everyone can do a business like this. Before I found this place, I prayed a lot and asked for God’s help. I prayed and prayed, and found it after a few days. At that time, it looked dirty and dark. The space had been used for cooking fast food. Everyone said it was a bad location. But you see [motioning to the room in which we sat and the paintings that adorned the walls]—it is a good place. So for the business, I think it is God who gives you chances. If you don’t work hard, God will take it away. I tell my assistants to share the information about the artwork with the customers, and if they like it, they can buy it. I tell them to never push the customer. Because of this, I now have many customers. Before we do business, we pray first. If we do the business, God will help. It’s the same with getting married. If God gives me the right person, I will get married. I dream of this. At this moment I cannot be a good wife; I cannot cook well. [Smiles.] So maybe now is not the time. I should prepare and get better—then I will have a chance.

Sarah spent much of her young adulthood focused on her career. This had brought the reward of an interesting life and had allowed her to pursue her interest in art. She was unusual in the degree of her success, which had allowed

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her to purchase her own apartment. She explained that she made the purchase so that her parents could have a place to stay when they visited. She was also unusual in that her parents did not push her to marry: “In the beginning they talked about it [my marriage]. They love me a lot and they never want to hurt me. I know that they worry and they talk about it with my sister. My parents take good care of me. They don’t want to put pressure on me. They don’t ask me directly. When they visit me here, they can see that I have a business, an apartment. They think that I have a good life.” Sarah’s success in her business and her ability to buy an apartment had given her a degree of freedom from pressure to marry. Sarah’s sister was married and had a child, which relieved her of some responsibility for immediately producing children. The success of the business and the life that it had provided for Sarah and her parents enabled Sarah to take care of herself and to convince her parents that they should not try to force marriage upon her. Among my informants in Shanghai who were single beyond marriageable age, most had fairly good jobs. Women without financial resources would need to follow parental and social expectations to marry on schedule. Without marriage, their social status, housing, and financial position is insecure. In this sense, women with financial success may buy freedom from marriage pressure. As mentioned, Kam’s study shows that lesbian women in Shanghai, or “lalas” as they call themselves, struggled to obtain financial independence as leverage to persuade their parents to accept their decision to remain single (2013, 69). Kam argues that obtaining a strong financial position has allowed lesbians in Shanghai to “compensate” their families for their socially stigmatized sexual status (2013, 69). Kam’s study and my own interviews show that single women’s experiences in Shanghai are not homogeneous. Women with different sexual orientations, incomes, and resources used various strategies to remain single against familial and social expectations. Some single women in Shanghai in their thirties and forties—and thus considered well-beyond marriageable age—had access to alternative systems of thinking that allowed them to distance themselves from the overwhelming pressures of their society. Sarah was a Christian and although her understanding of religion was that Christians should marry, she also used Christianity to argue that whether or not she found the appropriate person was God’s will. Women’s exposure to alternative ways of thinking about marriage and life often came through their contacts at work. Karen, a single woman in her thirties who had come to the city as a child with her family, said that her thinking about life changed through the influence of colleagues—French nationals—at

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the bank at which she worked. Marion, a woman in her thirties who had grown up in Shanghai, had been sent by her company to live and train in Japan for six months, and she had travelled the world extensively in the company of single women friends. Although she was critical of gender relationships she saw in Japan, her overseas experience led to friendships with other successful, cosmopolitan Shanghai women who were also looking to marry, but were determined to wait until an appropriate person appeared. Success at work and the international experience and confidence that such success brought led some women to resist marriage deadlines, even though few resisted the institution of marriage itself. I also met women who worked at low-paid jobs, such as factory workers and department store clerks. Twenty-eight-year-old Huiling attended a technical school, where she studied office automation, and now worked at a Japanese factory on quality control, monitoring the machines in the production process. Although she did not have a partner, she expected that she would marry soon. Her parents and grandmother, with whom she lived, frequently asked her whether or not she had found a boyfriend. She had had four blind dates with a view to finding a marriage partner (xiangqin), because, she says, she did not have a choice; her parents forced her to go. She currently gave her salary in its entirety to her mother, which she said was more comfortable for her than managing it herself. She expected that she would marry soon, and not long after that, have children and continue to work in a stable job in an office, perhaps working as an assistant to the manager. Migrant women who had come to Shanghai to work were drawn by the city’s opportunities and did not intend to return to their hometowns. They hoped to continue working in Shanghai and thought that if they were successful enough, they might marry and their parents might come to stay with them in Shanghai. This seemed possible only for a very small number, due to the expense of living in Shanghai and the difficulty of finding a local partner. Some women, particularly those with fewer resources, planned or considered moving back to their hometown to marry and live close to their parents. Kathy, who had come from Nanjing to work as a technician for a national bank, fell in the middle range in terms of resources and educational background. Having arrived in Shanghai only two years earlier, she shared an apartment in the Pudong area with three other newcomers to the city: three young women and one middle-aged man who lived away from his family. “If you are lucky, you may become successful here. But once you achieve the first level, you look up and see there are more levels,” she said. Kathy wanted to prove to herself that

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she could be successful in the city; this was what drew her to Shanghai. But she found that her achievements were not recognized by her boss. She was torn between pursuing her dreams in the city and returning to her hometown where she would be much more likely to find a partner. Sarah and Mingxia were migrants to Shanghai but they had social and financial resources that helped them to address conflicts between family and work. Due to their educational level and financial standing, they had a better chance of meeting and marrying local men and were better placed to bring their parents to live with them in the city. More often, women, like Kathy, had to choose between working in Shanghai and returning to their hometowns to marry. Many migrant women I knew delayed marriage until they could improve their financial and work situation so that they could accommodate both work and domestic life. At the same time, they understood that delaying marriage was risky, as their age would exclude them from local marriage markets. It remained to be seen how they would address this dilemma. Most women I met in Shanghai hoped to accommodate work and domestic responsibilities. Often they worked together with their parents to formulate a strategy of finding work that would be flexible, stable, and accommodating of marriage and family caregiving. They lowered their expectations regarding work and purposely chose careers that would be lower paid but stable. Some women adopted the strategy of trying to earn as much success and money as they could in their youth so that they would have more flexibility later on as mothers and caretakers of their parents. Others used money and status earned through their jobs to convince their parents and others that they could survive and perhaps even thrive as single women.

Hong Kong: Balancing Responsibilities to Self and Family Employment conditions for women in Hong Kong have changed dramatically over a few generations. In the 1960s and 1970s, Hong Kong industries were primarily small and medium-sized firms whose competitiveness relied on their flexibility in a fluctuating market in which girls and young women provided a critical source of cheap, unskilled labor (C. K. Lee 1998; E. Lee 2003). When the manufacturing industry in Hong Kong declined and manufacturers moved their factories to mainland China, Hong Kong’s economy emerged as a service industry hub and integrated into the regional economy of southern China (Lee 2003, 15). This shift provided opportunities for women in the emerging professional and managerial class. Ting and Lam found that between 1991 and 2006, the economy created half a million high-paying jobs

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such as managers, administrators, professionals, and associate professionals, and women were able to fill a little over 50 percent of these new positions due to their increased educational qualifications (2012, 173). The changes in the economy also displaced working-class women, who were forced to retreat from the workforce. Those who were married became dependent on their spouses, and many married and single women moved into low-skilled work such as cleaning, personal care, and food service (Lee 2003, 15–16; Ngo and Pun 2009, 74; Ngo 2012, 47–48; Chiu and Lee 2003, 127). In the years since the transition to a service economy, the absolute numbers of women as well as the percentages of women in the workforce have increased (Ngo 2012, 45). Median monthly incomes in Hong Kong rose from US$774 in 1991 to US$2,206 in 2019 (Census and Statistics Department 2020, 196). In spite of these increases, in 2019 women earned about 71 cents to every dollar earned by men and had not achieved the same level of leadership positions; women comprised only 35 percent of managers and administrators and 40.3 percent of professionals. Instead, women predominated in low-paid work, comprising 72.9 percent of clerical support workers and 58.7 percent of workers in service and sales (Census and Statistics Department 2020, 127). Single women I met in Hong Kong held a variety of positions in the economy. Some who were born in the 1960s and 1970s had experienced factory work as teenagers and changed to white-collar work in the 1980s. As teenaged workers, they had handed over most of their income to their parents; factory work did not conflict with family duties but was the means to fulfill responsibility to their family. As mentioned, their income supported family budgets and sent siblings to school. As these working daughters entered middle age, many continued to have close, reciprocal relationships with their family members. Some lived with siblings whose education they had subsidized. Others lived with their parents, to whom they provided nursing and financial support. Growing up in the 1960s and from a poor family with ten siblings, Siu Lan went to work in the factories after finishing primary school. As the factory was located far from her home village in the northern New Territories, she rented a dormitory bed in Sham Shui Po in Kowloon. She told me, “I walked every day from Sham Shui Po to the Star Ferry pier [about five miles] to take the ferry to Wan Chai, where I worked, because I didn’t have enough money to take the bus. I would have a bowl of noodles from the street stall and that would be my lunch and dinner because that was all I could afford. My family didn’t know my living conditions and I didn’t tell them.” In the first year of work, her food and lodging expenses left her without a surplus, but from her

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second year, she was able to give money to her family. She spent her days in the factory and her evenings in the classroom studying with other factory girls. On weekends, her family asked her to return home to spend time with the family: “I come from a traditional family. They don’t want kids to play. They think that young people should come home. Every Saturday I had to go home. It was a requirement! That’s why I didn’t have any time for dating when I was young. There were few opportunities to meet men.” Although she emphasized that she could survive by herself, she was concerned about her financial situation. As a middle-aged female worker without specific skills—she did routine clerical work such as filing, making copies, and document delivery—Siu Lan worried that she might lose her job. The other clerical staff members in her office were younger and had computer and English skills. In her first two decades at work, Siu Lan’s position in the job market improved due to her efforts to complete her secondary school education, and the expansion of the Hong Kong economy. By the 2000s, however, middle-aged women found that their position in the job market was shaky, as they were competing for jobs with younger, better-educated workers. For women born in the 1950s and 1960s, marriage would minimize or terminate their financial contributions to their natal families. Families thus had a financial incentive to refrain from actively encouraging their daughters to marry at an early age. In the 1980s, when the economy shifted from manufacturing to financial services, young women who had completed secondary school were able to find jobs in the new service sectors. These jobs allowed women to resist marriage, if they were so inclined, when families put pressure on them to marry—usually when they reached their late twenties. The slowing of economic growth after the 1990s and discrimination against older workers, however, left these women vulnerable in the job market. As families transferred wealth and property to sons rather than daughters, many older single women became financially insecure in middle age. In contrast, Hong Kong women I met who were born in the 1970s and 1980s expected competitive salaries and recognition at work. Trudy was born in 1976 and entered university in Hong Kong in 1994. After graduating, she joined the government and handled labor disputes. She worked long hours— spending time at the office on Saturdays and sometimes on Sundays as well— and earned a comfortable salary of US$5,000 per month. Her salary allowed her to buy—together with her sister—a condominium in Yuen Long, a district in the northern New Territories, and move out of the four-hundred-squarefoot apartment that she had shared with four other family members growing

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up on Hong Kong island. She wanted to have children and realized that her time was limited, but she did not yet feel ready to marry. Two years before, she had broken up with her boyfriend of eight years, with whom she had been quarreling and did not want to marry. For the past year, she had been dating a man whom she met at work. He was ten years her senior and would like to get married right away, but she was not so sure. “I don’t know him well enough yet,” she explained. When I asked if she wanted children, she replied, “There are lots of things to consider. You need to consider money, time, and whether you can get along well.” In other words, she wanted to marry and start a family but only if the conditions were right: she should have a good job, be able to support her parents, pay the rent, have an appropriate partner, and be young enough to still have children. Many single women in Hong Kong told me that they worked hard because this was expected of them but they found it difficult to find a partner when they reached their thirties and forties. In this sense, they were caught between marriage and employment markets in Hong Kong; employment markets required their time and attention, but focusing on work from their midto late thirties meant that they were at a disadvantage in marriage markets when they reached middle age. Peggy, 36, talked to me about the importance of work in the lives of women today: For our generation, we have to work, and work is important in our lives [compared to our mother’s generation]. The position between women and men is now equal. If women are knowledgeable, they have opportunities. Women are better than men at things like learning new skills and obtaining knowledge. Women have more confidence than before. In my mother’s generation, women had to marry early and they didn’t need to work. But now women are more independent. In the past, women wanted men to take care of them, but women today don’t need this anymore. In some ways, men have more disadvantages. For example, men have more responsibility. If they don’t work, they feel unstable. But we women can stay at home or we can work and either is acceptable.

Peggy did not perform well enough on the city’s standardized university entrance exam to earn an offer to a local university and she instead studied cooking in Italy. The youngest of seven children, she had benefitted from her elder siblings’ care and generosity as they pooled their money to support her living and studies in Italy for the first year. After living in Italy for five years,

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she returned to Hong Kong to work, and later she opened her own small restaurant. She had been successful so far in the highly competitive restaurant industry and she had seen many male friends fail at similar efforts. A few years ago, on a friend’s invitation, she had begun attending church and was now a Christian. As such, she believed that it was her duty to marry and start a family, as this was the view promoted in the church that she attended. Yet finding a marriage partner and getting married was challenging for a number of reasons. First, she worked at night and had no time for meeting potential partners. While in Italy she dated a man from Vietnam but he also needed to return to his country to support his family. It did not seem fair to ask him to come to Hong Kong, she said. Second, there are very few single men attending her church. Most churchgoers were women or married men. Third, she mentioned that Hong Kong men had opportunities to find wives in mainland China, where the income disparity makes Hong Kong men attractive. She mentioned that Hong Kong men saw little merit in marrying, regarding it as troublesome and expensive. She said: “Lots of Hong Kong men feel that it’s okay to go out to dinner, and meet with girlfriends, but there’s no need to suffer [by getting married].”6 Fourth, she wondered whether Hong Kong women, herself included, were sufficiently appealing to men: “Hong Kong women aren’t ‘gentle’ (wanyauh in Cantonese). I noticed when I was living in Italy that the Taiwanese, Japanese and mainland Chinese women would find Italian boyfriends, but it rarely happened with Hong Kong women. Hong Kong women don’t know how to be feminine (mhsik wanyauh). I have many good male friends, but we treat each other like friends and they won’t see me as a woman.” In addition to obstacles created by work, Peggy’s path to marriage conflicted with duties to her natal family. She did not feel that she could fully pursue her relationship with her Vietnamese boyfriend because she was committed to returning to Hong Kong to work and repay her family, who had supported her overseas education. She assumed that her boyfriend felt a similar commitment to return and repay his family in Vietnam. Moreover, Peggy was currently living with her mother, an arrangement that in Hong Kong symbolizes filial care. It was thus in her mother’s and her family’s interest that Peggy remain single for at least a few more years. Melissa, born in the 1970s, made her way up the career ladder at a large charitable organization in the city. When I met her, she was in charge of a division of nearly twenty persons, but did not enjoy the work. She said, “There’s a lot of pressure. If you gave me a choice, I wouldn’t take this job. When I was asked to do this job, I wondered if it was possible to refuse. I need to face many

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problems; there’s a lot of pressure and I have to manage a lot of staff. I have health problems now, I think as a result of this job. I would prefer to have a job where I don’t have to face people. Maybe something like writing books— although I don’t have talent for that kind of thing.” When she reached her forties, she still wanted to marry but felt that it was difficult to find a partner because of her age and high status in her organization: “It’s not true that Hong Kong women don’t want to marry; it’s that they have no chance to marry. We may spend a lot of time at work and we can’t find a man at the same level. I think it’s not easy to date a man who is of a lower level. At first, I probably wouldn’t mind it but in daily life problems would arise.” In living life as expected—obtaining a university education and performing well at work—she had arrived at a lifestyle that was not what she had anticipated. She would have liked to have a partner by this stage and a more relaxed life but was not sure how to create that kind of life for herself. Melissa’s experience seems to reflect that of other well-educated women in Hong Kong with good jobs who were eager to marry. In spite of her success at work, she was willing to put aside her career if she was able to find a suitable person to marry. She confided that she was thinking of moving to Canada with her sister, who was also single, where she heard it would be easier to find a spouse, even if it might mean that she would end up working as a supermarket clerk. In a large-scale study of Chinese women in Hong Kong, Odalia Wong (2003) similarly found that women in Hong Kong with high levels of educational attainment and career commitment were more desirous of marriage than women with lower levels of achievement. Wong found that this desire to marry was not in pursuit of financial security but of personal fulfillment. This tendency could be seen clearly in Melissa’s case, as she wished to marry because she thought it would bring a more meaningful and happy life. As Melissa’s parents had passed away, and she had spent much time in her youth caring for younger siblings, she was freer from familial responsibilities than many women I knew. As such, she could contemplate a life move with the sole purpose of obtaining greater personal happiness. In the 1960s and 1970s, Hong Kong daughters’ factory work directly contributed to their families’ well-being. Single women who went to work in the factories as girls commonly said that they did not give much thought to the hard work demanded of them; they did what other young women were doing because it was best for their families. In some cases, their contribution to their families allowed single women to assert that they did not want to marry. In other cases, single women may have wanted to marry but decided against it in

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order to better serve their natal families. In this sense, single women sacrificed a family of procreation for their natal and extended family. Hong Kong women who entered the labor market in the 1980s and 1990s were also expected to meet family expectations by performing well at work and contributing money to family budgets. While women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s often gave most or even all of their income to their natal families, women of more recent generations contributed a smaller amount—usually between 10 and 30 percent of their income.7 Many said that their parents had sacrificed to send them to school and now as adults it was natural to show their gratitude by making financial contributions and providing gifts. When women delayed marriage, it was often to focus on establishing themselves and their families with income and housing. Marriage would reduce their ability to follow through with these obligations to their natal family’s financial security because (1) marriage was assumed to include childbirth, and raising children in Hong Kong was an enormous expense and because (2) marriage involved a shift of resources of time and money from one’s natal family to a family of procreation and a husband’s family. For many Hong Kong women, marrying was considered less important than contributing to one’s own financial security and that of one’s natal family. A close look at the experiences of single women in Hong Kong shows that remaining single or delaying marriage has not been a product of a desire for career achievements, but a desire to balance responsibilities to oneself, one’s family, and a potential new family of procreation. Although women and their families understood this basic framework and priorities expected of single women, it was not a rigid and unchanging system. Women manipulated the framework while working within it. Women born in the 1950s and 1960s used their labor and their steady payment of family contribution to indefinitely delay marriage beyond the expectations of their natal family members. Women born in the 1970s and 1980s, who felt that they had fulfilled their responsibilities to their natal family through financial contribution, subsequently felt free to pursue or resist marriage according to the path that would best suit their personal happiness. Work provided some Hong Kong women with the resources to demarcate spaces for personal freedom and self-exploration.

Tokyo: Negotiating Conflicts between Work and Marriage, and Surviving in Employment Markets In Tokyo, the employment market changed considerably over the course of this study. Japan’s economy entered the period described as the “lost decade”

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(ushinawareta j nen) in the 1990s, a time of economic stagnation and labor restructuring that resulted in job losses and insecurity for women and men. This depressed economy continued in the 2000s, leading some to call the period from 1990 to 2010 the “lost twenty years” (ushinawareta nij nen). The changes in the Japanese economy brought career opportunities for some young, educated women as companies emphasized ability and individual achievement. For many other women, however, the changes brought precarity and depressed wages. Employment terms in Japan are often classified into several categories, with the best conditions described as “regular terms” (seishain), which include full welfare benefits and job security. As mentioned, the percentage of women holding “regular terms” employment status has declined in recent decades while the percentage of women holding lower-paid part-time jobs has increased.8 In 1995, 60.9 percent of women were employed as “regular staff.” By 2018, the figure had declined to 43.9 percent. The percentage of men working on regular terms, 77.8 percent in 2018, remains far higher than that of women (Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office 2019). In spite of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to encourage women’s achievements in the workforce, women comprised fewer than 10 percent of managers and administrators in Japan (Kajimoto 2018), substantially fewer than in Shanghai and Hong Kong, where the figures were generally above 30 percent. Women in my study in Tokyo held various positions in this employment structure. Some well-educated younger women benefitted from the changing employment market in that they were able to obtain good jobs with potential for advancement. Those with the highest skill levels were able to move within the employment market to find work that suited their interests and talents and that might allow them to have children and continue to work in the future. Older women and those with fewer skill sets and educational qualifications were more likely to be part of the irregular employment market, in which they had little opportunity for career mobility and a high probability that they would need to move laterally among low-paid work that provided few benefits and no long-term job security. A number of women I met were situated between these two employment situations: They currently held “regular” positions with full welfare and benefit packages, but were concerned that if they ever lost their current positions, they would be forced into the lower category of lowly paid and insecure work.9 In Tokyo, conflict between work and marriage was highly pronounced for many single women in their twenties and thirties with university educations

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and promising careers. Thirty-one-year-old Tokyo native Nami worked as a marketing executive for an international hotel chain. She held a “regular terms” management track position and was the only female member of an eight-member team. She described her work as “man’s work” as she did the same work as her male colleagues. We met for our interview on a Friday night at midnight at a coffee shop at a subway station near her home; we had an appointment to meet a few hours earlier but she had postponed it to help her colleagues at work. Nami wanted to marry but felt that her future was uncertain. She explained: I went to a four-year university and I’ve been working since then. After seven years’ experience [working] in society, I think that it’s a waste if I quit and become a full-time housewife. Many of my friends in their twenties were working but now some of them have started to marry and have children. Of those friends who have children, I don’t know any who continue to work. Since no one I know is working while taking care of children; without a model I can’t imagine how I could manage this as well. At this pace at work, I wouldn’t be able to have both a family and work. I want to work but it seems difficult. I don’t have a solution to this problem.

When I asked her what was most important in her life, she said, “It’s not work. I used to think about a life plan; what I wanted to be doing at each age. But now that I’ve reached 30, I can’t see an answer. I try to live every day as best I can. I try to balance my work and private life. I try to enjoy my life.” Nami lived with her parents, and nearly every day her mother reminded her of her age and the need to marry. Nami sighed as she told me that even when walking in the neighborhood, she felt pressure as she would hear neighbors say, “Oh, is that Nami? Is she still here?” Their comments imply that as a woman over 30, she should have already married and moved away. Nami said that she was influenced by her mother, who believed that women should have children. Her mother would tell her that a woman’s happiness lay in having a family, and that a woman was not a full member of society until she was a wife and mother. In Nami’s case, the conflict between work and family might not necessarily lead to nonmarriage, but it had arguably led to delayed marriage as she considered how to transition out of a career in which she had only started to gain competence and recognition. At the same time, my feeling was that Nami would marry immediately if she could find a partner. Her search for a partner, however, was hampered by her long working hours and the long working hours of

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men her age. She was interested in a man in her company and they had had a few dinner dates, but the relationship had not moved forward because, she believed, he was too busy to think of marriage at this point in his life. Thirty-four-year-old Miyuki was dressed in a blazer and skirt with her hair swept back in a professional style. We met in a small conference room in her company’s office with large glass windows that held stunning views overlooking a moss-covered moat and the lush green vegetation of a sprawling sixteenth-century garden below. Miyuki had worked for this company for six years, teaching leadership and team management skills to corporate clients. She enjoyed her work and said that she was impressed by the professional example set by colleagues, mostly women, and the relaxed atmosphere of the company. Thinking of a future in which she might have children, Miyuki had left a previous company, a firm that did business online, because there were few women in management. She wanted to have children and thought that it would not be possible if she stayed at that company. At her current company, women took maternity leave for a few months and came back to work. “In the environment in Japan these days, if you quit your job, you can’t get another one,” she said. In spite of the relatively good environment for women who wished to have children, Miyuki was not ready to have children because she did not have a partner: “When I was young, I wanted to be a full-time housewife! We had to write an essay at school, and I wrote that I really wanted to have a family. I’m 34 and now I realize that I can’t marry as easily as I thought. My life doesn’t go along as I imagined. Work is so fun that I’ve changed my mind. I’ve tried to look for partners through dating parties (g kon) or other gatherings. But I can’t say that I’m trying very hard at the moment.” When I asked Miyuki what she was looking for in a partner she said, “Because I really enjoy working, I want someone who would understand my situation and support me. It should be someone who also likes to work.” Japanese government surveys find that women commonly respond that an important quality in a future spouse is that he is “understanding about her desire to work.”10 Miyuki wondered whether her competence at work had made her unsuitable for marriage. She explained: It’s easy to meet people but it’s hard to find someone that you want as a partner. I’ve found that I’ve become more like a man. [Q: What do you mean?] I can do everything by myself. For example—making a reservation at a restaurant; I’m better at it than a man. I can go out to eat and travel by myself. Have you heard of “Narita divorce?”11 [Laughs.] That might

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happen with me. If I’m with a man, he may feel badly. I’m not that good at showing respect, and “face” [status] is important to men. When I practice the tea ceremony, men are in a higher position and women are supposed to be in back but I’m really bad at that and the teacher scolds me all the time!

Miyuki could see that there might be advantages in marrying and having a child even in relation to her work. Her clients sometimes asked her if she was married. “They think that if we are not married, we are incomplete (mikansei). If you are divorced, then that’s ok. But to have never been married—that’s seen as being less mature,” she said. In response to recent government initiatives, her company had been putting effort into creating “diversity,” which meant highlighting women in management positions. The personnel department at her company wanted to create a “model woman worker” mentorship program.12 Miyuki told me that a single woman without children could not be designated as a “model woman worker” at her company. She said: “If you look at the top companies, they create these diversity officers, and these officers are always women, and they always are married and have children.” Miyuki hoped to find a way to have both a career and a marriage. She had sufficient skills to be able to move to this company that allowed women to continue to work after having a child, and she planned to place her child ahead of her career. For the moment, however, the problem was finding a partner. Some single women I knew with less education and less promising careers were not particularly concerned about the conflict between work and marriage. Thirty-five-year-old Kotoe and 33-year-old Chisato both thought that they would marry only if the right person appeared. Kotoe worked as a hostess in a nightclub, an occupation that pays relatively well but becomes increasingly less reliable and well-paid with age. While we were out drinking one night with other single women, she told us about how she had practiced a self-hypnosis technique that she learned from an online video in which she imagined herself as a housewife with children. She said that the video taught that repeatedly conjuring this image in one’s mind would lead to such a reality. While she clearly wanted to marry, she would not marry just anyone. She also told us that she had recently broken off an engagement with a wealthy businessman because she suddenly realized that life with him would be unbearable. After Kotoe told us this story, Chisato, who works for an hourly wage for a secretarial dispatch service, shared that in a period of depression after a relationship ended, she had taken a day off from work to visit a famous fortuneteller.

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The fortuneteller told her that she would marry a foreigner. In the following months she did spend time with foreign men at bars in Roppongi, but she did not think that she would marry any of these men. Kotoe and Chisato did not think that marriage would necessarily improve their lives unless the man was someone whom they really loved. I found that single women in their late thirties and older were often still open to marriage and were relatively unworried about marriage deadlines because they had passed the age when marriage seemed likely. Instead, they were concerned about surviving in the job market.13 Forty-six-year-old Shiori, introduced in another publication as Noriko (see Nakano 2014), had spent her childhood in a northern prefecture and arrived in Tokyo to work after graduating from university. She had recently quit her job when she was transferred from a white-collar office job to work in a tile-producing factory. When a colleague lost a finger, she resigned and had been receiving unemployment insurance for a few months. Her previous position was on “regular terms,” with a full benefit package, and she worried that she might now fall into the pool of poorly paid temporary staff. She was studying to obtain a certificate allowing her to sell insurance, and like many older single women I knew, she was concerned about her position in the employment market: It’s hard for a woman my age to find a job. It’s hard for men too but much harder for women. I didn’t want to do it, but now I’m turning to connections and people I know and asking for help. They say that Japan is now a society where ability counts but that’s not true. Once, my boss gave me a high evaluation for a large bonus. But when the supervisor up the ladder saw it, he said, “Why does a woman need such a big bonus?” Even though they say ability counts, the people at the top are not able to judge ability fairly. Japan is still a society without [gender] equality.

