Response Paper: New Breeds in Modern Urban Life (China)

After the May Fourth Movement, Chinese citizens experienced a “transitional generation” in which the meanings and cultural ideas of family and roles of men and women in the society were redefined. Through a more creative piece, A Happy Family, Lu Xun, China’s revolutionary literary figure, presented his ideas of what the nucleus family in the city might be like. Glosser’s article takes this idea further and expands it to household management and women’s roles as depicted by You Huaigao. Whereas, the film Wan jia deng huo explores this issues in finer nuances portraying the possible conflicts that rose from adopting a modern urban life after living the traditional lifestyle that they were formerly accustomed to for centuries.

The concept of an ideal family in China is portrayed from different perspectives in each source. While all the sources show how the idea of a family was very much Western-influenced and had become more materialistic, they differ in the interpretations of how effective or suitable this was for the Chinese society at the time. The writer in A Happy Family includes elements such as Western-returned students, plenty of rooms, Arabic numerals in his story, which all signify the movement towards modernization. However, ironically, throughout the story, he struggles to write about this family, being distracted by household matters such as paying for firewood or tending to his daughter. This prompts a question in the readers’ mind of the possibility that a normal family in the early 20th Century China would be able to achieve this “ideal family”. Was this just a vision in most people’s minds at the time of transition? How could they find a perfect balance between maintaining the traditional culture roots with their new ways of living?

For You Huaigao, the vision of the family as an emotional locus had transformed “to a configuration of the family as an economic unit.” The function of families had therefore been reduced down to production and...