Kim Craig
SUNY Binghamton
SOC 605 - Problems with Method
Dr. Mahua Sarkar
Spring 2019
I. INTRODUCTION
This essay explores the ways in which Chinese woman have learned about sex over the last 30 years while considering challenges of interviewing remotely and tackling a taboo subject matter as well as how relationships with informants shapes the oral histories produced. Interviewing three Chinese women of different ages, I attempted to uncover how knowledge of physical intimacy was acquired within the intersection of a government that is heavily involved in the sexual habits of its citizens and a culture where such matters are not discussed. The varying ages of informants offers a window into the ways in which handing the topic has shifted throughout the last three decades. The stories collected share similar themes of embarrassment and social pressures to be a “good girl.” All three women shared their struggles to follow what some cognitive scientists call “social scripts” (St Clair, 2005).
II. RESEARCH METHODS
The three women selected for this project ranged in level of familiarity from close friend to professional acquaintance. Having lived in China, I was fortunate to be able to leverage existing relationships and was curious to assess how our relationship would shape the interview outcome. All informants were contacted first via email giving them a brief summary of the project. If they accepted, I followed up with a list of ten questions and a summary of the interview format as well as future use of the data. All woman chose their own pseudonyms during the interviews which were recorded and lasted 60-90 minutes. Depending on their locations, the interviews were either conducted face-to-face or via wechat video.
III. INFORMANTS
ZAI(1993)
Zai is a 25-year-old lesbian from Wuhan. She is the eldest child of divorced parents who each have significantly younger second children from their second marriages. Predominantly raised by her traditional upper-class father, Zai has struggled to gain her father’s acceptance of her sexuality and has used English as a means of escaping his domination.
I first met Zai as my ESL student in Beijing when she was 19-years-old. I was instantly drawn to her outcast status and we became close friends despite our age difference. I helped her to get into grad school in the US where she continually talked about her hope of finding an American girl to marry, allowing her to become a US citizen and escape the homophobic oppression back home.
When I interviewed her, she had just been forced to move back to China by her father, who had been financially supporting her throughout her schooling. Her current goal is to find a job and financial independence which she feels would allow her freedom of sexual expression: “I need to find money. I need to find a job. I need to be independent so I can choose the people I love... so I have no choice. I must listen to him [while I’m still financially dependent upon him].“
LI YOU (1983)
Li You is a 35-year-old Chinese teacher currently living the United States. She is from a middle-upper-class family of intellectuals in Fuzhou where she is the only child. Her father is a professor of Chinese literature and her mother is a librarian. She has never been married and, while very interested in looking at and talking about men, seems timid to approach them. We met when I took a Chinese class that she taught. Though very close in age, our relationship was always very professional. During the interview she spoke a great deal about her desire to speak to men and made references to early memories of being shamed that led to her current insecurities.
My interview with Li You began with her pulling up pictures of famous Chinese actors on her tablet and asking me in Mandarin if I thought they were handsome. I wasn’t sure if this was a way to practice vocabulary she had taught me or to ease us into the subject matter at hand. The pseudonym she chose carries significance as it’s a character from the textbook that we had used in her class. The character, Li You, is very successful at winning the attention of all of the male characters in the book, especially the coveted Wang Peng, much to the chagrin of the other female characters (see Figure 1). I interpreted the selection of this name coupled with her interview as a reveal of her desire to express a sexuality that has been deeply repressed.
JUN (1963)
Jun is a 55-year-old English teacher from Beijing. She has been married for nearly 20 years and has never had children. We were coworkers when I lived in Beijing and would often take our lunch breaks together. She quickly became my go-to for any questions I had about Chinese culture. I was surprised by how open-minded she was considering her age. Others of her generation that I had met were not so willing to share intimate details of their lives. Cultural taboos were a common topic of discussion and it was her story of how she learned about sex that was the inspiration for this project.
While she originally agreed to participate in this research, she eventually declined the recorded portion of the interview citing insecurity about her English abilities. I did not press further and have used the limited data collected in our correspondence from email and wechat conversation for this paper.