She had thought about marrying and felt great pressure to do so when she approached the age of 30 but in retrospect was glad that she remained single. In spite of her current financial problems, she felt that the men she thought of marrying in the past were not appropriate for her. Many of her friends who married, she said, did so because they felt that they needed to meet marriage deadlines, and some of them were now divorced or unhappy in their marriages. Regarding her future, Shiori thought that she might need to eventually return to her hometown to take care of her parents but at the moment they

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were healthy and she was not ready to return. For her own social security, she was planning to buy a condominium with a cousin who was 40 and also single, but those plans had been put on hold since she lost her job. Women who entered the labor market in Japan in the early 1980s started in clerical work as “office ladies.” Most expected that they would marry, but continued working and remained single when an appropriate candidate did not appear. From the late 1980s through the 1990s many women entering the workforce were given the option of applying for either management track work or clerical work. By the 2010s, most companies had distanced themselves from “lifetime employment” and official gendered tracking. The effect upon women I knew was that some with high levels of education had increased opportunities to obtain management positions while many others found that the employment market had become more inhospitable to women, especially as they aged. Those at the top of the employment market such as Miyuki, who worked in the new field of management training, found that some companies offered good conditions for women, allowing women to marry and care for children while continuing to work. Other women I knew could only move laterally among poorly paid contract and temporary dispatch work. Regardless of their position in the employment market, women I met were not willing to marry purely for financial or social security. Although some women in Japan probably do marry for financial reasons, they would have married and thus would not be included in my interview sample. In the 2000s, single women with high levels of education and promising career prospects understood that they would need to compromise their careers if they wished to marry and have children, and some delayed marriage so that they could work a little longer. After 2010, a number of well-educated women reported that they had found companies that offered flexible working environments for women with children. But these women remained single because they had not found appropriate partners. Single women with lower levels of education and older women often struggled to stay afloat financially and worried about the security of their jobs given the gender and age discrimination of the employment market. As they aged, many continued to want to marry, but their attention turned to the more pressing need of remaining competitive in the job market. Some women had arranged to provide nursing care to their parents in exchange for an understanding that they would inherit their parents’ property.14 If they need to provide nursing care for parents, however, women considered that they may need to leave their jobs and would thus lose their source of income. Some single women were beginning to think about life

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after their parents’ passing, when they would need to continue to earn a living and make elder care arrangements for themselves, without children, and possibly without close family members to assist them.

Learning to Curb One’s Ambitions In the stereotypes of single women as “loser dogs” and as a “third type of human being,” it is assumed that women are pursuing careers at the expense of family responsibilities. I found, to the contrary, that many single women in the three cities felt that they needed to succeed at work in order to please and honor their parents. In Hong Kong and Shanghai, some women felt that they needed to provide a financial basis for their family’s security. Many single women reported that they and their parents were on the same page regarding their careers. Parents wanted their daughters to enjoy and find success in their work. Adult daughters wanted to meet their parents’ expectations and demonstrate that the sacrifices made for them to obtain an education had been worthwhile. In Hong Kong and Shanghai, single women’s earnings often directly support the financial well-being of their parents and extended family members. In these cities, single women understood that marriage and childbirth might take them out of the most promising and lucrative stages of their career. Most women I met were attempting to balance expectations that they succeed at work and care for families: a set of contradictory demands that was not of their making but that they nonetheless must address. In Shanghai, single women and their parents feel pressure to take advantage of the possibilities to succeed in the growing economy. Single women I met considered, often with the help and advice of their parents, how to create a career trajectory that would allow for marriage and family caregiving. In Shanghai, the expectation that adult children—often a singleton—would provide social security for their elders placed pressure on young women to manage their careers and marriages well. Some high-earning single women evaded family pressures to marry by financially supporting themselves and their parents. Some lower-earning women reported that they would marry on schedule and adjust their work accordingly. Migrant women also wished to marry without sacrificing their careers but had greater difficulty finding partners due to their limited networks in the city and their lack of municipal residency rights. For some women in Shanghai who did not want to marry or who had yet to find someone whom they wanted to marry, successful careers allowed them to delay marriage deadlines if they could use their income to show their independence and ability to support themselves and their parents.

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In Hong Kong, many women felt that they could remain single if they continued to socially and financially contribute to their natal and extended families. Women who wished to marry, however, found that work disrupted opportunities to do so. Work took up their time in their youth and curtailed opportunities to meet prospective partners. As their incomes and positions rose, my informants told me that they had become less attractive in marriage markets. Women I knew in Hong Kong prioritized earning a living and supporting their natal families and considered marriage to be part of the realm of personal happiness. This construction of women’s duties allowed some women to negotiate their relationship with their families and provided space for some women to pursue personal happiness if they felt that they had fulfilled their filial responsibilities. Single women I knew in Tokyo entered the employment market with little idea of how to combine both work and family. Many tried to work as long as they could before marriage. Although the employment market had opened up positions for some young, highly educated women, my informants had not found appropriate partners, in part because of the demanding conditions of their jobs as well as the demands of work on men that made men uninteresting as partners. The majority of my informants worked in clerical positions and found that their position in the job market had become precarious. As they passed their mid-thirties, they hoped to work for as long as they could, expecting that they might need to leave the workforce at some point to care for aging parents. Even well-educated women felt a sense of vulnerability in the job market as they aged. Some hoped that marriage might serve as a form of security in an employment market in which they, as women, were considered to be of second-class status in spite of their accomplishments.15 The very different employment conditions for women in the three societies provided the context in which single women and their families implemented strategies for balancing work and family. The single women I knew in Shanghai entered the employment market at a time of enormous economic growth and expanded opportunities. They felt confident that a capable and well-educated woman could obtain suitable work. While some women wanted to reach the top of their professions, the majority were not highly ambitious; they were not looking for great achievements but for secure employment that would allow a stable life. Hong Kong’s economy had also changed dramatically, especially during the lifetime of the older single women I met. With the city’s emergence as a global financial services center in the 1980s, older and less-educated women who had worked in factories transitioned to work

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in the service sector, which provided low wages and required their continued reliance on their natal families for housing and social support. Women who entered the labor market in the 1990s and 2000s were younger and better educated than those who had entered a decade earlier. These women filled whitecollar and management positions and used their positions to negotiate their relationships with natal families. Japan’s depressed economy and corporate Japan’s treatment of women as a second-class category of workers created insecurity among women regardless of their position in the employment market. As a result, some of the most enterprising saw marriage as a form of financial and social security. Yet even these women would not marry a person who was not deemed a suitable companion. The comparison of the three cities shows that the employment market alone does not raise or depress marriage rates; the age of marriage increased over time in all three societies during the period of this study in spite of the different economic situations. A good income and a successful career, however, gave some women confidence in themselves and provided leverage with their families to indefinitely delay marriage. Women with high levels of income and education also held high expectations of achieving personal happiness and fulfillment. This sometimes led to delayed marriage as women waited to meet an appropriate person even as they aged past marriage deadlines. The marriage regimes were not unchanging but were in flux along with changes in the economy. Families shifted strategies to help adult daughters make their way through changing employment markets. Although they could not change the marriage regimes and employment markets of their societies acting alone, single women adopted various strategies to maneuver within these systems. Their individual actions contributed to marriage delay, career advancement for some, and shifting care practices for many.

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CHAPTER 4

“If I Keep This Up, I Will Never Have a Life of My Own” Negotiating Family Tensions

I

n this chapter, I discuss tensions that have arisen between single women and their families. I was surprised to learn that the kinds of issues that generated discussion, negotiation, and sometimes conflict in families differed remarkably across the three cities. In Shanghai, some single women told me about verbal exchanges in their families over marriage timing and partner choice. In Hong Kong, single women talked about friction over financial contributions to their families. In Tokyo, some women reported that marriage timing and choice of partner were major issues in their families, while others, particularly middle-aged single women, told me about family negotiations over elder care. I puzzled over why such different kinds of issues emerged in families in the three cities. Why is marriage timing a key issue in Shanghai but hardly discussed in Hong Kong? Why are single women’s financial contributions to their parents the focus of tensions in Hong Kong but basically absent from family dynamics in the other two cities? Also, how are these family tensions related to the different marriage regimes? After discussing these topics with many single women in the three cities, I realized that the issues that generate family tensions are profoundly shaped by single women’s relationship with caregiving. Family caregiving systems differ across the three societies according to the laws, policies, and histories of each society, and single women have different roles in family care provision in each place. In Shanghai, marriage is the critical step that leads to the establishment of care relationships. Through marriage, women enter into an intergenerational family in which young generations are expected to support their elders.1 In Shanghai, as in other Chinese 118

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cities, many older people have minimal or no pensions, due to the privatization of state industries in the 1980s and 1990s.2 If women do not marry, it is not clear how parents and grandparents will be supported. Even if single women care for their own parents, in a family-based social welfare system, there will be no one to care for the single woman in her old age if she does not marry and have children.3 During my research time there, family discussions in Shanghai revolved around securing a suitable marriage partner in a timely manner, a matter of importance for the entire family. In Hong Kong, the medical system is heavily subsidized by the government, but few people, except for elite civil servants, receive pensions in amounts sufficient to support a comfortable retirement. Families in that city are tasked with providing financial and social support for its elder members. A Hong Kong government study of retired persons found that 69.7 percent of respondents reported that they were receiving financial support from family members (Census and Statistics Department 2013, 210), and 80 percent agreed that children should be responsible for providing financial support to their parents (Census and Statistics Department 2013, 205). Although traditionally sons were expected to assume elder care duties, studies show that today Hong Kongers see elder caregiving as a joint responsibility; every family member, depending on their circumstances, is expected to pitch in (Wong 2009, 104). In Hong Kong, care service relationships are routinely organized both through marriage and outside of marriage. If a woman marries, she is held responsible for her husband, children, and her husband’s relatives. A woman who remains single, however, is often expected to serve her natal family including her parents, grandparents, siblings, and siblings’ children. An unmarried adult daughter is more likely to continue to provide care services to her natal family than a married daughter, whose attentions, it is understood, will turn to the needs of her husband and his family. In Hong Kong, the nature and amount of support that women provide to their families, rather than marriage, is the main issue that triggers family debate. In Tokyo, and in Japan as a whole, motherhood in marriage is considered the best and only means of providing childcare. It is only after the child reaches approximately the age of 3, and begins to attend preschool, that childcare is shared between mothers and preschool caregivers. This contrasts with Hong Kong, where grandparents, aunts, and domestic workers are also common childcare providers.4 At the same time, marriage in Japan is becoming separated from elder care. Under the ie family system,5 responsibility for caregiving fell to the eldest son and his wife, with the wife providing nursing and daily

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care services (Sodei 1995). Although the legal and constitutional basis of the ie system was abolished at the end of World War II, some people still believe that elder care should be provided by the eldest son and his wife (Lee 2016, 135). Some families continue the ie inheritance system by arranging for the eldest son to inherit property while expecting that he and his wife will take on the responsibilities of elder care (Ronald and Alexy 2011, 5). That being said, for a variety of reasons, including the aging of the population, urbanization, declining numbers of children, and the impact of the national LongTerm Care Insurance system,6 promulgated in 2000, patterns of caregiving are changing. For many people, a daughter rather than a daughter-in-law is the preferred caregiver (Knight and Traphagan 2003; Lee 2010; Long, Campbell, and Nishimura 2009).7 Long, Campbell, and Nishimura found that daughters are seen as attractive caregivers because they are thought to “naturally” love their parents, and many older people in Japan say that they feel closer to their daughter than to a daughter-in-law (2009, 2). In this context, it is understandable that some of the single women I interviewed said that family discussions revolved around their role in elder care provision and inheritance.8 In all three societies, caregiving is a sensitive issue, because its provision carries moral dimensions. As mentioned, the meanings of service roles in the family are intimately connected with the ways that governments in this study have articulated moral worth. These governments have resisted social welfare expenditure and asserted that the gendered division of labor in families remains critical to the development of the society, and all three also suggest that women’s performance of domestic service roles is tied to the survival of the society as a whole. Therefore, the family becomes a moral arena in which arrangements for domestic service may perpetuate or challenge understandings of women’s moral worth in the family and society. In this context, single women in all three societies obtain moral authority in their families and society through the performance of domestic service. Through negotiations of their responsibilities in their families, some women have found ways to remain single and reshape family relationships with profound implications for society as a whole. At the same time, single women and their families have reproduced gender inequality in the family and in the society at large by requiring women to provide more services than men, and by distributing a greater share of property and other resources to sons rather than to daughters.9 Most families do not actively discourage their daughters from acquiring property. Nonetheless, by not arranging property acquisition for daughters while making substantial effort to provide property

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for sons, families contribute to exacerbating an unequal gendered division of wealth in their societies. The practice of not preparing property and wealth for daughters might make sense if all daughters married, all husbands provided housing, and all marriages were lasting and happy. Rates of singlehood and divorce in the three societies, however, suggest that women are not adequately protected by current systems; indeed, current practices may be causing severe financial and practical housing problems for many women (see Fincher 2014). Most parents in the three societies clearly love their daughters and have their best interests in mind. Parents want their daughters to take advantage of the opportunities available to young women in education and at work, and most hope that their daughters will also marry and raise a family. Some parents, however, have encouraged or accepted their daughters’ delayed marriages or nonmarriages, for a variety of reasons including their hopes that their daughter would pursue an education, their disapproval of their daughters’ partner choices, acceptance of the daughters’ personality and life choices, and expectations that their daughters would provide elder care assistance. In the three societies in this study, marriage and family formation are central to the national narratives of modernization, growth, and progress in what Ong describes as “the moral economy of the family” (1999, 152). Ong has written that East Asian states such as Singapore, alarmed by changing demographics that include rising divorce rates and numbers of single women, assert that the moral foundation of the nation rests on women performing domestic duties (1999, 152). In withdrawing from marriage, single women are seen to threaten domestic femininity and the moral order of their societies. As discussed, however, marriage does not have the same relationship to caregiving in the three societies. When marriage is linked with care of family, as it is in Shanghai, marriage is also seen as a moral responsibility. When marriage is to some degree considered separate from family caregiving duties, as it is in Tokyo and Hong Kong, marriage loses some of its moral implications. I found that marriage thus had variable meanings in the three societies. Familial duties in the three societies, however, were consistently tied to moral responsibility, as we will see.

Shanghai: “Parental Love Is the Greatest Thing in the World” In Shanghai, marriage is not merely a personal commitment between two people, but is generally understood to involve the entire family: grandparents, adult couple, and grandchildren. As most single women are only children, or “singletons,” they are their parents’ only hope of creating an intergenerational

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family. This understanding of family makes it difficult for single women to evade marriage without seeming to reject their parents’ aspirations for family life. In most cases, single women and their parents in Shanghai that I met saw themselves as working together toward the shared goal of finding an appropriate partner. Typically both parents and daughter thought of marriage as the best path toward security and happiness for the adult daughter and the family as a whole. Parents were often highly involved in assisting their adult daughter to find an appropriate match. Parents might ask friends, relatives, and colleagues to introduce eligible bachelors to their adult daughters. Some parents approached professional or amateur matchmakers, and some attended the “marriage market” in People’s Park, the central green space in Shanghai discussed in chapter 1, where parents exchanged information in an effort to find an appropriate spouse for their adult child. Zhang and Sun (2014) studied the parents who congregated in Shanghai’s People’s Park marriage market and found that they saw themselves as assisting their daughters in a difficult and embarrassing task. The researchers point out that these parents had grown up in an era of state-assisted matchmaking and worried about their daughters’ chances of marrying because the latter’s high levels of education had become a liability in marriage markets and state institutions no longer provided matchmaking assistance. Parents Zhang and Sun interviewed were not imposing their will upon their daughters, but saw their role as that of helping their daughters by identifying and screening candidates (2014, 136). Zhang and Sun’s study found that parents were motivated by emotional ties and a sense of responsibility to assist their daughters, and daughters saw their parents’ actions as examples of their parents’ love and devotion (2014, 136). In Shanghai, relationships between single women and their parents were generally very close. Parents sacrificed for their children, and adult children were expected to care for their parents in return. In her study of singleton children and their families in the Chinese city of Dalian, Fong writes of an intense child-parent bond in which parents put all their hopes into their children and saw them as an investment. Fong points out that because urban daughters born after 1979 had no brothers, parents raised their daughters “to follow the cultural model of filial duty once reserved for sons” (2004, 131). It follows that daughters were expected to provide elder care for their parents.10 Zhang and Sun (2014) similarly argue that the extremely close emotional and social relationship between parents and adult children has been not so much a

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remnant of tradition, but a product of the contemporary situation. They write that financial pressure, lack of a well-implemented social welfare system, and the one-child policy have created “ever-closer interdependence among family members of different generations” (2014, 137). This reliance on children for social welfare has emerged as the Chinese state moved to make companies more competitive. Fong notes that the state enforced mandatory retirement and thus guaranteed that most people would need to depend on their children in the last decades of their lives. Economic reforms of the 1990s further dismantled social safety nets and increased parents’ dependence on their adult children (2004, 128). “There’s a saying in Chinese that says ‘parental love is the greatest thing in the world’” (tian xia fumu xin), explained Feng, a 27-year-old commercial chemist. “Young people wish to marry but don’t have a chance to meet people. Parents have the idea that girls should marry before 30 and they want to help.” Single women I knew saw marriage as a way of fulfilling filial obligations to their parents. Adult single daughters commonly reported that their parents pressured them to marry by repeated reminders, by worried questions, and by setting them up with eligible men. Women understood the pressure they received from their parents as a reflection of parental love and concern and as most adult daughters wanted to marry, they generally appreciated their parents’ help.11 Although none of my Shanghai informants came out to me as a sexual minority, studies show that in urban China even women with same-sex partners consider entering into heterosexual marriages to satisfy their parents (Kam 2013; Engebretsen 2017). Parents and their adult daughters sometimes worked together to find a marriage partner. Twenty-seven-year-old Margaret, an office clerk and local Shanghainese, agreed with her parents that she should marry as soon as possible, preferably before age 27. Her mother actively sought out potential husbands through friends and family, and tried to obtain information at the People’s Park parents’ information exchange. Margaret appreciated her mother’s help but argued with her about suitable candidates. Margaret told me, “I would cry after arguing with my mother. My mother would say, ‘That person is already good enough. Why are you so picky?’ My parents would tell me, ‘You are getting old; you will soon be too old to find someone.’” Margaret eventually did find a partner, a police officer introduced by a family friend, and they planned to marry within the year. Thirty-five-year-old Jacky came to Shanghai from a village in southern China to pursue a career as a professional opera singer. Although she obtained

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a position in one of the city’s top opera companies, her mother nonetheless agonized over her single status: “For the past ten years, in every conversation we have, every time I call her, my mother tells me that I should find a husband. She once asked me if I had a sexual problem! My mother feels miserable because I am not married. Her friends’ children are married and they have grandchildren even. No matter how smart or talented your daughter is, if she is not married, it is shameful.” Nicole, 38, said: “My parents tell me, ‘Hurry up! Hurry up!’ I’m an only child and I feel responsible [to satisfy and care for them].” She explained her family situation as follows: One day my parents may get sick. If I still need to work, I have no brothers or sisters to help me support them. Luckily, we [my parents and I] have deep feelings toward one another. I am happy living with them. We love each other very much and they take care of me very well. Andrea [her friend sitting with us] says that my life is so nice. When I get home, the dinner is prepared. But I think: What about the future? My parents’ brothers and sisters are already grandmothers and grandfathers. In my family there’s only one child—me. They worry about the future. They want to change their job title [from parent] to grandmother and grandfather. If I had a brother or sister, then they might already have children. Then I could say, “Ok, my life is my life.”

At first I was confused about why singleton women (without siblings) would face more pressure to marry than women who have siblings.12 In regard to elder care, it seemed to me that Nicole would be better able to care for her parents if she remained single. Marriage would draw her into caring for a child, husband, and a husband’s family, perhaps taking attention and time away from her own parents. On reflection, though, I can suggest several reasons why women who did not have siblings felt great pressure from their parents. One is that as singletons, they were their parents’ only hope of having a grandchild, and a grandchild was valued for its own sake as well as for discussion and comparison with other people of their same generation. Women reported that if one of their adult siblings gave birth to a child, the pressure on the others declined as their parents focused on raising the grandchild. The second reason why singleton daughters felt great pressure from their parents to marry is that the ideal of family care in Shanghai, and in urban China in general, involves the three-generational family in which grandparents care for the grandchild

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and in return the younger generations serve as social security in their later years. The pressure that parents placed on adult daughters to marry, however, was not a calculated ploy for social security, but was based on the social consensus about the best way to live a meaningful and secure life in urban China. Parents believed that their daughter would be happiest if she married and they worried about their daughter’s old age as she presumably would not have siblings, a husband, or children to care for her. Some women I knew who had passed marriage deadlines or who were ambivalent about marriage explained that their family accepted their singlehood. Karen had come to Shanghai as a child with her family and described her childhood as impoverished and miserable. Her family’s fortunes improved gradually over time and she was able to obtain an education and was working as an accountant for a French firm when I met her. Karen had been engaged to marry three times but none of the relationships resulted in marriage. She explained why it was acceptable to remain single at age 38 as follows: [Q: Do you feel pressure to marry?] No, not at all. My whole family is proud of me. When they [my siblings and in-laws] talk about me they say, “We’ve got a great sister.” My brother-in-law two years ago told me that I should get married instead of buying an apartment. Finally, he accepted that different people have their own way. I went ahead and bought the apartment. My brother-in-law said when you get old, who will care for you? I said, the problem has nothing to do with you. Mind your own business! [Q: What about your parents?] My dad told me, just the other day, “I’m proud of you. You are average, not smart, but you turned out the best. You try your best.” It made me almost cry [tracing tears down her cheeks]. My aunt says, “You have become the most beautiful one.” I’m still pretty. I’m the face of the future. Her daughter was beautiful before but has married and has become plain. It’s because I always do things for her. I try to do nice things and to be helpful. When she was sick, I rented a car and took her to the hospital.

Karen explained that her family appreciated and respected her because she had demonstrated through her behavior that she was a good daughter and niece. Although her cousin dutifully married, and thus would normally be considered the filial daughter, it was Karen who provided symbolically important domestic services for her family. Karen felt that she had established a place for herself in her family by her actions of helping her family members and

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that her acts of help and kindness were more important than marrying and having children. Marion (35), a Shanghai native and human resources executive in a foreign firm, would like to marry if she met the right person, but she had high standards: “I would like someone who shares the same interests with me, has a high position at work, has his own house, and is well-educated.” Although these criteria are similar to what might be mentioned by educated women in any city in the world, in Shanghai it would be very difficult to find a partner who meets these standards given that most educated, successful men Marion’s age and older would have already married or would prefer to choose a partner who is younger and less educated than themselves. Marion’s parents lived in the suburbs while she lived in an apartment she had purchased in the city. Marion explained her way of dealing with her parents in the following way: I have dinner with them two or three times a month. Being 35 and not married, I feel pressure. But it is better in my case because I have a brother. Most people my age have no siblings so there is a lot of pressure on them. For my parents’ generation, face (mianzu) is very important. They have the idea that something is wrong with the woman if she is single. They think, “What’s her problem?” I have lots of single friends. Many of them have immigrated to places like Canada, Australia, and the United States. They are not accepted by the society [in Shanghai].

Although Marion no longer lived with her parents, and making monthly payments to one’s family is not the common practice in Shanghai that it is in Hong Kong, she gave them 10 percent of her salary each month.13 She explained that her parents did not need the money because they owned two apartments and rented one out. “I give them money to make them happy. I also give them gifts and souvenirs when I come back from my travels,” she said. She felt fortunate because her brother already had a child, and her parents were busy taking care of this grandchild; every morning they took him to school and every afternoon they picked him up, took him to their home, prepared dinner, and in the evening, had dinner with him and Marion’s brother and sister-in-law. In her study of marriage and women’s experiences in Shanghai and Beijing, Fincher (2014) argues that because parents of sons routinely help their sons to purchase property while parents of daughters rarely do so, the marriage system systematically weakens women’s financial position in marital

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relationships. Fincher found that some women went so far as to transfer assets to their husband’s or boyfriend’s bank account to support the purchase of a home that was subsequently registered in the man’s name alone. According to Fincher, women take such actions for fear of becoming “leftover” and too old to find a husband (2014, 5). Because divorce laws require that women provide evidence of their contribution to the purchase of the property, which many women are unable to do, women in unhappy marriages have little leverage in bargaining with their spouses, and in the event of divorce, may lose the property entirely (2014, 48). While I did not meet women who reported providing money to husbands or boyfriends, I did find that most women and their families expected that a respectable marriage candidate should own an apartment or at least have plans regarding where the couple could live. Some women said that they could accept living temporarily with the man’s parents until they could afford a place of their own. Among the women I knew, none said that their parents invested in housing for them. Only two out of thirty-four single women I interviewed in Shanghai had purchased their own apartments. Both of them were successful in their careers and had purchased the place using their own money without their parents’ help. Fincher cites an All-China Women’s Federation survey in 2010 showing that only one in fifteen single women owned their own home compared to one in five single men (2014, 80). I also found that although parents invested in their daughters’ educations, they rarely invested in property for their daughters. This was not because they did not care about the wellbeing of their daughters. Rather, it was because they were confident that their daughters would marry. They were, after all, raising daughters at a time when well over 95 percent of the population married. It remains to be seen if this practice of gender-based property transfer will continue as increasing numbers of women remain single into middle age and beyond. In Shanghai, entry into marriage marks a woman’s acceptance of the obligations of family life—to procreate, provide her parents with the opportunity to serve as grandparents, and establish the basis for intergenerational caregiving relationships. Women who don’t enter into marriage create alternative ways of maintaining their relationships with their families. Marion and Karen tried to provide their parents with a variety of services. Marion tried to be attentive with regular visits, monthly payments, and gifts. Karen tried to convince her parents, siblings, and in-laws that she was a good daughter and niece by providing services such as driving her aunt to the hospital. Marion and Karen, however, were fortunate in that they had siblings who had already provided their

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parents with grandchildren. Nicole and Jacky did not have siblings and were under much greater pressure to marry and have a child. Both still hoped to do so although they had passed their mid-thirties and the window of opportunity for marriage and childbirth was closing. Marriage is clearly the main issue over which single women and families struggled in Shanghai, and not only because marriage is socially expected. Rather, marriage in Shanghai is thought to be the only way in which women may enter their primary role as family caregiver, with its related intimacies, pleasures, and obligations.

Hong Kong: “We Give Money to Our Parents” In Hong Kong, women may be excused from marriage but they cannot be excused from service to their natal families. The nature of family service changed as Hong Kong developed from a manufacturing center in the early postwar period to a financial services center in the 1980s. As mentioned, for the generation of women born in the 1950s and 1960s family service meant leaving school in their early to mid-teens to work in factories to earn money for their family. For women born after the 1970s, however, family service means doing well in school, obtaining a good job, and handing over part of their paycheck to their parents. Nearly all single women in Hong Kong contribute to their families by paying “family contribution,” joining family meals and gatherings, and accompanying their parents to hospital appointments. As discussed in the introduction, Hong Kong’s family system—described as familism (Lau 1981; Lee 2003) or as the “centripetal family” (Salaff 1995 [1981])—developed during Hong Kong’s postwar industrialization as a survival strategy in the context of inadequate labor protection, social security, and social welfare (Lee 2003, 5). Families pooled their resources, and women were asked to work and contribute their wages to their families. Women’s position in families have improved in recent decades with the rise of the nuclear family, decreasing birthrate, smaller families, and higher wages. Studies show, however, that an unequal division of labor persists in Hong Kong families (Choi and Lee 1997, 194; Choi and Ting 2009, 163; Ting and Lam 2012, 181). Since the 1970s, increasing numbers of middle-class families have been able to afford paid domestic labor, but the presence of domestic workers does not remedy the unequal share of domestic work between spouses. Ting and Lam find that domestic workers reduce women’s duties in areas such as washing dishes, cleaning, shopping, and cooking, but childcare remains a mother’s job (2012, 183). Grace Mak and Yue-ping Chung point out that “unlike men, women of all class backgrounds need to make arrangements for someone to do

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housework for her [sic] if she wants to work” (1997, 34–35). In other words, domestic work is considered to be a woman’s responsibility, and it is generally held that a wife may enter the workforce only as long as “no one in the family suffers” (Lee 2002, 247). In Hong Kong, the natal and extended family provides comfort, support, and financial help to its members including single women. But this support comes at a price. Single women are tied by financial and social obligations that limit their choices as they consider where to study and live, what kinds of jobs to accept, and how aggressively to pursue their careers. Families sometimes discriminate against daughters by privileging sons through family arrangements for education, finances, and housing. The ways in which families offer opportunity, on the one hand, and channel daughters into supportive roles, on the other, occur differently according to generation. The older generation of single women I met—“working daughters” (Salaff 1995 [1981]) who were born in the 1950s and 1960s—came from large families at a time when having many children was a form of social security given the lack of public social welfare and limited educational opportunities.14 Their families did not push them to marry when they were young and their factory wages helped to pay for family expenses. The younger generation of single women I met who were born after 1970 came from smaller families of one to two children and had more opportunities in education and employment. This generation of single women, however, was also expected to contribute social services and financial support to their parents and siblings. Born in the late 1950s and the only girl of six siblings, Mei Kwan left school in her early teens. When she reached 30, her mother and elder brother— who stepped in as the patriarch when her father died—asked her to get married, stating that marriage would be impossible later on. By then, Mei Kwan had been working and contributing to the family for over fifteen years and felt that she would decide for herself how to live her life. She said, “I told my mother that there are many people who are married and have problems and get divorced. ‘If I marry and get divorced, then what happens?’ I asked her. After that she didn’t bring it up again! I am very independent, I’m responsible, and I know how to take care of myself.” Mei Kwan worked as an office clerk and was unable to afford to buy an apartment of her own. At age 46, she still lived with her mother and brother’s family—one of her brothers, his wife, and their children—in a tiny public housing estate apartment. Mei Kwan had little privacy in the apartment; she lingered in shops on her way home when she needed time to herself. Every weekend her three brothers and their families had lunch

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together at a restaurant and then gathered in the small apartment to spend time together as a family. A comment I frequently heard among single women born before 1970 was that they were proud of their contributions to their families. Mei Kwan had supported her family through difficult times, and now supported herself. She did not regret her choice to remain single but in middle age, faced problems with housing quality and financial security. Her family passed ownership of their apartment to the brother with whom she currently lived. Due to the expense of housing in the city, she could not afford to move out. Mei Kwan emphasized, however, that she lived with her mother; rejecting the interpretation that she was an appendage of her brother and his family. She said, “I’m not there as part of my brother’s family. I’m a part of the whole family.” Ming, an office cleaner in her fifties, also lived with her brother and his family. Born in 1960 to her father’s second wife at a time when polygamy was still legal in Hong Kong,15 she also worked in factories in her youth and never felt that she needed to marry. Her married sisters urged her to stay single. They told her that once married, she would need to worry about many things, including the children’s education, and she would be held responsible for any problems related to her child. When Ming’s birth mother died, she lived with her father’s first wife (daaih poh) and her brothers born of both mothers. When the family received government housing for resettlement compensation to move into government apartments from their home on a fishing boat, she went to live with her younger brother and his wife. Ming would now have liked to move out but was unable to save enough money to buy an apartment herself: It’s a bit embarrassing to be living with my married brother and his family. Now that my brother is married, he sometimes goes to the mainland because his wife lives there [while awaiting permission from the Hong Kong government to move to Hong Kong].16 Then I stay by myself. It’s better to live by yourself. You feel freer. Sometimes there are differences between the families. For example, my brother’s wife uses MSG in the food and I don’t like it. We have different tastes. So when they come, we separate and I cook for myself.

