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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN STUDIES IN
FAMILY AND INTIMATE LIFE
Women Doing
Intimacy
Gender, Family
and Modernity in
Britain and
Hong Kong
Stevi Jackson · Petula Sik Ying Ho
Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and
Intimate Life
Series Editors
Lynn Jamieson
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
David H. J. Morgan
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK
‘The Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life series is
impressive and contemporary in its themes and approaches’
– Professor Deborah Chambers, Newcastle University, UK, and author
of New Social Ties.
The remit of the Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate
Life series is to publish major texts, monographs and edited collections
focusing broadly on the sociological exploration of intimate relation-
ships and family organization. The series covers a wide range of topics
such as partnership, marriage, parenting, domestic arrangements, kin-
ship, demographic change, intergenerational ties, life course transitions,
step-families, gay and lesbian relationships, lone-parent households, and
also non-familial intimate relationships such as friendships and includes
works by leading figures in the field, in the UK and internationally, and
aims to contribute to continue publishing influential and prize-winning
research.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14676
Stevi Jackson · Petula Sik Ying Ho
Women Doing
Intimacy
Gender, Family and Modernity
in Britain and Hong Kong
Stevi Jackson Petula Sik Ying Ho
University of York University of Hong Kong
York, UK Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong
Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life

ISBN 978-1-137-28990-2 ISBN 978-1-137-28991-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-28991-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

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Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the making. We know we have
tested to the limit the patience of the series editors, Graham Crow, Lynn
Jamieson and David Morgan as well as our editors at Palgrave, Amelia
Derkatsch and Poppy Hull. We thank them for bearing with us while we
struggled with the competing demands of academic life and with living
through turbulent times in Hong Kong. We also much appreciate Lynn
Jamieson’s careful reading of the completed manuscript. The project was
made possible through an ESRC Hong Kong Bilateral award, co-funded
by the Hong Kong Research Council (RES-000-22-362), which pro-
vided a rare opportunity to conduct collaborative and comparative re-
search between Britain and Hong Kong, for which we are extremely
grateful.
Our particular thanks go to the women who gave up their time to tell
us about their lives and relationships. We recognise that we cannot do
justice to the depth and scope of their conversations with us, but have
endeavoured to render their stories as faithfully as we can. We also ap-
preciate the contribution of all those who assisted us in the course of our
v
vi Acknowledgments
research. Harriet Badger transcribed all the English data and also pro-
vided much practical support to our long-distance collaboration. We had
the help of three research assistants, at different times, at the University
of Hong Kong and a research fellow at the University of York. In Hong
Kong, Cheung Man Lap (Alec Cheung), Prisken Lo and Ho Kwok Ying
(Connie Ho) aided Sik Ying in organising and conducting interviews.
We thank them all. We owe a particular debt to Jin Nye Na, our post-
doctoral research fellow at York, who worked with us during the first 18
months of the project. Jin Nye conducted most of the British interviews,
co-facilitated the two focus groups and played a central role in the early
stages of analysis. She did a fantastic job of the initial coding, summaris-
ing and mapping of the British data, which proved to be invaluable to
our subsequent analysis. We would also like to thank her for allowing
us to reuse and incorporate into the book revised sections of two articles
that she co-authored with us: “Reshaping Tradition? Women Negotiating
the Boundaries of Tradition and Modernity in Hong Kong and British
Families”, published in The Sociological Review, 61 (42), 2013 and. “A
Tale of Two Societies: The Doing of Qualitative Comparative Research
in Hong Kong and Britain”, published in Methodological Innovations On-
line 10 (2), 2017. Sui-Ting Kong collaborated with us an article from
more recent research, from which we have used a short extract, “Speak-
ing Against Silence: Finding a Voice in Hong Kong Chinese Families
Through the Umbrella Movement”, Sociology, 52 (5), 2018. While we
were finalising the manuscript, Lauren Cowling played a major role in
compiling and formatting our references. We fully appreciate her effi-
ciency and attention to detail. On a more personal level, we would like
to thank Sui-Ting Kong, Sue Scott, Ann Kaloski-Naylor, Harriet Badger
and Evangeline Kai-Wen Tsao for their friendship and intellectual nur-
turance through some difficult times.
We gratefully acknowledge permission to reuse passages from the fol-
lowing publications in the pages of this book.
Jackson, S., Ho, P. S. Y., & Na J. N. (2013) ‘Reshaping Tradition?

Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Tradition and Modernity in
Hong Kong and British Families,’ The Sociological Review, 61 (4): 667–
688 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12077.
Acknowledgments vii
Reproduced with permission of SAGE publications and the editors

and trustees of The Sociological Review.
Jackson, S., & Ho, P. S. Y. (2014) ‘Mothers, Daughters and Sex: The
Negotiation of Young Women’s Sexuality in Hong Kong and Britain’,
Families, Relationships and Societies, 3 (3): 387–405. https://doi.org/
10.1332/204674314X14037717559163. Reproduced with permis-
sion of Policy Press/Bristol University Press.
Jackson, S., Ho P. S. Y., & Na, J. N. (2017) ‘A Tale of Two Soci-
eties: The Doing of Qualitative Comparative Research in Hong Kong
and Britain’, Methodological Innovations Online, 10 (2): 1–20. https://
doi.org/10.1177/2059799117703117. Reproduced with permission
of SAGE Publications.
Ho, P. S. Y., Jackson, S., & Kong, S-T. (2018) ‘Speaking Against
Silence: Finding a Voice in Hong Kong Chinese Families Through
the Umbrella Movement’, Sociology, 52 (5): 966–982 (2018). https://
doi.org/10.1177/0038038517726644. Reproduced with permission
of the British Sociological Association and SAGE Publications.
Contents
1 Introduction: The Genesis of a Transnational

Collaborative Project 1
2 Conceptualising and Investigating the Gendered

Consequences of Modernity in Britain
and Hong Kong 13
3 Interconnected Histories: Locating Women’s Lives

in Time and Space 47
4 What Makes a Family? Meanings and Practices 87
5 Mother–Daughter Relationships 119
6 Love and Sex in Marital and Non-marital Contexts 157
7 Imagined Futures in Uncertain Times 187
ix
x Contents
8 Concluding Reflections 217
References 225
Index 247
List of Tables
Table 2.1 The young women 39

Table 2.2 The mothers 41
Table 4.1 Relationship status of mothers and dependant/adult
children in family home at the time of interview (numbers
of households in each category) 98
Table 7.1 Marriage patterns in China, Hong Kong and the UK 189
xi
1
Introduction: The Genesis
of a Transnational Collaborative Project
This book derives from a comparative study of the personal lives of young
adult women and their mothers in Hong Kong and Britain (England and
Wales) against a backdrop of social change in both societies. Transna-
tional collaborative qualitative research of the kind we describe here is
relatively unusual, in part because it presents practical difficulties, not
least in financing it, but also because of the parochial, local focus of
most social research, especially in western countries. We were fortunate
to gain funding from an ESRC Hong Kong Bilateral Award, co-funded
by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (RES-000-22-362). A central
element of our bid was to challenge the Eurocentrism of current debates
about families, intimacy and social change under late modern social con-
ditions though investigating the lives of two generations of women in one
‘western’ (British) and one East Asian (Hong Kong) location. We are not
simply treating these two locations as isolated examples, or as different
modernities, but as part of a web of asymmetrical global interconnections
that have produced the condition of the contemporary world variously
described as late, second or post-modernity. In this endeavour, we have
been influenced by feminist and other critical engagements with theori-
sations of late modern intimacy (Smart 2007; Heaphy 2007; Jamieson
© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Jackson and P. S. Y. Ho, Women Doing Intimacy,
Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-28991-9_1
2 S. Jackson and P. S. Y. Ho
2011) and by postcolonial critiques of parochially western theories of

modernity (Bhambra 2007, 2014). In this short introduction, we locate
ourselves in relation to our project, explain how we came to be collabora-
tors, the intellectual impetus behind our work, what each of us brought
to it and the challenges we faced in conducting the research and writing
this book.
We first met in May 2004 in Trondheim, Norway, at a conference
entitled: ‘Heteronormativity: A Fruitful Concept?’ We were staying at
the same hotel, went sightseeing together and discovered shared research
interests in sexuality and intimacy. We stayed in touch and each invited
the other to speak at conferences at our home institutions and Stevi then
asked Sik Ying to contribute to a book on East Asian sexualities she was
co-editing (Jackson et al. 2008). When the ESRC issued a call for bilat-
eral projects with Hong Kong, Stevi saw it as an opportunity to further
her interest in East Asian societies and immediately thought of Sik Ying
as a potential partner. Thus began a collaboration that has continued and
moved on to new projects—and extensive plans for the future. As is usu-
ally the case in feminist research, the work we have undertaken together
reflects both personal and political investments.
We have both lived through the social changes we describe here. We
are of the same generation as the mothers in our sample and represent
the two populations whose lives we document—white British and Hong
Kong Chinese women. Significantly, too, our own life histories evince the
interrelationship between the two locales and the heritage of British colo-
nialism. Stevi, the daughter of a British sailor, spent two years in Hong
Kong in one of the most turbulent periods of its history, 1966–1968,
when her father was posted to the naval base there (HMS Tamar). As a
teenager at the time, Hong Kong made a lasting impression on her and
was central to her politicisation. Educated at the British forces’ school, St
George’s, in Kowloon Tong and living in naval quarters in Happy Valley,
she could have spent her entire time in the colonial ex-pat community.
She chose not to do so, instead making the most of opportunities to
see more of Hong Kong and meet local people, shopping in markets
in Wanchai and Causeway Bay and enjoying the vibrant, chaotic street
life. Hong Kong then was very different from the modern cosmopolitan
city of today. Thousands of people lived in squatter settlements, in huts
1 Introduction: The Genesis of a Transnational … 3
constructed out of scraps of wood, corrugated iron and plastic or in over-