IV. FINDINGS
All three informants insisted that they had no “real” sex education in their youth and that most of what they learned was in secret or from friends. Because I originally framed the research around “sex education” and not simply “where did you learn about sex?” (which in retrospect realize would have been better), most of the stories began in middle school as this was the only formal sexual education they received.
SCHOOL
Only the younger two informants remembered having any sort of sex ed class in school. For both of them the information was delivered on a single day in a biology class at the age of 13. The physical act of sex was never mentioned. According to Li You, the topics covered that day were purely anatomical: “... [They just explained] the differences between man and woman. How the man and woman can have a baby. Like this cell goes into that cell and then [the baby is] born. They don’t talk about sex. Just biology.”
Zai’s experience seemed to mirror Li You’s. Although Zai did mention that sexually
transmitted diseases were discussed, but nothing regarding prevention or conception was covered. Both women remember this day as being extremely embarrassing, due to being seated next to peers of the opposite sex. They both remember the information as new and perplexing.
FAMILY
When asked if they ever talked about sex with their parents, the women’s reactions reached peak volume, “NEVER!!! Nobody would talk about that. Hahaha...It is Chinese tradition.” (Zai) and “OH NEVER NEVER NEVER talk [about] that...they will think you’re mad [crazy]...Never talk about that.” (Li You).
The closest thing to a sex talk that Li You received from her mother was about menstruation: “my mom told me that when girls grow up that this will come and then if you grow up a little more, then you can have a baby. Just like that...nothing more.” The assumption was that they were to follow the social script and be “good girls”. Good girls focus on their studies and don’t worry about boys or sexual feelings until they were out of college and ready for marriage. In fact, both Li You and Zai had parallel stories of being shamed for writing about romantic feelings in their diaries during middle school. Zai had written about falling in love with her female best friend. Later her mother admitted to reading her diary and told her that she was just confused about her feelings and that it was simply a friendship. This was the earliest memory Zai had of what would become a lifetime battle with her parents over her sexuality. It was around this age that she was also asked to start behaving and “dressing more like a girl”.
Li You’s experience was more traumatic. She was once scolded by her mother who used a direct quote from her diary about liking a boy as ammunition in her criticism. Quoting Li You verbatim scarred her to the point where she remembers this as the moment where she didn’t “even wanna [to] talk with boys anymore”.
It’s clear that the paternal reactions to the girl’s early sexual expression left deep roots in how the women approach relationships today. Zai is still struggling to gain her parents acceptance of her sexuality, while Li You still avoids talking to men.
Though most parents don’t allow their children to date until after college, Zai’s parents encouraged her to find a boyfriend when she was 19-years-old as soon as they learned that she had a girlfriend. Li You’s parents followed the dominant social script and didn’t push for her to find a boyfriend until she had graduated with her bachelor’s degree. But Li You was more interested on getting a graduate degree than finding a man. The social pressure to find a suitable husband has led both of these women to consider marrying gay male friends to please their parents and mitigate their fears or disinterest in (heterosexual) sexual intimacy.
OTHER SOURCES
With very little information given at school, and no constructive discussions happening at home, all three informants learned about the intricacies of sex through alternative means. This is where three stories diverge drastically.
As mentioned earlier, Li You’s mother was a librarian. During the holiday breaks from
school, Li You would spend her days at her mother’s work. This gave her an opportunity to read whatever she wanted without having to check out any of the material: “I can search for the books I want... I don’t need to let my mom know my reading record...” Her favorite genres were romance novels and Japanese Manga (graphic novels). While none of these stories were explicit in their content, she was able to grasp the concept of sex through the subtleties of their stories and illustrations. It was from this reading that Li You felt that she obtained the bulk of her sexual knowledge.
Zai, who was not such an avid reader, relied on older friends to pass on their wisdom. Once in high school, she befriended an older lesbian who she had met through her cousin, Xiao Jia. It was here that she learned about the mechanics of lesbian sex and how to pleasure a woman. Through an extremely embarrassing conversation and a short video clip, Zai was brought into the lesbian sisterhood, though it would be a few more years until she could put her training to the test.