Although Ming had helped to pay for her brother’s education, she was now in the awkward position of having to assert her place in the family in relation to her brother’s wife. She wanted to apply for government housing but said that

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it was difficult to obtain an apartment as a single person because families have priority.17 Many of the single women I knew of the “working daughters” generation had helped care for their nieces and nephews. This support was seen as voluntary and was done with affection. Many women of this generation told me that they spent time with their extended families including nieces and nephews every weekend. Siu Lan saw her nephews regularly at her family’s weekly gatherings, and she helped to raise them. Siu Lan said that she did not need to have children herself because she already spent a good part of her youth working to support family members and spending time with her sister’s children. She thought that in helping her sister, she understood the enormous difficulties and heavy responsibility of raising children. The generation of women born in the 1970s and 1980s grew up in a wealthier Hong Kong than that of the working daughters. This younger generation came from smaller families of one to two children. Adult daughters of this generation were accustomed to making their own decisions and had the financial ability to support themselves. Yet adult single women born in the 1970s and 1980s are also expected to be available for family activities such as weekend and holiday meals, to provide social and financial support to extended family members if the need arises, and to provide financial support to their parents to symbolize their care. The generation of women born after the 1970s gave generally between 20 and 50 percent of their salaries to their parents. Most daughters reported that they passed money, their “family contribution” (ga yuhng), to their mothers rather than their fathers because their mothers ran the family finances or because their mothers did not have their own income. Women I knew told me that the amount of money depends on mothers’ expectations, daughters’ ability to pay, and the feelings and relationship between the two. A fresh university graduate might earn more than both her parents combined and pay up to 50 percent of her income to her parents. The amount of family contribution could fluctuate, women explained. If they had large expenses such as a mortgage or graduate school fees, some temporarily stopped paying or reduced the amount. When I asked if family contribution payments were made to repay parents for the money they had spent on their daughters’ educations, most women said that the amount was based on affection and love rather than on any kind of direct calculation. Fran, who worked at an advertising firm, explained her own practice:

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I give about US$400 a month [to my mom]. When we were living together I would give US$650. I decided on this amount myself. At one point I was giving more than my brothers and sisters because I was making more than them. But when my income became unstable, I gave less. My sister is married and she doesn’t need to give money any more but she still does on special occasions like festivals. When I get married I will continue to give my mother the same amount that I’m giving now.

Single women obtain moral authority from their offering of family contribution to their parents. Daughters who pay see themselves as behaving properly and their contributions are appreciated by their families as appropriately filial (haau seuhn). Fran criticized her nieces and nephews for their attitude toward giving money to their parents, “We grew up feeling that we should give money to our parents. When I see my sister’s children’s view of money, I feel angry. In our generation, we give money to our parents, but they feel that they have a right to demand money from their parents.” The family contribution payment, however, can also be a way of moving resources from daughters to sons, reproducing gender inequality in families. Daughters often pay more family contribution than sons, even though daughters often earn less than sons, and sons are much more likely to inherit family property than daughters. When I asked why parents wanted daughters to pay more than sons, I was given a few explanations. Older generations, I was told, worry that sons have more expenses than daughters as they will need to raise a family, pay for the monetary gift to a bride’s family (laih gam), and purchase property if they want to marry. Some women in their thirties told me that there is no gender discrimination in families; the amount of family contribution depends on the feelings of the child for the parent, the closeness of the relationship, the financial situation of the child, and the financial situation of the parents. Yet women I knew also agreed that usually daughters have much closer relationships to their parents, worry more about their parents having enough spending money, and thus usually give more. “It’s better to have a girl than a boy” (saang neuih hou gwo saang zai), goes the local saying, referring to the better care that one will receive from a daughter than a son in one’s old age.18 In some families the exact amount paid by each child to their parents is not known by the other siblings, and family arguments arise not over the daughter’s marriage, but over payments of family contribution, provision of care services to parents, and distribution of family resources among siblings.

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Becky, 29, paid her mother a family contribution while her brother was exempt from paying, even though both were unmarried and living with their parents. Becky had recently returned from studying in the United Kingdom, where she obtained a master’s degree. Her mother paid for her school expenses. Upon returning to Hong Kong and obtaining work, Becky paid half of her salary to her mother upon the latter’s request. Yet the payment was a source of tension between her and her mother because her brother was excused from paying. She said: My mother spent fifty minutes explaining to me why I should pay while my brother doesn’t need to pay. She’s a very domineering woman and makes all the decisions in my family. But she is also traditional. She gave me a long explanation about why I have to pay because I’m a girl. It has to do with my brother keeping his surname and me changing mine when I get married. In the end, I could not agree with her, but I still have to go along with what she says.

Families do not prevent single women from purchasing property but also provide little assistance. This contrasts with parental attitudes toward sons, for whom large sacrifices may be made in an effort to help them to purchase property. Many parents of adult daughters in Hong Kong live in government rental housing, which cannot be passed to adult children. Even if the adult daughter’s parents are homeowners, the family is likely to have more than one adult child so the single daughter may not inherit the family apartment. Many single women want to buy their own place but are unable to do so given Hong Kong’s unaffordable property market. Suk Jing, who lived with her mother and her brother and his family, thought that she would not buy a place because she would need to spend most of her income on the mortgage. As she lacked property, when her mother passed away, she would need to rely on the generosity of her brother and his family to remain under their roof. The extended family welfare system in Hong Kong allows single women to feel that they can somehow find a place to live with relatives if necessary, but they are also disadvantaged compared to their brothers as they are likely to remain renters and house guests in a city in which property is the major source of wealth creation. Iris found ways to manage her relationship with her natal family in ways that surprised me. Her childhood in Hong Kong was not happy; she had lived with her parents and her paternal grandmother, and witnessed arguments

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and occasional violence, and on reflection now understood that the problems emerged in part from a family member’s mental illness. As a teenager, Iris accompanied her family when they migrated to Australia and lived there for five years. In high school, she began to take steps to distance herself from her natal family. While her family were devout Catholics, Iris stopped attending church with them and instead threw herself into school and extracurricular activities. She obtained a scholarship to attend university and made up her mind to avoid relying on her family’s help. She told me, “I haven’t used my parents’ money since leaving high school. I went to university on full scholarship and I worked part-time. I won’t say that it was very tough. I won’t make it seem like that. It was manageable. Ever since coming to Hong Kong, I’ve lived on my own resources.” After graduating from a university in Australia, she came to Hong Kong alone to develop her career in the city. When I first met her she was in her mid-forties and director of the public relations division of a large corporation. She spoke as a confident, self-made person, and she had created distance between herself and her family. “I insist on following my own path. My family has gotten used to it already. They’ve only recently stopped bugging me about work and my life—although they still ask me about marriage,” she said. Although reciprocal relationships with family members is the central mechanism of the Hong Kong family system, from a young age Iris had resisted this arrangement. In refusing to accept her family’s financial help, she created space to live her life as she chose. Given that Iris had taken this extreme and unusual step of asserting financial independence from her family, I was puzzled to learn that Iris sent money to her parents and even to her brother on a regular basis. In giving money directly to her brother, Iris went beyond what most Hong Kong women would do. Yet Iris’s action follows the logic of Hong Kong family financial transfers in which income from daughters is passed to sons, a path of funding usually managed by parents. But as Iris did not fully trust her parents’ handling of money and family relationships, she took the initiative to take care of her brother herself. She explained that while she did not feel close to her family, having relationships with family was one’s responsibility. Marriage, in contrast, was her personal choice and not a moral obligation. Iris ingeniously respected and reproduced the cultural logic of mandatory filial relationships and optional marriage but negotiated the filial relationship in a way that gave her freedom to live her life as she chose. Families in Hong Kong provide social services and intimacy for single women more so than in the other two cities. They withdraw from women’s

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romantic lives, allowing women to make their own decisions about marriage. But they also place limits on women’s lives by claiming time and resources and channeling women into supportive roles within the extended family. Family resentments in Hong Kong are inspired not by single women’s indefinitely delayed marriages, but emerge in relation to the nature and extent of adult children’s social and financial contribution to their parents and relatives and the equity of resource distribution among siblings. Family dynamics in Hong Kong reproduce gendered economic disparities and role division; single women often give more time and money to their parents in comparison to brothers but are likely to be given the short end of any transfer of wealth or property. Single women in Hong Kong told me that they were free from the insecurity and unhappiness of bad marriages to unreliable men. Many felt that they could hold their heads high knowing that they had made disproportionate financial and social contributions to their families. But their contributions, while freely and lovingly given, were not rewarded with commensurate legal recognition and rights. While married women may feel entitled to live in their homes with a husband and children and are legally entitled to assets upon divorce or death of a spouse, a single woman without her own apartment needs to negotiate a place to live with her parents or brothers.19 A few single women I knew were fortunate to have been able to purchase property—three purchased apartments with sisters when prices fell for a period following the SARS outbreak in 2003.20 The majority did not have property and many seemed destined to live indefinitely with parents or siblings, as Hong Kong’s property prices, as of this writing, have spiraled beyond the reach of middle-class households and far beyond what a typical single woman’s salary could afford.

Tokyo: “If I Keep This Up, I Will Never Have a Life of My Own” In Tokyo, family tensions have emerged around two issues: marriage and elder care arrangements. Some families I met pushed adult daughters to marry because they wanted their daughters to have children and enjoy the accompanying middle-class lifestyle. For these women and their families, marriage timing was a source of tension as parents urged their adult daughters to marry on schedule. In other families, especially when the single women had passed into middle age, family members discussed elder care arrangements and property transfer. Although this chapter is organized around “conflicts,” the discussions regarding single women’s provision of elder care were usually not filled with tension, perhaps because daughters’ elder care of parents is seen

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as optional; it is usually assumed that elder care responsibility will fall to the oldest son and his wife. When single women in my study had decided to provide their parents with elder care, it was usually accompanied with promises of property transfer to the designated care provider, and the whole arrangement was mutually agreed on by the parents and other siblings. In Tokyo, many women I knew wanted to marry precisely because it was the only path to motherhood. Twenty-six-year-old Ayumi said: “Since I was born with this woman’s body, I should let it function and have babies” (laughs). Ayumi told me that she wanted to have five children but because it was said to cost US$270,000 to raise a child in Japan, 21 she reined in her aspirations and now hoped to have three. “Recently I told my boyfriend that I want to have a baby when I’m 31 and quit work when I’m 35. He has a similar idea about retiring early, so we match in that way. But I’m a little worried because he says he doesn’t like children!” Ayumi explained her views to me: “When I was a child my mother was a housewife. I thought that I’d also like to be a housewife. In high school when the teacher asked us what we wanted to do in the future, my classmates said things like doctor or lawyer, both girls and boys. I was the only one who said that I wanted to be a housewife. The teacher—he was a young man—got really angry at me!” Ayumi had argued with her parents in the past about her marriage. Her parents wanted her to have a middle-class marriage, which would allow a comfortable life. For this reason, they had objected to a prior romantic relationship she had with a man from Hong Kong: “My parents live in the countryside. There are a lot of people in Japan who discriminate against Chinese people even now. They were afraid that if we married there would be discrimination against him, our children and me. At the time I told them that I’d be able to raise my children properly [in spite of such discrimination]. But now that I think about it calmly, I think they were probably right. After my parents strongly opposed our marriage, my relationship with him [my Hong Kong boyfriend] grew worse.” Although Ayumi accepted her parents’ view that it would be difficult to raise children if she married a Chinese man, it was ironic that while she was now dating a Japanese man in line with her parents’ preferences, he was reluctant to have children. Some women who wanted to marry and have children felt that life was on hold until they could achieve this goal. Twenty-nine-year-old Madoka, introduced in an earlier publication as Y ko (see Nakano 2014, 171), had a successful career as a TV producer but very much wanted to marry and start a family. Her boyfriend, a year older than her, had changed companies three

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times in the three and a half years since they started dating. She told me that she wanted to get married, but he [my boyfriend] . . . is really busy now. Last year I asked him when we would marry and he said next year [because he was just learning how to manage his new job]. This year he says “next year” again. Now I’m wondering if he’s really the best person for me (Nakano 2014, 172). My mother was a full-time housewife who never worked. In the past few years she’s really put a lot of pressure on me to marry. Now every time I see her, she usually says something about it. My father also wants me to marry and mentions it often. I agree! I’m the kind of person who likes to be needed. I want to be needed at work and also needed in my family. I want to create that kind of place for myself.

When single women did not feel pressure to marry on schedule, it was often because they felt that they did not need to have children. Yasue, 36, worked for a cosmetics firm in the Ginza District. She lived with her parents in a one-room apartment some forty-five minutes away from the city center. She said that she does not have the confidence to raise children and preferred to work rather than become a housewife. In an earlier publication I introduced her words as follows: “When I was about 29, I felt pressure [to marry] because my mother got sick and my relatives and neighbors told me that I should marry to give my mother comfort. My married friends urged me to marry; they told me not to be so choosy. It really bothered me then although now I just let it go in one ear and come out the other” (Nakano 2011, 139). Yasue was having problems at work at that time and she resolved to remove herself from both work and marriage pressures by quitting her job and going to Australia for six months on a working holiday visa. Although she felt that she would not have children, Yasue was committed to caring for her parents. Yasue’s mother was not well, and Yasue had already started taking care of her. Yasue occasionally stayed home from work when her mother needed her. If her parents should become seriously ill, the family had decided that Yasue would be the one to care for them rather than her younger brother or sister. As her parents now relied on her for help, they did not pressure her to marry. “My parents understand my feelings. The pressure has come from relatives and neighbors,” she said. Chisato, 36, told me that she felt afraid of being trapped into caregiving by her family. Although she thought that she did not need to have children,

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she wanted to marry. She lived with her parents and grandparents and had watched her mother care for her paternal grandfather until his death. When her paternal grandmother became sick, her mother cared for her as well. Chisato was an only child who would presumably need to care for her parents in the future: Because I was living with my grandmother who was sick, I often spent time caring for her. I thought that if I keep this up, I would never have a life of my own. That’s one of the reasons why I decided to move out [of my parents’ home]. At the time that I was planning to move out my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. I thought that maybe I should give up my plan but then I thought that if I did, he’d think that he had a really serious cancer and would worry. So I decided to move out anyway.

Chisato chose a life on her own—which she hoped would include marriage— over elder care. Contrary to popular views of single women, she was not choosing individual freedom over family service. Rather, she was choosing service to a husband over service to her parents and grandparents. Other women I knew had given up on marriage or put it as a lower priority because they felt they needed to care for their parents. Thirty-one-year-old Sana, for example, was living in an apartment in Tokyo when her father fell ill and subsequently passed away. She decided to quit her job in the city and move back in with her mother in Saitama, an hour away from central Tokyo, to keep her mother company and help with the family business. Upon taking up these family duties, she noticed that family and friends who had previously encouraged her to marry had fallen silent on the issue. Several single women I met prepared to take care of their parents in their old age and in return expected that they would inherit the family home. Rika, 42, had made such an arrangement with her parents. When her father decided to remodel the family home in which she had been living, he gave her a choice of either moving out or contributing to the loan. The house was located in a central area in Tokyo and if she moved out, she would need to rent a place far from the city center. She decided to contribute to the loan. Now she regretted her decision: “I don’t like living with my parents because there’s no privacy and I don’t get along with my father. Also, if I have a boyfriend, there’s no place to bring him. It’s really hard living with my parents and I’d like to live on my own. It was a mistake [to agree to stay with them] but now I can’t move because I have to repay the loan.” Rika also worried that marriage would

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affect property succession in her family. She explained that she would inherit her parents’ home upon their death and she would like to bequeath the home to her niece. She worried that if she married, the home would instead go to her future husband. Rika worried about her parents’ health. She could maintain her current lifestyle as long as her parents remained healthy. She told me that her father was the type of man who insisted on being waited on by her mother. “If there is salad dressing that needs to be poured onto the salad, he won’t do it,” she said. “Once he yelled at me to come into the living room, and when I ran in, he asked me to change the TV channel on the remote control,” she said. Because of her father’s helplessness, Rika was concerned that if her mother became ill she would be responsible for caring for both her mother and her father. The arrangement in which single daughters care for their parents represents a change in the way that families deal with elder care and inheritance in Japan. As mentioned, the legal basis of the ie family system was dismantled at the end of World War II, but in the postwar period, many families have continued to informally designate a male heir (atotsugi), usually the eldest son, to carry on the family name and inherit the family property or business. The designated heir is also considered responsible for living with or close to the parents while his wife is expected to provide care services. I asked single women without brothers whether their parents were concerned about the lack of an heir and none replied that this was a concern of themselves or their parents. Single women’s stories suggested that succession now involved a package in which the adult child who provided elder care might inherit family property and that a single daughter might be preferred over a daughter-in-law. Single women were making decisions in the context of their anticipated family responsibilities; many were either waiting to start families or anticipating that they would need to take care of their aging parents. This state of waiting led some women to try to do more in life—travel and pursue hobbies—thinking that their life would soon change when they married or cared for their parents. For many, the state of waiting led to missed opportunities, as these women did not make plans, manage their finances, or secure housing for their old age. Some single women I knew who were eager to transition to the status of wife and mother expressed a sense of frustration over living in a liminal state while waiting for marriage. As we have seen, often it is the woman’s male partner who is not ready to marry and have children. The sense of waiting for marriage affected women’s financial standing. As I wrote in a 2011 publication,

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some women hesitated to invest in property because they feared it signaled that they were resigned to being single. Kazuko, 32, decided against purchasing her own apartment, explaining that it might signal that she would not marry: “Women who buy their own condos end up not getting married, so I think it’s better not to buy!” (Nakano 2011, 145).22 I believe that in Japan parental pressure on women to marry has declined perhaps in part because marriage is no longer the only pathway into domestic service. Women who wish to marry and have children must still meet marriage deadlines, as their families remind them. Those who do not wish to have children or who have passed marriageable ages, however, often begin to have conversations with their parents and siblings over elder care and inheritance. When daughters have agreed to provide elder care, marriage may complicate these care and inheritance arrangements. We have seen that Rika worried about how marriage would frustrate her plans to give property to her niece. Sana’s family and friends seemed to sense the conflict between marriage and parental care, as they stopped asking her about whether she would marry after her father died and she moved back to her natal home to live with and care for her mother. Chisato felt sorry about moving out of her parents’ home, and she felt that continuing to provide elder care in her family would impede her chances of marrying. “I thought that if I kept this up, I would never have a life of my own,” she said. As single women are blamed in the media for their “parasitic” lifestyle, marriage is often posed as the ethically appropriate life choice. But we can see from their stories that some single women’s choices are fraught with conflict, not between a free and independent lifestyle as a “parasite single” but between two kinds of domestic care responsibilities: marriage and elder care.

The Morality behind Caregiving The Singaporean government’s attempts to encourage women to marry and bear children have failed, points out Youyenn Teo (2010; 2013). Yet state policies are not totally ineffective. Teo finds Singaporean government housing, childcare, and elder care policies have not been successful in reversing declines in marriage and fertility rates but have instead provided the framework through which people articulate a consciousness of themselves as Singaporeans (2010, 351). Similarly, I found that state policies could not persuade single women in my study that they needed to marry and bear children. But they did provide frameworks in which single women articulated their moral value in their families and in their societies as a whole.

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Single women in the three cities told me that the relationship between marriage, caregiving, and morality is not fixed. Women I knew informed me that the provision of domestic services is a requirement and a measure of women’s moral value but that marriage is a personal choice and not a moral issue. I believe that this is because in the three societies under study, marriage is not the only way for women to participate in family caregiving. In this sense, marriage has become less important as a moral issue for some single women in my study. In Shanghai, Karen served her family by taking her aunt to the hospital. Marion gave her parents money although it is not expected in Shanghai, and she made sure to give her parents gifts when she returned from overseas trips. Single women I knew explained to me that the provision of services to family members should be the measure of a woman’s worth, not whether or not she marries. In Hong Kong, single women I knew met their moral obligations by providing family services, including “family contribution,” to their parents. I sensed that this contribution gave single women confidence and moral authority in their relations with family members, especially when single daughters offered more to their parents than did their brothers and married sisters. In Tokyo, women I knew said that they were morally responsible individuals by describing how they took care of themselves financially and did not burden others; perhaps an unspoken comparison with married women who accept money from their husbands, and a reference to criticisms by conservative politicians that single, childless women burden society. Single women in the three societies have rejected claims that they are morally problematic in their societies. Many have explained their moral worth and, in some cases, moral superiority over siblings or married people by referencing their contributions to their families. Single women thus have established a respectable place for themselves in their families and in society but many have done so by reinforcing the validity of the gendered division of labor in their societies; they accepted the idea that women should take responsibility for providing family services, and they emphasized their commitment to such service provision.

Inequality: “There’s No Use Getting Angry about It” I occasionally heard complaints from women about unfair treatment at work, but I rarely heard women complain about gender inequality in their families. I wondered why single women would accept unequal treatment. I think there are several ways to answer this. One is that inequality in families does not occur in obvious ways. Single women in Shanghai usually do not have siblings,

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so inequality for them does not occur as a result of competition between a brother and a sister as in previous generations. Instead, inequality emerges because parents of sons routinely put aside money for their sons to own property while parents of daughters are much less likely to do so (see Fincher 2014). The unequal distribution of housing resources occurs because parents expect that their daughters will marry, and their housing will be provided by a husband. But this arrangement works well for a woman only if she marries and if the marriage is a stable and happy one. If a woman remains single or divorces, she may be left without housing, and if she is unhappy in marriage it is difficult for her to negotiate her needs or find an exit. In Hong Kong, the unequal distribution of resources also does not occur in an obvious way. Parents routinely support the education and careers of both daughters and sons. The provision of services and payment of family contribution that adult daughters provide to parents is construed as a voluntary provision based on love. Parents usually (although we have seen the exception in Becky’s case) do not explicitly ask daughters to pay more than sons. Rather, daughters pay more and do more for their parents because they feel that they are closer to their parents or because they care more about the well-being of their parents than their brothers do. Daughters may be unaware, however, that parents plan to divide inheritance unequally among siblings, often provisioning greater shares to adult sons than to daughters. The cultural justification for this unequal division of property may be that the son inherits the family name or that the son requires property for his family. In Tokyo, the distribution of resources within families occurs along gender lines. In spite of legal prescriptions for equal inheritance among all children, sole inheritance is often preferred—usually to the eldest son. The reason given is that sole inheritance to the eldest son serves the interest of maintaining “family continuity” (Izuhara 2002, 70). This practice has meant that daughters-in-law or daughters who have provided care services to the elderly usually do not inherit property. Studies show that property ownership among single women is low. While the average female rate of owner occupation in Japan is 54 percent, only 7.8 percent of unmarried women own property (Ronald and Nakano 2013, 454). Women do not buy property in part because a large percentage live with their parents and purchasing a home may not be affordable on a single woman’s salary. Another reason, as suggested earlier, is that women expect that they will marry and live with a husband and so the purchase of property is seen as unnecessary. It remains to be seen whether

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the trend of single women inheriting property in exchange for elder care will address inequalities in property distribution. A second reason that single women accept unequal treatment from their families is that family relationships are experienced and articulated in the language of love. When I asked Hong Kong women why they could accept the inequality of family contribution arrangements in which men pay less than women yet obtain more property inheritance, most women said something equivalent to: “That’s the way it is. There’s no use getting angry about it.” One woman said, “In Hong Kong people live longer than almost anywhere in the world. I think it’s because their daughters are taking their parents to the hospital [to see a doctor] as soon as they start to feel sick!” She recognized the inequality of women’s service to their families, but also saw its benefits in the quality of life of one’s loved ones. The expectation that single women provide care services to their parents is difficult to contest because it involves those one loves. If women do not provide care services to their family members, no one would do it, or no one would provide better care than themselves. I asked a single woman in Tokyo why she would care for her parents rather than her brother. She said: “Ha! My brother can barely take care of himself. I will definitely be the one who cares for my parents.” Assigning women care duties, however, reproduces a system that allocates women and men grossly unequal shares of the wealth in their societies. As others have pointed out (see Fincher 2014; Ronald and Nakano 2013; Song 2010, 2014), single women often struggle to find quality housing and are thus excluded from ascending the housing ladder in their societies and thus obtaining the accompanying wealth and financial security. As singlehood is seen as a temporary and less than ideal state, in all three societies single women are not encouraged to prepare for their own financial futures and may even be actively discouraged from doing so. Single women may arguably have a better quality of life through stronger relationships with their parents, but the result may be that single women care for their extended family and parents and find themselves without caregivers, property, or sufficient resources in their own old age.

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CHAPTER 5

“Maybe I Just Love Myself Too Much” Finding Meaning as Single Women

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ost single women I knew had not expected that singlehood would bring second-class status. By second-class status, I mean that in their societies, the highest status for women over marriageable age is to be married and have children, and such status is seen as superior to any other achievement that a woman could obtain in her life. John Borneman argues that in the United States, heterosexual marriage is associated with completing the self as a human being, with imagery of two halves coming together: marriage “regulates, privileges and protects” (1996, 228).1 He argues that this view of marriage requires and creates an excluded category of the unmarried, divorced, and homosexual. Feminist scholarship points out that in spite of recent celebration of the “empowered autonomous woman” (Budgeon 2016, 402), the family centered around the romantic heterosexual couple remains at the heart of the social order, and alternatives, particularly for women, are stigmatized and denigrated (Budgeon 2016; Chandler 1991; Lahad 2017; Rich 1980; Trimberger 2005).2 In the societies under study, single women are a second-class category of persons in contrast to the privileged category of married women. Unmarried persons are seen as socially incomplete and morally suspect. In Shanghai, women’s second-class status is overt—family members and friends remind single women that they need to marry or face a life of unhappiness and shame. In response, many single women I knew in Shanghai directly articulated a rebuttal by asserting the merits of their lifestyle in spite of their singlehood. In Hong Kong and Tokyo, cities in which people see themselves as open and accepting of different lifestyles, women I knew responded indirectly by asserting their value and worth without overtly addressing their single status. 144

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The experience of second-class status pervaded single women’s stories of searching for meaning in their lives in all three societies. In this search, some single women I knew embraced marriage and having children as the best way to live a meaningful life. They wanted to marry because they wanted to have children and a family of their own, to be seen as full and responsible adults, and to obtain financial security and companionship. Other women I knew sought meaning outside of marriage. Regardless of their view of marriage, many women emphasized the advantages of singlehood. Singlehood brought opportunities that their married sisters and friends could not enjoy, such as freedom to make their own decisions about how to spend their time. Single women could pursue hobbies, travel, or focus on their work. Travel was particularly attractive, and many women in my study said that travel made them change their way of seeing the world, that travel experiences led to personal growth and change. Some women with this perspective were surprised by the realization that they had nonetheless accrued second-class status because they were single after marriage deadlines. In their youth, they believed the assertions of their parents and teachers that women and men are equal and women should pursue every opportunity. They learned of their second-class status when others made remarks that showed pity or embarrassment when learning that they were unmarried. In addition to the advantages and pleasures of singlehood, single women’s narratives explain their moral worth in society. Single women’s explanation of their moral worth reflects on the particular ways that their societies criticize single women as morally suspect. In the previous chapter, I discussed the ways that single women in my study explained their moral value through their roles in families. In this chapter, I discuss single women’s explanation of their moral worth in their societies, nation, and the world. In Shanghai, single women I met argued that they were doing their part as modern citizens of China by developing themselves, pursuing their dreams, and finding alternative ways to contribute to national progress. In Hong Kong, single women in my study asserted that they were skilled cosmopolitan subjects who possessed knowledge of self and society; they thought for themselves and did not follow the crowd. Many emphasized that they found meaning in simple pleasures and contributed in their own way to their natal and extended families. In Tokyo, single women I knew said that they enjoyed freedoms unachievable by their mothers’ generation. They emphasized their ability to support themselves and live independently in an unspoken contrast with married women, who relied on their husbands, and in dialogue with accusations that single

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women were contributing to the nation’s decline due to their failure to produce children.