crowded unsanitary tenements; there were beggars in the streets (then a
rare sight in the UK) and informal markets and hawkers everywhere. The
rich lived in opulent mansions on The Peak or in Kowloon Tong (where
Stevi went to school) and frequented exclusive shops and hotels in the
centre of the city. Stevi also learnt about white privilege, which enabled
her to observe excessive wealth at close quarters. Although her father was
a naval rating, not of the officer class in forces still rigidly class segregated,
the fact of being white gave her entry into spaces she could or would
never have accessed in the UK. She could go into hotels patronised by
the super-rich just to use the toilets, knowing her whiteness would pro-
tect her from challenge. She could even to go to entertainment venues at
some of these hotels and meet the offspring of the rich and, being white,
gain invitations to parties in their homes and even, once, on a yacht, and
see at first-hand how they lived. Notably these were the local rich—she
could never have ‘passed’ as of an acceptable class within the social circles
of the white colonial elite. The very wide, and very visible, gulf between
rich and poor, along with the racial divide and the virulent anti-Chinese
racism of most of her British contemporaries, provided Stevi with an
object lesson in the evils of colonialism, a lesson that had much to do
with her later becoming a sociologist.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, Hong
Kong erupted in rioting against the colonial regime (see Chapter 2).
There had been some riots the previous year over a fare rise on the
cross-harbour Star Ferry, but this was something new and different.
What started as a labour dispute escalated, led by Maoists leftists in
Hong Kong, into mass street demonstrations, which met with consid-
erable force from the authorities with the use of tear gas, baton rounds
and live ammunition. Some of the leftists resorted to violent methods,
including the use of homemade bombs and weapons. The protests lasted
8 months into early 1968. Stevi recalls travelling to school with grilles
on the bus windows and soldiers armed with machine guns as protection
as well as bomb disposal teams dealing with three devices placed in or
near the naval ratings’ housing where she lived (the officers, tucked away
in the salubrious neighbourhood of The Peak were less vulnerable). She
does not remember being scared, just excited and, while opposed to the
extremes of violence used, thinking that the protesters had a just cause.
This experience, therefore, did not do anything to alter her critical stance
on the colonial regime. Her time in Hong Kong planted the seeds of her
later interest in East Asian societies. For all its problems, there was much
about Hong Kong that she loved and which left her with a deep attach-
ment to it and with a continued—and continuing—concern about its
future.
Sik Ying was only eight years old at the time of the disturbances, but
one particular memory of them has stuck in her mind, and also tells us
something about the contrasting lives led by the local Chinese and even
humble members of the British population. At the time Sik Ying’s family
(her parents, grandmother and 6 children) lived in Sai Ying Pun in one
room of an apartment shared with two other families—a contrast with
the roomy three-bedroomed flat where Stevi lived with her parents and
sister. Sik Ying remembers one tragic and horrific incident from the riots:
the death of the radio actor and social commentator Lam Bun, who was
attacked by the leftists, doused with petrol and set alight in his car. The
reason this mattered to an eight-year old was because of the significance
of the serialised radio drama Dai Zengfu (Big/Real Man’s Diary), starring
Lam Bun, in her daily life. Her mother listened to the show every night
at 10 pm. She would bribe the children into helping her assemble plastic
flowers and toys (factory outwork) by telling them that if they were able
to work hard until Dai Zengfu started, they would be rewarded with
late supper snacks—sesame soup, red bean soup and sometimes wonton
noodles. As a result of Lam Bun’s death, which shocked the family, the
much-loved show that had marked the end of their working day was
terminated.
Soon after the disturbances, Sik Ying’s family moved to a new public
housing estate in East Kowloon. She was educated at St Paul’s School
(Lam Tin), which, like most schools in Hong Kong, was church run,
reflecting the colonial context in which Christian organisations and mis-
sionaries provided much of the welfare and education for the local pop-
ulation. St Paul’s was a school for girls run by the Sisters of St. Paul de
Chartres, an order than had been active in Hong Kong since the mid-
nineteenth century. Sik Ying went on to obtain her undergraduate and
master’s degrees at the University of Hong Kong, where she was sub-
sequently employed. It was, therefore, a thoroughly colonial education,
modelled on the British system.1 Later, as a mature student, Sik Ying
went to the UK for postgraduate study, gaining her Ph.D. from the Uni-
versity of Essex in 1996. Overseas education is valued in Hong Kong and
in the colonial era British education was seen as the best available. Study-
ing in the UK was also facilitated by the colonial system. Sik Ying’s Ph.D.
was funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship, by a grant specifically for
junior women academics who did not have a Ph.D. She also acquired a
British passport as part of a special scheme to discourage educated people
from fleeing Hong Kong prior to the 1997 handover to China.
Sik Ying arrived in the UK in the early 1990s, by which time Hong
Kong had changed dramatically since the 1960s. It had experienced rapid
economic growth with GDP per capita rising substantially year on year
from $714 in 1968 to $13,281 in 1990.2 It was still, by this measure,
not as wealthy as the UK (with a per capita GDP of $20,808 in 1990)3
but was now identified as one of the ‘Asian Tigers’ and no longer as a
‘third world’ economy. The gulf between rich and poor remained, but
the educated middle classes were doing well, enjoying high salaries and
the benefits of a technologically advanced consumer society. On arriving
in the UK, Sik Ying was shocked to find that the country was so back-
ward, especially technologically. For example, the accommodation office
at the Essex University was using pencil to record room bookings and
allocation. She found British people polite but rather slow and inefficient
after the hard-working fast-paced life in Hong Kong. She also felt that
she was richer than her UK peers, could afford expensive designer clothes
and long international phone calls to her boyfriend in Holland. Yet at the
same time she was disappointed and disoriented by her encounter with
the reality of life in Britain. Her English was not as good as she thought,
despite being educated through the medium of English since she started
secondary school, and she had a Hong Kong accent. Her understanding
1 Hong Kong has recently moved to a school and university system more like that in the USA.
2 https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/hong-kong?year=1990. Accessed 24 February 2019.
3 https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/uk. Accessed 24 February 2019.
of western culture was also limited in terms of the common-sense know-

how needed to navigate daily life and interact with the Europeans among
whom she was living and studying. She was criticised for what she ate,
how much she was able to eat and for remaining slim and felt that Asian
women were looked down on. A Danish flatmate told her that she and
other Asian women were not taken seriously because they looked too
young and lacked confidence in public presentations. Yet despite these
setbacks, she adapted and began to enjoy the slower pace of life in the
recognition that gaining her Ph.D. would put her on the path to career
success—which it ultimately did, while also setting in train the develop-
ments whereby her path would cross with Stevi’s. Stevi, meanwhile, had
been teaching in a post-1992 University throughout the 1980s, when
there were very few sociology posts available (see Platt 2003), but in 1993
managed to move to the more established University of Strathclyde, and
then, in 1998, secured the Chair in Women’s Studies at the University
of York. It was here, though teaching and supervising graduate students
from East Asia that her interest in that part of the world was rekindled.
Our lives, then, bear testimony to the interconnected histories of
Hong Kong and the UK and give us something in common beyond a
shared academic interest in intimate relationships. By the time we met,
we had each, through different processes, begun to question the hege-
mony of ‘western’ knowledge, the ways in which theory generated from
Europe and the USA was treated as if it were universal knowledge. Even
among feminists keen to acknowledge differences among women and
to champion perspectives from the Global South, East Asia was largely
ignored. Sik Ying’s experiences in the UK had left her well versed in
European theory but also, in combination with her life experiences, with
a more critical perspective on the western world and its knowledge claims
than she had previously been able to develop as a colonised subject.
Returning to work at the University of Hong Kong, she could not help
but be aware of the theoretical hegemony of western scholarship and
ways in which knowledge from beyond the west was treated as periph-
eral, of only local relevance. Stevi, meanwhile, was striving to cast off the
parochial western blinkers that had previously confined the scope of her
academic vision and was beginning to see the privileges that her loca-
tion in the ‘west’ had afforded her and make connections with the white
privilege she had enjoyed many years before in Hong Kong. She had
learnt from her East Asian graduate students who had also connected
her to networks of scholars from the region, enabling her to discover the
richness of feminist work being produced there but which was largely
unknown in British sociology and women’s and gender studies. It was
this that precipitated our first meeting in Trondheim. Stevi had noticed
that the names of a small group of Hong Kong scholars appeared on the
conference programme and wanted to meet them. Spotting a group of
Chinese people at breakfast in the hotel she took a chance and walked
over to their table, asked if they were the delegates from Hong Kong
(they were) and introduced herself.
We started working together on the proposal for the project in 2009,
began to plan the research in 2010 and conducted the fieldwork over the
next eighteen months. It was in some ways opportunistic, a response to
a funding call that offered a rare opportunity for collaboration between
UK and Hong Kong scholars. It was not, however, only opportunistic,
as we had a genuine intellectual aim: to do work that challenged western
knowledge claims. Even so, the UK and Hong Kong may seem odd cases
for comparison as one is a nation and the other is a Special Administra-
tive Region of China.4 This asymmetrical relationship, however, is part of
what makes the comparison of interest. As our personal biographical nar-
ratives indicate, these two societies are a product of their interconnected
histories and, as we will argue later, of the wider global connections that
shaped the modern world.
Working together was not always easy or straightforward. Although we
had stayed in touch over the intervening years since our first meeting, we
did not know each other very well when we began the project and there
was, therefore, a certain degree of risk in collaborating and in not fully
understanding each other’s approach to research or the intellectual bag-
gage we each brought to it. It was very much a learning experience for
both of us. We had slightly different intellectual agendas, differing theo-
retical and methodological concerns and intellectual histories in addition
to our specific cultural locations. This affected what we each brought
4 While here we use ‘UK’ in discussing the relationship between the two territories, elsewhere
we deliberately use ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ since all the UK interviews were conducted in England
and Wales rather than in the UK as a whole.
to the research collaboration and how we undertook both the fieldwork

