Now that brings us to the next question. It's hard to define love, but we all agree that we do have love. The question is, do Chinese have romantic love? Does Michelle Yik have romantic love? Do you have romantic love? Now, that put romantic love into the Chinese context. So what did people do about it? So I read up a lot of literature conducted by psychologists or social scientists. There are at least three different views. The first one is basically saying that, no, Chinese do not have romantic love. It's nonsense. It doesn't exist, or she called it a culturally alien concept. The second one will be like, romantic love is everywhere. It's universal. It's found in the US, it's found in Europe, it's found in China, different parts of the world. You just don't know about it. The third view is a very safe view. Well, maybe yes, maybe no, those typical model answer s in the public exam, I'm going to explain that a bit with you guys. Potter, 1988. It's a girl. She had nothing to do with Harry Potter. They just shared the same last name, so I call her Ms. Potter. She decided to study household finances in rural China, so she learned Mandarin, she went to one of the rural villages in China, lived there, and talked to the people. Like psychologists, most of the time we collect data using questionnaires, et cetera. Anthropologists will be going there to be part of them, stay there, talk to them, be friends with them, this is what she did. She stayed there and originally she was interested in how people, how the Chinese villagers felt about raising chickens for the central government. So probably you never heard about it, but in the old days, you have to raise chicken, grow the crops, and surrender everything to the central government. So she wanted to study how people felt about it, and also asking the informants or the villagers, how do you feel about your father gambling away the house? So she isn't studying emotion, but it's related. The emotions as they are related to the household finances. At the very end, by accident, she was attracted to the topic of romantic love, and in the end, she graduated, got a master's degree as I recall, but what's she's famous about is actually arguing that Chinese do not have romantic love, or romantic love does not exist there. How I feel doesn't matter. So according to Ms. Potter, emotions do not matter in China. You can cry, you can shout, people will give you a chair, sitting at the village, house, or something. You can cry, people do not look after you, do not look at you at all. So emotions do not take up a central position as they were in North America, in United States for example. Romantic love is an alien concept there, people getting married not because of love. Imagine, she's an American, she expected that if you are getting married it must be some emotion. It could be trust like you say, maybe chemical reaction, that is a metaphor, it could be, I don't know what it is, I just want to be in love, I just want to marry. But no, emotions are not mentioned at all. So she's saying that romantic love is an alien concept, and marriage choice is based on what they call good feelings. This is the literal translation of what the villagers told her. Why are you marrying the guy? Good feelings. [inaudible]. Now, if you want to read more about her masterpiece, that will be the references, you can go on, it's in your handout. So she went to talk to different people in a party. She ran into a couple who were about to get married, so she couldn't help, she forgot about the household finances, forgot about the chickens. Instead, she remember ed the husband. So she asked him why are you getting married? Why are you marrying her but not Michelle Yik? We were on the same team, we met working together, and then we had good feelings, I helped her family, she helped mine. So to Ms. Potter's surprise, why are you marrying that woman? The conversation will be like, build a house, to clean the plots, and taking the parents to the hospital . You are marrying a woman and how do you show that or why are you marrying her? Well, I just do work for that woman's family. To her surprise, the only thing they mentioned about emotions is I have good feelings for one another, I have good feelings for her. So to her, she's very surprised, what? You marry someone and you just go and help. Nowadays, if you are living in Hong Kong or China or other parts of the world, you can hire domestic helper s to do all this, but you are not going to marry your domestic helpers for sure, right? So that's the surprise but bear in mind, that's 1988. And then she got a chance to talk to the mother-in-law, why did your daughter marry the guy? I don't know. I don't know how she felt, but I guess she liked the young man because he was kind and didn't scold. I guess most of you are kind and didn't scold and she can marry everyone of you. So again to Ms. Potter, that's love? Or that's why you get married? Again, she's like, "Oh, the boy is very nice. He came to build our house, collect the straw, and harvest our sugar cane." To Ms. Potter's surprise, all the mentioning about the marriage or things justifying is that maybe kind, didn't scold, and I guess she liked him. When I asked her, she said she had no opinion. It's just like when you are filling out the questionnaire. When you don't want to tell people how you feel, you just pick the middle point, one to five, you just pick three, and no opinion, that could be yes or no. But at least she didn't say no. And then she went on, Ms. Potter went on and asked the people around, and finally, one informant or one villager was just like, "Okay, hang on. I know you are looking for some words, some I love you or whatsoever, but hang on. You've got to understand, we Chinese- now, that might not represent us or you or me, alright? We Chinese show our feelings for one another in our work, not with words. Don't expect that I'll say I love you, I marry you because I love you to death, et cetera. If I love you, if I want to marry you, I just go to clean your house, I will just be your domestic helper basically. Now, to Potter that was interesting, that was surprising. But at the very end, she's like, "That is very very