Shanghai: Desiring the World Lisa Rofel wrote that everyone she met in her fieldwork in China were “desiring subjects” in that they insisted that they had a desire that they were trying to fulfill, whether that desire was for sex, consumption, or multiple desires (2007, 18). She argued that a “properly cosmopolitan self is supposed to be desirous and this desire is supposed to be open and unconstrained” (2007, 8). Single women I met in Shanghai also had many desires. These desires emerged from the widespread feeling that China was changing in positive ways and previously unattainable opportunities had become available to women of their generation. The failure to dream and strive to achieve these opportunities that everyone else was achieving would be a loss for the individual and contrary to common sense. In Shanghai, some single women dreamed of marrying. Single women commonly spoke of a wish to be happily married to a man, to have children, and to have a meaningful but not overly demanding job. Samantha, a 26-yearold editor at a publishing company, said, “Marriage is based on love. I want to marry someone, I hope before 30, because I want to have a child. I want to find someone to share my happiness and also my burdens. I want to love someone for a lifetime.” Twenty-eight-year-old Beatrice said, “We should live together in our own house. He should be healthy. We should have lots of communication and unconditional love. We should grow in spirituality and together become more aware and more conscious.” Many women I knew dreamed of balancing family and work. Thirtythree-year-old Cindy told me, “I’d like to find a good partner and build a family. I want to have a baby and create a balanced life. I want to continue to work and be happy.” But not all women dreamed of marriage. Many women in their twenties were worried about or afraid of marriage, thinking that they would need to marry when the time came and it would not be a happy experience, based on what they heard from their friends. A small number of women said that career was their first priority and they would marry only if the opportunity arose. Lee, 29, dreamed of reaching the top of her field: First, I want to go to a good university in America to learn how to do research. I want to do my own research and get a position in the academic world. I want to publish in good journals. Chinese people only publish in

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Chinese journals, not in American journals. In the next ten years, I will focus on my career. Second, I wish to meet the right person at the right place, at the right time. I don’t want to be just pushed to marry. You don’t know when you’ll meet the right one. Career is in our hands; we can control it [but not marriage].

Amy, who spent eight years attending school in Canada, desired marriage with the right person, but unlike most women I met in Shanghai, she said that she would remain single if she did not meet such a person. “I want to have a family if I find my ideal match.” she said. But she thought that if her “ideal match” did not appear, then she would focus on her career and aim to become a chief financial officer in a real estate company. Some women mentioned that singlehood allowed them to enjoy freedoms, including sexual freedoms. Rofel writes that in the 1990s, “the whole point for young, urban women was to be savvy about sex. Discussions of sex were everywhere in China: sexology had burst onto the scene” (2007, 121). A few women spoke about the freedom to have different sexual partners, a freedom which they felt that they could not enjoy if they married. “If we have a family, even without kids, if we are married, we wouldn’t date other guys. We’d feel guilty. Because of the moral issue, we wouldn’t do it,” said Jacky. A few women in my study went clubbing and had tried one-night stands.3 Marie, 38, whom I introduced in an earlier publication (see Nakano 2016a, 162), had a one-night stand and found it liberating but also frightening because it made her cynical about love: “Because everything is so convenient, it is difficult for people to be devoted to love. The temptations are everywhere. Most of my friends have had one-night stands. We feel that it is safe and ok to have fun. . . . I had my one-night stand, and I’m not afraid to do it again. The experience changed me. It is harder for us to be truly devoted to love” (Nakano 2016a, 162). Many single women enjoyed travel. If their residence registration was located in Shanghai or a major metropolitan area such as Beijing or Guangzhou, they could relatively easily obtain visas to travel overseas. In the past two decades, overseas travel has become a national leisure activity of enormous scale for Chinese citizens. Rofel states that travel for leisure, not for work or to improve one’s social status, is “one of the key ways to embody the global self ” (2007, 128) and a marker of the “emergent bourgeoisie in China” (2007, 128). Women I knew understood that travel placed them into a category of a global elite. But it was also something that they spoke about with real passion.

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Marion had been to France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Japan. She said, “It stirred my heart to see the architecture in France and Italy. In China I’ve been almost everywhere. I want to see all the places in China, and then see the whole world. I went to Hokkaido last year. I kept a travel diary—a blog—so friends can see what I’m doing. There is not enough time [to travel to all the places that beckon]!” For some women in my study, travel was more than leisure consumption: it was a transformative spiritual experience. Twenty-nine-year-old Penny said that she spent one year travelling around Asia: Last year I went to Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong for one month, and Japan for two months. I also went to India. This trip to India taught me to clean up my life. It made me become mature. When I was 24 years old I looked 18. Now I almost look close to my age [because of my personal growth]. In India, I went to the birthplace of Shiva, the goddess of yoga, and stayed there for two and a half months. I lived in the ashram and became a vegetarian. I did volunteer work and research, and I talked to the spiritual leaders and learned a lot from them. I met people from all over the world. My time in India was the happiest in my life!

Single women in Shanghai saw the ability to enjoy leisure as a privilege that was not available to their parents, to themselves in their youth, nor to their married sisters and friends. Luna, who was planning a trip to the Philippines to obtain a scuba diving license, explained that young women of her generation have more opportunities than ever before to explore the world. She said: “When our generation was young, we only studied and tried to get good grades. That was the only thing. We didn’t have time to do sports. A lot of people our age [in their thirties] are trying things like scuba diving and skiing.” Luna’s friend, Karen, explained that these experiences opened their world and brought happiness: “In our leisure we want to try new things, fresh things. I’ve played tennis for ten years. I’ve started to learn how to swim. Twice a week I’m taking lessons. I’ve been doing this for two years now. I think that mentally and physically I am much better now than before. I am five to ten times happier than I was ten years ago.” Kleinman (2011) points out that there is increasing interest on the part of ordinary Chinese, mobilized through the internet, in global social movements of humanitarian aid and volunteerism. One example is the mass support for voluntary blood donations in Chinese cities following the Wenchuan

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earthquake in 2008 (Jun 2011).4 Some single women in this study aimed to contribute to solving the social problems of China. Marion explained that her dream was to serve children in China’s impoverished rural areas: “In China there is a big gap between the rich and the poor. People live well here in Shanghai but in other parts of the country some kids can’t go to school. I sponsor ten kids [through a charity]. I want to go to places where these kids live and I want to be a teacher for them.” Marion was failing to meet her parents’ expectations that she marry and have children, but she could find other ways to contribute to society and the nation, and these avenues opened because she was single and not tied to caring for children and a husband. Some women in Shanghai discussed the ways in which they were contributing to the world. Several women said that they contributed to global charities that cared for children in impoverished places in Africa. Penny, 29, thought that the purpose of her life might be taking care of animals: “One day I was watching a National Geographic TV show about whales. The Japanese were killing the whales and a scientist was trying to save them. The TV show moved me and I felt that I understood that the mission of my life was to save animals. Because in this world if only a few people love animals, and these people don’t do something, who will?” Penny planned to try to obtain an M.B.A. in Malaysia and then join a nonprofit animal protection organization. Gaetano found that the single women she met in Chinese cities reported that dating experiences and falling in love constituted a “rich experience” (2010, 14) in which they gained new knowledge, contrary to stereotypes that single women were wasting time. She points out that their narratives resonate with Giddens’ (1991) idea that in modern societies, selves must reflexively create themselves.5 Karen’s story reflects the idea that her love affairs and breakups, although painful, contributed to her growth and development as a human being: My views have changed. I am from a poor family. I had to struggle in society. I was very jealous of the others in school. Even though I had boyfriends, I was not happy and wanted more. Now I feel lucky, and I give thanks. People at my company taught me how to be generous, how to sympathize, how to be a better woman, a better person. When I look at a photo of myself from ten year ago, I see that I looked like a mean and petty person. After I broke up with my last boyfriend, I went back to my apartment and I felt so empty. It wasn’t because I missed him but because I

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understood that the problem was in myself. In the past I always thought that I was the victim. All I did was complain. I complained about my boyfriends; they could never do enough to satisfy me. It’s not about whether we are married or not. We are happy because we make ourselves happy. If you’re an unhappy woman, you will be unhappy regardless of whether or not you are married. If we are happy, we will make ourselves happy and our marriages will be happy. That’s why it doesn’t matter whether we are married or single.

Karen’s experience of breaking up with several partners without marrying them allowed her to achieve this wiser version of herself. Some younger women I met in Shanghai wanted to pursue their dreams, but when they realized that doing so conflicted with marriage, they decided to choose marriage over their dreams. In another publication, I introduced Kathy, who had arrived in Shanghai at the age of 25, leaving behind in her home city a boyfriend whom she had assumed she would marry, because she wanted to pursue her dreams of living in the glamorous city and seeing the world. She told me, “I dream to go abroad, to see the other parts of the world besides China. I want to have a wide vision. When you go to different places, you can change what you think of the world” (Nakano 2015, 168). When I met her a year later, however, her situation had changed. Her boyfriend had broken up with her and had become engaged to marry another woman. Having reached the critical age for marriage in Shanghai of 27 without a partner, she told me that the most important goal now was to find a partner and marry. In her study of single women in the San Francisco Bay Area, London, and Helsinki, Tuula Gordon found that because single women were positioned outside of conventional life paths, they struggled through a period in which they needed to figure out how to live their lives; how to organize intimate relationships, work, and family obligations (1994). In Shanghai, the struggle of living an unconventional life was made more difficult by the enormous pressure placed upon single women to marry. Single women in this study had not expected to be suddenly seen as social deviants when they passed marriage deadlines. Before reaching marriage deadlines, others had praised their achievements. When they reached their late twenties as single women, they needed to address not only how they would organize their lives, but how to defend their choices. Marion had been discussing with her friends why so many women in Shanghai are attractive, well-educated, and successful in their jobs yet remain

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single. She concluded, “In Shanghai women are excellent. I don’t mean to brag, but we have our own house, our own car, and good jobs. These women can’t marry. For regular women who go to two-year colleges or just graduate from high school and get regular jobs—these women tend to marry quickly when they are young. Our situation is different. But if I can marry, and I have this dream, that would be great.” She presented a sociological analysis to explain why she and many of her friends remained single in spite of their desire to marry—it was not their fault that they remained single. Rather, they were caught in a trap caused by society’s production of large numbers of accomplished single women, a preference for hypergamy (women marrying men of a higher social class), and discrimination against women’s age and education in marriage markets. She also adopted an ethical argument that contrasted her view of marriage with the views of other women of her generation born in the 1970s and those born in the 1980s. She said: “In Shanghai among the seventies generation, among my peers, many are divorced. Those in the ‘eighties generation’ (born in the 1980s) marry early and divorce early. These people don’t have a strong sense of responsibility. If it doesn’t go well, they want to divorce immediately.” She and her single friends, she says, take marriage seriously—as a lifetime commitment—and do not enter marriage so easily. Single women I knew in Shanghai were finding ways to live rich and meaningful lives.6 Many were interested in self-development and self-improvement in ways that echoed state discourses that encourage citizens to reach their full potential. Their stories also included discussion of self-reflection and improvement; some had read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love (2010) and watched the HBO TV series Sex in the City, popular genres that emphasize single women’s learning and self-development through experiences and relationships. Their stories, such as the one told by Karen, involved becoming a “better woman” through experiences including failed romantic relationships. Unlike Western narratives of self-development explored by sociologists such as Anthony Giddens (1991, 1992), however, many single women’s stories of self-development in Shanghai did not valorize self-development for its own sake. Rather, their stories of self-development were linked to the development of selves who were better able to contribute to family, community, nation, and the world. Marion’s travels to first-world countries led her to decide to commit to caring for the impoverished children in China. Karen explained that she was a better daughter due to her experiences of failed relationships; she learned how to take care of her family members and earn their appreciation. Penny’s travels to India led her to embrace Buddhism and discover her life calling to

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protect the world’s wildlife. It may be that their re-commitment to serving others in their families, communities, and the world may be a way to rationalize their “failure” to meet social expectations to marry. But I found genuine passion in their optimism that they could participate in remaking China and the world for the better.

Hong Kong: Finding Space for Personal Happiness Hong Kong women I knew also dreamed of having families and careers but their dreams were more modest and tentative than those of women I met in Shanghai. Hong Kong society had slower economic growth, as well as extremely high property prices that determined wealth and fortune in the city. No matter how hard one worked or succeeded in one’s career, one might never own property and thus would be relegated to a modest life. In the second half of the 2010s, many young adults became extremely pessimistic about Hong Kong’s future, due to social movements that resulted in the outbreak of violent clashes between protesters and police in the streets and subsequent political instability. Hong Kong women I knew did not dream of individual success or of changing the world, but of personal happiness embedded in the well-being of their natal and extended families. Very few women in Hong Kong said that their dream was to marry and have children. This contrasted with Shanghai and Tokyo, where the marriageand-family dream was commonly mentioned. In Hong Kong, one woman who held such a dream was 32-year-old Eliza, who said that her Christian background taught her that she should marry and have children. Eliza had become a Christian as a teenager during a time when she felt she could not obtain support and direction from her parents.7 She wanted to create a warm family life that she felt she had missed when she was a child. She was unusual in that she was the only Hong Kong woman I met who admitted that she was trying online dating, and she had attempted a few dates with men she met in this way. Few women in Hong Kong had approached dating and marriage with such seriousness. Most said casually that they hoped that one day they would meet someone and would marry. “I’d like to pursue my career. If I am fortunate, I will get married around 30. I won’t have kids right away. I shouldn’t be too old, maybe at 32 or 33. So in ten years’ time I hope to have a family,” said a 23-year-old university graduate. Some women said that they found meaning and pleasure in work. Thirtynine-year-old Lisa, who had spent most of her career working for Japanese companies, explained, “In the past, work was my number one priority. I wanted to

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protect the team. I didn’t feel that I needed to rely on a man because I relied on work, and work brought me satisfaction.” More often, however, women said that their joys in life came from leisure activities. This orientation was expressed not as self-indulgence but as taking advantage of opportunities to expand one’s world view and obtain experiences that had not been available to their mothers or married sisters and friends. Iris, who did not intend to marry, said that she enjoyed pursuing her own interests: “I like being alone. Every couple of weeks, I like to have a Sunday all to myself. I will go to a concert or see a movie. It gives me room to reflect, and just enjoy quiet time alone. I travel by myself quite often. I like to go hiking. I enjoy walking a lot. I enjoy art and culture. I go to seminars and talks, cultural events, and music festivals. Sometimes I will plan a trip around attending an exhibition or festival.” Wing Yee, who left school early to work in factories to support her family, now spent her free time reading. “There are so many things that I want to learn and there isn’t enough time for them all. I’m interested in computers and studying other things in courses. After work I go home, have dinner, read newspapers, and after reading newspapers, I read books.” She said that once she stayed home for ten days reading. Mei Kwan, who also left school as a teenager to work in factories, marveled at how she had been able to see the world: I travelled in China by myself for two months! My friends and I decided to go together because we had just finished school and it was really cheap. At first I thought that I would go to Europe but my teacher told me that it was important for me to go to China and see how people live, what their daily life is like, and to know about their culture. After a month, some of my friends returned to Hong Kong, but I stayed and travelled by myself for another month. I love travelling because it allows me to see other places, and to see what’s different about these places.

Single women in my study were sensitive to media criticism of single women as hedonists and “princesses”—such as in the “Hong Kong woman” (gong neuih) rhetoric8—and argued that they wished to enjoy simple pleasures. Mei Kwan told me, “I’m not a ‘single aristocrat’ who lives a privileged lifestyle. I live simply and get by, but I’m happy and satisfied with my life.” Many Hong Kong women mentioned that they were grateful for the ability to have time to read, travel, or spend as they saw fit. Some women tied their leisure to a desire to contribute to their families. Siu Lan had opportunities to travel to China and around the world. When her

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older sister divorced and encountered financial problems, Siu Lan paid for her sister’s children to study English in Australia over the summer. She explained, “I discovered that this world is very big; I’ve seen it for myself after travelling and seeing different places. Because I had this experience, I wanted to give my nephews the same chance. I prefer to let them go and see for themselves rather than spending money on myself.” Jesook Song studied young single women in South Korea who had participated in the antimilitary state movements in the 1980s and later became involved in women’s and nongovernment organizations. The women in my study share a common feature with those in Song’s study—the struggle to acquire quality housing. Women in Song’s study hoped to live alone in rental apartments as a way to achieve an enjoyable lifestyle (2014, 70). Most single women that I met in Hong Kong also would have preferred to live on their own. Although a few professional women rented apartments and a handful had purchased places together with family members in the early 2000s, for many women I knew, even renting a place of their own, much less buying, was financially beyond reach.9 Instead, women I knew in Hong Kong commonly lived with family members, and saved and economized so that they could enjoy leisure activities. Mei Kwan said: “My salary is not high and if I bought a place I’d have to stop doing what I like such as travelling. I don’t have high demands in my life, but if I can’t do the things I like, then what’s the point of buying a flat? Also, if I bought a flat, there would be no one to live in it when I die! I have a place to live now and that’s good enough.” Single women I knew in Hong Kong who were resigned to not having a place of their own told me instead of how they managed to find spaces for themselves in daily life. As we have seen, Wing Yee spent long hours reading with a flashlight under the bedcovers to avoid bothering her family members who slept in the same room. Ming treasured the moments when her brother and his family visited in-laws in mainland China and she had the apartment to herself. Mei Kwan, who lived with her mother and brother’s family, said that when she wanted time by herself, rather than returning home directly from work, she would make her way home slowly, lingering in shops and walking the streets. In Hong Kong, single women I knew emphasized that they had developed a clear understanding of themselves and of the realities of marriage. This knowledge led them to see singlehood as a reasonable and satisfying life path. Joni explained that she was happily single because she understood that she was not suitable for marriage. “I understand how difficult it is to live together with other people. If I got married, I would have to adjust myself. I would have to

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compromise and do things that I don’t like. It would be difficult. It would not be fair to ask my spouse to change himself. So it’s better to stay single,” she said. Hong Kong single women I met referred to this understanding of self and society when explaining why they did not want children. Ruth was in her early forties and had no intention of having children. In another publication, I introduced Ruth’s words as follows: “Basically I like children but I don’t feel that I need them. You have to spend a lot of time to raise children and education today is very important. There are many things that you need to teach them and it is a great responsibility. If you marry and have children you have to change your life” (Nakano 2016a, 166). Wing Yee, born in the late 1950s, said: I like to play with children but I’m not interested in raising them. It’s frightening and too great a responsibility. In the past you just had to feed them but now you have to take care of so many things. When I see others with children I feel that it’s really a burden and a difficult thing. It’s very difficult to teach children nowadays. People I know who have children feel regret. I’m selfish and I don’t want to take that responsibility. In past generations, children would stay with their parents [in their old age] but in the current generation, [adult] children won’t do this. So if after all that trouble they won’t even stay with you [when you get old], what’s the point?

Of single women in the three cities under study, those I knew in Hong Kong were the most reluctant to have children. Like Wing Yee, many had well-considered arguments explaining why they did not want children. Younger women in Hong Kong were also cautious about children. Many wanted children but felt that raising them would require certain conditions to be in place—a husband, money, and housing. In rejecting children, however, single women were not rejecting the need to sacrifice and contribute to their families, which they all had done: many had spent time caring for nieces and nephews and were in the midst of caring for elderly parents. Rather, they were saying that the price of having their own children was too high and the related responsibilities were too heavy given the sacrifices for their family that they had already made. Iris, born in the 1970s, had taken the idea that one should develop one’s own life strategy based on self-understanding further than any woman in the study.10 She had a clear life mission. “My purpose is to pursue happiness while making a contribution to society. When I worked in PR, I thought I could help to close the gap between business and society. In higher education, I try to help students and their families to live more meaningful lives,” she said. She

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developed her life purpose through talking with a life coach in her early twenties. When she told him that her purpose was to pursue happiness, he asked her whether there was something she would like to give back to the world. She then added the second part of her life motto, which was to make others happy. Her conviction about her life purpose—she saw herself as “generally programmed to be single”—allowed her to reject her mother’s attempts to encourage her to marry. When her mother showed her pictures of her friends’ grandchildren—attempting to induce Iris to feel responsible for producing children as well—Iris said: “Good for them! If you want grandchildren— fine—but they won’t come from me!” She told me that she also combatted assumptions in everyday language about single women. When older people told her, “You just haven’t met the right person yet,” she responded, “Maybe I just love myself too much!” And when people asked in Cantonese “Are you married (yet)?” (neih git jo fan meih), which suggested that the expected action of marriage was not yet completed, she did not give the typical answer—“not yet” (ngoh meih git fan). Instead, she responded: “I am not married/will not marry” (ngoh mouh git fan). Women in their forties and fifties worried about employment and housing. Forty-five-year-old Sue worked as a clerk in a government office. She wished to quit because it required that she carry heavy files from place to place but she stayed because she was afraid that she would not be able to find another position. In her youth she had lived with her parents and eight siblings but one by one they married and moved away. After her father passed away she lived with her mother, but a year and a half ago her mother had also passed away. Sue could have asked to live with one of her brothers but thought it would be more responsible to rent her own apartment. Although self-sufficient at the moment, she found her life lonely and her future uncertain. In Shanghai, the stigma and awkwardness of singlehood for women are upfront and obvious. In Hong Kong, there is little outright criticism of single women. Nonetheless, Iris pointed out that people judged women based on whether they had a partner: “Women who don’t get married are seen as leftovers. It has affected single women. They feel worthless. It sends a very bad message to single women.” She gave the example that in the celebrity gossip magazines and on TV, “when people talk about a mature woman, the first question they ask is whether she can get out of the situation [of singlehood] rather than whether they are enjoying who they are.” She added, “There are many women like me who are thrilled to be single!”

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Single women I knew in Hong Kong emphasized the importance of selfreliance and autonomy and the dignity and self-respect gained from such a life. Their autonomy allowed enjoyment of leisure activities and this enjoyment was also a kind of identity: they were individuals who had experienced the world. Some women emphasized the importance of self-knowledge, which allowed them to decide whether or not marriage and having children was appropriate for themselves, and they noted the wisdom of not rushing to follow what others were doing but to think for oneself. Single women I met in Hong Kong emphasized happiness and meaning in the context of their contributions to their extended families and used discourses of filial piety to assert their value. A few older single women in Hong Kong used the word “selfish” ( jih si) to describe themselves. At first I found this to be curious because I knew them to be anything but selfish. They had sacrificed their own educations and dreams and had spent decades of their lives working for others; they had paid for their siblings’ educations, cooked meals for the family, and raised their siblings, nieces, and nephews. Now many were taking care of their parents. By stating that they were “too selfish” to marry, they were saying that they had done more than enough service for others, and further service to a husband and children was not at all appealing. They were ready to spend time on themselves.

Tokyo: Hoping to Preserve My Lifestyle Most single women I knew in Tokyo had relatively modest dreams. Some hoped to marry and have a family. Many others merely hoped to continue to live their current lifestyle for as long as possible. Women’s relatively low levels of expectations for themselves and their futures in Tokyo may be a product of the changes in the Japanese economy in their lifetimes. Japan’s economic growth period ended abruptly in the early 1990s with the end of the “bubble economy.” Most women in this study were young adults during the 1990s and 2000s, two decades characterized by persistent economic stagnation. They had witnessed Japan’s painful economic restructuring: a time of corporate layoffs, shrinking budgets, more work for less pay, and the reduction of full-time positions for women.11 Many women I knew thought that they would find ultimate meaning and satisfaction in life by marrying and raising a family, but they somehow were not able to make the transition to marriage.12 Sana, 34, had been living with her mother after her father passed away two years before. She wished to marry and start a family, but did not have a partner and was uncertain about

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the future: “Right now there isn’t anything that I really want to do. If there was something, then maybe I would go out and start trying to do it. But since there isn’t, it doesn’t seem necessary to suddenly leave my mother. I think my mother wants me to marry but she also doesn’t want me to move out.” Sana had a boyfriend but they broke up when the relationship did not seem to be leading to marriage. She said: I’ve had love affairs (renai) before. The most recent one went on for several years. We didn’t see each other frequently because he worked at a research institute in Osaka. I thought that it would be OK to marry but I heard from friends that he didn’t want to get married yet; it was something about him not having confidence to marry. At least that’s what he was telling friends, who then told me. We broke up I guess because I got tired of the ambiguity of not knowing where our relationship was heading. But we’re still friends! We send email and he calls every once in a while. Recently he has been suggesting that he wants to get back together. But I’m not sure. . . . I think he wants to marry now. But why is it that in the past he said he didn’t have confidence? Does he think that he has confidence now? What does confidence mean?

Fifty-four-year-old travel agent Maki never felt that she absolutely needed to marry, but she did hope that she would at some point meet a lifetime partner and they would marry and have children together. That just never happened. She said: I would like a partner (p ton ). If I can’t find someone, I’ll just keep on going on like this. There are few chances to meet people. I’m also not forcing myself to go out and meet people, and I’m busy with work. Maybe work is an excuse. When I was young, I went to dating events (g kon) and those kinds of gatherings,13 and I thought that rather than rushing, I’d wait until I find a good person, but I haven’t yet. When I was younger my expectations were too high. I didn’t go to university myself but I wanted the “three highs:” high educational level, high salary, and height.14 When I was in my twenties I was dating someone and we talked about it [marriage]. But I just couldn’t make that final decision to do it. In the end I decided not to marry that person. I was 28 and I just wasn’t sure whether he was the right person. Now I think that at 28 you don’t really know yourself well enough to make that kind of decision.

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Also I was selfish then and had many expectations. But at about 35 you start to know. As you get older, you start to lose chances to meet people. Most of the men I know now are married. I don’t make good choices in regard to men. In my life I’ve had two “big cries.” I’ve had two experiences in which the man I was dating suddenly married someone else because the other woman got pregnant (dekichatta kekkon). Timing is critical. If the timing was a little different, things might have worked out quite differently.