and analysis. While Stevi was primarily interested in the changes in the
lives of two generations of women in relation to theoretical debates on
modernity and intimacy, Sik Ying was more concerned with and atten-
tive to mother-daughter relationships. Both preoccupations are evident
in the final form this book has taken.
Both of us, however, always been interested in the everyday, the ways
in which personal lives and intimate relationships are conducted within
particular sociocultural and political contexts and how individuals make
sense of their lives in those contexts. Working collaboratively across cul-
tures has broadened our understanding of the complexity of the everyday
and sensitised us to the importance of thinking not only about cultural
differences, but also about the material socio-economic conditions and
political circumstances in which our intimate and family relationships
take shape. Collaborative working across cultures has also sensitised us to
local specificities, leading each of us to question what we take for granted
and make our own familiar strange—as when we find we have to explain
aspects of our local cultures and conditions to each other.
Attending to local specificities has also prompted us to think critically
about the methodological and conceptual choices involved in doing com-
parative research. In particular, it is vital to do comparison symmetrically,
not taking ‘the west’ as the benchmark against which others’ sexual mores
and family practices are evaluated. In making comparisons and account-
ing for differences across the world we should not simply attribute such
differences to culture or tradition, but also take account of wider his-
torical, social, economic and political conditions through which cultural
continuity and change are mediated. We should certainly not assume that
there is a universal trajectory of ‘progress’ that all are travelling along,
with some leading the way while others lag behind. We should avoid
thinking of ‘them’ and ‘us’, the all too easy ‘othering’ of places outside the
metropole. This means staying alert to the limitations of theories gener-
ated from western locations and the difficulty of having voices from the
global periphery heard in what counts as the academic mainstream. As
Raewyn Connell points out, in ‘the era of neoliberal globalization, the
metropole continues to be the main site of theoretical processing’ affect-
ing how scholars the world over do their work, so that the metropole’s
theoretical hegemony has become ‘the normal functioning of this econ-

omy of knowledge’ (Connell 2015: 51). Issues of language and the con-
ceptual possibilities it enables and delimits are part of this. In working
together on Cantonese language data, as, respectively, native English and
Cantonese speakers writing for an international audience, we are con-
stantly trying to capture the nuances of expression in a Chinese lan-
guage and make them intelligible to an Anglophone audience. We are
then constrained to effect a further translation into the conceptual lan-
guage of Euro-American scholarly convention. We hope this book will
contribute to critical scholarship and to internationalising feminist and
sociological knowledge, which requires attention to the range of issues
we have raised: material socio-economic contexts, colonial legacies and
western conceptual and Anglophone linguistic hegemony (see Jackson
et al. 2017; Jackson and Ho 2018).
Since we completed our fieldwork with mothers and daughters, the
world has continued to undergo change. There has been much conflict
on the global stage as well as the rise of populist political movements and
increasingly autocratic regimes in states that are ostensibly democratic.
The UK and Hong Kong have had their share of political strife—in
the former over Brexit and in the latter the ongoing struggle for democ-
racy, freedom and human rights. In Hong Kong the political turbulence,
ongoing as we complete this book, has been particularly acute and was
unforeseen when we began work on this project. Hong Kong needs to be
understood in relation to China as well as in relation to its past colonial
ties to the UK; both have shaped its particular conditions of life. When
we began our research, conditions in China seemed to be becoming more
liberal, but the PRC’s regime has grown increasingly authoritarian since
Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Rigorous censorship has limited the
research that can be conducted on and in China and is threatening aca-
demic freedom in Hong Kong (Ho et al. 2018a). The revival of Confu-
cianism in China and its emphasis on the centrality of the family to social
stability is also being felt in Hong Kong through attempts to extend Chi-
nese style ‘national and moral education’ to Hong Kong. The tightening
hold of Beijing over Hong Kong’s local governance and, in particular,
the denial of the democracy promised at the handover, led to a major
popular uprising, the Umbrella Movement, in the autumn of 2014 and
ultimately to the protests that began in the summer of 2019. These later
protests were sparked by a bill (now withdrawn) allowing extradition of
alleged criminals to mainland China but have broadened into wider pro-
democracy activism. The reverberations of the Umbrella Movement, as
our recent research demonstrates, had an impact on personal and family
life (see Ho et al. 2018b, c), which prompts us to think about the future
consequences of the 2019–2020 struggles, intensified early in 2020 by
the coronavirus outbreak. These political developments, because of their
urgency and immediacy, absorbed much of our energy and diverted us
away from completing work on this book. At the same time, however,
they offered us new insights and cast new light on the data we had gath-
ered from our sample of mothers and daughters. Where relevant we use
some of our more recent research in what follows to complement our
earlier findings on Hong Kong family life.
In the next chapter, we begin to explore and elaborate on the issues
outlined above by discussing the theoretical and methodological frame-
work of our study and then introducing our participants. In the fol-
lowing chapter, we set the lives of women in Britain and Hong Kong
in historical context, emphasising the interconnections between the UK,
China and Hong Kong that have shaped those lives. We might think that
this matters only for Hong Kong, but it does not; Britain’s past empire,
we will argue, shaped the ‘home country’ as much as its colonies. In sur-
veying this history, we will use accounts from the women we interviewed,
particularly the older generation, to demonstrate the changes that have
occurred in the social life of each location since the end of the Asia Pacific
War and the Second World War.
In the fourth chapter, we address the central issue of our study: the
diverse forms of family life in our two locations, the meaning ‘family’
has for our participants and the practices associated with it. This empha-
sis on family practices carries over into the following chapter (Chapter 5)
where we make use of the concept of ‘practices of intimacy’ (Jamieson
2011) to analyse the relationships between mothers and daughters and
how they have been sustained from the daughters’ childhoods into their
young adulthood. The sixth chapter charts the romantic and sexual rela-
tionship trajectories of both generations of women, focusing how social
change and sociocultural differences have shaped women’s partnership
choices. We look to the imagined futures of the daughters in Chapter 7,

bringing our attention back to notions of tradition and modernity in
young women’s aspirations. In our final, brief, concluding chapter we
reflect again on theories of modernity and how modernity is lived and
experienced in specific contexts.
Throughout the book, in making comparisons and accounting for dif-
ferences between the two locales, we subject ideas of ‘cultural’ and ‘tra-
ditional’ differences to critical scrutiny and continually emphasise the
importance of social, economic and political conditions through which
continuity and change are mediated. This is a major strength of under-
taking comparative research. Even when done on a relatively small scale,
as in this study, it serves to demonstrate the social shaping of individual
lives by attending to the varied ways that intimacy can be practised, fam-
ily lives can be lived and gender relations can be constituted in differing
circumstances. In detailing the lives of the women who participated in
our study and the ways they told their stories to us, we also pay attention
to their relational constructions of gendered selfhood within the forms
of subjectivity available to them in changing times and in their specific
locales. We see our analysis as exercising a feminist sociological imagina-
tion, which ‘enables us to grasp history and biography and the relation
between the two in society’ (Mills 1970: 12), in this case in two very
different societies with intertwined histories.
2
Conceptualising and Investigating
the Gendered Consequences of Modernity
in Britain and Hong Kong
Part of the impetus behind this project was our shared discontent with
the Eurocentrism of much of the existing work on families and rela-
tionships—at least that considered more mainstream—and in particu-
lar a neglect of East Asia. Living, as we are told, in the ‘Asian century’,
we cannot but be aware of Asian economic ascendancy, ‘the seemingly
irreversible shift to the East, particularly to Asia, of the dynamism of
global capitalism’ (Bhambra and Santos 2017: 4). As Dipesh Chakrabarty
(2008) points out, Europe has already been provincialised by history in
the sense that it has lost its central place in the world order, yet it con-
tinues, as an imaginary figure, to hold sway over much of the world and
European social thought continues to exert a global influence on aca-
demic production. There remains a profound asymmetry between the-
ory and research generated from the ‘west’ or the metropole and that
generated elsewhere. Too often, parochially based western knowledge is
assumed to be universal, while that generated elsewhere is categorised
as ‘area studies’, as relevant only to a particular part of the world. The
Taiwanese cultural theorist, Kuan-Hsing Chen, offers an acerbic com-
mentary on this situation:
© The Author(s) 2020 13