curious. In where I came from, of course, you must have some feelings, specific feelings, maybe love and that's why you marry the guy or the girl. " Now, and that echoes very well by one of our psychologists growing up in the West. To an American in love, the emotions tend to overshadow everything else. To a Chinese in love, the love occupies only a place among other considerations. So maybe you might have some emotions for the guy, the guy may have some emotions for the girl, but at the end, they have to consider other things. I have a bamboo door, does she have a bamboo door? I have a wooden door, does she have a wooden door? Do we have the same education, maybe status? Do my parents like him, or in Hong Kong, does he have an apartment or is she rich, that sort of things? Waley made an observation, "To Chinese, it is something commonplace, obvious. Why are you getting married? It's a need of the body, not a satisfaction of the emotions". Now, I'm putting down all of this. It's not that I agree with them completely, but this is like one school of thought. Chinese do not have romantic love, even if they do, it's different from how romantic love was conceptualized or understood in the Western world. Well, there are other group s of people saying that, "Hey, that's not true, when we talk about romantic love, it's everywhere, it's a near-universal." What you found, maybe because Ms. Potter, you went to a Chinese rural village, that might be very specific. If you come to Hong Kong, you come to Beijing, or different parts of the world, life or romantic love could have been different. I can never pronounce this guy's name. I talked to him in person. William J. J and Fischer, J and F studied the presence of romantic love in the books in ethnographies and folklore, and they decided that, you can talk about, you can make different observation, you could go to different villages and make your observation. In this village, you have romantic love, in others, you don't. Why didn't we do an empirical study? We have books, we have magazines, we have stories, why didn't we go there and see whether people or different societies have romantic love or not? So this is what they defined, they read through the books, the famous stories in different cultures and looked for any indication of intense attraction that involved the idealization of the other within an erotic context, blah, blah, blah. This is how they defined romantic love. So they read the story, they read the books, and magazines et cetera and looked for the evidence, and this is what they found. They studied 166 societies. They found that in 90% of these societies, there is at least one single incident of passionate love. So of course, you could argue that only one, and you read the books, and first of all you'll be like, this is a definition? I don't think this is romantic love. It's so erotic! Now, putting that aside, at least when you are doing an empirical research, you need to have a definition. Argument by definition is nonsense. It doesn't move you anywhere. Alright. So if you have that definition, I studied all the folklore and the literature, I found that 90% of the societies have an indication of romantic love. Now, that is basically supporting, it's actually very universal. Mr. J indeed in his book, 1993, he went to study romantic love. Now, this is like an empirical research, doing your own reading and looking for the incidents of passionate love. Mr. J went to the capital city of Inner Mongolia. Now, I don't know why he chose that city, but he went there to look for examples of romantic love. As soon as he got into the city, he said, "I heard the love songs and the DJ was answering the phone calls from the callers, and the guy was dedicating a song to the girl." Romantic love is everywhere. So it's not just we read the book and folklore, I went to China, I went to Inner Mongolia. For those of you who are from China, who are familiar with China, of course you would say Inner Mongolia is a very unique city. Well, we are all unique in some way, but sometimes when you believe in something, you look for something, you get it. So I always look around, looking for people taller than me, and it's everywhere. So the first group of people. Love, romantic love doesn't exist in China. Alright. The second group of people. It's everywhere, I studied the books, I even went there to the city, I listened to the radio, the DJ broadcasted all the love songs, people loved each other, I read the magazines, it's everywhere. Now, how about the third view? The third view is interesting. It's very subtle, and that's why in my topic, I don't know what to put down. It's... So if you were the Analects of Confucius, Chinese, we don't have love, or it's very subtle, et cetera. There are three things the gentleman must guard against. In youth, when the energy in the blood is still not settled, he should guard against lust. Lust is at least part of the definition of romantic love in the Western world. So what he's saying here is that, it's sort of by nature. We do have that kind of love or romantic love or lust in our blood, but we are not sure. Now, Pan in 2015, this is a very interesting book, easy to digest, easy to read. She wrote about when true love came to China. She started with the "Chinese do not have love", but actually gradually you see how the love creeped into China or something. She made a very interesting observation. Well, you would say that maybe Chinese do not have romantic love. Sometimes a guy married a woman because of the status, think about the king, the emperor marrying the guy who, married the guy? No, married the woman, that is not his choice. "I marry her because my father chose her, and she will be my wife." But after that, we all know that in China, they got 3,000 concubines, maybe more than that. She rightly made the comment that, "Maybe they are engaged in the loveless marriage." Loveless, without love, marriage, but they are still looking for romance in getting the concubines, and it's all well-accepted. So these two quotations or the literature are basically telling you that, well, do we have love? Maybe yes, maybe no. They might not admit that, but it's there, in a very, very subtle way.
