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

It is a rare happenstance when an author and a subject make a perfect match, and even rarer when the subject is exceedingly timely. Since Philippe Ariès's groundbreaking and provocative book L'Enfant et la vie familiale sou l'ancien régime was published in 1960, the West has been inundated with books and treatises on the history of children and childhood. Journals devoted to one or another aspect of this broad new discipline have proliferated. In contrast, before 1990 no work expressing an interest in Chinese children appeared in English except one: Childhood in China, edited by William Kessen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). Its contributors were a group of thirteen American specialists in early childhood development who in 1973 were invited by the government of the People's Republic to participate in an escorted tour of China. That book reports on what they observed in a number of schools and child-care facilities selected by the Chinese authorities. It says not a word about China prior to 1949. No attempt was made to ascertain if the behavior of the children they saw-and whose achievements they often praised-could be wholly attributed to the prevailing political system and not to the long tradition in China of bringing up children. Despite its tantalizing title, Childhood in China is absent, perhaps justifiably so, from the list of relevant works cited by Hsiung. She does discuss other publications: "Amid this general oblivion, two works have recently dealt with the Chinese case [at] length. One is Jon Saari's study of the transitional nature of the lives of schoolboys growing up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Legacies of Childhood (1990), and the other is Anne Behnke Kinney's edited volume Chinese Views of Childhood (1995)" (p. 6).

To my knowledge, no other studies on this topic have been published in English. Therefore the appearance of Ping-chen Hsiung's excellent book, the result of more than twenty years of research, is indeed an occasion for celebration. Stanford University Press is to be complimented for sparing no expense in making the book extremely attractive. The forty-seven illustrations, undoubtedly costly, add much to its appeal. It is also gratifying to see the Wade-Giles system used; while pinyin has a proper place in publications of a more contemporary orientation, for certain books, such as Philip Kuhn's on the Ch'ien-lung era (Harvard, 1990), Yu Chunfang's on Kuanyin (Columbia, 2001) and Robert Hymes' on Taoism (California, 2002), Wade-Giles is an appropriate choice. One wishes that journals, especially those having to do with early and imperial China, might consider adopting the pragmatic principle of "one China, two romanization systems."

The book consists of an introduction, eight chapters grouped in three parts, and an afterword. The introduction (pp. 1-30) surveys what has been done in the field, both in the West and in China. It also offers, in a section on sources, a prospectus of what research can and needs to be done, and it concludes with various views of Chinese childhood and the three related meanings of the child.

Part 1, "Physical Conditions," consists of three chapters: "Treatment of Children," "Newborn Care," and "Nursing and Infant Feeding." These contain Hsiung's most original and important findings, and this is especially true with regard to the science of pediatrics. In contrast to Europe,

. . . specialized medicine for children both as a coherent body of knowledge and as an active clinical profession appeared considerably earlier in China. Ch'ien I and his medical teachings (in the form of a small book called Proven Formulae of Pediatric Medicine) marked the beginning of practicing pediatrics, at least since the second half of the eleventh century. In addition to general medical writing on children, pediatric medicine had evolved into an active medical discipline, with its own theoretical ideas, empirical experience, and therapeutic...