S. Jackson and P. S. Y. Ho, Women Doing Intimacy,
Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-28991-9_2
Europeans, North Americans … [and others have] been doing area stud-
ies in relation to their own living spaces. That is, Martin Heidegger was
actually doing European Studies, as were Michel Foucault, Pierre Bour-
dieu and Jürgen Habermas. Once we recognize how extremely limited the
current conditions of knowledge are, we learn to be humble about our
knowledge claims. The universalist assertions of theory are premature, for
theory too must be deimperialized. (Chen 2010: 3)
A number of other authors have drawn attention to the parochialism

of Eurocentric knowledge claims, demanding recognition of theoretical
and epistemological perspectives from the Global South or calling for a
decolonisation of knowledge production (see e.g. Bhambra and Santos
2017). Feminist knowledge has not escaped such critiques, framed from
a variety of locations and perspectives (e.g. Connell 2015; Giraldo 2016;
Lugones 2010; Moletsane et al. 2015). While we are inspired by such
writers, we are not here attempting anything as grand as a new episte-
mology. Our aim is more modest. Through a comparative study of one
western and one East Asian society, we hope to call into question a set
of very specific western knowledge claims: narratives about modernity,
gender and intimacy.
Some caution is necessary in approaching any analysis of societies
other than our own, in particular in making comparison between ‘the
East’ and ‘the West’. We use the terms west or western, east or east-
ern, for convenience and also because of the lack of easily understood
alternatives and our dissatisfaction with currently available alternatives,
such as ‘global North’ versus ‘global South’—both because of their lack
of geographical specificity and because they simply do not adequately
describe the Asian society with which we are concerned—Hong Kong.
The vocabulary of east and west is also very widely used in many Asian
countries, not least when Asians differentiate themselves from perceived
western values and practices. We do, however, acknowledge the prob-
lematic nature of these terms. In the first place, ‘east’ and ‘west’ are cul-
tural constructions rather than geographical absolutes: if one is located
in Japan, the USA is geographically to the east. The common-sense geog-
raphy that established the place of ‘the west’ in relation to ‘the east’ is a
2 Conceptualising and Investigating the Gendered … 15
product of a history of western exploration, adventurism and imperial-

ism, as well as relations among European powers that led to the Green-
wich meridian defining what, in terms of longitude, was to the east or
the west. This is more than a matter of the calculation of longitude.
For westerners, the idea of ‘the East’ bears the marks of the orientalism
through which it has long been imagined (Said 1978). The west, how-
ever, does not have a monopoly on imagined geographies; the ‘west’ as
seen from the ‘east’ is also a construction. Thus, there is a need to be
wary of these constructions and the ideological baggage they carry and
also to avoid homogenising either ‘the east’ or ‘the west’. Secondly, com-
parisons are always made from a particular location. In order to avoid
the worst consequences of this, the ‘othering’ of those from regions of
the world distant from our own, it is imperative to pay attention to the
voices and writings of scholars from those regions and exercise a degree
of reflexivity about our own geographical and cultural locations and the
intellectual preoccupations associated with them, as well as being alert to
the imaginaries associated with the idea of modernity in different parts
of the world (Appadurai 1996; Rofel 1999; Chakrabarty 2008; Bhambra
2007).
It is equally crucial to attend to modernity’s ‘other’—tradition—which
is also imagined from a variety of locations and perspectives and put
to a variety of uses politically, particularly in resisting purportedly west-
ern influences. For example, the rhetoric of ‘Asian values’ has been used
against claims for LGBT rights and gender equality (Lee 2016; Teo 2009)
and, more generally, in nation building (Teo 2010; Jenco 2013). As Dir-
lik notes, it is common for countries ‘empowered by success in the cap-
italist economy’ to make strong, culturally based claims to versions of
modernity different from those of the west (2007: 45–46). This could
be said of Japan’s well-documented invention of tradition (Vlastos 1998)
and China’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. In such situations,
Dirlik argues:
Native pasts may serve as sources for claims to alternative cultures and
knowledges. But these are pasts that are themselves inventions of moder-
nity, that already have been reimagined in the face of challenges posed
by a hegemonic Eurocentrism as well as by more than a century of social

and economic transformation. (Dirlik 2007: 46)
This opposition between tradition and modernity is often based on

essentialist notions of indigenous culture and ignores the evolution,
reshaping and (re)invention of tradition. How modernity and tradition
are co-constructed and how this dualistic understanding is deployed in
both political rhetoric and academic theory requires some exploration,
though with some caveats. Traditions and local cultural values are not
mere inventions, but have a history and can give meaning to lives. They
may also sometimes be resources for progressive resistance to western
hegemony (see Jenco 2013). Moreover, as Phillips (2004) argues, tra-
dition is not always invented and we do need to take account of tradi-
tion as cultural transmission, the way ideas, values and ways of life are
passed down from one generation to another and persist through time.
A balance needs to be struck between acknowledging the ways in which
tradition is constructed and recognising that particular histories and cul-
tural ideals do create persistent differences between countries and regions
of the world. We remain sceptical about the political invocation of ‘Asian
values’ or ‘Chinese tradition’—and also, of course, of ‘British values’—
but also attend to the ways in which local traditions and culture feature
in daily life, though always understood in their wider socio-economic
and political contexts.
In addressing modernity and tradition, we are also dealing with issues
of gender and generation and adopting a feminist stance. There have,
for some decades, been challenges to the European and North American
dominance of feminist theory, but such endeavours have largely been
framed in terms of an opposition between first world and third world
women or, more recently, between Global North and Global South (Spi-
vak 1988; Mohanty et al. 1991; Connell 2015; Giraldo 2016; Molet-
sane et al. 2015), with the most common points of reference being post-
colonial societies in South Asia, Africa or Latin America. These have
been important and influential analyses exposing both material and intel-
lectual injustices. One effect, however, has been to marginalise women
from wealthy East Asian territories within such discussions. Women from
Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan or South Korea are neither west-
ern nor from the Global South (if the latter is conceived as comprising
relatively impoverished or ‘developing’ nations). They are from places
that, in economic terms, might be seen as included in the ‘metropole’,
but in the academic literature continue to be treated as peripheral.
While there is now a large body of research on gender in East Asia
produced by western and indigenous researchers, much of which is fem-
inist, it largely remains sequestered in ‘area studies’ and has only rarely
been taken up by mainstream western academic feminism. When East
Asia in general, and Chinese societies in particular, have been consid-
ered by western feminists this has, in the past, sometimes simply repro-
duced orientalist and essentialist constructions of eastern women. Writ-
ing in the 1990s, Jinhua Teng (1996) pointed out that Chinese women
had historically received attention when they fitted into western political
or theoretical agendas, whether colonial, leftist, developmental or fem-
inist in character. They were thus variously portrayed as emblematic of
cultural backwardness, victims of patriarchal tradition or revolutionary
heroines. From these diverse positions Chinese women were treated as
a homogenised, unitary category and Chinese tradition, whether con-
ceived as continuing into the present or as transcended by socialist trans-
formation, was represented as having existed unchanged over the cen-
turies, as at ‘an eternal standstill’ (1996: 134). In early feminist engage-
ments with China, essentialising Chinese women was an offshoot of
treating women as a whole as a fixed, unitary category, subordinated by
a universal patriarchy, but when ‘essentialism is informed by orientalism,
one runs the risk of establishing a hierarchical relation between Western
women and Chinese women that ironically reinforces the discursive sub-
ordination of Chinese women’ (Teng 1996: 141). Feminism has come a
long way since the 1970s and it is now widely recognised that women
are not a unitary category. Feminist work on Chinese societies has also
grown and developed since then, and especially since Teng’s article was
published. There is now a plenty of sophisticated and nuanced research
on the gendered complexities of Chinese societies. Yet Teng’s hopes that
women’s studies might provide an opportunity for ‘Chinese studies to
end its segregation’, which has ‘meant its marginalization in the Western
academy’ (1996: 144–145), remain unrealised.
In the context of this book, it is vital that we recognise that not all
Chinese majority societies are the same; Hong Kong differs from main-
land China, Taiwan and Singapore. These societies may share a cultural
heritage but this is not something that has remained unchanged over
time and how it has changed, and how it has been re-shaped and re-
interrogated in the past and present, has been influenced by their diverse
histories, including the legacies of colonialism, western and Japanese.
These societies also differ in terms of socio-economic conditions, their
political regimes and their location within the regional and global geopo-
litical order. Even within the small territory of Hong Kong, there are
differences of class, of age and generation, of antecedents (local or main-
land) and individual biographies among women. It is as absurd to treat
‘Chinese women’ or ‘Chinese culture’ as unitary as it would be to regard
British women or British culture as essential unities. Yet the imagined
fictions of ‘west’ and ‘east’ continue to haunt us—we do not imagine
ourselves to be immune from stereotypes of ‘the other’. This is where
collaborative working between scholars from two different cultures can
be an advantage, in sensitising us to local specificities, raising questions
about what each takes for granted and enabling a mutual and reciprocal
process of making what is familiar to each of us strange and, conversely,
facilitating an appreciation of everyday actualities that might seem, to an
outsider, alien and ‘other’ (Jackson and Ho 2018).
Working between Hong Kong and the UK is a very specific project.
Neither can be considered representative of their geographical region
(Europe or East Asia) and thus cannot be used to generalise about East
Asian or European social mores and practices. While this comparative
case may be very particular, the historical relationship between the UK
and Hong Kong, as coloniser and colonised, respectively, makes it of par-
ticular interest as an exercise in attending to the interconnected histories
that have shaped the modern world (cf. Bhambra 2007). Both are now
part of the rich, post-industrial world but British colonialism has left its
mark. The particular niche Hong Kong occupied in the British Empire
was associated with a neglect of the local population (see Chapter 3).
Up to the 1970s, Hong Kong was characterised by ‘third world’ lev-
els of poverty but it is now richer in terms of GDP per capita than
the UK. World Bank figures indicate that in 1960 Hong Kong’s per
capital GDP was less than a third of the UK’s (US$429.44 compared
with US$1380.31). Since then Hong Kong’s wealth has grown exponen-
tially, with a GDP per capita of $46,193.61 in 2017 surpassing the UK’s
$39,720.44.1 The IMF ranks Hong Kong as the 10th richest economy in
the world (with the UK ranking 28th).2 This is, however, only part of the
picture; Hong Kong may be among the richest places in the world, but
it is also one of the most unequal in terms of the distribution of income,
ranking 9th most unequal, much worse than the UK (at 86th) and worse
than comparable Asian economies (Singapore 32nd, Japan 63rd, South
Korea 76th, Taiwan 81st).3 The most widely used, though far from per-
fect, index of inequality is the Gini coefficient, where the closer to zero,
the more equal, the closer to one the more unequal. Hong Kong’s Gini
coefficient has risen steadily from 0.45 in the 1980s to 0.54 in 20164 ;
The UK has also become more unequal since the 1970s, from its histori-
cally most equal at around 0.24 to around 0.34 in 2015–2016, with the
most significant rise, unsurprisingly, in the 1980s.5 Britain’s increasing
inequality, reflecting the erosion of progressive taxation and the welfare
state, while alarming in its consequences, has not produced the degree of
stark inequality and grinding poverty evident in Hong Kong, where the
policies of both the colonial and present administration have resulted
in a lack of welfare provision and a huge gulf between rich and poor
(Goodstadt 2013a, b, 2018). These conditions force Hong Kong’s inhab-
itants into self-reliance in a climate of economic uncertainty, with con-
sequences for their personal lives, as we will see in subsequent chapters.
In this postcolonial era, comparing women’s lives in two contexts, shaped
by their differing relations to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism,
offers us an opportunity to think about the gendered consequences of
1 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.pcap.cd?end=2017&start=1960&view=chart.
Accessed 3 February 2019.
2 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-richest-countries-in-the-world-2018-5?r=US&IR=T#29-
france-45473-1. Accessed 3 February 2019.
3 https://photius.com/rankings/2018/economy/distribution_of_family_income_gini_index_
2018_0.html.
4 https://www.socialindicators.org.hk/en/indicators/economy/11.6. Accessed 3 February 2019.
5 https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed. Accessed 3 February 2019.
social change in terms of connected histories and intersections between