Both Sana and Maki wanted to have a partner, but they were also not interested in making an effort to find a partner through commercial services or blind dates. Maki rejected friends’ and relatives’ invitations to set her up with single men. She believed that if she were meant to have a partner, she would meet someone naturally. Sana and Maki both said that they found meaning in the lives that they were leading: Sana seemed content living with and helping her mother. Maki said that she was satisfied with her life and, as a travel agent, she travelled frequently around Japan and around the world. Maki gained satisfaction from her work: “I feel happy when people come back from a trip and say, ‘It was good’ or ‘We could easily find the hotel.’ If there’s a mistake in the arrangements, they need to spend extra money to resolve the problem and so on. It’s terrible and stressful. But now I can answer any and all questions. In the past, when I was young, I’d have to say, ‘Please wait’ and I’d have to ask someone else.” Maki did not see herself as a career woman but she had obtained experience over the years and was appreciated by her clients. Her work was a source of satisfaction in her life although it was not the life she had imagined for herself. Some women said that they wanted to marry but their actions and words suggested that they were happily single. Miyuki, 34, dreamed of becoming a board member of the nonprofit international organization at the top of her profession. She worked in a new and growing area of corporate “coaching” and wanted to share Japanese-style coaching with the world. Miyuki said that she would like to find a partner and marry but admitted that she was not making an effort to find someone: “Sometimes I wonder if something is wrong with me. Maybe I’m too satisfied with my life. If I were dissatisfied, I would make changes. I want to marry, but to be honest, I’m not sure if that is because I really want to marry or if I feel pressured to marry. I do think that life would be more fun if I had a partner.” Miyuki was one of the few women I met in Tokyo who had ambitions in her career. She was open to marriage but was

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happy with the overall quality of her life, including her work. Her colleague 56-year-old Gen held a similar view, stating that she wanted to continue a life that involved work, friends, travel, good food and wine, and hopefully a partner with whom she could share her life. A few women wanted to find companionship in a partner but were not concerned about marriage. Forty-four-year-old Rika said the following about marriage and romance: “I wouldn’t mind marrying but I don’t need to marry. I never felt that I had to marry. I guess because my father was such a negative example. But I do want to have a partner. I’d like to have someone that I can tell my problems to, someone that I can be close with.” Some women I met found meaning in life from hobbies and personal interests. Teruko, introduced in chapter 2, was committed to staying single because it allowed her to continue to make trips to Hong Kong and other Asian countries three to four times a year. Other women travelled frequently to pursue their hobbies; Yasue went to Europe to watch downhill racing events, and Hikari travelled to North America to attend pop concerts and later became interested in Formula One car racing. My sense is that most women I met in Tokyo wanted to marry and would have liked to have a life that included their hobbies, a romantic partner, and marriage. But they felt that they were not able to achieve such a life. In some sense, in Tokyo, single women’s moral obligation is to be true to themselves ( jibun rashisa)—they should also be financially independent, not rely on money from others, and not burden others in their own old age. They echo statements popularized by former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi— while advocating structural reform to spark economic growth—celebrating independence ( jiritsu), self-responsibility ( jiko sekinin), and strong individuals (tsuyoi kojin) (Alexy 2020, 12). Japanese politicians occasionally argue that single women who have not given birth are burdens on the society— Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politician Kanji Kato made such a statement at an LDP meeting on May 10, 2018. Kato stated, “I always tell brides and grooms at wedding parties that I would like them to have three or more children. . . . We need three or more children from those people to make up for couples who cannot bear a child no matter what they do” (Teramoto 2018). The national daily Asahi Shimbun reported that he “implied that it would be unfair if women with no children were cared for at nursing homes funded by other people’s taxes” (Teramoto 2018). When asked by reporters about the remark, Kato was unapologetic, responding, “Improving the birthrate is the most important issue facing our nation. That is all” (Teramoto 2018).15 Single

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women I met said that they paid no attention to politicians but they rejected the idea raised by conservative politicians that they were burdens on others. When I asked what was most satisfying about her life, Rika said, “I like that I’m working and supporting myself. I’m more worried about what to do when my parents get old. Fortunately, so far they’ve been healthy but if my mother gets sick, then I have to care for her and for my father. That would be a double burden, I don’t know how I’d ever manage.” Self-employed Seiko, 54, said: “I’m happy now but money is a problem. I would like to find work that I do myself, not just work that I do because I am asked. In the future I want to be able to continue to support myself. Before I thought that I would retire at 60, but now 60 is just around the corner and I’m not ready or able to retire, so I guess I’ll work until I’m about 65 if I can.” Conversations with women over 45 almost invariably turned to money and their ability to survive financially into old age. Of a sample of thirty-five, only two women in Tokyo had purchased condominiums. Several expected to inherit their parents’ homes but were also expected to provide elder care. Maki reflected on her future: “I heard that after 55, our pay will decline. Our retirement is at 60. It’s possible to get an extension, but I plan to work hard so that I retire at 60. I heard that we can receive the pension from age 65. So I’m trying to be sure that I can live on a budget of less than US$1,350 per month.” Statements by politicians such as Kanji Kato overlook the fact that single women earn less than men and are discriminated against in marriage and employment markets. They also overlook the reality that single women want to marry but find it difficult to do so for a variety of reasons including long hours and demanding jobs, unwilling partners or unavailability of partners, and women’s responsibilities to their natal families as future caretakers of their parents. The stigma against single women in Tokyo is not as overt as that in Shanghai. Most people in Tokyo would agree that it is not acceptable to prod colleagues or friends into marrying. Tokyoites see themselves as living in a liberal city in which people’s lifestyle choices are respected. There are large numbers of single women in Tokyo—they are in every office, family, and friendship group. Yet single women who have passed “marriage deadlines” remain a minority in their society and subject to speculation that they have a problem, usually stated as having overly high expectations or being inflexible. Single women I interviewed said that they did not pay attention to negative depictions of single women in the media and politics. That being said, their stories show that many are sensitive to criticisms of single women as burdening

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others, and the implication that their lives are less meaningful and valuable than those of married women. More so than in the other two cities, single women in Tokyo seemed to struggle to articulate their goals and what made their life meaningful. They discussed failures in romantic relationships as bad luck rather than learning experiences. I suspect that the economic recession and its unequal impact on women in Japan have dampened many women’s hopes, ambitions, and expectations. As mentioned, the most obvious impact of the economic recession on women has been the decline in full-time positions for women and an increase of women working in lower-paid, part-time work. The extended recession also brought longer working hours, demanding working conditions, and declining employment security. A few women in my study were able to benefit from new industries and corporate cultures that provided opportunities to female employees (such as cultures that encouraged women to return to work with reduced hours after maternity leave rather than resign at childbirth), but these opportunities were available to limited numbers of young, highly educated women. As a result, few Tokyo women I knew were optimistic about careers or thought that they could contribute to their society or to the world. Tokyo women in my study are members of a generation for whom alternatives to the housewife role for women have yet to be clearly identified. In their childhood or young adulthood (depending on their age)—that is, in the 1980s and 1990s—everyone was expected to marry and women were expected to find meaning in the housewife role even as they continued to work parttime. By the 2000s, women increasingly spoke of marriage as optional, but there was no consensus on how single women should find meaning in their lives. Women I knew in Shanghai drew upon discourses of national optimism in which every Chinese citizen might find a way to contribute to the nation. Women who participated in my study in Hong Kong referred to their contributions to their natal and extended families. Many women in Tokyo continued to refer to the housewife role as their ideal way of finding meaning in life even as they entered middle age without partners or prospects for marriage. In Tokyo, one commonly mentioned source of pleasure was leisure and consumerism—not so much buying luxury goods, which single women are often accused of—but through travel. Some women combined travel with fandom and journeyed overseas to attend related concerts, exhibitions, and events. For many single women I met in Tokyo, opportunities to travel overseas were almost irresistibly appealing. Among the single women interviewed by Song in South Korea, the reasons for the desire for travel included frustration

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with their housing situation, the confining expectations for marriage, women’s curiosity, or all three (2014, 70). Similar reasons applied to the women I met in Tokyo. Most women in my study worked in jobs that did not have great promise for advancement and they lived in small apartments or with their parents. Travel and living overseas allowed some of them to live in their own space for the first time and provided freedom from intrusive expectations about their sexual or relationship status.16 Women I knew said that overseas experience could also be used to equip oneself for the future such as through learning languages or merely learning to survive on one’s own. Teruko explained: “My parents are getting old and I am an only child so I think about the fact that when they die I’m going to be completely alone. I think I can get used to living alone. I’ve done it before in Hong Kong.”

Single Women and Leisure in Capitalist Economies: Play Hard but Not Too Hard Single women in the three cities are criticized for engaging in leisure activities and described as materialistic, spending-obsessed “princesses” who neglect their responsibilities to marry and care for a family. Japanese popular phrases such as “single aristocracy” (dokushin kizoku) and “parasite singles” (parasaito shinguru) criticize single women’s use of money on themselves. The phrase commonly used to denigrate Hong Kong women in popular media, “gong neuih” (Hong Kong woman), criticizes Hong Kong women for materialism and excessive, selfish spending. At the same time, single women’s leisure and consumption are necessary for their societies’ continued economic growth. Single women are expected to consume but within limits, or “play hard but not too hard.” Their situation reveals contradictions in the capitalist economies of their societies that at once require women’s domestic labor, discriminate against women in the labor force, and require women’s consumer expenditure for continued economic growth. Just as women are expected to become educated and obtain employment yet not succeed to the extent that it interrupts their ability to care for families, single women are also expected to participate in leisure but not to the extent that it compromises their sexual and personal morality and commitment to domestic responsibilities. The single women interviewed by Song in South Korea were critical of capitalism and consumerism, yet were also persuaded to enjoy and improve their personal lives (2014, 4).17 Song found that the single women in her study adopted the framework of consumerism in neoliberal capitalism to shape their identities (2014, 4). I also found that the women in the three cities of my study

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sought to improve their lives through the pleasures of capitalist consumption. In all three cities, a substantial number of single women sought out pleasure as a legitimate framework for making decisions. But single women I knew also were careful to acknowledge the limits of consumerism and reinsert themselves into domestic service frameworks. Many women I knew told me that they were measured and balanced in their pursuit of pleasurable activities and were also responsible in that they wanted to marry. Some said that they used leisure for purposes such as developing themselves, preparing for the future, or creating better relationships with their family members. In this way, many single women I met in the three cities tried to find a way to negotiate life paths that balanced leisure with conformity to conservative social expectations. This balancing occurs in the West as well, where young women are expected to regulate themselves—as we have seen in the previously discussed Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding 2001) model of continuous self-monitoring and self-improvement (McRobbie 2004, 2009). But unlike Bridget Jones, some women in my study viewed leisure as a marker of the privilege and luck of being born in their generation. Their mothers had not known such opportunities to travel, learn, and consume, and their married sisters would face criticism if they participated in such consumption. Leisure is a benefit of singlehood to be savored and treasured.

National Dreams I was surprised that single women in the three cities had noticeably different ways of talking about their dreams. In Shanghai, I found optimism and repeated mention of how women wanted to contribute to their nation and the world. In Hong Kong and Tokyo, women were more modest in their ambitions and more likely to talk about continuing to enjoy the pleasures that enriched their lives. The economies of the three societies seem clearly relevant in shaping women’s perspectives. The growing economy of Shanghai gave single women confidence to aim high, while the more developed economies of Hong Kong and Tokyo, with their lower growth rates, dampened women’s expectations. Nationally circulating ideas and discourses also shaped the ways in which women expressed their hopes and dreams. In Shanghai, single women’s statements echoed post-Mao national discourses that encourage young heterosexual women to embody a cosmopolitanism that transcends locality and to take their place in the world through consumerism (Rofel 2007, 111).18 In Hong

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Kong, women referred to contributions that they made to their families and of the importance of developing an autonomous and cosmopolitan self, a key tenet of postwar Hong Kong identity. In Tokyo, women often spoke of their desire to have children, in line with national concerns about declining fertility and the cult of motherhood. But they also spoke about self-reliance, emphasizing that they could support themselves and did not need to rely on other people; they adopted Liberal Democratic Party politicians’ discourses of self-responsibility to explain their unconventional life paths. In other words, women used the dominant national narratives in their societies to frame and legitimize their life goals. Although they were not embracing marriage and motherhood, as encouraged by their societies, many single women I knew used the dominant cultural scripts in their societies about progress and the national future to explain their contributions to society and assert their moral worth. It is ironic that single women use national discourses to explain their dreams. Nationally circulating, state-sponsored discourses about ideal citizens—the cosmopolitan consumer in China, the autonomous self in Hong Kong, and the self-reliant individual in Japan—are not intended by their governments to be used by single women to explain the legitimacy of their choices. Single women found a place for themselves in national agendas but not in the ways imagined by the policy makers in their societies.

Happiness for Single Women Bella DePaulo uses the term “singlism” to describe the ways in which single people are marginalized and stigmatized in the United States (2006, 10). DePaulo writes that the corollary to singlism is “matrimania,” or the glorification of marriage and coupling. Matrimania, she states, is the idea that marriage is the only path to deep and meaningful well-being and happiness (2006, 13). In the societies in this study as well, matrimania is present in the form of glorification of marriage as a goal in life for women. DePaulo’s definition of marriage, however, differs in important ways from the definitions I found in the societies in this study. Among the women I met, the attraction of marriage is not just that it provides romantic partnership with another person under marriage laws. Rather, marriage is prized for the social status it brings women, and for a marital lifestyle comprising a package of features that includes heterosexual partnership, the roles of wife and mother, and responsibility for caregiving of children, a husband, and possibly parents and other relatives. In other words, in the societies in this study, marriage is thought to bring happiness not

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only because it brings a stable romantic partner but because it leads women into domestic social roles to which women are supposedly best suited according to national narratives of progress and development. In reviewing my notes, I was surprised that many single women had told me that marriage and caring for a family was how they would like to find meaning in life. A substantial portion of the women I interviewed in the three cities thought that women’s happiness lay in marriage, and that they would like to similarly orient their lives toward marriage and caring for a family at some point in the future. Even those who had passed marriageable age and who seemed to be making no attempt to marry continued to state that they thought that ideally they would like to find meaning and happiness in marrying and caring for a family. Strong marriage orientation in their societies, invasive pressures to marry, and lack of alternative models of happiness for women may lead one to expect that single women are unhappy. Some surveys conducted in Japan show that married women report higher levels of happiness than unmarried women,19 and I have argued elsewhere that single women who strongly want to marry may be unhappy because by definition they have not achieved their life goals (2017, 62). In spite of these circumstances that might lead women to be unhappy, I found that to the contrary, most women, in reflecting on their lives, said that they were satisfied and some said that they were quite happy. Researchers who have interviewed single women in Western societies report similar findings.20 A few women I knew, especially in Shanghai, commented that they were happy even though society expected that they would be deeply unhappy. Some reflected that they should have married their boyfriends when they were young or should have found a boyfriend while they were still in school, as it became difficult to meet people later in life. Most, however, said that they were glad that they had not married in their twenties when pressures to marry were greatest, as marriage rushed into only for the sake of marriage would not have brought them happiness. Unmet pressures to marry create stress and thus probably decrease happiness. We have seen that pressures to marry are greatest in Shanghai. I found that most Shanghai women were anxious about marriage regardless of whether or not they wanted to marry. In Shanghai, however, perhaps because deciding to resist marriage deadlines required repeated defense of one’s singlehood in everyday conversation, women who remained single were clear in articulating their thinking about their lives. Many single women I met in Shanghai were themselves surprised and perplexed by their singlehood and some had

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discussed among themselves the sociological reasons—relating to hypergamy and women’s educational level—why they remained single, arguing that their singlehood was not their fault. “Women in Shanghai are excellent. . . . That’s why we can’t marry,” explained Marion. In Hong Kong, where pressures to marry are weak, single women did not need to think deeply about their lives as single women or constantly defend their lifestyle; they could continue to have a comfortable place in their families and in society without marrying. In Tokyo, women also did not see their singlehood as a form of resistance to social norms; rather, they saw singlehood as an unintended situation that arose as a result of not having happened to meet the right person at the right time. Single women in Hong Kong and Tokyo did not need to face a personal crisis in remaining single because singlehood was accepted as a somewhat less than ideal but nonetheless acceptable life path for women. I suspected that friendships would be key to single women’s levels of happiness. To a large degree, this was the case. Some single women in my study relied on strong friendship networks with other single women for support. I could easily find women to interview because single women introduced me to their single friends. Single women travelled with friends, had regular meals together, and created supportive networks for one another. Women who had migrated to the cities in which they lived needed to work harder to build friendship networks, but many of these migrants developed strong networks precisely because they were in the city without family and needed this support. I did not find, however, very many communities of single women. Rather, single women usually had a few good friends of various marital statuses. Single women also spoke of the fragility of friendships as they lost friends who married or moved away and whose interests and schedules changed. A few older women spoke of losing friends through illness and death. While friends were important, friendships are not valued in the societies under study compared to family relationships. Friendships have no legal standing and there is little understanding or support of same-sex friends renting or purchasing housing together. As same-sex marriage advocates point out, nonmarried people have no rights in caring for significant others with whom they have no legal relationship. Friendships, then, provided single women with support to an important but limited degree, with many single women reporting a loss of friends over time. A small number of women in my study mentioned the need for sexual intimacy and they talked about various ways of fulfilling these needs including one-night stands and short-term partners. In Tokyo I interviewed Minori

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Kitahara, a well-known feminist and author who operates a sex toy shop and encourages women to take control of their own sexual pleasure.21 Most women, however, did not mention sex as an issue. Like Gordon, who interviewed women in the San Francisco Bay Area, Helsinki, and London (1994, 106), I found that single women I knew did not feel that they were missing sexual intimacy. Even when I asked directly about sex, women I knew responded with comments such as “I don’t think sexuality is so important for women.”22 Rather, single women developed their own strategies to obtain nonsexualized intimacy through various relationships and activities in their lives. Single women I knew generally did not question the veneration of marriage in their societies, but they rejected the negative stereotypes of single women in their own ways. Some single women I met offered unprompted defenses of their lives against the criticisms of single women. In Shanghai, some women told me how happy they were as single women, contradicting the narrative that single women must be miserable. Karen, in Shanghai, told her friend Luna and me, “If we are happy, we will make ourselves happy and our marriages happy. That’s why it doesn’t matter whether we are married.” Her friend, Luna, however, disagreed, stating: “Other people don’t believe that you can be happy. They try to help you. They can never understand. They will always think you are unhappy.” I suspected that Luna might be closer to the truth but could not deny that Karen seemed to have convinced her family. If more women think and speak like Karen, people’s views may well change.

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Conclusion Making the Best of Our Special Situation

S

ingle women I knew talked about unprecedented opportunities to obtain an education, find work, and enjoy leisure activities. Many mentioned that such opportunities were not available to their mothers and grandmothers, who had been expected to marry and care for families. This change in the lives of young women is not limited to the societies in this study but is occurring across the developing and developed world. What distinguishes the societies in this study from many other places is the speed of change. Over the span of one or two generations—a “compressed modernity” (Chang 2010a, 2010b, 2014)—these three societies have moved from nearly universal marriage and circumscribed opportunities for women to the current situation of complex choices and responsibilities. The rise of opportunities for women was driven by their societies’ rapid economic growth. Japan experienced accelerated growth in the 1960s, Hong Kong developed into a global financial center in the 1970s and 1980s, and China emerged as a first-tier economic power in the 1990s and 2000s, with Shanghai leading the way as the country’s wealthiest and most international city. Though these large-scale transitions to later marriage and increased opportunity for young women have been driven by capitalist urban development, I found that they are not globally uniform processes. The meanings of marriage and experiences of singlehood across societies differ considerably according to configurations of family, which are in turn shaped by government policies, economic trends, corporate cultures, housing markets, and the cultural and historical contexts of particular societies. The societies in this study should thus not be easily lumped together and labelled as representing 169

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an “Asian family pattern,” as singlehood is experienced very differently in the three cities, with an especially sharp contrast between Hong Kong and Shanghai: a contrast all the more surprising given the two societies’ shared Chinese cultural background. The differences among the three societies lay bare the importance of state policies, economic developments, and popular media in shaping single women’s lived experiences in contemporary societies. In Shanghai, birth control policies implemented from 1979 produced the generation of women and men who became adults after 2000 with few or no siblings. This generation is held responsible for marrying and producing children as well as caring for parents and grandparents. State policies have supported universal marriage and naturalized women’s roles as mothers and nurturers. At the same time, marriage has become difficult for urban women as the state has stepped back from matchmaking and as economic growth has led to increased educational and work opportunities for women, which conflict with expectations to marry on schedule. The rising cost of housing in urban areas and the domination of home ownership by men and their families further reinforce single women’s vulnerabilities as they face pressure to find spouses by marriage deadlines, not only to create new families but also to secure housing and financial security (Fincher 2014). The wealth of China’s cities has attracted single women from around the country who wish to live in the city and explore its opportunities, yet their futures remain insecure as they do not possess urban residency registration and its accompanying rights and benefits. In Hong Kong, government policies have been instrumental in creating the city’s marriage and caregiving regimes. The British colonial government’s selective intervention in the social life of Hong Kong people supported the continuity of patriarchal families (Lee 2003). The emergence of Hong Kong as a manufacturing center in the 1960s and 1970s led to the availability of factory work for daughters, allowing young women to remain in the workforce longer before marrying or to remain indefinitely single as they contributed to their siblings’ education and household coffers. Hong Kong’s development as a global financial services center since the 1980s has led to smaller families, and to better educational and employment opportunities for women. At the same time, growing social and economic integration with mainland China has created inequalities in marriage and employment markets, as Hong Kong men gained greater access to these mainland markets than Hong Kong women did. Since the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, China’s growing economic power brought wealthy mainland buyers

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into the Hong Kong housing market, and Hong Kong government policies supporting large business interests led to unaffordable housing prices for local people. This made marriage difficult for men, who have been expected to provide housing to their families upon marriage. I suspect that widespread public recognition of the difficulties encountered by many men who wanted to marry—rather than feminism or respect for individual choice—helped to create increased acceptability of singlehood for men, which then led to the acceptance of singlehood for women in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the aging of Hong Kong society without substantial government welfare support provides avenues for single women to continue to serve as valued caregivers in their natal and extended families. In Japan, the experience of single women was shaped by government and corporate policies and by economic growth. The monopoly of social and financial resources by the state and large corporations in the early postwar period led to the standardization of goals and lifestyles of the Japanese people; marriage was universally expected and almost everyone married. In the 1980s the age of first marriage continued to climb, but this did not make singlehood acceptable; studies show that during that decade women were still expected to marry on schedule (see Brinton 1992; Creighton 1996). Singlehood for women became increasingly acceptable in Tokyo in the 1990s. This is because, I believe, the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s led to corporate restructuring and the breakdown of structures that had helped previous postwar generations of men transition into stable work and marriage; men faced problems achieving levels of income that would allow entrance into marriage with its financial responsibilities, and women faced greater difficulties finding partners who could meet their financial and social expectations (see Yamada 1999). As in Hong Kong, I suspect, the acceptance of singlehood for women in Tokyo was triggered by the widespread social recognition of the serious obstacles that impeded men’s ability to marry rather than by any consideration of women’s wishes. In Hong Kong, men could not obtain the requisite marital housing. In Tokyo, men had difficulty obtaining the sufficient income and employment security that was seen as necessary for marriage. While I believe that the unaffordability of housing in Hong Kong and the decline of stable employment for men in Tokyo contributed to widespread acceptability of singlehood for men, and then for women, in those cities, we can see that the situation in Shanghai is considerably different. In Shanghai, housing is also extremely expensive. In contrast to Hong Kong, however, in Shanghai, small family size—due to birth control policies—has enabled many

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parents of sons to somehow assist their son in obtaining property. The growth of the economy in Shanghai—compared to the depressed economy in Japan— has meant that people are fairly confident that a young man of reasonable abilities will be able to support a family. In Shanghai, therefore, it seems likely that marriage will continue to be expected of women and men in the near term.

Singlehood in Advanced Capitalism Young single persons are ideal subjects in advanced capitalist societies. Single persons provide mobile, flexible labor in a constantly shifting competitive economy with unstable employment markets. Song writes the following of young unmarried women in South Korea: Young unmarried women who want to live by themselves and enjoy their lives without rushing to marry or ever marrying at all are the embodiment of a liberal person that eulogizes “enjoyment” as a life-governing principle. . . . This is the kind of life that becomes more and more an asset and a commodity within the neoliberal economy in the rubric of flexibility that serves to navigate unstable, unpredictable, and competitive job markets. . . . The ideal . . . is to be capable of maneuvering between a free lifestyle grounded in a private living space and the requirements of flexible labor, for which people must become equipped with self-management skills and financial techniques. (2014, 10–11)

This ideal described by Song is a caricature of a single person’s economic role in a capitalist system. Women I knew when conducting interviews for this study adopted some aspects of this ideal. Some women I met, especially in Tokyo, felt that they needed to constantly upgrade their qualifications to meet the demands of shifting employment markets. Many single women I knew were attracted by leisure activities and consumerism offered by capitalist markets. And although the majority of single women in the three societies lived with their parents or other family members, many of these women would have preferred to live alone if circumstances allowed.1 Single women in my study saw living in a place of one’s own as a sign of independence, pleasure, and individualized consumption. That said, many single women distanced themselves from a model of the unfettered individual because they saw themselves as accountable to their families—natal, extended, and possible future families of procreation. As many

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women I met hoped to marry, they did not view the lifestyle of independent singlehood as ideal. Some worried that too much strength as an individual— being too successful at education or work, too comfortable travelling and dining alone, or owning one’s own apartment—might endanger one’s chances of marrying by scaring away potential partners; it might signal to the outside world that one is not a marriageable type, or one might inadvertently make oneself into the kind of independent woman who no longer desired to marry. Single women and their families in the three societies walked a fine line between making appropriate efforts in education and employment, on one hand, and preparing for marriage and family service, on the other. Too much attention to family service would limit one’s ability to take advantage of opportunities for women to have careers and to enjoy leisure, travel, self-development, and self-exploration. Yet too much emphasis on worldly opportunities threatened a woman’s suitability for the sacrifices required in marriage and the needs of families to have adult daughters provide care services. Today, a properly modern woman in the three societies is one who skillfully maneuvers between these competing imperatives. Women and their families balance these competing expectations according to the needs of particular life stages. In their youth, girls and women are encouraged to pursue education and employment. But at a certain point they are expected to reduce this commitment and shift their focus to marriage and providing family care services. In Shanghai, the critical moment arrives in a woman’s mid to late twenties when they are expected to marry and insert themselves into the intergenerational family. In Hong Kong, women are expected to begin to repay their families from their salaries and provide care services to their parents from their early to mid-twenties. In Tokyo, single women are expected to marry by their mid-thirties and provide childcare for their children, and if they do not, many are expected to provide elder care for their parents when the need arises. In popular stereotypes such as “parasite singles” and “leftover women,” single women are represented as failing to negotiate a balance between opportunity and starting a family; they are seen to have taken advantage of opportunities while failing to take up family duties. I found the opposite to be the case; single women are skilled at this balancing act. They take initiative and find new ways to serve their families as aunts, daughters, nieces, and granddaughters. Single women I knew sometimes acted against the wishes of their families but more often single women and their families together sought to find the best possible way to allow young adult women to both explore the world and

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support their families. These findings challenge sociological theories that hold that singlehood arises because women are less tethered to families and traditional values than in the past.2 Most women I met had assumed that in the course of living their lives, they would meet a partner, fall in love, marry, and raise a family. For a variety of reasons, many of which were beyond their control, this did not happen. As Marie in Shanghai told me, “Society has created a special situation for us.” She referred to the situation in which women are provided opportunities in education and work but are not given paths to marriage. The reasons why women remain single beyond “marriageable age,” I believe, are not derived from women’s individual personalities. The only character trait that older single women share in common is that they did not possess a driving desire to marry; women with such a desire married on schedule. Rather, women remain single on an epic scale, in my view, due to the changes in the structures of their societies; changes that are occurring in nearly every society in the world. These changes include urbanization, smaller families, rising levels of education for women, and more opportunities for women to participate in the workforce. In the three societies in this study, additional factors include rigid views of family and gender roles, men’s disinclination to marry, high property prices and the expectation of property ownership upon marriage, discrimination against educated and older women in marriage markets, and the conflict between expectations that women succeed in education and work and at the same time be prepared to take primary responsibility for domestic care services.

Destiny: “If God Wants Me to Marry, He Will Give Me a Partner” Social scientists argue over whether single women have “agency,” or the ability to determine the course of their lives.3 I found that single women shaped their own lives, including the decision of when, whether, and whom to marry. They emphasized their ability to make the best of situations. Their stories were full of choice-making, growth, and action. Women told of rejecting inappropriate suitors and marriage proposals, and of making decisions to develop their education, careers, or life experiences. But these choices were made in the context of their relationships with others and through marriage, employment, and housing markets in which their disadvantaged position was not of their making.4 In Tokyo, women I knew told me that marriage is based on destiny (en in Japanese). They simply did not have fate or luck on their side, they said.

