Love, Desire, and Race

Abstract

This chapter addresses how Chinese male writers internalized and popularized the new discourse of love and love marriage. Toggling between the social and the fictional, the chapter traces the formation of a desiring Chinese moral subject to three moments in the late colonial period. First, in a “racializing” moment of birth (1903–17), writers experimented with the Western binary approach to sexual love in a series of lust caution stories. Safely pursued outside the context of Confucian marriage, the stories centered on Chinese men's attraction to native women, at the same time as they turned native concubinage into a moral problem. Second, in a “spiritual” turn, authors appropriated the Christian concept of redemptive love in the 1910s by secularizing their translations and adaptations of Alexandre Dumas fils's Camille with a modern Confucian spiritual twist. Third, in a “bourgeois cultural” moment of closure, “love” and love marriages became the ideal not only for the super-wealthy Chinese but also for the rising middle classes between the 1910s and 1930s. This closure normalized for the male bourgeois imagination Western romantic practices while retaining women's “purity” at the core of what defined Chineseness.