local and global social relations.
Re-Thinking Intimacy and Modernity

In taking as our point of departure debates on intimacy and modernity,
we are immediately faced with a problem; the very concepts we are deal-
ing with have, for the most part, been framed from a western perspec-
tive. Since the 1990s, the concept of intimacy has been used in west-
ern sociology to refer to the specific qualities of close personal relation-
ships (Giddens 1992; Jamieson 1998; Gabb 2008). The advantages of
this concept are that it potentially encompasses varied forms and dimen-
sions of intimacy and does not specify who is on intimate terms with
whom; it thus includes the terrain of family relationships while also task-
ing in extra-familial relationships as important aspects of contemporary
sociality. The very breadth of the term may also be a drawback since it
is understood in differing ways, not only in academic circles but also in
lay terms, where it is often used primarily in relation to romantic, sexual
relationships. Indeed, the term was first used in academic circles in the
context of couple intimacy and this remains central to much research
in this area despite the broader scope of the concept in use today (see
Jamieson 1998, 1999; Gabb 2008). ‘Intimacy’, as a western concept, did
not initially translate easily, linguistically and culturally, into many other
contexts. It is usually rendered in Chinese as qin. As Jieyu Liu explains it,
qin can be used as either an adjective or a noun and describes ‘the state
of a very good relationship’. She continues:
Qin is distinguished from Jin (close) in the common phrase ‘Jin er bu

qin’ (a relationship can be socially recognized as close but not intimate);
and so Qin in particular emphasizes the subjective feeling and the quality
of a relationship and this is largely captured by the concept of intimacy.
(Liu 2017: 1038)
This term is also used in Cantonese (the language of natives of Hong

Kong) and can be used in a composite way to refer to an intimate rela-
tionship, qin mi guanxi. This phrase is relatively new to Hong Kong but
has become common usage, as in the title of a song by Hong Kong singer
Sammi—a song that describes qin mi guanxi as surpassing romantic love,
something that requires very deep feelings and a closeness based on near
telepathic mutual understanding. A related, though distinct, term, which
sounds similar in Putonghua (Mandarin), is qing (a term usually trans-
lated into English as ‘feeling’) and is even more multi-valent than ‘inti-
macy’ and is usually used as part of a compound term (e.g. ai qing, liter-
ally ‘love feeling’ meaning something similar to romantic love).
The utility of the idea of intimacy in academic contexts in East Asia
has been greatly facilitated by Jamieson’s conceptualisation of ‘practices
of intimacy’, that is ‘practices which cumulatively and in combination
enable, create and sustain a sense of a close and special quality of a rela-
tionship between people’ (Jamieson 2011: n.p.). This shifts us from a
rather abstract quality of a relationship or feeling to what individuals
actually do in terms of acts of care or affection. The emphasis on the
‘doing’ of intimacy is less abstract than intimacy alone and also allows
for exploration of the many and varied ways in which intimacy can be
expressed and enacted. This conceptualisation thus allows for contextual
and cultural differences and provides a means of thinking beyond the
parochially western, making it conducive to cross-cultural comparison. It
also focuses on practices of intimacy as relational, which moves us away
from view of the self, prevalent in western theory, as individualised and
autonomous and thus makes it applicable to societies which do not have
a liberal notion of individual selfhood (Liu 2017). The idea of ‘practices
of intimacy’ is now being taken up by some Asian scholars; for example,
in addition to Liu’s work, it is deployed in a study of Taiwanese young
people’s use of communications technologies in maintaining friendships
and love relationships (Yang 2014) and in a discussion of mainland Chi-
nese men’s marital lives (Cao 2019). The concept has also been extended
to include ‘negotiable intimacy’ in analysing the exchange of material
assistance and emotional bonds between parents and their adult chil-
dren in China (Xhong and Ho 2014) and we have recently adopted it in
exploring the impact of political protest on Hong Kong family life (Ho
et al. 2018b).
In western theory, particular forms of intimacy have been associated
with the development of modernity, but this relationship has been much
contested. In the first place, the way modernity is framed is profoundly
Eurocentric. In the long history of theorising modernity, dating back to
the nineteenth century, western scholars have tended to assume (until
very recently) that their parochially based theories are universally appli-
cable. In much academic theorising, modernity has been seen as paradig-
matically western, an assumption now brought into question (see Bham-
bra 2007; Chakrabarty 2008). If we define late modernity in the narrow
sense in which it is usually understood (a sense that requires some inter-
rogation), it is a condition characteristic of ‘developed’, post-industrial
and wealthy societies. These now include East Asian nations and terri-
tories such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong,
while China is in the process of a major modernisation project. These
societies, with some common features but differing histories, cultures
and socio-political conditions, therefore present scholars with an oppor-
tunity to think about the consequences of late modern social change
for our intimate lives beyond the Euro-American arena and to reflect
critically on Eurocentric theories. Yet it is not only western academics
who need to do some re-thinking. As Chakrabarty argues, provincial-
ising Europe not only means recognising that ‘Europe’s acquisition of
the adjective “modern” for itself is an integral part of the story of Euro-
pean imperialism’, but that modernising nationalisms elsewhere have also
been complicit in equating Europe and modernity (2008: 43). While
Chakrabarty is largely concerned with the ways in which this idea of
modernity manifests in the Indian context, it could also be applied to
much East Asian scholarship. As a consequence of the hegemony of
western theory, many East Asian scholars take the idea of modernity as
paradigmatically western as a starting point, even as they modify and
contest western theories in relation to their particular local contexts (see,
for example, Tanabe and Tokita-Tanabe 2003; Yan 2009; Chang 2010b).
A further problem of seeing European societies as the originators
of modernity and everyone else as engaged in a game of catch-up,
it that it ignores the interconnected histories that made the rise of
European ascendancy possible in the first place (Bhambra 2007; Dir-

lik 2007). Bhambra (2007, 2010) argues that it is impossible to under-
stand modernity without an appreciation of its history and the inequali-
ties to which it has given rise. That history is not one of an endogenous
European modernity, but of global interconnections involving colonial-
ism, exploitation and dispossession. She notes, too, that those societies
deemed pre-modern until they came into contact with western moder-
nity were not stagnating in a state of unchanging tradition, but had their
own histories and paths of development. Bhambra reminds us of what we
ought to know: that the development of European modernity depended
on knowledge and technologies from outside Europe as well as the colo-
nial exploitation of other regions. She takes the history of the cotton
industry, often seen as central to Britain’s industrial revolution, and thus
its development to modern industrial capitalism, as an example. Cot-
ton cloth was originally imported from India as, subsequently, was the
knowledge of how to spin weave and dye it. The development of the
cotton industry in the UK led to the UK out-competing India in global
markets, while still importing raw cotton from India as well as that pro-
duced on slave plantations in the Americas (and slavery and the slave
trade had also boosted Britain’s trade and global power). Britain later
imposed tariffs on finished cotton from India, further undermining the
latter’s industry and clearing the way for British exports. Britain became
the world leader in cotton textiles by the end of the nineteenth century,
a development that depended on destroying India’s industry. The con-
nections to which Bhambra draws to our attention could be extended
further. As we will demonstrate in the next chapter, they included the
opium trade between India and Hong Kong, which played its part in the
chain of trade and exploitation contributing to sustaining both Britain’s
imperial projects and its domestic economic development. As Bhambra
argues:
…understanding Europe in terms of global interconnections will provide

a better understanding of how modernity has developed and, at the same
time, alter our understanding of what it means to be modern, and alter
our understanding of the European ‘ownership’ of modernity as an orig-
inary project. (Bhambra 2007: 78)
In addition to questioning the way modernity has been Eurocentri-

