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Dear Editor,

I come from an old-fashioned family. My marriage was arranged for me.... I was fourteen when engaged. I tried to get to know her but had no success [since] she is completely uneducated and very stubborn. I was so completely put off by her that I left home three days after the wedding.

I have been reading about the new-style marriage. It is absolutely beyond my power to remake this woman into a lovable wife [and] I believe it is necessary for my happiness as well as for hers that we get a divorce. Are there legal entanglements? May I fall in love with someone else before I get the divorce?

This letter, written in Shanghai in the years before worldwide depression and war struck in the 1930s, was one of scores that arrived daily in the popular “Readers’ Mailbox” of the newspaper Shenghuo zhoukan, published weekly by the Chinese Society for Vocational Education. The paper’s energetic editor, Zou Taofen, doubled as career and moral advisor—Stephen R. Covey rolled into Ann Landers—for a growing middle class that author Wen-hsin Yeh claims in her recently published book, Shanghai Splendor, blazed the trail for modernity in China.

Professor Yeh herself is one of the scholarly trailblazers overturning the traditional emphases of China studies in the West. Since Mao’s 1949 revolution, according to Yeh, the political right has been obsessed with the question of “who lost China” to the communists, while the left strove to explain the revolution as a response to European and American colonialism and capitalist exploitation. She argues convincingly that the changing lives and shifting ethos of an emerging middle class, like the young letter-writer above, had a more decisive impact on the country’s history.

Tradition and modernity clash in 1930s
Shanghai

These new Chinese moderns came of age neither in the provinces nor in Beijing, but in the port city of Shanghai where, for a century after the Opium War (1839–42), increasing trade with the so-called foreign concessions and internal industrialization created fabulous wealth. There, young men and women strove to embody the virtues of hard work and self-improvement they believed would lead to prosperity and happiness.

The family was modernizing, too, and becoming nuclear. As Yeh explained in an interview at Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies, which she directs, “Under the ancient Confucian system, a son’s filial piety to his mother is much more important than his devotion to his wife. In the early 1920s a new generation of radical students argued that conjugal bonds ought to be part of the relationship between men and women.” Romantic love, portrayed in department store advertisements and promoted as a virtue in Zou’s newspaper (which extolled the “sweetness of love” and the “quest for happiness”), trumped traditional family values.

Thus the modern Chinese wife learned “the virtue of refined manners, educated language, smart household management, and sound judgment.” For the first time among women, this led to school and to a greater worldliness. Inevitably, sexual mores were also in flux—and a source of family conflict. “Lately I have grown very close to someone,” a young woman wrote to “Readers’ Mailbox.” “Our love has led to physical intimacy ... and I am carrying the fruit of our love!” But she added ominously, “My father threatens to put me to death.”

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