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Women in Hong Kong told me that marriage is a matter of destiny (yuanfen), so there’s no need to worry about it: “If God wants me to marry, he will give me a partner.” Others in Hong Kong and Shanghai said that “destiny” in Chinese refers to the opportunities that appear in our lives combined with what we do with those opportunities.5 This interpretation of destiny encapsulates how the experience of singlehood appears to many single women: as a series of opportunities considered one by one, and decisions made according to one’s situation at that time. In this process, remaining single indefinitely is rarely a decision that is made, but is rather the consequence of acting responsibly to the opportunities that present themselves. Observers have aptly described single women in these cities as “drifting into singlehood” (Ng and Ng 2004, 11; Yoshida 2017). Because they did not intend to remain single, many women I met saw themselves as living in a temporary state. Popular ways of talking about single women reinforce this view. The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (2016) in Japan asks a survey question about why women and men who want to marry are “stuck in singlehood” (dokushin ni todomatteiru riy ). Singlehood is “framed as a liminal, temporary state; a transitory stage on the way to couplehood and family life” (Lahad 2012, 183), writes Lahad in her discussion of Western, and particularly, Israeli popular culture. The belief that singlehood is an unwanted and temporary state contradicts the reality that vast numbers of women are remaining single for many decades, and many will be single their whole lives. Unlike mothers, housewives, and widows, single women do not meet in social associations or organize for political rights.6 The denial of the reality that many women spend decades single has serious negative financial implications. Single women may be discouraged from preparing for the possibility of lifetime singlehood. Many are not saving nearly enough to provide for their futures, and most have not purchased property. Families generally do not provide for their daughters’ financial futures, including housing provision, as they assume that daughters’ housing and financial security will be provided for by a husband. Instead, financial resources and property are prepared for sons, and families sometimes actively move resources from daughters to sons. Single women are often losers in processes in which families prepare resources for their children’s adult lives. Though they had not fulfilled society’s expectations that they marry, I found that most single women were satisfied with their lives. Most had no regrets and felt that they had wisely given up on marriage opportunities that had not suited them. Most are well integrated into friendships, family, workplaces, and community. This is not specific to women in East Asia; women

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around the world are finding ways to live their lives meaningfully as singles. They are creating relationships of intimacy and support, earning their own living, and finding meaning through friendships, family relationships, and self-development (see DePaulo 2006; Gaetano 2010; Gordon 1994). In the United States, writes DePaulo (2006), single women are seen as missing the most intimate form of love and closeness—romantic love in marriage—and thus as incomplete. In the societies in this study, women I met felt that romantic love was pleasurable and exciting, but was not necessary for happiness. Women I knew did not say that they were missing romantic love or that they were incomplete without a male partner. Meaningful relationships with family and friends were far more important to most women I met. That being said, as many other studies mention, single women are made vulnerable by public discourses that label, shame, and blame them (Fincher 2014; Song 2014; To 2015; Yoshida 2017) for not fulfilling their moral duty to marry and care for a family, and thus for not being fully mature and adult. Although women told me that they did not pay attention to the moral blaming and stereotyping of single women, they explained their lives in moral terms. In each of the cities, women offered rebuttals to the stereotypes of single women as leftover, undesirable, and selfish. In Shanghai, where singlehood is often seen as an affront to family values, women were adept at addressing their parents’ concerns and in demonstrating their commitment to their families. In Hong Kong and Tokyo, labeling was less intense but single women could not entirely escape negative views. Single women I knew in these cities emphasized their self-discipline, contributions to families, respect of marriage and family, and self-understanding. A number of women in Hong Kong told me, “I’m selfish!” But they went on to show that they were highly committed to their families. Single women in Tokyo asserted that they were living a life that was true to themselves ( jibun rashii), based on self-knowledge and achieved without comparing oneself to others. Single women in the cities under study are targeted by the media and sometimes by their governments, not for the actual ways they live their lives, but for the symbolic threat they pose to the gendered division of labor in their societies.7

Promises and Limitations of Families in East Asia’s Cities The gendered model of family in the three societies simultaneously assigns married women the responsibility for family care services and undervalues the family service contributions and potential for contribution of others such as single women and married and single men. Yet a close look at the lives of single

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women in the three societies reveals that families are finding ways of incorporating single women into family care systems. Moreover, the distinct ways that single women and their families in the three cities have addressed the competing expectations placed on women demonstrates what I believe single women and their families already know: that the main issue is not marriage but the provision of care services. In recent years, a range of commercial care options have become available through the growth of consumer markets and because of state policy changes. The family’s role has shifted from directly providing resources and nursing to organizing care and supplying emotional support. In Shanghai, middle-class families hire domestic workers, and a range of commercial services are becoming available for elder care.8 With the growing availability of commercial care services, Wang and Hsueh (2000) argue that in urban China, family care relations may be increasingly characterized by psychological interdependency rather than material reciprocity. In the cities in this study, single women, as family caregivers, may be the psychological center and organizer of care for middle-class families. The introduction of commercial care services, however, does not eradicate the demands placed on women to take responsibility for family members’ welfare. As we have seen in Hong Kong, the availability of commercial care services and domestic workers results in a bifurcated class structure in which middle-class women are freed to work while retaining responsibility for family affairs, and working-class women, unable to afford such services, are forced out of the labor force as they must perform the domestic work themselves. Single women’s changing roles in family care arise from longer coresidence and interdependence with parents. In Japan in 2016, for example, approximately 45 percent of unmarried adults aged 20 to 34 lived with their parents (Nishi 2017, 10).9 In this respect, the experience of singlehood in these societies differs from that in many Western societies. In North America, due to an emphasis on independence and cheaper housing prices, adult children are much less likely to live with their parents into adulthood. Although the Japanese government sees extended youth coresidency as a problem, we can also see that the precarious employment market for young people has resulted in closer relationships between generations with benefits and disadvantages that are not yet fully understood. The blaming of single women by governments and in popular culture takes attention away from the more important issue of how to organize care systems in a fair and equitable way. The blaming discourses prevent discussion

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of the ways to relax insistence on gender-based care, recognize care services already provided by men and single women, and seriously consider alternatives to the current gender-based care model. Single women are blamed for declining fertility, but such blaming—and even the manipulative profertility government policies in places such as Singapore—has not reversed declining marriage and birthrates (Teo 2010, 2013). In an age of low fertility, governments may consider welcoming births outside of marriage, especially if they are already occurring. Reproductive technologies are increasingly available, but they are not legally or readily available for single women in the cities under study. Living arrangements that foster alternative family forms are limited by the policies of governments and institutions. The university that employs me, for example, does not allow single persons to live with persons who are not their legal—and thus necessarily heterosexual—spouses and still receive housing allowance. In the past ten years, the movement toward legalizing same-sex marriage has gained ground in many Western societies, but little movement toward legalization has occurred in the societies under study.10 I started out by asking what could be learned from an ethnographic comparison of single women’s lived experience across three great East Asian cities. I found that single women are making the best of their lives in the context of rigid family systems. These systems developed during their societies’ rapid economic growth period but have not changed greatly over time in terms of their expectations of women. Under the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, heterosexual reproduction and the gendered division of labor continued to be seen as the only legitimate way of organizing fertility, childcare, education, elder care, and housing. As the financial and social costs of these family services have risen dramatically in a short period, it is not surprising that families are experiencing considerable stress leading to divorce, low fertility, and later marriage (see Chang 2010a, 2010b). Government determination to control reproduction in these societies has human costs. Middle-class heterosexual reproduction is privileged while all other forms of reproduction such as births by migrants and births outside of marriage are prevented, stigmatized, and marginalized. As there is no cultural or legal alternative to relationships of intimacy, caring, and nurturing such as are expected in heterosexual marriage, most single women that I met hoped to find a way to enter marriage even as they resisted forms that were unappealing, such as marriage with inappropriate partners or marriage for the sake of meeting marriage deadlines. I have discussed the financial problems experienced by single women as a result of waiting for marriage without preparing

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for their financial futures. But other deleterious effects include unwanted celibacy, social isolation, and lack of access to the important human experiences of nurturing children, caring for elderly, and receiving care from loved ones in return. Some people living outside of heterosexual families—single women, sexual minorities, elderly single people such as widows and widowers—are attempting to create new kinds of relationships and associations, but these initiatives face obstacles, as I discussed in relation to friendships, because relationships outside of the family lack legal and cultural legitimacy. In the process of waiting for an appropriate marital partner to appear, some single women came to revise their visions of singlehood and marriage as it became clear that marriage might not lead to a better or happier life than the one they were living. Many single women I knew were asking profound questions. Marie, living in Shanghai, told me, “I’m not sure what a good life is. Is a good life one that is a little boring and consists of enjoying a good meal, listening to music, and living peacefully? Or does it consist of loving someone painfully and having those moments to testify that I have been in love and I am alive? Or should I just find a stable partner to share my life?” Marie’s college classmate from her hometown in northern China had married a handsome and successful businessman. Last year her classmate cried when they met; her husband was having an affair. “I can’t see what she has gained by staying in the marriage,” Marie said. “Maybe I will be the same if I marry. When we are on the outside of marriage, we don’t need to compromise. The longer we stay single, the harder it is for us to accept the difficulties that come with marriage.” Marie reflected on her life by referencing a U.S. TV show: “After one hundred years of [women’s] liberty in New York, you get the situation of Sex in the City, but in Shanghai [after a shorter period of freedom], we are feeling the same thing! We are not depressed and lonely. We are enjoying our lives. But we want to know: What is the meaning of our life in this city?” Such questions are not easy to address, and the single women I knew gave answers that were evolving as they and their societies changed. They fully understood that their marital status had pushed boundaries in their societies and that they have embarked on an uncharted life course. This position was perplexing, yet it also provided space to imagine and attempt new ways of living, connecting with others, and finding happiness. Although their societies often dismissed and denigrated singlehood for women, for those I knew singlehood also brought opportunities and new destinies, still in the making, with far-reaching implications for the rest of society.

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Notes Introduction 1 In Hong Kong in 2018, 37.9 percent of women in the 30- to 34-year-old age range were single (Census and Statistics Department 2019). In Tokyo in 2015, 35.5 percent of women in this age range were single (Statistics of Tokyo 2017). In Shanghai in 2016, the percentage for this age group was lower than in Tokyo and Hong Kong, at 13.4 (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 2017). Nonetheless, the 2016 figure was more than five times greater than in 1995 in Shanghai, when only 2.4 percent of women in this age group were single (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 1997). 2 In 2018, the median age of first marriage for women in Hong Kong was 29.7 (Census and Statistics Department 2020). In 2016, the figure was 30.5 in Tokyo (Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health 2016). In Shanghai in 2015, the average age of first marriage for women was 28.4 (Xinhuanet 2018). The ages of first marriage for women in the three cities under study are similar to those in Europe, where in many countries, ages of first marriage for women hover around 30. In the United States the average age of first marriage for women was around 27 in 2018 (U.S. Census Bureau 2018). 3 Japan’s government-supported National Institute of Population and Social Security Research found that 59.1 percent of never-married women between the ages of 18 and 34 were not involved in a romantic relationship, and 44.2 percent of all never-married women of this age group had no sexual experience, a rise of 6 percentage points from the previous survey taken in 2010 (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016). 4 The surveying method is problematic because it asked only about heterosexual relationships. Nonetheless, the figure is low. 5 Regarding Japan, for example, studies by Joy Hendry (1981) and Takie Lebra (1984) found that heterosexual marriage based on a gendered division of labor was naturalized as part of the life course and marriage was seen as a “necessary if not sufficient condition for making one an adult (ichininmae) and a human being in the full sense of the term” (Lebra 1984, 78; see also Edwards 1989; Lunsing 2001). Wedding speeches (Dunn 2004) and wedding ceremony symbolism (Edwards 1989) promoted the married couple as the joining of two genders, each incomplete without the other.

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6 When discussing the complex combination of tradition and contemporary political and economic systems in this book, I am not suggesting that Western societies are modern while East Asian societies are traditional. To the contrary, I draw on studies by historical sociologists who point out that modernization theories have taken a Eurocentric perspective (see Bhambra 2007) that equates modernization with westernization. It is also worth noting that sociologists of the family have shown that modernization theories underestimate the strength of traditional ideas and practices in Western societies (see Jackson and Ho 2020; Jackson, Ho, and Na 2013; Smart and Shipman 2004). I am also not claiming that any of the three societies under study are more or less modern than any other; each represents its own unique combination of traditional and modern elements. 7 Researchers such as Yunxiang Yan (2003, 2009, 2010), Harriet Evans (2008), and Deborah S. Davis and Sara L. Friedman (2014) have argued that, while there are parallels in some social demographic processes, family changes in China emerge from the particular legal, political, and cultural histories that converge and diverge across the region. 8 For example, see Harrell and Santos (2017); Jackson and Ho (2020); Jackson, Ho, and Na (2013); and Ji (2017). 9 In 2016, for example, the average age of first marriage for women in Tokyo was 30.5 (Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health 2016), compared to 29.4 in Japan as a whole (Statistics Bureau of Japan 2018). In 2015, 39.5 percent of women aged 30 to 34 living in Tokyo were single (Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health 2016) compared to 34.6 percent in the nation as a whole (Cabinet Office 2018). 10 Feminist studies have shown that placing all single women into one category erases the diversity of their experiences. Lahad notes that singlehood “varies according to gender, age, class, religion, ethnicity, ableness, sexual orientation, or other axes of social differentiation” (2017, 2; see also Dales 2015). Sociology of the family demonstrates that the category of “single women” has become increasingly diverse as women move in and out of marriage categories more frequently and flexibly. 11 All three words use the same Chinese characters that include the character “not yet” and contain the suggestion that the person thus described has yet to marry but will eventually do so. 12 In 2016, for example, 57,000 mainlanders joined their families in a “OneWay Permit” scheme that admits a maximum of 150 persons per day (The Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 2017). The Hong Kong government has also launched a “Capital Migrant Admission Scheme” that admits people who have made major investments in the city (Immigration Department, Hong Kong SAR Government 2019). The number of people who

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apply and are accepted through these programs, however, is relatively small, as fewer than 4,000 were granted admission to Hong Kong in this way in 2017 (Immigration Department, Hong Kong SAR Government 2017). Since May 2008, the Hong Kong government has offered a scheme in which nonlocal graduates of Hong Kong universities may stay in the city for one year to look for employment. As of 2018, around 11,156 participants in the program—of whom 90 percent were from China—had stayed in Hong Kong the seven years necessary to obtain right of abode (Xinqi 2018). In societies such as Greece, Israel, and Turkey, children born out of wedlock similarly comprise fewer than 10 percent of all births. Throughout much of the world, however, births out of wedlock have grown significantly. In places as diverse as Chile, Iceland, Mexico, and France, births out of wedlock surpass 50 percent of all births (OECD 2020). Most women I met in Shanghai were only children but around one-quarter had a sibling. Shanghai women had siblings for several reasons. Some were born in rural areas where the one-child policy was not enforced at the time of their birth. In a few cases, their parents had paid the fine for having a second child, and a few were born before the implementation of the one-child policy in 1979. In Hong Kong, women born in the 1950s and 1960s typically had between three to five siblings. Those born after 1970 generally had one to two siblings. In Tokyo, most women had one or two siblings. A number of researchers have contributed to an understanding of the diversity of single women’s experiences. Nancy Rosenberger (2013) has looked at how region and class shaped whether single women lived meaningful and successful lives in Japan. Akiko Yoshida (2017) found that the reasons women remain single differ according to generation in Japan. In a longitudinal study in Japan, Kaori Okano (2009) has researched the transition to adulthood of workingclass women. Chikako Ogura (2003) has written about class differences among single women in Japan. Sandy To (2015) has discussed single women in Shanghai of a particular middle-class range. Although not focusing on the cities under study, Jesook Song has written about university-educated but nonetheless underemployed single women in South Korea unable to secure stable, full-time employment and their struggles in the rental housing market (2010, 2014). Feminists point out that some women—usually young and well-educated— have many choices while others, such as women with low educational levels or from minority groups, may have far fewer choices (McRobbie 2004, 2009). Further, research on the lives and experiences of single women in non-Western societies (Berry 2011; Bennett 2005; Chanda 2017; Song 2010, 2014; Weiss 1999) have examined how institutions including state and family systems limit and shape single women’s life choices.

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17 Although some suggest that the use of the term “singletons”—rather than the pejorative “spinsters” (see Fink and Holden 1999)—demonstrates cultural acceptance of single women, Taylor dismisses this claim, arguing that negative views of the spinster continue to powerfully shape contemporary narratives (2011, 3). In Western cultural imagination, although singlehood has become more acceptable within certain temporal limits—for example a woman in her early twenties may be encouraged to be single and choosy—it remains unacceptable for a woman to choose to remain partnerless for an extended length of time (Taylor 2011, 2; see also Lahad 2012). Moreover, whether in journalism, film, or television, single women, who are generally white and almost always portrayed as heterosexual, are encouraged to find romantic love and a long-term partner. In Western popular culture, finding a heterosexual partner is presented as validating for women in ways that it is not for men (Taylor 2011, 3; see also McRobbie 2004). 18 See Nakano and Wagatsuma (2004) for a discussion of generational differences between mothers and daughters in Japan; for observations of generational changes and mother-daughter relationships in China, see Evans (2008), Fong (2004), and Liu (2007). 19 The percentage of women working full-time in Japan decreased from 68 percent in 1985 to 44.5 percent in 2017 (Statistics of Japan 2017). 20 In Tokyo in 2012, 77.4 percent of women aged 25 to 34 worked in some capacity, but the figure drops to 66.2 percent among women aged 35 to 44 as they leave the workforce to care for young children, and rises to 71.6 percent among women aged 45 to 54 as their children enter middle and high school (Statistics of Tokyo 2016). 21 Shinzo Abe first served as Prime Minister in 2006–2007 and again from 2012 to 2020. 22 In their study of women born in the 1980s and 1990s and their mothers in Hong Kong, Jackson and Ho found that Hong Kong mothers wished to preserve their daughters’ virginity and some carefully policed it. Nonetheless, Jackson and Ho found a range of views toward premarital sex among Hong Kong young women, including disapproval, conditional approval if the man was a steady partner, and acceptance (2020, 175). 23 In China, the crude divorce rate—referring to the number of divorces per a thousand persons in the population—doubled from 1.46 to three between 2006 and 2016 (Zhou 2017). The divorce rate in Hong Kong has been rising steadily, from 0.77 in 1986 to 2.73 in 2018 (Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 2020). In Japan, divorce peaked in 2003 and has since declined slightly, reaching 1.69 in 2018 (Statistics Bureau of Japan 2019).

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24 In Hong Kong, the provision of reproductive technologies to single women is prohibited according to the region’s Human Reproductive Technology Ordinance (Council on Human Reproductive Technology 2010). Hospitals in Japan, according to a survey of websites, decline to provide services to single women and ask them to seek assistance at clinics overseas. The websites of major Chinese hospitals also state that services are not provided to single women. 25 In Japan, a few tentative steps have been made toward recognizing same-sex marriage. Two municipalities in Tokyo have been granting marriage certificates to same-sex couples since 2015, but these are not legally binding. 26 In China, Choi and Luo find that marriages between gay men and lesbian women have become popular. They describe this arrangement as a “performative family” (2016). In Japan, some same-sex couples resort to adopting one another to establish a legal relationship between them (Chalmers 2002). 27 South Korean sociologist Kyung-Sup Chang describes East Asian governments’ over-reliance on families as resulting in “functional overload” (2010a, 13; see also Chang 2010b; Chang and Song 2010). See Ochiai for a discussion of how family caregiving throughout East Asia has taken different forms as a result of the economic, political, and social conditions that shaped their historical development (2014a, 2014b, 2014c). 28 In this book, I refer to three languages besides English: Standard Chinese (also known as Mandarin or Putonghua), Cantonese, and Japanese. For spoken Standard Chinese, the official language of the People’s Republic of China, and written Chinese including the variety that appears in newspapers in Hong Kong, I use the Pinyin romanization system. For spoken Cantonese, the language spoken by the majority of Hong Kongers, I use the Yale romanization system. For Japanese words, I use the Hepburn romanization system. 29 In China, some urban families hire live-in or hourly paid domestic workers— primarily women who have migrated from rural areas since the 1970s (Wang and Wu 2017)—and in large cities some households hire foreign domestic workers. Institutional elder care is emerging as an option for some urban middle-class families. At the same time, state policies in recent years have strengthened patriarchal authority in families. For example, alarmed by rising divorce rates, a 2011 revision to the country’s Marriage Law, issued by the Supreme Court in China, specified that marital property belongs to the person whose name is on the deed. In China, this is usually the husband, even though the wife may have contributed to the purchase of the property (Fincher 2014, 7–8). The law weakens women’s position in marriage and discourages women in unhappy marriages from exiting the relationship.

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30 In Hong Kong before the 1970s, family care was supplemented by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) run by churches, philanthropists, and neighborhood mutual help organizations. In the 1970s, the government launched a series of campaigns that focused on community building and family building under the rubric of “Family Life Education” (Ho 2004, 30). These family-oriented policies have continued in post-1997 Hong Kong (C. K. Chan 2011; R. Chan 2011). 31 Insufficient social welfare protection compels women without an independent income to depend on families. The Hong Kong government’s pension system, known as the Mandatory Provident Fund and established in 2000, for example, is only available to those who have a paid job and thus fails to cover over 640,000 unpaid family caregivers (97 percent of whom are women) as well as foreign domestic workers. Because women are more likely to work in parttime jobs while caring for families, many will receive relatively little benefit from the scheme (Hong Kong Federation of Women’s Centres 2020). 32 In Japan, a second earner who brings home less than 1.5 million yen per year could be claimed as a dependent on a spouse’s income tax return and this secondary income would not be taxed. Prior to 2018, the ceiling for tax exemption was lower, at 1.03 million yen per year. This taxation policy discourages women from taking up work that would exceed the tax-exempt ceiling (Brasor and Tsubuku 2019). 33 According to Chang (2010a, 2010b, 2014), “compressed modernity” refers to the condensed manner in which rapid capitalist industrialization, economic growth, urbanization, and democratization occurred, while societies maintained traditional characteristics in terms of personal, social, and political life. Sociologist Emiko Ochiai draws on Chang’s theory to argue that Japan’s experience may be described as “semi-compressed modernity,” because the degree of compression in Japan was not as intense as in other Asian countries; Japan’s modernization occurred over a slightly longer period (2014a). 34 After falling to a low of 1.26 in 2005, birthrates in Japan have fluctuated but remained low; they stood at 1.36 in 2019 (Statistics Bureau of Japan 2020, 16). The fertility rate in Tokyo—1.20 in 2018—is lower than the national average (Tokyo Metropolitan Government 2020). Fertility rates are even lower in Hong Kong and Shanghai. In Hong Kong, the fertility rate per woman stood at 1.05 in 2019 (Census and Statistics Department 2021, 4), and Shanghai had perhaps one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at .59 in 2017 (Survey Office of the National Bureau of Statistics in Shanghai 2018). 35 Former Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro, for example, commented in 2001 that “it’s both wasteful and sinful for women to live beyond menopause” and that “such useless human beings are extremely harmful for the whole planet” (Yamaguchi 2006, 110). These remarks, which were strongly criticized by

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38 39

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women’s groups and opposition political parties, represent the views of some conservative policy makers. In Hong Kong in 2005, for example, while serving as chief executive, Donald Tsang urged families to have three children to address population ageing (Lo 2005). Yet there was strong public backlash against the trend of pregnant women from mainland China giving birth in Hong Kong hospitals and obtaining rights to Hong Kong permanent residency and 12 years of education. As a result, the Hong Kong government implemented a “zero-quota” policy in 2013 that aimed to ban mainland women from giving birth in Hong Kong (Tsang 2016). Zurndorfer notes that in China single women are condemned for earning their own living but also condemned if they search for a man to financially support them, as seen in the uproar caused by the female contestant on Fei cheng wu rao, Nuo Ma, who famously commented that “she would rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bike owned by a jobless man.” Government authorities subsequently criticized the show for promoting “wrong values” and the show was forced to change its format (Zurndorfer 2016, 16; see also Luo and Sun 2015). I use Pinyin to write the names of programs written in Standard Chinese and Yale romanization for spoken Cantonese words. TVB programming on Xing qi dang an, or Sunday Report, features episodes such as Gang nam jiang nü (“Hong Kong men talk about women” ; March 8, 2009), Gang nu jiang nam (Hong Kong women talk about men; March 15, 2009), Zhongnü gaobai (“middle-aged women’s announcements”; March 2, 2010), and Touting namren xin (eavesdropping on men’s true thoughts; April 3, 2011), which repeated negative stereotypes of Hong Kong women. The drama Araundo 40—Ch mon no i onnatachi (Around 40—Demanding women) aired on the Japanese TBS network in the spring of 2008. Freedman and Iwata-Weickgenannt argue that the show promotes “individual happiness rather than that of the family” (2011, 297) although it also portrays single women as unfeminine and idealizes romantic heterosexual relationships. According to Mandujano-Salazer, recent TV dramas that use the word “arafo” portray single women as choosing singlehood and are subtly critical of the assumption that marrying the hegemonic masculine ideal man will bring happiness (2017). Iwashita’s (2001) usage of the term is associated with women enjoying life and shedding fears of dining or travelling alone. See Tomomi Yamaguchi’s (2006) discussion of the mainstream media’s response to Sakai’s (2003) book. Dalton and Dales (2016) note the mismatch between online konkatsu (often translated as “marriage hunting,” this Japanese word refers to the organized

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49

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efforts and activities said to be required to find a spouse) websites and the actual lives of women and men; the konkatsu websites promote marriage as a partnership between the male “pillar of the family” (daikokubashira) and the supportive wife. This model of marriage omits growing numbers of women who do not aspire to be housewives and unemployed men (2016, 17). Goldstein-Gidoni (2012, 200–204) provides a detailed discussion of various terms used to describe single women. Ching Kwan Lee (1998) has effectively used this comparative approach to understand why a factory located in Hong Kong and another in Shenzhen owned by the same company used strikingly different mechanisms of labor control, and why workers in these factories used different methods to obey and resist company policies. Don Kulick and Jens Rydstrom (2015) have used comparative ethnography to address questions of why the sexuality of people with disabilities is acknowledged and assisted in Denmark but denied and impeded in Sweden in spite of the similarities in the social welfare systems and cultural backgrounds of the two societies. The privileging of certain groups in society and the exploitation of others under neoliberalism is not limited to East Asian societies. Political philosopher Wendy Brown points out that exploitation of women’s domestic labor and implicit protection of white, male privilege is built into the basic structure of neoliberalism (2019, 13). In the United Kingdom, for example, rhetoric stressing the importance of the family increased with the rise of neoliberal policies even as the proportion of the population actually living in “traditional” families declined (Brecher 2012). Jesook Song (2010, 2014) provides an important counterexample. She argues that her single women interlocutors in South Korea adopt liberal self-identities of freedom of choice that “compete with the conservative sexual moral regime” (2014, 19). Song’s informants were former student activists in antimilitary state movements and many continued their involvement in women’s movements and nongovernmental organizations through the 1990s. Ryang argues that in postwar Japan “the sphere of the mundane” has become infused with state power particularly in the realms of education, culture, media, and health (2006, 7). This is similar to Borovoy’s (2005) finding that women coping with substance abuse among family members in Japan sought to impose limits on the kinds of care they would provide, but did not challenge the basic premises of gendered caregiving. Borovoy believes that this is due to the “compelling and ideologically persuasive nature” (2005, 85) of postwar prescriptions for women that link the virtue of Japanese national culture with the virtue of women as caregivers.

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51 Padilla et al. (2007) state that scholars such as Hirsch (2003), Wardlow (2006), Rebhun (1999), and Yan (2003) share Padilla’s discomfort with studies that see women and men as antagonists and that focus on families primarily as sites for “negotiation and reproduction of inequalities” (2007, xv). Padilla and his colleagues argue that, while the first wave of feminism critiqued inequalities in the structures of families, recent researchers have come to see intimacy, love, and pleasure within families as areas that require further study (2007, xv). 52 In discussing family, I draw on anthropological approaches that maintain that the family is not a functionalist unit that fulfills individual needs, but “an ideological construct with moral implications” (Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanagisako 1997, 79; see also Goldfarb 2016, 152). 53 Similarly, discussing Japan, Raymo and Iwasawa (2005) describe a “marriage market mismatch” due to women’s increased educational levels and “changes in the supply of potential partners” (2005, 817). 54 Lahad urges that we should be wary of celebratory discourses of single women’s choice that is drawn from white, middle-class experience. Such discourses may prevent us from developing a more nuanced understanding of singlehood (2014, 259). Discussing young single women in China, Howlett (2019) argues that women’s “liberational aspirations” and filial piety are not necessarily antithetical but are often combined in culturally specific ways.

Chapter 1: Three Marriage Regimes Chapter 1 is a significantly revised version of “Single Women and the Transition to Marriage in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo,” which was published in the Asian Journal of Social Science, vol. 44, 2016. 1 As of this writing, housing prices in Hong Kong are the highest in the world. The average price of a home in Hong Kong in 2019 was US$1.25 million. Munich was second, at US$1 million, followed by Singapore at US$915,601 and Shanghai at US$905,834 (Arcibal 2020). 2 This does not mean that marriages have become more companionate, but that the companionate ideal has gained prominence as a concept that people draw upon when explaining their relationships (Hirsch and Wardlow 2006, 6). Hirsch and Wardlow note that an important part of the appeal of companionate marriage is its association with modernity—in other words, people use companionate marriage to describe themselves and others as more or less modern or traditional (2006, 20; see also Padilla et al. 2007). 3 Constable found that Chinese and Filipino women involved in transnational relationships with Western men may be attracted to the potential for greater

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wealth and freedom that such relationships entail, but that these attractions do not preclude romantic love and other deep emotions (2003, 120). Statistics show that the majority of transnational marriages in Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan in recent decades have been driven by the demands of certain groups to “widen domestic marriage markets” (Jones and Shen 2008, 15); the typical pattern involves a man from a wealthier Asian country marrying a woman from a less wealthy Asian country (Jones and Shen 2008, 16). In China, massive labor migration has increased opportunities for rural women to meet single men in urban areas (see Gaetano and Jacka 2004; Mu and Yeung 2019). Female migrants tend to marry men with educational attainment levels that fall below local population averages, suggesting that such men are not competitive in local marriage markets (Fan 2008, 149). Kelsky (2001) has written about how the Western trope of modernity attracts as an eroticized and racialized power, and how Japanese women’s views of the West as liberating combine with a desire for the white man as a “fetish object of modernity” (2001, 4). See also Farrer on Chinese women’s narratives of international romance (2012). Although I was not able to obtain figures on marriages between local women and Western men in any of the cities, given the small percentage of international marriages involving local women in general, we can surmise that the numbers of such marriages are low. In Chinese government data, for example, the category “foreign” refers to people who are not overseas Chinese nor residents of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. The category of marriages to “overseas Chinese residents of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan” comprises a much larger portion of all marriages than the category designated “foreigners” (Jeffreys and Wang 2013, 356). In Shanghai in 2019, remarriage comprised approximately 30 percent of all marriages (China Bureau of Statistics 2019). In Hong Kong in 2016, remarriages constituted 34.6 percent of all marriages, and approximately 10 percent of all marriages in that year involved a never-married woman marrying a divorced man (Census and Statistics Department 2019). In Japan in 2016, marriages in which at least one of the partners was remarrying comprised 26.8 percent of all marriages, and 10 percent of all marriages in that year involved a never-married woman marrying a divorced man (K seir d sh 2017). One of the main scholars of modern relationships, Anthony Giddens, argues that the dominant form of relationships in the modern period is the “pure relationship,” or “a relationship of sexual and emotional equality” (1992, 1). Western feminists have criticized Giddens’s theory, arguing that the relationships depicted in his approach ignore the gender inequalities and discrimination that persist in social structures. They point out that Giddens

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seems to celebrate the “democratization of intimacy” while ignoring the fact that the changes brought about by women’s increased financial independence have not emancipated women from inequality (Evans 2003, 4). My view is that in East Asian societies, we do not see widespread embrace of the “pure relationship,” suggesting that we cannot assume that Western models necessarily spread to non-Western societies or that world cultures are becoming more uniform in following a Western model (see also Evans 2008). This definition differs from that used by Hirsch and Wardlow (2006, 4). In the companionate model in these societies, I did not find that women thought that marriages required that couples work on emotional closeness for the marriage to be effective or that the conjugal partnership was necessarily privileged over other family ties. Similarly, in her study of transnational relationships between non-Asian men in Western societies and Chinese and Filipina women, Constable argues that the relationships are not necessarily devoid of love. Rather, the political and economic context of the relationship is more transparent in comparison with U.S. marriages, where pragmatic contexts are taken for granted (2003, 120). Illouz argues that romantic love has emerged as an indispensable part of democratic ideals of affluence that accompanied the emergence of mass markets. Dating, for example, often involves romantic dinners, nice cars, and other displays of wealth. In other words, romantic love also reflects the mechanisms of economic and social inequality that operate in American social structure (1997, 2). Mu and Yeung, using the large-scale 2012 Chinese Family Panel Studies and 127 in-depth interviews conducted in Beijing, also found that migration delays ages of first marriage (2019, 11). This emphasis on “marrying up” in urban China today is not merely a holdover of tradition, but a product of the competition and consumerism of postsocialist China. During the Mao era the state supported marriage involving equals as women entered the workforce along with men. In postsocialist China, consumerism has evoked essentialized gender difference, with women celebrated for femininity, marriage, and motherhood (Rofel 1999; Evans 2008). In the new market economy, the “marriage of equals” has given way to the “‘marrying down’ norm for men and the simultaneous ‘marrying up’ norm for women” (Luo and Sun 2015, 243). While in the Mao era marrying and producing the next generation was expected as a woman’s “natural duty” (tianran yiwu), in the post-Mao era, marrying and having children are seen as women’s essentialized biological nature, leaving women who fail to marry “incomplete and unfulfilled” (Evans 2003, 348). In contrast, men are valorized for an entrepreneurial masculinity which emphasizes “power, wealth, sexual prowess and rebellion” (Zheng 2012, 45; see also Song and Hird 2014).

