Time for Day 3 of #IASPR18! First up, Fang-mei Lin on the topography of romantic love in Taiwanese literature (specifically, the literary novel Orphan of Asia by Wu Zhuoliu).
Lin: Orphan of Asia is concerned with deep questions of national identity, but there has been little work done on how this quest for identity intersects with erotic longing. #IASPR18
Lin: romantic longing and disillusionment are the drivers of the protagonist's constant journeys between Taiwan, Japan, and China. #IASPR18
Next up: Huike Wen, talking about rural love stories in recent Chinese television. #IASPR18
Huike Wen describes "bachelor villages" in Southern China, which exist because of the disproportionate population and the migration of women to cities. #IASPR18
Huike Wen: Rural Romantic Love Story (2006-) has run for over twelve years and five hundred episodes, and is immensely popular. It's almost entirely created by men. #IASPR18
Huike Wen: there's no courtship in Rural Romantic Love Stories - the couples have known each other since birth, and marital issues are resolved via conversations between their fathers. It's "the romance of the fathers' utopian life". #IASPR18
Next up: Jin Feng, talking about food, sex, and gender in Chinese web romance. #IASPR18
Jin Feng: in Chinese web fiction, the most popular genre with men is fantasy, and with women, it's romance. #IASPR18
Jin Feng: in food romances, one of the protagonists is a food professional. In time-travel food fiction, the protagonists interestingly almost always travel forward, not back. #IASPR18
Jin Feng: people travel forward in food romances, but look backwards to and exalt the culinary heritage of China, as the future is often a "food dystopia". #IASPR18
Finally in this session: Erin Young, discussing the love stories of Edith Maude Eaton. #IASPR18
Young: Eaton developed "trickster" methods to write against the dominant racial discourses of her time. #IASPR18
Young: in Eaton's works, the protagonists can construct their own rules for romance in the unruly space of Chinatown, even though they are discriminated against in the broader American society. #IASPR18
Young: repetition and adaptation go hand in hand in the trickster space of Chinatown. #IASPR18