MEDIA
As mentioned earlier, it was Jun’s entrance into sexual awareness that spawned my interest
in how the Chinese learn about intercourse. A full generation older than Li You, Jun came of age in a time that was much more conservative. As far as she remembers, there was no class in school that taught anything resembling the anatomy lesson that the younger two informants received. But, like them, she confirmed that there was no talk of sex at home. It wasn’t until her wedding day in 1995, at the age of 23, that she gained full knowledge of penetrative sex. Before she shared a bed with her husband for the first time, she and her then husband-to-be were made to watch a six-minute instructional video produced by the Chinese government that explained what to expect on their first night together. It was only after they finished watching the movie that they were permitted to sign the paperwork that legally sealed their marital status. For years I tried to find a copy of this video. Finally, with Jun’s help, we found the slightly updated version from 1998. Though different, she assured me that it was the same information. After talking to some younger friends that recently gotten married, I learned that the video was no longer compulsory at the Marriage Registry Office.
The film begins with a young girl who struggles to keep her boyfriend from touching her
in public, having to physically remove his hand from her shoulder. This cuts to their wedding day, were the couple is in their honeymoon suite and she no longer has to fight the man’s affection. He unzips her wedding dress and carries her naked to the bed. Everything is strategically cropped. When the couple start to have sex under the blankets, the film cuts to rotoscope animation, which acts as a sort of x-ray vision, allowing the audience to witness the couple’s nudity. This is intercut with a anatomical illustration which explains the mechanics of penetration (see Figure 2). Only the missionary position is attempted, and the husband falls asleep immediately after climaxing, leaving his new bride to watch him sleep.
But Jun wasn’t the only one to learn about sex through media. Li You and Zai both shared
stories of watching the 1997 film Titanic and realizing something was “different.” Li You
remembers watching the film with both of her parents for the first time while in middle school. She explained that most foreign films in China are edited before they reach theaters and would never include a sex scene. But unbeknownst to her parents, they had gotten an unedited, bootleg copy and were just as surprised as Li You to see Rose and Jack naked in the back seat of a car with steamed windows. Li You’s father quickly sent her out of the room to get snacks, only calling her back in once everyone’s clothes were back on. Li You remembers watching the remainder of the film with heightened anxiety in the air and noted that the event was never mentioned again until this interview.
Porn was also mentioned by all three women as a resource that they assumed most other
people were using to learn about sex, especially, they assumed, their male peers. None of them claimed porn consumption as a personal method of educating themselves, and I don’t think it was solely out of bashfulness. The younger two women spoke a great deal about censorship laws on the Chinese internet and the fear of being monitored. Li You expressed great interest in how Chinese men were able to find porn with all the restrictions. “Guys know everything,” she concluded.
V. PROBLEMS WITH METHOD
Alessandro Portelli describe oral history as being the result of dialog between two people:
“Documents of oral history are always the result of a relationship of a shared project in which both the interviewer and interviewee are involved together, if not necessarily in harmony.” (Portelli, 2016. p.55). The co-creation of the oral histories I have collected was dependent upon a number of dynamics between myself and my informants, including our prior relationship, the environment in which the interview took place, the sensitivity of the subject matter, and the inherent power dynamics that exist in an interview. Had any of the variables been even slightly altered, the resulting stories collected would likely have been different.
RELATIONSHIPS
I vary in closeness to the women selected for the study as mentioned in section II. Going
into this research, I assumed that the degree of proximity would directly correspond with a level of expressed vulnerability. Having known Jun and Zai for over five years and having had extensive conversations with both of them on the subject of sex, I assumed their interviews would have been less work on my part. I was surprised, then, when Jun decided last minute that she didn’t want to commit to the recorded portion of the interview. It had been four years since we had seen each other face to face, and I will not assume to know the exact reason for her discomfort (perhaps it really was an insecurity with language abilities), but I think our time apart played a role in her reluctance.
