For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast
China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an
anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years' fieldwork
that has resulted in this book--a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced
account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural
China from 1949 to 1999.
The author's focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book
apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private
lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked,
such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and
individuality.
He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual
transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within
which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.