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15 In her interviews with single women in Shanghai, Ji (2015, 2017) also found that in addition to matching socioeconomic status, women wanted to find partners who were compatible in thinking, lifestyle, values, and other personal characteristics. 16 Studies show that women who come from rural farming areas in China face class-based discrimination and sexual harassment when they migrate to urban areas. The rural women who came to Beijing, as discussed in Jacka’s study (2006), could not marry city men, who looked down on them as unsophisticated and inferior because of their rural roots. Yet even so, the women in Jacka’s study could not imagine returning to their villages to marry a local man who has never left the village (Jacka 2006, 153). 17 Kwok Fai Ting reports that women and men both look to spouses for trust and emotional support (2014) and finds that marriage is “an evolving, yet still highly cherished, social institution for Chinese in Hong Kong” (2014, 159). Jackson and Ho also found that Hong Kong women see marriage as a normal part of life and that marriage is generally more taken for granted among Hong Kong young women than among the young British women they interviewed (2020, 190). 18 Singlehood for women has a long history in southern China, particularly in villages along the Pearl River Delta. Studies by Stockard (1989) and Topley (2011 [1978]) suggest that the rise of the silk industry in the nineteenth century allowed young women to resist or indefinitely delay marriage by supporting themselves in single-women associations. Helen Siu argues that marriage delay and avoidance strategies were supported by families and communities and predated the rise of the silk industry (1990). When cyclic depressions hit the silk industry in the early twentieth century, single women migrated in large numbers to Hong Kong, where they worked as domestic servants and organized themselves in nunneries and religious associations (Chai t’ang) (Sankar 1978, 138). Although these women were elderly by the early postwar period, they are part of general cultural memory and knowledge in south China, including Hong Kong. 19 In Hong Kong in 2016, 16.6 percent of women aged 40 to 44 and 15.2 percent of women aged 45 to 49 had never married. Among women aged 50 to 54, around one in ten, or 10.6 percent, had never married and the figure declines slightly to 7.4 percent for women aged 55 to 59. Among women over the age of 65, marriage experience is nearly universal, with only 3.4 percent having never married (Census and Statistics Department 2018a). 20 This latter interpretation of destiny is similar to that found by Farrer (2006a, 70). He points out that the idea of destiny is similar to the idea of a “mythic code of love” that Swidler (2001) found in American conversations about love.

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21 The South China Morning Post reports that a family in Hong Kong would need to save for twenty-one years without spending a single dollar to be able to afford a home in the city. In comparison, a family in Singapore would need to save for 4.6 years and a family in the United States would need to save for 3.9 years (Liu 2019). 22 Hong Kong is home to around 379,000 Catholics and 480,000 Protestants. Christians in Hong Kong have historically been highly active in establishing and running schools, hospitals, rehabilitation services, and family and social services (GovHK 2016). 23 Jackson and Ho point out that negative attitudes toward sex are not “traditionally Chinese.” Rather, Confucian tradition prescribes chastity for women as part of a package of filial duties and obligations in families. Today, however, sin and guilt in relation to sexual behavior are deeply embedded in Hong Kong culture (2020, 177). 24 This contradicts the typical negative stereotyping of Hong Kong women in the media as pragmatic and materialistic. 25 The numbers of single women in Tokyo are considerably higher than the Japanese national averages. For example, in the 30- to 34-year-old age group in 2015, 29.5 percent of Tokyo women had never married, compared to 24.6 percent in Japan as a whole. Among women aged 35 to 39, 27.9 percent were never-married in Tokyo, compared to 23.7 percent nationwide (Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health 2016). 26 In 1935, for example, 69 percent of marriages were reported as “arranged marriages” and 13.4 were reported as “love marriages.” By 2015, the figures had reversed, as 5.5 percent of marriages were reported as “arranged marriages” and 87 percent of marriages as “love marriages” (National Institute of Social Security and Population Research 2016). Marriages described as “love marriages” (ren’ai kekkon) have been contrasted with “arranged marriages” (omiai kekkon) but as others have pointed out (Edwards 1989; Dunn 2004), the reality was a complex mix as “love marriages” also generally involve the participation and approval of parents and “arranged marriages” generally involve dating and romantic attraction. 27 In her ethnography of men who work at part-time and irregular employment, Cook (2016) finds that such men have difficulty marrying. 28 The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research Survey (2015) found that for single women aged 18 to 34, the most important quality in a partner was personality (hitogara), with 88.3 percent of respondents indicating this feature to be “very important,” followed by “ability to do housework” (kaji no n ryoku), at 57.7 percent, and “understanding of my work” (shigoto e no rikai), referring to the man’s understanding of a wife’s desire to

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work, at 49.6 percent. Only 30.3 percent of women surveyed said that “earning ability” (keizairyoku) was very important (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016). Goodman (2000, 137–142) points out that adoption was widely practiced in Japan for at least 1,300 years, yet today both adoption and fostering are relatively uncommon, and the numbers have fallen over the past forty years. Roberts (2016, 40) makes a similar observation, stating that the young urban adults she interviewed found that single motherhood should be avoided because of its associations with poverty and social censure. In popular culture, negative imagery of women in Hong Kong seen in the “gong neuih” (“Hong Kong woman”) stereotype criticizes Hong Kong women for self-centeredness, narcissism, and materialism. The “parasite single” and “single aristocracy” (dokushin kizoku) popular rhetoric in Japan have a similar slant. As mentioned in the introduction, academic literature on modernization suggest that changes in family formations are a result of increasing individualism and the release of women from the family. See Anthony Giddens (1991), Ulrich Beck (1992), Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002), and Ron Lesthaeghe (1995, 2014). For example, China Daily carried a story titled, “Unmarried Women Go to US to Freeze Eggs,” describing how the online travel company giant Ctrip paid for most of the travel costs for a female employee to visit the United States for the procedure (Chen 2018). Normally women would not share their abortion experiences, even with close friends or family members. I believe that they told me perhaps because I was an outsider to their social circles and knowledge passed to me would not complicate their relationships with their friends and family members. Alexy and Cook suggest that being a relative stranger can elicit intimate confessions because this status creates distance from the usual social bonds (2019, 255). I usually did not ask directly about highly stigmatized experiences such as abortion or relationships with married men in interviews. Women sometimes surprised me by volunteering such information in follow-up conversations after the interview.

Chapter 2: “When I Went to Graduate School, My Parents Said I Had to Get a Boyfriend” 1 The phrase warns that highly educated women such as medical doctors and Ph.D. holders become freakish misfits who will not be accepted by men as marriage partners and who thus cannot enter the mainstream life paths of marriage and family.

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2 Around half of my informants have obtained a university education, a little less than half have obtained high school education, and a small number have postgraduate degrees. 3 In a 2018 scandal, Tokyo Medical University was found to have been manipulating entrance exams in favor of men on the grounds that women retreat from medical practice to raise families. A subsequent Education Ministry investigation revealed that nine of Japan’s eighty-one medical schools had altered entrance exams to favor men and legacy candidates whose family members were alumni ( Japan Times 2018). 4 Singapore’s prime minister from 1959 to 1990, Lee Kuan Yew, famously lamented that high levels of education for women led to lower birthrates (the Economist 2019). 5 Retherford, Ogawa, and Matsukura (2001) found that university-educated women in Japan marry slightly later than less-educated women and that they are significantly more likely to be single at age 40 than their less-educated peers. In Hong Kong in 2016, university-educated women in the 30- to 34-year-old age range were much more likely to be single than the general population of women: 43.7 percent of women with college education were single compared to 22.3 percent of women of all educational levels (Census and Statistics Department 2018). In a large-scale study in Hong Kong, however, Odalia Wong (2003, 2005) found that highly educated women expressed the strongest wish to marry compared to other groups, suggesting that highly educated women are delaying rather than abandoning marriage. 6 Of the thirty-five women interviewed in Shanghai, two held Ph.D. degrees, five held M.A. degrees, and sixteen held university degrees. Of the thirty-five, one had studied overseas, in Singapore, and had obtained an M.B.A. Overall, they are slightly better educated than the women I met in Hong Kong and Tokyo. I believe that this is because they tended to be younger than the women in the other cities; due to the small numbers of single women in Shanghai over the age of 40, the majority of women I interviewed in Shanghai were under 40. In Hong Kong and Tokyo, I interviewed more women who were over 40 and they were more likely to have lower levels of education. Even given their youth, the women I met in Shanghai are better educated than most single women in that city, and I do not claim that they are representative. Nonetheless, I believe that their aspirations for education, even if they were not able to achieve them, reflect the hopes of many women in Shanghai across various levels of educational attainment. 7 In Chinese, the inappropriate romantic attachment of young people who are attending school is called “premature love” (zaolian[ai]) (Farrer 2002, 180; 2006b, 105).

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Notes to Pages 76–88

8 Mingxia was unusual among my informants in that she was one of the few women from outside of Shanghai who planned to marry a Shanghai man. In Mingxia’s case, this may be in part because she spoke Suzhou dialect which is intelligible to Shanghai natives and she had been able to secure a Shanghai residence permit (hukou) because she had attended a prestigious graduate school in the city. Mu and Yeung’s study (2019) found that high-skilled internal migrants in China are better equipped to marry locals than low- or semi-skilled migrants and are more likely to desire to settle down and start a family in receiving communities. 9 I distinguish between generations of single women in Hong Kong because Hong Kong’s economy and education system have changed greatly over recent decades, and single women in Hong Kong can be found in different age groups, including among middle-aged women. For example, in 2016 in Hong Kong, 16.6 percent of women in the 40- to 44-year-old age group were single (Census and Statistics Department 2018b). This contrasts with the situation in Shanghai, where the education system has also changed dramatically in recent decades, but where single women over forty comprise a very small percent of the population. In 2015, only 2.5 percent of women in the 40- to 44-year-old age group were single, and only 1.2 percent in the 45- to 49-year-old age group were single (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 2017). These figures reflect the pressures of the culture of universal marriage that dominated in the 1970s and 1980s in Shanghai and China as a whole. 10 Of the thirty-three women interviewed in Hong Kong, one held a Ph.D. degree obtained in Canada, sixteen held university degrees, and the rest held technical school or high school level degrees. Most of the women born before 1970 held high school degrees, and most of the women born after 1970 held university degrees, reflecting the shift in Hong Kong educational policy that made higher education widely available to women and men in the 1980s and 1990s. 11 Of thirty-three women interviewed in Tokyo, fourteen had degrees from fouryear universities, two had M.A. degrees, and the remainder had attended twoyear colleges or technical schools. Of the thirty-three, seven had studied in courses overseas: one had studied in Hong Kong, one in the United Kingdom, and five in the United States. 12 Regarding parental support of education, my sample is skewed toward those with higher education because the location of the study was in Tokyo. Women whose parents did not support their university education likely would have stayed closer to their hometowns and I would not be in a position to meet them. 13 “Ability-ism” refers to the notion that Japanese workplaces increasingly reward individual performance and merit (Borovoy 2010, 174). Borovoy notes that this orientation has led many young people to struggle to obtain licenses and

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certificates in various trades. Aronsson (2015) found a similar tendency among well-educated, career-oriented young women in Tokyo.

Chapter 3: “Because I’m a Girl, My Parents Want Me to Find a Stable Job” 1 Although the Equal Employment Opportunity Legislation (EEOL, 1986) intended to support women’s entry into the workforce on an equal basis with men, it failed to do so because it did not dismantle institutional barriers such as long working hours and masculine cronyism. It also created a two-tiered employment system for women in which companies offered women a small number of management track positions and larger numbers of clerical track (ippanshoku) positions with no promotion path. Many women who started in the management track eventually left due to the structural barriers that made marrying and having a family difficult. This two-tiered system was largely abandoned by most companies during the corporate restructuring of the 1990s. 2 In Shanghai, mothers of adult daughters or mothers-in-law commonly assist with the care of their grandchild, allowing a mother to continue working. Some middle-class families hire domestic workers. In Hong Kong, workingclass women sometimes rely on relatives to help with childcare while many middle-class women hire domestic workers, primarily from the Philippines and Indonesia. In Tokyo, childcare facilities allow some women to work until five or six in the evening, but leaving work at this time everyday makes it difficult for women to maintain careers which would require longer working hours. In Tokyo, the hiring of domestic workers is prohibitively expensive. Also, women are expected to spend the first few years of the child’s life caring for the child herself. In spite of these different arrangements, in all three societies, the mother is expected to take responsibility for the upbringing of the child even if she is not the primary caregiver. 3 Lee notes that although women in Hong Kong have gained more influence in family affairs because of their paid work, women are still expected to perform traditional family roles (2002, 247). 4 The Hong Kong government established policies to admit foreign domestic workers to Hong Kong in the early 1970s, to address the shortage of live-in domestic workers. 5 In contrast, the economies of Hong Kong and Tokyo were growing very modestly—since 2010, Hong Kong’s growth rate has fluctuated between 1 and 4 percent and Japan’s growth has generally remained under 3 percent (World Bank 2018). 6 By this she meant that for Hong Kong men, marriage is very expensive, requires that the man provide housing, and restricts a man’s freedom.

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7 The family contribution payment (ga yuhng), often made by adult children to their mothers, will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 4. Basically all the women I met in Hong Kong, with the exception of those who were attending school or unemployed, said that they were expected to pay. 8 Andrew Gordon summarizes the situation by stating that “despite much of the talk of the ‘advance’ of women into new roles outside the home, younger women and women overall have retreated from the ranks of regular employment in recent years even as the proportion of women in the work force has increased” (2017, 26). 9 Companies in Japan tend to hire regular employees fresh out of university and promote them internally based on a seniority system. Women who lose their positions as “regular employees,” or temporarily leave their positions to care for children, are often unable to find a way back into employment on regular terms and instead reenter the job market in part-time or temporary work. 10 The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (2016, 30) survey of never-married women aged 18 to 34, for example, found that 93.2 percent responded that “understanding of my work” (shigoto e no rikai) was a factor they considered to be very important as a condition for marriage. Men also indicate that this is an important condition in a marriage partner, but at a slightly lower level of 88.2 percent. Moreover, the meaning of “understanding of my work” differs for women and men. For women it may refer to permission to work, while for men it may mean that he would like a wife to support his work by maintaining the home. 11 “Narita divorce” refers to a widely discussed phenomenon in the media in which a newlywed couple embark on an overseas honeymoon during which time the wife discovers that her husband lacks social and linguistic competence in comporting himself when overseas. For example, he is unable to order in restaurants or communicate in English with hotel staff. The wife, however, who has experience travelling overseas with friends, is able to manage well and finds her husband’s incompetence to be unacceptable. As a result, in this urban myth, the wife asks for a divorce upon landing at Narita International Airport at the conclusion of the honeymoon. 12 Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare offers financial subsidies, currently titled “Ry ritsu shient joseikin” (compatability support fund), to companies that make efforts to improve working conditions for female employees. Toward this end, the Ministry recommends, among other measures, that companies establish a mentorship scheme in which women working in the same company help one another through establishing senior-junior relationships. The scheme, however, is not intended to assist women improve their careers, but aims to promote women’s continued presence at work while bearing children and caring for the elderly. The Ministry’s handbook provides

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an example of how women will need to balance work with childcare in their thirties and provide elder care in their forties while again obtaining the understanding (rikai) of colleagues (K seir d sh itaku jigy 2012). 13 I have argued elsewhere (see Nakano 2014) that single women face discrimination in both marriage and employment markets. 14 In Japanese families, the oldest son is usually expected to take responsibility for providing for the elder care for elderly parents, and the eldest son’s wife provides the actual nursing assistance. In exchange, the eldest son inherits the family home and property. My finding that numerous single women informants have established an understanding with their families that they will provide nursing care for their parents and inherit the family home suggests an important shift in the ways that families address elder care and inheritance issues. I discuss this in detail in chapter 4. 15 In her study of career women in Tokyo, Aronsson found that during times of economic uncertainty, women held on to marriage as a form of security, giving rise to “marriage hunting” events in Japan. She found that at 30 her informants did not want to marry, but changed their minds later when their jobs became routine and when their friends and former classmates married and had children (2015, 194). Swee-Lin Ho’s (2018) study of career women’s friendship groups in Tokyo found that close-knit drinking groups served as a means for women to network and support one another in the extremely competitive and insecure job market.

Chapter 4: “If I Keep This Up, I Will Never Have a Life of My Own” 1 Studies show that approximately 22 percent of urban elderly persons’ income in China derives from financial support from children (Nihon B eki Shink Kik 2013, 6). 2 See Jieyu Liu (2007) for a discussion of women of the “unlucky generation” who endured the three-year famine (1959–1961) in their childhood, were relocated to the countryside during Mao’s policy of “learning from the peasants” as youths, and, as adults, lost their work positions during the economic restructuring. 3 A 2013 filial support law in China requires that family members “care for the spiritual needs” of the elderly, and family members who live separately from the elderly “should frequently visit or send a greeting” (Serrano, Saltman, and Yeh 2017). 4 The situation today also contrasts with modernizing Japan, when a host of others, including wet nurses, godparents, and nursemaids, were commonly assigned childcare responsibilities (Ohinata 1995, 201). Ohinata points

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out that the cult of motherhood emerged in modernizing Japan when the government shifted responsibility for developing the country from the state to the family, and within the family, to women (1995, 200). The emphasis on motherhood as key to the child’s development started in the early 1920s. Before then, the village community was also considered responsible for raising children (1995, 201). The ie family system was codified into law by the Meiji Civil Code of 1868 and then abolished in the reforms following the end of World War II. The system was organized around the authority of a patriarch and based on a continued line of succession. The successor was usually the eldest son, who was the sole inheritor of family property and assets. The Long-Term Care Insurance System in Japan requires all persons aged 40 and over to contribute a premium that is determined by income. After age 65, persons are eligible to receive benefits to cover disabilities related to aging. These benefits include services provided in institutions, at homes, and in community facilities. K. S. Lee noted that in a 2012 Public Opinion survey of the Baby Boomer Generation conducted by the Japanese Cabinet Office, that asked respondents to name their ideal caregiver, 54.7 percent of men and 26.6 percent of women preferred a spouse, 5.4 percent of men and 13.5 percent of women preferred a child, and only 0.1 percent of men and 0.7 percent of women preferred a child’s spouse (2016, 135). In Japan, young adults are not expected to provide regular financial support to their parents. This is because the elderly in Japan often have sufficient financial resources, including pensions and savings, to support themselves. In Japan, in 2019, only 6.2 percent of income reported by elderly persons over the age of 65 fell into a category that could be interpreted to include money received from family members (other sources of income included “personal remittances, private pensions”); public pensions occupied the largest category of income for this age group at 63.8 percent (Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare 2019, 11). As mentioned, in discussing family I draw on anthropological approaches that maintain that the family is not a functionalist unit that fulfills individual needs, but “an ideological construct with moral implications” (Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanagisako 1997, 79), and this construct deserves close examination (see also Goldfarb 2016, 152). Similarly, Evans reported that urban Chinese women saw marriage as “a framework for the desire to have a child, expressed as an aspect both of selffulfillment and of reciprocity to the parents, and . . . particularly to the mother” (2008, 172). In rural northeastern China throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Yan found a decline of parental power, an increase in youth autonomy, and the rise of young

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women as “active agents in family politics” (2003, 8–9). Similar trends have been reported in urban areas. Farrer finds that men who dated in the 1980s in Shanghai reported strong parental influence on courtship, but by the 1990s young people made their own decisions about whom to date (2002, 182). As mentioned, some single women I knew had siblings. This was possible for several reasons. One is that they were born outside of Shanghai in rural areas where families were permitted to have more than one child. Another reason is that they were born before the one-child policy was fully enforced. A third reason is that their parents paid the large fine (the amount differed according to various factors such as their parents’ income) for having a second child. This contrasts with Hong Kong, where, as mentioned, giving monthly contribution to one’s parents is common practice. In 1971, 60.2 percent of Hong Kong households consisted of four persons or more. By 2016, the percentage dropped to 30.8 percent (Census and Statistics Department 2016, 3). Polygamy was legal under the British colonial government until 1971. Lee points out that the British colonial rule relied on co-optation of local business and rural elites through selective intervention in local social life. This resulted in the prolongation of patriarchal institutions in the “name of respecting local traditions and practices” (2003, 4). The muih zai (slave girl) system also persisted until the 1950s (Lee 2003, 4), and the Hong Kong government has famously upheld patrilineal property inheritance practices instituted in law in 1972 in which males over the age of 18 who can prove that they are descendants of rural villagers may build a “small house” on their farmland without paying the usual heavy property fee. Female descendants are not granted a similar route to inheritance (Zhao and Cheung 2019). As mentioned, the Hong Kong government controls the number of migrants it accepts from the People’s Republic of China. Many families have been separated as they wait for permission from the Hong Kong government to bring children, parents, and spouses from the mainland into Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s public housing policies encourage heterosexual family formation by giving priority to such families (same-sex unions are not recognized) and to elderly over the age of 60 when allocating subsidized rental units. In 2018, 44.6 percent of the population lived in public housing and subsidized home ownership apartments (Housing Department, the Government of the HKSAR 2019). Unmarried persons under 60 years old could apply for public housing units, but in 2018, the success rate for a single person under 60 was only 2.02 percent—with 2,190 units allocated—compared with a success rate of 16.91 percent for families and the elderly. It was also explained to me that in having a daughter, parents will gain a son when the daughter marries because daughters tend to remain close to their

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parents, and daughters will bring their husband into the family fold. If one has a son, however, parents will “lose” the son to his wife’s family when he marries because of a son’s tendency to follow the initiatives of his wife. Six of the single women I knew in Hong Kong lived in apartments that they owned. Three had purchased apartments at low rates through government purchase schemes. Three lived in apartments that they had purchased on the private market together with their sisters during the period of low prices in the mid-2000s. The remainder lived with family members: mostly with their mothers and a few with married brothers and their families. SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, broke out in Guangdong, China, arrived in Hong Kong, and subsequently spread to the rest of the world. As a result of the spread of the disease, property prices fell in Hong Kong in the mid-2000s but have been rising steeply since then. It is often stated that it costs 30 million yen to raise a child in Japan. Only two Tokyo women in my study had purchased apartments. Erika bought an apartment after living in Tokyo in a rented apartment for more than twenty years. A real estate agent knocked on her door and explained that she could buy an apartment and pay the same amount in mortgage that she was paying for rent. Sana bought an apartment in the 1990s when prices fell in the city due to the bursting of the property bubble.

Chapter 5: “Maybe I Just Love Myself Too Much” 1 Borneman argues that in the United States, marriage is posited as “the antithesis of death: an escape or way out of death—out of the abyss of chaos, loneliness, singlehood, incompleteness, and, now, AIDS” (1996, 228). Lahad makes a similar point, arguing that single women are seen as experiencing accelerated aging, leading to their social death (2012; 2017, 22). Lahad and Hamaz point out, in their study of internet sites, that single women are considered “old” while women of the same age may be considered “young mothers.” In other words, the process of aging, normally viewed as a biological category, should be viewed as a symbolic practice with implications for structuring women’s life trajectories (2014). 2 In other words, in contemporary Western society, heterosexual marriage continues to be the only legitimate choice for women. Feminist scholars describe this situation as “compulsory heterosexuality,” drawing on Rich’s (1980) argument that the enforcement of heterosexuality for women assures male rights of physical, economic, and emotional access to women (1980, 647). Feminist scholars have long argued that single women are a marginalized population (Chandler 1991; Gordon 1994; Trimberger 2005), and recent scholarship takes this further and articulates the specific gendered nature of

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3

4

5

6

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that marginalization. In her study of singlehood in Israeli society, Lahad (2012, 2013, 2014, 2017) has demonstrated how discussions of singlehood illustrate patriarchal and heteronormative assumptions and practices in society. Lahad explores how ideas about single women reproduce tropes that evaluate women in relation to their willingness and ability to produce children in a heterosexual marital relationship. Feminist scholars challenge assumptions that “the status and social worth of women is dependent upon their relationships to men” (Lahad 2017, 4) and that women’s primary role is to provide care services for family members. See Farrer and Field (2005) on the bar scene in Shanghai. They state that by the 2000s, rural migrant bar hostesses were rather unimportant in the bar scene. Instead, university-educated, urban white-collar women such as those glamorized in Hui Wei’s novel, Shanghai Baby (2001), were the central players. They write that the glamorous spaces of the night club were “sexual fields” (2005, 176) in which Shanghai women affirmed their sexual appeal. While volunteering has become popular in both Japan and China, full-time or sacrificial volunteering is not fully understood or accepted in the context of the neoliberal rationality of the market economy. Nakano (2000, 2004) found that volunteers in Japan struggled to explain themselves to others who questioned their motives. Ning and Palmer (2020) argue that volunteers in China are unable to articulate their commitment in reference to any moral code and volunteering becomes a private and misunderstood personal choice. Giddens argues that in the current period, which he calls “late” or “highmodernity,” self-identity is a reflexive project. Individual choices of lifestyle become increasingly important, and individuals must make lifestyle choices from a diversity of options in a globalized world (1991, 5). Other researchers have arrived at similar conclusions. Gaetano found that urban women suffered from the lack of social acceptance for singles in contemporary China but they also constructed meaningful lives, “maintaining their independence and integrity, building networks of friends or other singles, and emphasizing kinship roles in the family of origin” (2010, 17). Sandy To (2015, 154) reports that some single women in Shanghai seek sources of meaning and satisfaction outside of marriage in the form of unconventional companionships such as cohabitation, platonic friendship networks, and collective support networks (2015, 154). Wang and Abbott found that single women in Shanghai and Beijing enjoy freedom, autonomy, and independence as well as suffer disadvantages of loneliness, pressure, and stigma for being unmarried (2013, 228). As mentioned, around 10 percent of the Hong Kong population is Christian (GovHK 2016).

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8 As mentioned in previous chapters, the “gong neuih,” or “Hong Kong woman,” rhetoric criticizes Hong Kong women for being overly materialistic, selfish, and focused on luxury-brand goods. 9 As previously mentioned, the Hong Kong property market has been rising sharply since the 1990s, but prices plunged for a few years due to the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 and the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak in 2003. Some participants in my study purchased property with sisters during this period of relatively low property prices. Since 2010, however, the market has become prohibitively expensive, exacerbating a bifurcated class structure in Hong Kong based on property ownership. 10 I have introduced Iris as “Erica” in another publication (Nakano 2015, 174). 11 Akiko Yoshida identified generational differences as important in shaping views of marriage among single women she interviewed in Tokyo. She labelled single women born between 1962 and 1971 the “boom cohort,” and those born between 1972 and 1984 the “recession cohort.” The boom cohort knew that they were expected to marry but were enraptured by the new opportunities available to their generation, which led to marriage delay (2017, 39). The “recession cohort,” on the other hand, did not receive instructions and had to figure out the path to marriage on their own (2017, 39), and not all were successful. 12 Yoshida (2017) describes single women in Japan as “drifting into singlehood.” 13 In Japan, a variety of commercial and nonprofit dating activities are available for young people. Dating events may be organized by matchmaking companies or restaurants, or as a social activity organized by friends. They typically involve dinner gatherings of a total of six to eight women and men in equal numbers. A variety of other formats are possible including speed dating style meetings or casual parties. 14 In Japanese, “sank ” is a popular phrase that refers to a woman’s requirements that a potential marriage partner be well educated, have a high salary, and be tall (k gakureki, k sh ny , k shinch ). 15 The remarks by Kanji Kato are the latest in a series of similar remarks made by ruling Liberal Democrat Party politicians regarding women’s responsibility for fertility. In 2003, former prime minister Yoshiro Mori suggested that childless women should be denied welfare payments. In 2007, Hakuo Yanagisawa, who was serving as health minister at that time, referred to women as “child-bearing machines” (South China Morning Post 2018). 16 Kelsky (2001) observes that lack of career opportunities in Japan makes romanticized images of Western men and Western experiences highly appealing for some Japanese women.

