A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (review)

"Tender voyage" is a Buddhist image that aptly evokes the fragility and vulnerability of children, from birth to adolescence, captured in Ping-chen Hsiung's masterly study. Inspired by the work of Philippe Ariès and his critics, Hsiung's analysis is also intended to challenge European and North American scholarship on the history of childhood. She focuses on a crucial historical juncture in the late sixteenth century, linking important changes in childhood and childrearing to the broad social, economic, philosophical, and cultural shifts of the late sixteenth century, especially the expanding economy and the rise of urban print culture, which placed a premium on hard work: in scholarship for those eager to advance through the official examination system, in accounting and entrepreneurial skills for those moving into the expanding merchant class, in learning for elite women as mothers and mentors, and in physical labor and productivity for commoners, both male and female.

Hsiung identifies this historical shift with three changes in the "discourse" on children and childhood: a new emphasis on the importance of early childhood education and moral development; a positive view of strong, even punitive, childrearing sanctions; and an insistence that both girls and boys receive the same education in their early years (p. 107). These changes increased the importance of parental instruction (p. 111) and heightened the value of both father's and mother's personal attention to their offspring (p. 115). Fathers were particularly affected by this shift, struggling to balance their traditional authoritarian roles with the emotional opportunities opened by changing views of parenting. Parents responded to the new demand for educated brides who, as mothers, would give their children the "head start" so necessary to success in the competitive late imperial world. Accompanying this shift was an increased emphasis on "indoor, bookish occupations, leaving less time for physical and leisure activities" among the children of the elite, especially boys (p. 122). The "new domesticity" thus created, and the "competitive parenting" it inspired, frame Hsiung's narrative.

She divides her book into three parts, presenting three levels of analysis: the biophysical or developmental understanding of childhood; the sociological or role-based understanding of the child as a junior participant in a hierarchical structure; and the philosophical and religious understanding of childhood as a state of innocence accessible to all human beings at every point in the life course. The first relies heavily on medical texts, stressing that pediatrics had become a medical specialty in China as early as the eleventh century, and that children as the subject of specialized prenatal, neonatal, and toddler care were an obsessive concern of both doctors and parents from the Song dynasty onward. The second focuses on the normative rules and the subjective experience of childhood, playing off the contrast between didactic and hortatory texts—many dating from earliest times—and the intimate contradictory details supplied by memoirs, eulogies, poems, paintings, and material culture. Some of Hsiung's most compelling passages describe young children torn by the emotions of their parents' own struggles: a father who cannot find a job, a mother distraught over the presence of a concubine. A parent's death left many children with a deep sadness, never assuaged and painfully expressed in their adult writings. At the same time, the complexity of overlapping kinship ties across communities and marriage networks allows Hsiung to pluck the child out of the conventional "family" structure that informs Western literature on the subject. A dense network of kinfolk and neighbors, including wet nurses, could be tapped to feed, parent, mentor, shelter, educate, or otherwise provide for an orphaned child, or a child whose parents were absent or incapacitated.

Scholars interested in Western cultures will not need Hsiung to convince them that childhood is not a "modern" historical phenomenon. But they will have much to learn from Hsiung's many other challenges to Western thinking and writing about the history of childhood. Her most powerful critique is leveled at...