cally imagined, we should also take note of the ways in which it has
been imagined in gendered terms. Women can simultaneously be cast
as bearers of tradition—as embodying it through their dress and con-
duct and as passing it on to their offspring—and as icons of moder-
nity, as educated women who are emblematic of progress—and some-
times both simultaneously. In East Asia, modernisation projects have
often involved redefining the roles of women and men, as often in ways
that re-traditionalise as much as de-traditionalising them. The creation of
the ‘good wife and wise mother’ ideal, which originated in Japan in the
late nineteenth century and thence spread to China (Sechiyama 2013),
was based on a fusion of (reinvented) Confucian tradition and ‘mod-
ern’, ‘scientific’ notions of motherhood. More recently, the retreat from
Maoist ideals of gender equality in China as part of its post-reform period
of rapid development has re-traditionalised gender divisions, with the
emphasis on ‘natural’ feminine and masculine qualities and harmonious
family relationships (Rofel 2007; Ji 2017; Ho et al. 2018a).
In the context of western theory, classical theorists have been critiqued
for positioning women, seen as domesticated creatures of the private
sphere, as less affected by modernity than men (see Sydie 1994; Marshall
and Witz 2004). Recent theory, with its emphasis on the relationship
between intimacy and modernity, has instead placed women as agents of
change, or at least as equally implicated in the posited changes in inti-
mate life. This is evident in Giddens’ (1992) proposition that a ‘trans-
formation of intimacy’ is occurring in western societies. Giddens’ argu-
ment is situated within a globally influential version of modernisation
theory developed in European sociology from the 1990s, which posited
that processes of individualisation and detraditionalisation within late,
reflexive, second or liquid modernity were rendering relationships less
stable and binding (Giddens 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002;
Bauman 2003). Giddens proposes that older ideals of romantic love have
been supplanted by the ‘pure relationship’, which lasts only as long as
it ‘deliver[s] enough satisfaction for each individual to stay within it’
(Giddens 1992: 58), which is ideally democratic and egalitarian, and is
founded on trust and a form of intimacy based on mutual self-disclosure.
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) conceptualise personal relationships as
‘elective affinities’; they have ceased to be ‘communities of need’ so that

our ties to others are no longer secure and predictable.
This argument, along with the individualisation thesis as a whole, has
been subjected to numerous criticisms in the western context and has
been modified and contested by some Asian scholars. While we posi-
tion ourselves among those who are critical of the transformation of inti-
macy, individualisation and detraditionalisation theses, we (and they) are
clearly not arguing that nothing has changed in the ordering of family
life and gender relations. In much of the western world, families and inti-
mate relationships have become more diverse and individuals do have
more choice in how they conduct their personal lives—though some
have more choice than others. It is also the case that neoliberal policies
and ideologies are making individuals more responsible for their own
lives. Yet these claims should also be tempered with recognition of the
continued importance of close personal ties. There are good reasons to
doubt that the claims made by Giddens and Beck capture the complexity
of the way intimate relationships are forged and conducted in contem-
porary western societies. This being so, we should be even more wary
of extending versions of the individualisation thesis to other social con-
texts. Commenting on Yan’s (2009) arguments on the individualisation
of Chinese society, Stevan Harrell and Gonçalo Santos acknowledge the
increase in personal freedoms in China but note that ‘this model of social
transformation tends to overstate the extent to which individuals have
become unmoored from family and other social and cultural ties’ (2017:
6).
We are particularly concerned about the way this theory travels and
is deployed beyond the western societies where it originated. In think-
ing critically about the global reach and influence of western theory, it
is important to consider also the critiques of these theories within the
west. While a few East Asian researchers acknowledge such critiques (see
e.g. Koo and Wong 2009), prominent East Asian scholars have built
their theory on the work of Beck and Giddens without considering
the widespread scepticism about this version of western modernity (Yan
2009; Chang 2010a, b; Ochiai 2014). So why does this matter? There
are two main reasons. First, if only some, very particular, western theo-
rists are taken as representing the ‘truth’ of late modern social conditions
in the western world and then taken as the basis of contrasts with Asia,
false comparisons are being made. Secondly, modifying the theories of
Beck or Giddens to fit China, Japan or Korea, while ignoring critiques
of their work, leaves the account of western modernity untouched. If
modernity is imagined from specific locations, then this applies to soci-
ological imaginings too, to how sociologists imagine both their own and
other societies.
It is therefore worth considering briefly some of the problems western
scholars have identified in these influential theories and the alternative
images of western societies they have produced. One key theme in all
the criticisms is the lack of evidence to support many of the claims Gid-
dens (1992) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995, 2002) make about
changes to intimate lives under late modern conditions—and their wilful
neglect of existing research, especially feminist research, on these issues.
Their claims are thus seen as more speculative than empirically grounded
(Jamieson 1999; Heaphy 2007; Jackson 2015). There are, however, a
number of more specific points made by their critics. First, Western soci-
eties can be imagined as overly de-traditionalised, as if only Asian soci-
eties have traditions, so that the European and modern are assumed to
be opposed to the local and traditional—as in Tanabe and Tokita Tan-
abe’s account (2003). They argue, contra Giddens, that modernity in
Asia ‘cannot be seen as a “post-traditional order”’, but involves a ‘com-
plex self-reflexive endeavour to position oneself for and against “Euro-
pean modernity” and “indigenous tradition”’ (2003: 4, emphasis in orig-
inal). It is easy to see why a reading of western accounts might give the
impression that tradition in the West is dead—or no longer very salient
to everyday life. Modernity is characterised as a ‘post-traditional order’
(Giddens 1991: 4) or as profoundly affected by ‘de-traditionalization’
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2001: 25–26). While neither Giddens nor
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that tradition is completely irrelevant
to late modern life, they see it as no longer having institutional moor-
ings; in the contemporary world tradition ‘loses its rationale’ (Giddens
1991: 206) or ‘has force only through the decisions and experience of
individuals’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 26). It is largely ‘invented’
tradition (Hobsbawm 1983) that is seen as having some purchase in con-
temporary times: as ‘chosen and invented’ to cope with the pressures of
modern life (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 25–26) or reconstructed

and invented as a source of ‘moral fixity’ in the face of the ‘always revis-
able’ outlook of high modernity (Giddens 1991: 206–207). While tradi-
tion and modernity are often posited as polar opposites, in actuality they
are not mutually exclusive. Modernity does not do away with tradition,
but is shaped by it and reshapes it (Jackson et al. 2013).
The detraditionalisation thesis thus tends to overstate the move away
from tradition. Recent British research suggests that many heterosexual
young people still hold to quite conventional approaches to marriage,
commitment and gendered divisions of labour (Thwaites 2016; Carter
2018; Twamley 2018). Drawing on a number of recent studies, Carter
and Duncan (2018) identify a mixing of the traditional and modern in
family life, deriving both from social conditions and everyday practices.
These findings confirm the argument advanced by Neil Gross (2005)
on the continued relevance of tradition. He notes that there has been a
decline in the normative constraints of regulative traditions around fam-
ily life, but contends that this does not necessarily mean the demise of
‘meaning constitutive’ traditions, such as ideas of love and commitment,
which continue to guide individuals’ investments in marriage and fam-
ily relationships. If this is the case in the West then we should not be
surprised that aspects of Confucian tradition continue to be ‘meaning
constitutive’ in East Asia—and this should not be taken as indicative
of a lesser degree of modernity on the assumption that western soci-
eties have done away with tradition. It is the case that traditions are
often invented or reinvented over time—Confucianism being a case in
point, as is the Japanese ie system (Ueno 2009)—or, indeed, the prac-
tice of British women taking their husbands’ names on marriage, which
was not always a universal practice throughout Britain (Thwaites 2013,
2016). Although the decline in regulative traditions has introduced some
choice in whether an individual adopts them or not, these choices are
not random. As Thwaites (2016) points out, the particular tradition
of women adopting their husband’s surname reinforces the idea of a
male family head. That it was ‘chosen’ by many of her participants and
simply taken for granted by others illustrates the continued normative
power of meaning-making traditions. Indeed many referenced tradition
in explaining their decisions, as well as a sense of ‘belonging’ to a new