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17 Song refers to Michel Foucault’s (1988) concept of “technologies of the self ” to describe the way that single women create their identities through selfknowledge and self-care (2014, 4). 18 The idea of contributing to the nation through inner cultivation is related to the idea of promoting “suzhi,” or “quality,” in human beings that is associated with “civility, self-discipline and modernity” (Yan 2008, 113). “Suzhi,” writes Yan, “marks a sense and sensibility of the self ’s value in the market” (2008, 113) in the post-Mao construction of a market economy. 19 I have noted in another publication (see Nakano 2017, 53–54) that a national survey of 2,579 respondents conducted by an insurance company found that 54 percent of married women reported being happy, compared to 26.8 percent of never-married women (Meiji Yasuda Seikatsu Fukushi Kenky jo 2011, 4). However, other findings are inconclusive. Tiefenbach and Kohlbacher found that people in Japan who lived with a spouse reported greater levels of happiness than those who did not, but the effects were larger for men than for women (2013, 198). 20 Sociological studies based on interviews show that single women are living fulfilling and happy lives (Anderson and Steward 1994; Gordon 1994; Trimberger 2005). 21 Kitahara describes herself as a feminist and promotes the creation of positive spaces for women to express their sexuality. See Laura Dales’s study (2009) for a fuller discussion of Kitahara’s views. 22 Jesook Song (2014, 72–73) also found that single women she interviewed in South Korea did not mention sexual pleasure even when asked about it directly. Women I knew in Hong Kong and Tokyo also did not mention sexual pleasure. Some women in Shanghai, however, were open in discussing sexual desire. I believe that this is related to the discourses circulating in Chinese society related to speaking openly about desires, including sexual desires, in the 1990s (see Rofel 2007). Similar state-sponsored discourses have not circulated in Hong Kong or Tokyo.

Conclusion 1 Single-person households are the fastest-growing household type in many advanced capitalist societies. In Japan, single persons living alone comprise approximately 30 percent of all households. Observing single-person households primarily in Western societies, Klinenberg (2012) writes that the numbers of people living alone is growing because more and more people can now afford to live alone. He suggests that living alone creates new possibilities for revitalizing cities and creating meaningful connections with friends, neighbors, and communities (2012, 230).

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2 Similarly, China scholar Harriet Evans argued that the strength of family bonds in China challenges the modernization thesis that capitalism, consumerism, increased conjugality, and small families lead to individualism that breaks up the family (2008, 192). 3 Writing about singlehood in Israeli and Western societies, Lahad (2014) cautions against celebrating single women’s free choice, or being “single by choice,” as this conceptualization limits our understanding of the ways that single women’s choices are restricted by their societies. 4 Dales similarly argues that experiences of singlehood vary significantly according to factors such as levels of family support, financial situation, and health (2014, 225). 5 I made a similar point in an earlier publication (see Nakano 2016b, 376). 6 Rachel Moran (2004) argues that second-wave feminism, in emphasizing equal rights in the workplace, has benefitted single women but has also ignored single women due to the emphasis on “having it all,” that is, combining work and family. As the number of single people has risen along with their visibility in popular culture, there is surprisingly little discussion of the identity politics of single women. Moran further points out that political parties, including the Democratic Party in the United States, have ignored single women as a constituency, perhaps afraid to be associated with being “antifamily,” and have instead focused on policies that privilege families (2004, 287). 7 Anthropologists such as Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanagisako (1997) argue that the purpose of studying family relationships is not to arrive at generalizations about actual functional relationships, but to understand the symbolic meanings of such relationships. 8 Recent studies show that institutional elder care is now viewed by some middle-class families as a privilege rather than as a stigma (Zhan, Feng, and Luo 2008). 9 In Japan, parents often have greater financial resources and stability than do their adult children (Izuhara 2010), and younger generations may rely on their parents for housing and subsidized living costs into adulthood. 10 As mentioned in the introduction, two municipalities in Tokyo recently began granting marriage certificates to same-sex couples, but the certificates carry no legal weight. In East Asia, only Taiwan has legalized same-sex marriage.

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Index Abe, Shinzo, 15, 109, 184n21 abortions, 67, 194n33 adoption, 62, 194n29 The Age of ‘Marriage Hunting’ (Konkatsu jidai; Yamada and Shirakawa), 25 The Age of Parasite Singles (Parasaito shinguru no jidai; Yamada), 24–25 All-China Women’s Federation, 23, 127 Amanda, ix, 42, 147 Angel, x, 81–82, 89 arafo, as term, 24, 187n40 Araundo 40—Ch mon no i onnatachi (TV show), 187n40 arranged marriage, 16–17, 18, 193n26 arranged meetings, 49, 59–60, 61, 62–63, 69. See also marriage markets; matchmaking services art business, 98–99 Australia, 54, 78, 126, 134, 137, 154 author’s positionality, 5, 11–12 Ayumi, xii, 136 Beatrice, ix, 146 Becky, xi, 133, 142 Bernice, xi, 52 Bianca, xi, 53 birth control policies in China, 6, 17, 82, 123, 170, 183n14, 201n12 Borneman, John, 144 Bridget Jones’s Diary (column, book, movie), 13, 15–16, 164 Buddhism, 151 Burawoy, Michael, 27–28 Canada, 54, 81, 107, 126, 147, 196n10 capitalism and neoliberal gender expectations, 15–16, 22–23, 28, 164, 172–174. See also economic changes and singlehood caregiving responsibilities: expectations of young women, overview, 3, 13; of

grandparents, 28–29; in Hong Kong, 22, 92, 119; in Japan, 17–18, 21, 29, 93, 119–120, 135–139, 188n50; morality and, 140–141; in Shanghai, 92, 118–119, 122–123; of single men vs. women, 17, 26; state-directed, 16, 19–21; working mothers and, 14–15, 92. See also children; family care systems Catholicism, 134, 193n22 centripetal family, as term, 18, 128 Chandler, Joan, 7 Chang, Kyung-Sup, 22, 185n27 childcare. See caregiving responsibilities children: one-child policy on, 6, 82, 123, 183n14, 201n12; out of wedlock, 1–2, 62, 178, 183n13; Sachiko on, 61–62; single women with, 10, 19, 194n30. See also caregiving responsibilities Chile, 183n13 China: birth control policies in, 6, 17, 82, 123, 170, 183n14, 201n12; cross-border marriages in, 49–50; divorce in, 16, 17, 184n23; domestic labor in, 93; domestic workers in, 185n29; educational statistics in, 70, 73; elder population in, 22; negative stereotypes of single women in, 23; remarriage after divorce in, 38; statecontrolled family systems in, 16–17, 19–20, 22, 185n29; statistics on marriage in, 6; transnational marriage in, 37; women’s labor force in, 14. See also Hong Kong; Shanghai Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 16–17 Chinese Ministry of Education, 23 Chisato, xii, 63–64, 112–113, 137–138, 140 Christianity: on abortion, 67; in Hong Kong, 53–54, 55, 80, 193n22, 203n7; marriage and, 47, 53, 99, 100, 106, 152; in Shanghai, 99 Cindy, ix, 34–35, 39, 146

231

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cohabitation, 1 companionate model of marriage, 34–35, 39, 189n2. See also duty model of marriage; love marriage; marriage; marriage regimes concubinage, 16–17, 18 Confucian tradition, 19, 193n23 consumerism, 28, 162, 163–164, 165, 172, 191n14, 206n2. See also leisure contract marriages, 36, 46, 123. See also marriage; same-sex relationships Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), 6, 73 danshen, as term, 8 democracy movements in Hong Kong, 6, 24, 152. See also Hong Kong Deng Xiaoping, 6, 73 DePaulo, Bella, 165, 176 desire, 36, 65, 146–152, 153. See also leisure; love marriage; marriage; romantic love, as concept destiny, 49, 174–176, 192n20 discrimination: in China, 192n16; against Chinese in Japan, 136; family contribution payments and, 130, 132, 133; in marriage and family systems, 30–31, 66, 151, 161, 174, 190n9, 199n13; from migration, 192n16; through family property ownership, 11, 139, 142–143, 185n29; in workplaces, 15, 55, 83, 85, 87, 88, 104, 114, 141, 163. See also inequality; samesex relationships The Distant Cry of Loser Dogs (Makeinu no t boe; Sakai), 25 divorce: in China, 16, 17, 184n23; in Hong Kong, 18, 184n23; “Narita divorce,” 198n11; property rights and, 126–127, 142; remarriage after, 38, 64, 190n8; rise in rates of, 4, 18–19 dokushin, as term, 8 dokushin kizoku, as term, 24, 163, 194n31 domestic labor, 3, 93, 128–129, 163, 188n46. See also caregiving responsibilities domestic workers: in China, 185n29; in Hong Kong, 10, 21, 93, 119, 128, 163, 177, 186n31, 197n2, 197n4;

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in Japan, 93; in Shanghai, 93, 177, 197n2; in Tokyo, 197n2. See also employment opportunities double entanglement theory, 15 duty model of marriage, 39, 48. See also companionate model of marriage; marriage; marriage regimes Eat Pray Love (Gilbert), 151 economic changes and singlehood, 169–172. See also capitalism and neoliberal gender expectations; Hong Kong; Shanghai; Tokyo education: determining goals for, 88–90; expectations of young women, 13–14, 71; in global cities, 7, 8; of Hong Kong women, 78–83; as obstacle to marriage, 69–70, 75; opportunities for young women, 14, 70; at overseas institutions, 75, 78–79, 81–85, 89–90, 105, 106, 195n6, 196n11; of Shanghai women, 73–78; of Tokyo women, 83–88. See also employment opportunities; self-development Eisenhart, Margaret A., 90 elder care. See caregiving responsibilities Eliza, xi, 53–54, 152 emotional support, 32, 35, 52, 82, 177, 192n17. See also love marriage employment opportunities: in China, 14; in global cities, 7, 8; in Hong Kong, 14–15, 102–108, 116–117; in Japan, 15, 184nn19–20; for men, 30, 193n27; in Shanghai, 94–102; through migration, 40; in Tokyo, 83, 108–109, 112–115, 116, 162; for young women, 13. See also domestic workers; education; workplace discrimination Equal Employment Opportunity Law (1986; Japan), 86, 91 ethnographic methods. See research methods Etsuko, xii, 63 familism, as term, 18, 128 family care systems, 176–179. See also caregiving responsibilities

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Index family contribution payment (ga yuhng), 82, 92, 131–135, 142, 198n7. See also financial security family tensions, 118–121; in Hong Kong, 128–135; in Shanghai, 121– 128; in Tokyo, 135–140. See also caregiving responsibilities Fei cheng wu rao (TV show), 23, 187n37 feminism, 61–62, 182n10, 183n16 Feng, ix, 123 fertility rates, 20, 22, 31, 64, 140, 178, 186n34 fetishization, 190n6 filial piety, 4, 189n54; education and, 75, 90; ga yuhng as, 82, 92–93, 131–135, 142, 198n7; in modern Shanghai, 122– 123. See also caregiving responsibilities; marriage; morality financial security: Cindy on, 34–35; Maggie on, 43; before marriage, 51, 52–53; of Sarah, 98–100; Shirakawa on, 25; of single women, 48, 51, 52–53; through Japan’s pension and taxation systems, 186nn31–32; of women over 45 years old, 161. See also family contribution payment (ga yuhng); property ownership and transfer Fran, xi, 131–132 France, 183n13 friendships, 101, 161, 167, 175–176, 179 gay relationships. See same-sex relationships ga yuhng. See family contribution payment (ga yuhng) Gen, xii, 160 “general privatization of the institution of marriage,” as concept, 17 Giddens, Anthony, 151, 190n9 global cities, as term, 6–7 gong neuih, as term, 23–24, 153, 163, 194n31. See also negative stereotypes of single women Gordon, Tuula, 150 grandparents as caretakers, 28–29. See also caregiving responsibilities Greece, 183n13 group dating, 59. See also arranged meetings

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guanggun, as term, 25 guilt, 193n23 happiness, 17, 24, 27, 152–157, 165–168. See also desire; leisure; marriage; self-development; self-worth Hikari, 160 Holland, Dorothy C., 90 Hong Kong, 170–171; births out of wedlock in, 2; caregiving responsibilities in, 29, 92, 119; Christianity in, 53–54, 55, 80, 193n22, 203n7; cross-border marriages in, 49–50; description of, 6, 10, 102, 169; domestic labor in, 128, 163, 197n2, 197n4; domestic workers in, 10, 21, 93, 119, 128, 163, 177, 186n31, 197n2, 197n4; educational decisions in, 78–83; educational statistics in, 14, 70, 78; elder population in, 22; family contribution payment in, 82, 92, 131–135, 142, 198n7; family tensions in, 128–135, 142; housing costs in, 35, 51, 133, 189n1, 193n21; living arrangements in, 1; marriage regime in, 2, 3, 16, 27, 48–58; marriage vs. work in, 102–108, 116–117; moral worth of single women in, 145, 152–157, 164–165; negative stereotypes of single women in, 23–24, 25; population statistics in, 26; property ownership and transfer in, 133, 135, 142, 152; protest movements in, 6, 24, 152; remarriage after divorce in, 38; state-controlled family systems in, 18, 20–21, 22, 186n30; statistics on single women in, 1, 48–49, 59, 181n1, 192n19; transnational marriage in, 37; women labor force in, 14–15. See also China; names of specific women housing costs: in Hong Kong, 35, 51, 133, 189n1, 193n21; in Shanghai, 35, 171, 189n1; in Tokyo, 11. See also living arrangements; property ownership and transfer Huiling, ix, 101 hukou (residence registration), 9, 45, 187n36, 196n8 humanitarian aid, 148–149 hypergamy. See marrying up

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Iceland, 183n13 ie system, 17–18, 119–120, 139 individualism, 3–4, 66, 134, 194n31, 206n2 inequality, 141–143. See also discrimination; wage gap infidelity, 51–52, 179. See also monogamy Iris, xi, 56, 57, 133–134, 153, 155–156 Israel, 175, 183n13, 203n2, 206n3 Iwashita, Kumiko, 24, 187n41 Jacky, ix, 46, 123–124, 128, 147 Japan: caregiving responsibilities in, 17–18, 21, 29, 93, 119–120, 188n50; domestic labor in, 93; educational statistics in, 13, 70; employment laws in, 86, 91; ie system in, 17–18, 119–120, 139; pension system in, 161; remarriage after divorce in, 38; state-controlled family systems in, 17–18, 21, 22; statistics on single women in, 1, 181n3; terms for single women in, 24–25; transnational marriage in, 37, 190n4; women labor force in, 15, 184nn19–20. See also Tokyo Jean, ix, 42–43 Jing, ix, 47 Jones, Gavin, 1 Joni, 154–155 Kam, Lucetta, 48 Karen, x; caregiving responsibilities of, 125– 126, 127–128, 141; on happiness, 148, 168; on self-development, 47, 100–101, 149–150, 151 Kathy, x, 101–102, 150 Kato, Kanji, 160, 161 Kazuko, xii, 140 Kitahara, Minori, 167–168 Koizumi, Junichiro, 160 konkatsu, as term, 187n43 Kotoe, xii, 112–113 labor migration, 101, 167, 190n5. See also migration “lalas,” 100. See also same-sex relationships language, 11–12, 185n28, 187n38 lao gu niang, as term, 23 Law of Compulsory Education (1986; China), 73

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Lee, x, 76–77, 78, 89, 146–147 leftover women (shengnü), as term, 23, 72, 127, 173, 176 leisure, 141, 145, 147–148, 162–164, 198n11. See also consumerism; happiness; self-development lesbian relationships. See same-sex relationships LGBTQ sexual orientations and relationships. See same-sex relationships Liberal Democratic Party (LDP; Japan), 160, 165 liminal state, 139, 175 Lisa, xi, 56–57, 152–153 living arrangements: cohabitation, 1; shared apartments, 10, 101, 104. See also housing costs; property ownership and transfer long-term care insurance, 21 Lori, 53 loser dogs (makeinu), as term, 25, 115 lou, as term, 25 love marriage, 193n26. See also companionate model of marriage; desire; emotional support; marriage; romantic love, as concept Luna, x, 148, 168 Ma, Nuo, 187n37 Madoka, xii, 136–137 Maggie, xi, 43, 69, 77–78, 88 Maki, xii, 158–159, 161 Malaysia, 19, 149 Margaret, x, 123 Marie, x, 42, 147, 174, 179 Marion, x, 126, 127–128, 141, 149, 150– 151, 167 marriage: by arrangement, 16–17, 18, 193n26; capitalism and neoliberal expectations of, 15–16; Christianity on, 47, 53, 99, 100, 106, 152; companionate model of, 34–35, 39, 189n2; as duty, in Shanghai, 2, 16, 26–27; duty model of, 39, 48; expectations of young women, overview, 13; financial security and, 34–35; later marriage, rise of, 4; loss of property ownership and, 138–139, 142, 175; as optional, in Hong Kong, 2, 16, 27, 134–135; as social expectation, in Tokyo,

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Index

2, 16, 27; statistics on, 1, 40, 71; transnational, 36–38, 189n3, 190n4, 190n7, 191n11. See also Hong Kong; marriage regimes; Shanghai; Tokyo marriage hunting, as term, 25, 66, 187n43 Marriage Law (1950; China), 16–17 Marriage Law (1980; China), 17 Marriage Law (2011; China), 185n29 marriage markets, 36–39, 44, 60, 66, 122–123, 189n53. See also matchmaking services Marriage Reform Ordinance (1971; Hong Kong), 18 marriage regimes, 34–40; defined, 2–3; Hong Kong, 2, 3, 16, 27, 48–58; Shanghai, 2, 3, 16, 26–27, 29, 39, 40–48; Tokyo, 2, 3, 16, 58–65. See also marriage marrying down, 42. See also financial security; marriage marrying up, 32, 60, 71, 151, 191n14. See also marriage mass-dating culture, 17 matchmaking services: in Hong Kong, 18; in Japan, 18, 25; in Shanghai, 122; on TV show, 23. See also arranged meetings; marriage markets; online dating sites matrimania, 165–166 meif n, as term, 8, 182n11 Mei Kwan, xi, 55, 129–130, 153, 154 Melissa, xi, 106–107 mental illness, 134 Mexico, 183n13 migration, 54; of author, 12; discrimination and, 192n16; residency status of, 9–10, 182n12; for work, 101, 167, 190n5 mikon, as term, 8, 182n11 Ming, xi, 130, 154 Mingxia, x, 75–76, 77–78, 97–98, 102 misogyny, 186n35 Miyuki, xii, 111–112, 114, 159–160 modernization theories, 3–4, 182n6, 186n33 monogamy, 18. See also infidelity morality, 121, 134, 140–141. See also caregiving responsibilities; filial piety; marriage; religious beliefs; single women motherhood. See children; marriage; working mothers

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Nami, xiii, 61, 110 “Narita divorce,” 198n11 national dreams, 145, 164–165 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 175 National People’s Congress (China), 14 negative stereotypes of single women, 187n39; as burden, 161–162; as gong neuih, 23–24, 153, 163, 194n31; as leftover women, 23, 72, 127, 173, 176; as parasite, 24–25, 140, 163, 194n31; as spinster, 184n17; as third type of human being, 69, 115, 194n1. See also single women neoliberalism, 15–16, 22–23, 28, 172–174, 188n47 never-married women, as term, 8. See also single women New Civil Code (1947; Japan), 17 Nicole, x, 44–45, 95–96, 124, 128 Nora, x, 96–97 Noriko, xiii, 61, 113 Ochiai, Emiko, 186n33 Ogura, Chikako, 183n15 ohitorisama, as term, 24, 187n41 Okano, Kaori, 183n15 one-child policy, 6, 82, 123, 183n14, 201n12 Ong, Aihwa, 19, 121 online dating sites, 44, 49, 64, 66, 69. See also matchmaking services otaku, as term, 25–26 overseas education, 75, 78–79, 81–85, 89–90, 105, 106, 195n6, 196n11. See also education Padilla, Mark, 32, 189n51 parasites, as term, 24–25, 140, 163, 194n31. See also negative stereotypes of single women Peggy, xi, 105–106 Penny, x, 148, 149, 151 pension system, 119, 161, 186n31. See also caregiving responsibilities People’s Park, Shanghai, 44, 122–123 pleasure. See desire; happiness; leisure polygamy, 16–17, 80 premarital sexual relationships, 18

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236

Index

property ownership and transfer, 202n19, 202n22; divorce and, 126–127, 142; gender inequality in, 11, 120–121, 139, 142–143, 185n29; in Hong Kong, 133, 135, 152; of potential partners, 126–127; in Tokyo, 136, 138–140, 142–143, 161. See also financial security; housing costs; living arrangements protest movements in Hong Kong, 6, 24, 152 “pure relationship,” as concept, 190n9 queer relationships. See same-sex relationships religious beliefs, 53–54, 55; groups statistics, 193n22; marriage and, 47, 53, 99, 100, 106, 134, 152; of Penny, 151. See also Christianity; morality remarriage, 38, 64, 190n8 reproductive choice, 19, 20 reproductive technologies, 19, 67, 178, 185n24, 194n32 research methods, 2, 5–13, 26 research participants, ix–xiii, 2, 10–11. See also names of specific women residence registration (hukou), 9, 45, 187n36, 196n8 Rika, xiii, 138–139, 140, 160, 161 Rofel, Lisa, 146, 147 romantic love, as concept, 35–36, 147, 176, 189n3, 191n12. See also desire; love marriage Ronnie, xi, 80–81, 83 Rosenberger, Nancy, 183n15 Ruth, xii, 56, 155 Sachiko, xiii, 60, 61–62 Sakai, Junko, 25 Saki, xiii, 87 Sally, xii, 54 Samantha, x, 43–44, 146 same-sex relationships, 19; in China, 185n26; financial security and, 48; heterosexual marriages and, 36, 46, 123; in Japan, 185n25; in Shanghai, 100; state exclusion of, 23, 67; stigma of, 1; support in, 167; in Taiwan, 1, 19. See also sexuality

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Sana, xiii, 138, 140, 157–158, 159, 202n22 Sarah, x, 98–100, 102 Sassen, Saskia, 7 second class status of single women, 144–145 second wives, 18 Seiko, 161 self-development, 149–152, 163, 169. See also education; happiness; leisure; travel, as leisure activity selfishness, 24, 90, 155, 157, 159, 176, 204n8. See also negative stereotypes of single women; self-development self-worth: in Hong Kong single women, 152–157; of Shanghai single women, 145, 146–152; in Tokyo single women, 145, 157–163. See also happiness Sex and the City (book and TV show), 13, 35, 151, 179 sexual harassment, 192n16 sexual intimacy, 167–168 sexuality, 7; changing views on, 4, 18–19; in China, 41. See also desire; same-sex relationships Shanghai, 170; caregiving responsibilities in, 92, 122–123; Christianity in, 99; description of, 6, 94; domestic workers in, 93, 177, 197n2; educational decisions in, 73–78; educational statistics in, 14, 70; family tensions in, 121–128; housing costs in, 35, 171, 189n1; hukou in, 9, 45, 196n8; living arrangements in, 1, 177; marriage regime in, 2, 3, 16, 26–27, 29, 39, 40–48; marriage vs. work in, 94–102; moral worth of single women in, 145, 146–152; one-child policy in, 6, 82, 123, 183n14, 201n12; property ownership in, 171–172; romantic love in, 36; statistics on marriage in, 40, 71; statistics on single women in, 59, 181n1; women labor force in, 14. See also China; names of specific women shared apartment arrangements, 10, 101, 104. See also housing costs; living arrangements; property ownership and transfer shengnü (leftover women), as term, 23, 72, 127, 173, 176

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Index

Shintaro, Ishihara, 186n35 Shiori, xiii, 113–114 Shirakawa, Touko, 25 silk industry, 192n18 sin, 193n23 Singapore, 140; education and birth rates in, 195n4; family and gender roles in, 19, 31, 32; housing costs in, 189n1, 193n21; profertility policies in, 178; transnational marriage in, 190n4 single aristocracy (dokushin kizoku), as term, 24, 163, 194n31 single men, 24–26, 30–31, 193n27 single mothers, 10, 19, 23, 194n30 singletons: caregiving responsibilities of, 20, 28–29, 77; education and family support of, 70, 73–74; marriage expectations of, 74, 121–128; as term, 73, 184n17 single women, 169–179; agency of, 31–33; career and family ambitions of, 69, 115– 117; as category, 182n10; changes in societal roles and, 3–4, 169–172; children of, 1–2, 62, 183n13; defined, 8; desire of, 36, 65, 146–152, 153; family-oriented but not married, 65–68; happiness for, 17, 24, 27, 152–157, 165–168; in history of southern China, 192n18; leisure of, 141, 145, 147–148, 162–164, 198n11; in a liminal state, 139, 175; previous studies on, 30–31; as scapegoat for global economic challenges, 22–23; second class status of, 144–145; self-development of, 149–152, 163, 169; statistics on, 1, 58, 59, 181n1, 192n19, 193n25. See also marriage; negative stereotypes of single women Siu Lan, xii, 55, 103–104, 131, 153–154 Song, Jesook, 154, 183n15, 188n48 South Korea: family systems in, 22, 185n27; housing in, 154; identity of single women in, 163–164; transnational marriage in, 190n4; travel of single women from, 162–163 spinster stereotype, 184n17 state-controlled family systems, 16–23, 186n30 substance abuse, 188n50 Sue, xii, 156 Suk Jing, 133

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Taiwan, 1, 19, 190n4. See also China Teo, Youyenn, 31, 32, 140 Teruko, xiii, 62–63, 85, 88, 160, 163 third type of human being (di san zhong), as phrase, 69, 115, 194n1. See also negative stereotypes of single women Ting, Kwok Fai, 192n17 To, Sandy, 31, 183n15, 203n6 Tokyo: caregiving responsibilities in, 21, 29, 93, 119–120, 135–139; description of, 5; educational decisions in, 83–88; educational statistics in, 13; first marriage age in, 1; housing costs in, 11; marriage regime in, 2, 3, 16, 58–65; marriage vs. work in, 108–115, 116; moral worth of single women in, 145, 157–163, 165; population statistics in, 26; property ownership and transfer in, 136, 138– 140, 142–143, 161; statistics on single women in, 58, 181n1, 193n25; women labor force in, 15. See also Japan; names of specific women Tomoko, xiii, 91 Toni, xii, 51, 52 transnational marriage, 36–38, 189n3, 190n4, 190n7, 191n11 travel, as leisure activity, 141, 145, 147– 148, 162–163, 198n11. See also overseas education Trudy, xii, 52–53, 104–105 trust, 192n17 Tsang, Donald, 187n36 Turkey, 183n13 Ueno, Chizuko, 24 United Kingdom, 188n47 United States: abortion in, 67; domestic labor in, 93; housing costs in, 193n21; marriage in, 144, 181n2; migration to, 54, 76, 78, 87, 126; singlehood and dating in, 38, 40, 41, 65, 90, 165, 176 urban migration. See labor migration; migration virginity, 18, 184n22, 193n23. See also sexuality volunteerism, 148–149

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wage discrimination, 14, 15, 21. See also workplace discrimination wage gap, 94–95. See also discrimination; inequality weihun, as term, 8, 182n11 Wing Yee, xii, 79–80, 153, 154, 155 women. See single women “womenomics” policy, 15 Wong, Odalia, 107 working mothers, 14–15, 91–92. See also caregiving responsibilities; children; employment opportunities workplace discrimination, 15, 21, 55, 83, 85, 87, 88, 104, 114, 141, 163. See also

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discrimination; employment opportunities; wage discrimination work satisfaction, 152–153. See also employment opportunities Yamada, Masahiro, 24–25 Yasue, xiii, 137, 160 Yoshida, Akiko, 183n15 young women. See single women Yui, xiii, 86–87, 88 zung neuih, as term, 23–24

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About the Author Lynne Y. Nakano is professor of Japanese studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Author of Community Volunteers in Japan: Everyday Stories of Social Change, she has written and spoken extensively on diverse populations such as low-income volunteers, families dealing with developmental disability, and the rise of singlehood and changing gender roles in Japan.

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