Zai’s interview also had not gone as expected. Unlike my relationship with Jun, Zai and I
have remained very close for the last six years and we had just seen one another in New York a few months before the interview. We have taken to calling each other 妹妹 “meimei” (little sister) and 姐姐 “jiejie” (big sister) and end every conversation with “I love you”. Our friendship was founded on a shared sexual identity and we have always been very open talking about sex. What was surprising was that 20 minutes into our interview, which was recorded over wechat, I realized that there another person in the room with her. Her elder cousin, Xiao Jia, had been listening to our entire conversation. Once this was revealed, Xiao Jia instantly became a 3rd person in the interview and was quick to correct Zai if she felt that she wasn’t being totally honest. The most revealing moment happened when Xiao Jia outed Zai for having a boyfriend when she was in high school. Zai was instantly embarrassed and defended herself telling me, “it was a long time ago” and that she “just wanted to try it and see”. I found it odd that she had never mentioned this before.
It is only later that it occurred to me that she was trying to keep up with identities that we had co-created for each other over our six years of friendship. The idea that she could be interested in men didn’t fit the narrative I had of Zai. Even more interesting was that up to this point in the interview she insisted on going by her real name because, almost as a political point; she wanted her truth known. Only once the fact that she had a boyfriend in high school surfaced, did she quickly decide to take a pseudonym. When questioned about this sudden caution, she said she didn’t want her family to find out that she had been dating this young. I found this adherence to the social script intriguing as I assumed her lesbian identity would be more taboo if on public display than a teenage boyfriend whom she never experimented with sexually.
Li You’s interview was the most surprising of all. Up until that point we had only had a
professional teacher-student relationship. While she agreed to do the interview, stating that she thought the subject matter was important, she did have a few stipulations. She did not want to discuss specific details of her sex life because she thought it would be embarrassing to continue to teach me if I knew too much. We agreed to speak in vague terms and that she would be more the spokesperson for her generation, sharing her understanding of her peers’ experiences. I went into the interview thinking that it may be unusable but was pleasantly surprised by the direction in which our conversation unfolded. While we avoided intimate details of her sex life, she was very open to sharing her criticisms of the restrictions and high expectations placed on the Chinese women’s sexuality. Her story was by far the most poetic, and one that seems to be echoed by many women of her generation.
ENVIRONMENTS
The spaces and technologies surrounding the interview were also definite factors affecting
the stories produced. Only Li You’s interview was conducted face-to-face while Zai and Jun were captured remotely through email and wechat.
I originally suggested that Li You and I meet somewhere off campus, assuming that she would feel more comfortable talking about such a sensitive subject away from her place of employment. She insisted that it was fine and more convenient for both of us to just meet in her office. We ended up using an empty office space across the hall from her shared office which was quite messy. She assured me that we won’t be disturbed. I could tell that she was worried about being overheard by her colleagues as there were portions of the interview where she started whispering, though they weren’t the parts I would have predicted. The most notable example was when she only mouthed the word “lesbian” when describing her first impression of me. I’m unclear if this was a way of making sure I wasn’t offended or if it was such a taboo word for her that she didn’t feel comfortable saying it out loud. Once I explained my sexual identity, she seemed to feel more comfortable using the word although still in reduced volume.
Meanwhile, Zai’s interview need to be coordinated between our 12-hour time difference.
We decided to chat on a Saturday at 8:30AM my time, 8:30PM her time. I had just woken up while she was just arriving home after a long day. We were both clearly tired but tried to be in high spirits for the sake of the project. There was a constant delay and some audio issues that lead to some minor misunderstandings that became obvious during the transcribing process. I could tell that we were both a bit annoyed by having to constantly repeat ourselves, though didn’t let our frustration overtake the interview. I think that had we been able to conduct the interview face-to-face, in the same time zone, our wavelengths would have been more in sync.
The same goes for Jun. Because all our communication had been over email and text, I
couldn’t get a sense of her eventual reservations. I feel that had I been in Beijing and able to talk to her directly, I would have been able to resolve any of her discomforts. Because of the distance and not wanting to pressure her too much, I was willing to work within her restrictions.
SUBJECT MATTER
I knew going into this that the restricted topic of sex was going to be an obstacle through
which I would need to maneuver. I had originally reached out to seven women and two of the four that declined were uncomfortable with discussing the topic. The three that were initially willing to participate may have been acting out of loyalty to our established relationships. I couldn’t help but wonder how comfortable they actually were talking about their sex lives. Jun’s decision to back out could have very well been out of her discomfort discussing sex (though we had talked about it at length before) that were masked behind her insecurities of her language abilities. Li You was upfront about her reservation and was gracious enough to negotiate terms in which she was comfortable. Zai was the only one who seemed the most comfortable with everything, which could be attributed to our closeness, her sexuality, or her generation’s more liberal attitudes towards sex.