family.
Thwaites’ research indicates that for many British women their sense
of self is closely tied to family relationships and that they are, there-
fore, not fully individualised. Many researchers have contested the idea
of individualisation, pointing to the ways in which (western) individu-
als continue to lead highly relational lives and construct relational selves
(Smart 2007; Heaphy 2007). Relatedly it is argued, following Mead
(1934), that a highly reflexive sense of self can only be constructed in
relation to others, that reflexive self-hood is, can only be, social and rela-
tional (Adams 2003; Jackson 2011). It is not only a matter of defining
oneself in relation to others, but close personal relationships continue to
matter in how western individuals conduct their lives. A sense of obli-
gation within families can still be found (Finch 1989; Finch and Mason
1993; Morgan 2011a), even when relationships break down (Ribbens
McCarthy et al. 2003). In couple relationships, there is little evidence
of Giddens’ posited ‘pure relationship’ which lasts only as long as it
‘deliver[s] enough satisfaction for each individual to stay within it’ (Gid-
dens 1992: 58). Commitment remains important to couples in negoti-
ating relationships (Carter 2012) and is evident in the motives of young
lesbian and gay couples seeking legal recognition of their relationships
where this has become possible (Heaphy et al. 2013)
There is, in any case, an over-emphasis on couple relationships, par-
ticularly in Giddens’ account, whereas Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995)
at least acknowledge parents’ investments in their children. Many doubt
the rosy picture of the democratisation of couple relationships painted
by Giddens; it is still women who take on the main burden of running
households and raising children. Giddens also places too much emphasis
on what Jamieson calls ‘disclosing intimacy’ at the expense of other prac-
tices of intimacy that keep relationships functioning (Jamieson 1998,
1999, 2011). Moreover, practices of intimacy are not necessarily demo-
cratic—even in the case of disclosing intimacy (Jamieson 1998, 2011).
For example, disclosure between parents and children is usually asym-
metrical with parents expecting to know far more about their children’s
lives than vice versa—and expecting openness from one’s teenage chil-
dren can be a form of surveillance and control. Parent–child relationships
may have become less authoritarian in western societies, but they are far
from being egalitarian; how democratic and open they are can vary from
one western country to another (see, e.g. Schalet 2011), as well varying
within any society.
Bringing parent–child relationships into the frame also raises questions
about the idea of ‘elective affinities’. Some relationships are clearly more
elective than others. One may choose one’s lover or spouse but not one’s
parents. Couples and individuals may now make decisions on whether
to have children, when and how many, albeit within the constraints of
fertility, the reliability of contraception and the availability of assisted
conception or options for adoption. Once children arrive, however, par-
ent–child bonds are not usually thought of as elective. Both normatively
and legally, parents remain responsible for their children until they attain
adulthood while children, particularly when young, remain dependant
on their parents for their every need. Conversely, some affinities have
always been elective, friendship being the primary example.
Finally, Giddens and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim stand accused of pre-
senting an overly homogenised ‘monochrome’ view of western societies
(Smart and Shipman 2004), a white middle-class view of the world. They
ignore class differences that might lead, for example, to more geographi-
cal mobility and hence movement away from kin among the professional
classes than the less advantaged as well as the ethnic diversity of contem-
porary western societies. The ethnocentrism of these accounts is particu-
larly marked, since there is strong evidence of the continued importance
of kin ties in many minority ethnic communities (Smart and Shipman
2004; Heaphy 2007). To this charge of ethnocentrism could be added
eurocentrism, in the failure to acknowledge the contribution of these
same minorities, and their ancestors in their countries of origin, to the
development of European modernity.
Three points are central to our analysis and pertinent to both western
and East Asian contexts. First, what Carol Smart (2007) calls ‘relation-
ality’ remains central to late modern selves; secondly, ideas and practices
deemed ‘traditional’ (albeit reconfigured within modernity) still play a
part in personal life; and thirdly, gender inequality and heteronorma-
tivity persist—in old and new ways—in the social ordering of personal
life. Having said this, we also need to consider what differentiates west-
ern and East Asian societies. First, we need to consider differing histo-
ries of specific nations and territories and their locations within colo-
nial, neo-colonial and modernisation projects and processes. Secondly,
we should take account of varied cultural traditions and how these have
been reshaped by history and by contemporary social conditions in an
increasingly globalised world. Thirdly, while gender inequality and het-
eronormativity are global phenomena they are not everywhere the same,
differing both in degree and form (Jackson 2018, 2019). Finally, all these
differences impact upon the ordering of intimate relationships, the prac-
tices through which they are sustained and how relational selfhood is
constituted and experienced within them. In addressing these differences,
some care needs to be taken over the version of ‘the west’ used for com-
parative purposes.
Modernity or Modernities? the Asian

Experience
To the extent that theorists from other parts of the world accept at face
value accounts of modernity presented by Beck and Giddens, they leave
untouched the idea that western modernity is an endogenous European
achievement. If modernity is the outcome of a history of global inter-
connections (Bhambra 2007, 2010) or conceived as global capitalism
(Dirlik 2003) then it is a singular entity. Does this leave us without
a means of accounting for differences among the world’s regions and
nations? The answer is no. Precisely because global interconnections are
uneven and asymmetrical, as Bhambra emphasises, modernity is not
lived and experienced in the same way everywhere. In some parts of
the world and for some populations, modernity has been catastrophic.
Even among the ‘winners’ in the modern world, the wealthy ‘developed’
nations, uneven and asymmetrical connections have continued effects.
We cannot assume, therefore, that the whole world is following the same
developmental path. The rich East Asian nations and territories differ
in important respects from those of a comparable economic standing
in Europe and North America and also from each other. Japan, South
Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong—as well as Singapore, which is geopolit-

ically South East Asian but culturally (as a Chinese majority society) and
economically has more in common with East Asia—are often grouped
together as sharing (in varying degrees) a Confucian heritage and by
virtue of their economic success. Each, however, has its own distinctive-
ness as a result of its particular history; Singapore and Hong Kong were
British colonies, the former now independent the latter now a Chinese
Special Administrative Region; Taiwan and Korea were both colonised
by Japan and subsequently both were subjected to periods of dictato-
rial government and martial law, bolstered by the USA during the Cold
War as bastions against communism. Both underwent a late transition to
democracy at the end of the 1980s and continue to be subject to consid-
erable US influence. Japan itself became a wold power and expanded its
sphere of influence during the late nineteenth and first half of the twen-
tieth centuries before defeat in the Second World War led to the loss of
its overseas acquisitions and its occupation by US forces. It then rebuilt
to become the second largest economy in the world—though now, with
the rise of China, the third.
Despite differences among them, these societies share some features
that set their modern conditions apart from those of the west, not only
in terms of their indigenous cultures but also as a result of the timing and
pace of change. At this point, it is useful to distinguish between moder-
nity as a global condition and modernisation as a process, and often a
project, undertaken by states keen to raise their standing in the world
order. Both local characteristics and modernisation processes have had
consequences for families and intimate relationships. The shared charac-
teristics of East Asian societies make them a useful test case for thinking
about modernity beyond the west or, as Chang Kyung-Sup puts it, ‘a cru-
cial real-world reference in critically examining the empirical relevance
of Western social sciences’ (2010a: 5). Chang was referring specifically
to South Korea, but it is equally applicable to other East Asian capital-
ist societies. His account is the most sophisticated of attempts to engage
with debates about late modernity and social change in Asian contexts.
Chang is best known for coining the phrase ‘compressed modernity’, to
characterise the East Asian experience of extremely rapid economic devel-
opment and social change and their consequences (1999, 2010a, b, c).
While Chang takes as given accounts of western modernity provided by

Beck and Giddens (see Jackson 2015), the concept of compressed moder-
nity does capture significant and important features of the East Asian
experience and has been take up by others (Lan 2014; Ochiai 2014). It
is as applicable to Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong as it is to South
Korea, though the processes whereby they achieved rapid socio-economic
development differ. These societies have all ‘successfully condensed what
Westerners had experienced socially, politically, and above all, economi-
cally for over two centuries into an experience of less than half a century’
(Chang 2010a: 5). Japan, which embarked on a deliberate modernisation
project in the late nineteenth century, is rather different; its modernity
has been characterised as semi-condensed (Ochiai 2014).
Initially Chang (1999) defined compressed modernityprimarily in
temporal terms, but in his more recent work he analyses it as a complex
matrix of temporal and spatial compression, taking account of internal
change within South Korea, the effects of external influences and the
interplay between them. In addition to its ‘explosive industrialization
and economic growth’, South Korea’s exposure to Japanese and American
influences and its own adoption of ‘various elements of western civiliza-
tion’ have transformed its ‘spatial configuration’. The rapidity with which
this has happened has created ‘intense competition, collision, disjointing,
articulation and compounding between traditional, modern and post-
modern elements’ and between ‘foreign/multinational/global elements
and indigenous elements’. He suggests that there is a further layer of these
colliding and competing elements with all the above in the mix (Chang
2010a: 6–7). A more succinct definition of compressed modernity is pro-
vided by Pei-Chia Lan: ‘a dynamic condition that involves historical and
contemporary entanglements between Western and non-Western soci-
eties in colonial and postcolonial contexts’ (2014: 533). This does not
necessarily mean that the modern equals western. Lan is concerned, as
are we, to avoid a simplistic ‘West/non-West dichotomy’, but nonetheless
to take account of the way in which compressed modernity and global
socio-economic conditions impinge upon Asian societies.
An alternative formulation, put forward by Ji Yingchun (2017) in rela-
tion to China, is ‘mosaic temporality’, which has features in common
with compressed modernity in attending to a complex mix of indige-

nous and foreign influences, complicated further by the retreat from the
Maoist past and the shift to a market economy. In the resultant mosaic,
‘tradition and modernity, the resurgence of Confucianism, the socialist
version of modernity, the capitalist version of modernity, and the social-
ist heritage’ all figure (Ji 2017: 2), and in which the pieces of mosaic
do not merely co-exist but shape each other. Ji is particularly concerned
with the consequences of this for familial and gender relations within
what she calls ‘mosaic familialism’, which helps account for the persis-
tence, indeed intensification, of gender inequality in recent Chinese his-
tory. Here the confluence of the ‘resurgence of Confucian patriarchal
tradition’ combined with the ‘neoliberal rhetoric of individual responsi-
bility’ emphasises the traditional virtues of womanhood and at the same
time represents ‘women’s sacrifices as their own personal choice’ (2017:
3). While Ji’s analysis is, in some respects, very specific to China, it serves
to remind us that we cannot consider tradition to be a thing of the past,
that change is not linear and unidirectional and that traditional ideas
and practices may not only survive within modernity, but can be revivi-
fied and made use of under modern conditions.
The PRC remains very particular in some respects, especially in the
ways family life has been and is regulated. Leaving China aside, there
are some convergences between capitalist East Asian and contemporary
western modernities that are manifested in personal and family life: a
trend towards late marriage and low total fertility, with birth rates falling
below population replacement levels. Ochiai (2014) ties late modernity
to a second demographic transition, but one that is manifested differently
in East Asia from the patterns prevalent in many western societies—in
the former, birth rates are exceptionally low, have fallen very rapidly and
there is not the acceptance of alternative forms of personal relationships
such as cohabitation and same-sex marriage common in many western
countries. In Britain, although the population is ageing, birth rates have
risen somewhat in recent years, with many births occurring outside for-
mal marriage. Late marriage in East Asian societies occurs in a context
of highly familial societies, where families are central to the provision of
welfare to members and thus to survival. Reliance on families for support
has been intensified due to neoliberal governance, which throws citizens
back on their own resources. These conditions are often defended by

