Marital Acts: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity among the Chinese Thai Diaspora (review)

This book is based on the author's long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bangkok on Chinese in Thailand with a focus on their shifting ethnicity as seen from their cultural construction of sexuality. The author convincingly argues that there is "no sex that is not already gendered, classed, or ethnicized, and that cultural identities are informed by regulations of sexuality" (p. 3). After making detailed and insightful comparisons with (and deconstruction of) the ideals and practices of sexuality between the Chinese and their Thai hosts (Chapters 3 to 9), the author turns her inquiries to the Chinese Thai Americans in the Bay area in California, where their transnational migration to the United States has brought them face-to-face with yet another set of moral codes and social ideals that compels them to realign their previously held hybrid cultural identities (Chapter 10). The analysis of the transition of these Chinese Thai to Chinese Thai Americans further affirms the author's main thesis: Individual identity is informed by one's sexuality that is ultimately conditioned by gender, class, ethnicity, and generation of immigration; it is also transitional, inconsistent, and sometimes contradictory.

Dr. Bao's rich ethnographic data provide moving episodes that support her main thesis. She skillfully deploys individual life histories to illustrate the intricate, changing personal living conditions, state of wealth, kinship networks, and social mobility strategies of these transnational migrants. Changing marital arrangements, reproduction considerations, and childrearing practices underscore the Chinese Thais' changing social fortune overtime, from Chinkao (first generation Chinese immigrants) to Lukchin (native-born offspring of these immigrants), as well as their evolving hybrid sexuality.

Mainstream Thai sexuality assumes that male masculinity is part of men's natural biological drives and hence womanizing is an acceptable "male privilege" (the chaochu image, p. 81), while female sexuality is strictly associated with reproduction and hence de-sexualized. For the Chinese in Thailand, while they accept the prevailing Thai view that womanizing is a male privilege and that female sexuality should be detached from sexual pleasures, they nevertheless insist that men should support and adequately provide for their extramarital sexual partners as an indication of their middle class respectability and the influence of Confucian teaching that places high value on biological linkages between parents and children, especially between father and son(s). As the author states succinctly, "'Chinese-ness' is not only an ethnic category but also a class category, connoting middle-class status regardless whether the subjects are middle class or not" (p. 53). Since Thai males generally do not feel responsible for the material well-being of their sexual partners in extramarital liaisons, Chinese Thai males in general harbor a negative stereotypical view of them as irresponsible womanizers. This negative stereotype reinforces the Chinese Thais' positive self-image and cultural identity derived from Confucian values. Similarly, the historical circumstances of Thai national politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that permitted Chinese Thais to monopolize many professional trades also reinforce the negative stereotype among the Thais about the Chinese immigrants as penny-pinching, lacking in fun, and cunning in business.

As an ethnographer studying sexuality, identity-construction, migration, and transnationalism, Bao has shown promise as a leading light in identifying problem areas for future researchers. Where the present book under review is concerned, I would like to point out that, in spite of its major theoretical significance, there are two issues that are insufficiently addressed by the author. The first is related to "conjugal sex." While the author considers conjugal sexuality an important aspect of her study, discussion of the subject seems to be conspicuous by its absence, and brought up only in the negative context of extramarital male philandering which includes visiting brothels, taking concubines or minor wives, and committing adultery. The second issue is that she should have brought up, in the earlier part of the book, the question of how "modernity" (thansamai) of the Thai nation-state affected the overall...