5:15 pm
A Longitudinal Study of Chinese Single-Child Families from
Adolescence to Young Adulthood (1997-2010)
Vanessa Fong, Associate Professor of Education, Harvard University
Vanessa Fong looks at how a cohort of over 2,000 youth born under China's one-child policy between 1979 and 1986 experienced adolescence, citizenship, study abroad, childbearing, and the raising of children of their own. She draws on data from a survey of 2,273 members of this cohort (conducted in 1999 while they were in grades 8–12 in Dalian), over four years of participant observation in their schools and homes in China and abroad between 1997 and 2010, and annual surveys and interviews of that cohort conducted between 2008 and 2010. This cohort faced unprecedented levels of parental pressure and competition in the educational system and the job market. Many who did not get the education and careers they felt they deserved studied abroad, hoping to improve their chances at upward mobility. Many of them postponed marriage and childbearing to pursue their goals. This generation also experienced unprecedented levels of gender equality while growing up, and show no evidence of the son preference common in rural areas of China where two-child families remain the norm.
Vanessa Fong is associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. She received her doctorate from Harvard University's department of anthropology in 2002. Her book, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One Child Policy (2004), won the Francis Hsu Book Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology. Her new book, Paradise Redefined: Transnational Chinese Students and the Quest for Flexible Citizenship in the Developed World, will be published in 2011. She has also published in a variety of journals including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, China Quarterly, City and Society, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, and Ethos. Her current reseach is funded by a five-year National Science Foundation Career Award.
6:30 pm – Dinner Break – See option below
7:30 pm
The Myth of the Independent Writer:
The Examples of Lu Xun and Han Han
Martin Woesler, University of Applied Languages, Munich, and
Visiting Scholar at EALC, Harvard
Despite coming from totally different educational backgrounds, modern Chinese writer Lu Xun and contemporary novelist and blogger Han Han in their respective times have become prominent figures, even cult celebrities, in literary discourse. They follow the ideal of the independent writer, although Lu Xun was claimed by Mao Zedong as a communist revolutionary. Both writers fought polemical battles with dissenters in public: Lu Xun with his razor-sharp essays (zawen) in newspapers; Han Han in his blog with 300 million readers. In their socially critical stories, both use fictional metaphors, placed in realistic environments: Lu Xun uses cannibalism in Diary of a Madman (1918), while Han Han uses a solo choir in His Land (2008), similar to Kafka’s metaphor of a man turning into a bug in Metamorphosis (1915).
Martin Woesler is professor of intercultural communication and chair of the Chinese studies program at the University of Applied Languages, Munich, Germany. He is currently a visiting scholar in the department of East Asian languages and cultures at Harvard University. He works on Republican and contemporary Chinese literature, as well as on the Dream of the Red Chamber, which he co-translated in the first full German translation. He also translated His Land by Han Han (forthcoming), as well as essays by Lu Xun, Zhu Ziqing, Ba Jin, Qian Zhongshu, Wang Meng, Liu Zaifu, Jia Pingwa, and others. He is writing the book “Literature and the Public Sphere: Chinese Post-Socialist Discourses as Déjà Vu.”
New England China Seminar Dinner Option
We welcome participants who wish to attend both sessions of the New England China Seminar to join colleagues for a buffet dinner at 6:30-7:30 pm, in Room S153. The dinner cost is $15 per person ($10 for students). Due to space limitations, we will accept 30 reservations on a first come first serve basis. Advance reservation and payment is required. Please register before noon on Tuesday, March 22, 2011, with Linda Kluz at lkluz@fas.harvard.edu. You will receive instructions for payment by cash or check.
Location: CGIS South, Belfer Case Study Room (S020),
1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
Contact: lkluz@fas.harvard.edu