POWER DYNAMICS + LANGUAGE
With all informants, I was sure to share my own stories in an attempt to level the playing
field, but also to give an example of the many different places and times I acquired knowledge about sex. By starting the interviews with my own stories as an attempt to take away some of the inherent interviewer/interviewee power dynamic, I inadvertently layed out certain expectations. Not only did my story provide the tone of further stories, but also subscribed to a particular set of terminology and structure for storytelling. My history was told chronologically and used sex terms that fell between medical and slang. The stories my informants told ended up following similar guidelines. This was indeed conscious as I had an idea of the kinds of stories I wanted to collect, but I only recognized as being potentially problematic after the fact. I’d be curious to see how my informants would have disclosed their histories on their own terms.
Additionally, conducting interviews in a language that was native to me and not to my
informants was another layer of unspoken power. There is no doubt that the use of English rather than Mandarin affected the direction of the conversations. Not only did this dictate the way in which the topic would be discussed, but also forced informants to defer to me when unsure how to express certain ideas, widening the imbalance that already existed in our roles as researcher and researched. In the end, I would be collecting their stories (not mine) with permission to share it to an audience of my choosing, but they were not left with the same powers.
VII. CONCLUSION
While this project allowed me insights into how the Chinese have thought about and
disseminated information regarding sex over the last thirty years, what I really took away from this experience was a new awareness of the problems with interviewing. Learning to how to maneuver around unmentionable topics while managing your informant’s comfort is an invaluable skill. My self-awareness of how my role as an interviewer affects the stories told was heightened and led to a more nuanced understanding of the information I was given. Previously, I might have considered the final story as simple fact, the storyteller’s truth, but this class led me to understand it more as a partial truth, a co-creation based on a shared experience of both the storyteller and me.
The framing of all three stories were based on how the informants saw themselves in
comparison to me. Jun was worried that I would judge her language abilities and Li You’s story was continually compared to my seeming “success” in relationships. Had the women seen me as someone exactly the same as themselves the story would have been framed differently. Not to say that our sameness would have led to a better telling, only that a different story would have been told.
This is illustrated beautifully in my interview with Zai when Xiao Jia revealed Zai’s secret
high school boyfriend: a “truth” she didn’t want to reveal, as it negated our established “sameness”. Her reaction informed how the establishment of our relationship dictated the story she wanted to tell. I’m so thankful for the surprise presence of a 3rd person in that interview and will consider its usefulness when arranging future interviews.
This led me to question if having previous relationships does more harm than good. Would
having a interview that wasn’t tainted with as many prior expectations be more pure? Does purity even really exist? Perhaps it is unavoidable and needs to be considered during any interview and its analysis.
Relationship dynamics are just one of the many layers that affect the stories that are told.
Languages used can affect the framing of a story and tend to match the cultural script of the culture of which it is associated. The language barriers that exist between researcher and informant can also exaggerate the power dynamic that surrounds all interviews. Attempts to maintain an interlocutor’s trust and comfort should be a constant concern of any good interviewer especially if the topic is difficult. Lastly, researchers should consider how the surrounding environmental factors affect both themselves, the people they are speaking with, and the resulting stories being told.
VIII. REFERENCES
First Night: Newly-Wed Life Education. (1998). Retrieved May 16, 2019, from People’s Republic of China website: http://www.pinshan.com/qita/video/706557.html
Liu, Y. (2018). Integrated Chinese 2 Textbook Simplified (4th ed.).
Portelli, A. (2016). What Makes Oral History Different. In Robert Perks & Alistair Thomson (Eds.), The Oral History Reader (3rd ed., pp. 48–58). New York, NY: Routledge.
St Clair, R. (2005). THE ROLE OF SOCIAL SCRIPT THEORY IN COGNITIVE BLENDING. Retrieved from http://www.humboldt1.com/~cr2/reply.htm
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