governments as preserving ‘Asian values’—which serves as an excuse for
poor state welfare provision, which is certainly the case in Hong Kong
(see Chapter 3). As Ochiai argues, ‘rather than being a direct expression
of cultural values (“Asian” or otherwise) familialist social systems are pri-
marily products of socioeconomic conditions and policy decisions made
in specific historical settings’ (2014: 217). We would concur and this
observation is certainly relevant to the lives of the women we interviewed
in Hong Kong.
There is a paradox here, which has been extensively explored by Chang
Kyung Sup (2010, 2014, 2019; Chang and Song 2010). As he notes,
all the evidence suggests that social attitudes in East Asia still strongly
endorse the centrality of family and yet at the same time there seems to
be a retreat from family. Because of the excessive burdens families place
on individuals (especially women), this produces a process of ‘defamil-
ialisation’—not a desertion of family but a ‘tendency of individuals to
decrease the familial burden of social reproduction by effectively limit-
ing the scope and duration of family life’ (Chang 2014: 41). Late mar-
riage and increasing divorce are the most obvious indicators of this trend;
another that Chang identifies is the geographical separation of nuclear
family members. Most commonly, this involves women staying with chil-
dren and supervising their education, often overseas, while men devote
themselves to their careers elsewhere. Thus ‘large numbers of married
men lead single lives, despite – in fact because of – their commitment of
family’ (Chang 2014: 55). This is a family strategy that prioritises men’s
earnings on the one hand and, on the other, children’s education (left to
women on a day to day basis), to ensure present prosperity and maximise
the future success of the next generation. These husbands and fathers—
known as ‘wild geese’ in Korea and ‘astronauts’ in Hong Kong may spend
little time with their families. There are also other patterns that produce
this situation. Hong Kong and Taiwanese men taking jobs or running
businesses in mainland China, where rapid economic growth is creat-
ing new opportunities, often leave their wives and children behind. This
produces effective defamilialisation within a family strategy. Shen Hsiu-
hua (2014) has described this, in the Taiwanese context, as giving both
husbands and wives a ‘vacation’ from family obligations—women are
freed from having to cater to their husbands’ daily needs, while men
are freed from monogamy. These family strategies are class specific—that
of a wife/mother and children moving abroad for educational purpose is
clearly a means of middle-class social reproduction while other forms of
family separation, for example a Hong Kong man taking a job across the
border in China because of lack of local opportunities, may be available
to those who are less privileged.
These class-based strategies have varied consequences, one of which is
the extent to which family members have access to trans-local cultural
and social capital and foreign or ‘western’ ideas, which may affect how
they live their lives. Asian families affected by compressed modernisa-
tion are not homogenous and are not all affected in the same ways by
global–local interrelations. Lan coins the phrase ‘glocal entanglement’ to
describe two levels of global-local entanglements, ‘those between soci-
eties with intersecting histories and often under asymmetrical relations
of power’ and how ‘the local society as an uneven entity receives, engages
and negotiates with these entanglements in a dynamic and disparate
manner’ (2014: 534). These will have differential consequences within
local societies and may both reflect and reinforce local inequalities, in
terms of those who have access to the ideas and commodities that are
seen as part of a ‘modern’ and cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Modernity may be a singular global phenomenon but its impact is
uneven both within and between nations and regions. The analyses
developed by these Asian theorists emphasise the importance of ‘provin-
cializing the Western experience of modernity and refraining from essen-
tialising or homogenizing non-Western cultures and societies’ (Lan 2014:
544). It is also crucial to take account of the specific histories of given
societies and the local and global socio-economic and political conditions
that have shaped them. Hong Kong and Britain have very particular his-
tories and an interrelationship that continues to influence lives today (see
Chapter 3). It is in terms of these theoretical considerations that we anal-
yse the lives of the women we interviewed.
Another random document with
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huimapäinen vain, kuten sinäkin, Gustel, taidat olla. Hitto vieköön,
kuinka kauan olet jo hyöriskellyt kuninkaan ympärillä? Olet muuten
kerrassaan kuin poika. Ja vaaleat kiharat on ajettu niskasta,
junkkari», ja vanhus nykäisi häntä tukasta. »Älä vain kuvittele olevasi
ainoa naisolento leirissä. Katsoppas vain Jakob Eriksonia tässä.»
Poika astui juuri sisään tuoden pulloja ja laseja. »Samallainen mies
kuin sinäkin! Ole rauhassa, Gustel! Hän ei ole jaksanut oppia
ainoatakaan saksan sanaa. Siihen hän on liian typerä. Mutta mitä
kunnollisin ja jumalisin nainen! Ja ruma! Muuten luonnollisin asia
maailmassa, Gustel: seitsemän paitaressua, elättäjä määrätty
sotaan, vaimo lähtenyt hänen sijastaan. Mitä parhain mies! En voisi
enää mitenkään tulla toimeen ilman häntä.»
Hovipoika tarkasti tuota kelpo olentoa tuntien ehdotonta

vastenmielisyyttä, ja eversti jatkoi tarinaansa. »Oli miten oli, mutta ei
ole ollut helppoa päästä kuninkaan katon alle, sillä hän inhoaa naisia
miesten puvussa. Olet esittänyt satua, jota Upsalan penkeillä
kutsutaan monodraamaksi, kun jokin ypö yksin riemuitsee, pelkää,
on epätoivoissaan, tuntee hellyyttä, on traagillinen ja haaveilee! Ja
olet vielä Herra ties miten paljon kuvitellut, vaikkei ainoakaan
kuolevainen tiedä siitä mitään tai välitä hituistakaan. Sinä näytät
tyytymättömältä? Hengenvaarallista ei se suorastaan ole,
lapsukaiseni! Jos asia olisi paljastunut: 'korjaa luusi, heittiö!' olisi hän
sinulle tiuskaissut ja jo heti perästä ajatellut jotain muuta. Mutta
olisipa kuningatar nähnyt naamiosi läpi! Huh! Sen minä sanon: lapsia
ei pidä suudella! Sellainen suudelma uinuu ja syttyy jälleen liekkiin,
kun huulet kasvavat ja paisuvat. Ja se on ja pysyy totena, että
kuningas on ottanut sinut kerran minun sylistäni, kummilapseni,
hyväillyt ja suudellut että vain läiskähti! Sillä sinä olit uljas ja sievä
lapsi.» Hovipoika ei tiennyt mitään suudelmasta, mutta hän tunsi sen
ja sävähti punaiseksi.
»Entäs nyt, huimapää, mihin nyt ryhdytään?» Hän mietti vähän
aikaa. »Hyvä, minä luovutan sinulle toisen telttani! Sinusta tulee
minun ratsutyttöni, annat kunniasanasi ettet pötki tiehesi ja ratsastat
minun kanssani kunnes sota päättyy. Sitten minä vien sinut kotiini
Ruotsiin lähelle Gefleä. Minä olen yksin. Minun kaksi nuorempaa
poikaani, Axel ja Erik» — hänen silmästään pusertui kyynel.
»Kuninkaan ja isänmaan puolesta!» sanoi hän. »Jäljelle jäänyt
vanhin elää Falunissa sanan palvelijana ja hänellä on suuri palkka.
Voit valita meidän molempien välillä.» Leubelfing lupasi risti-isälleen
mitä jo oli itselleen luvannut ja kertoi sitten hänelle juurtajaksain
seikkailunsa sillä totuuden kaipuulla, joka pyrkii ilmoille pitkän
naamio-elämän perästä yhtä valtavasti kuin nälkä ja jano pitkän
paaston jälkeen.
Vanhus pohti kuulemaansa juttua ja nautti sitten erikoisesti

Leubelfing-serkusta, jonka piirteet hän antoi hovipojan kuvata.
»Liinatukka», punnitsi hän, »ei voi sille mitään, että hän on ämmä.
Se on hänen suonissaan. Minunkin poikani, Falunin pappi, on jänis.
Hän on perinyt äidiltään.»
Kesän lopusta aina elonkorjuun päähän ja aina siihen saakka, kun

eräänä pakkasaamuna ensimäiset ohuet hahtuvat kierivät
maantiellä, ratsasti hovipoika Leubelfing kiltisti risti-isänsä, eversti
Åke Totten vieressä sinne tänne aina sen mukaan, minne sodan
epävakaiset vaiheet milloinkin veivät. Pääkortteeria ja kuningasta
hän ei tavannut, kun eversti useimmiten johti etu- tai jälkijoukkoja.
Mutta Kustaa Aadolf eli nytkin hänen sielunsa silmissä, joskin
kirkastuneessa ja koskemattomassa muodossa, nyt kun hän ei enää
ravistanut häntä kiharoista ja kun hovipoika ei enää kuullut
kuninkaan öisin vieressään, vain ohuen seinän eroittamana,
kääntelevän ja rykivän. Sattumalta sai Leubelfing sitten taas nähdä
kuninkaan kasvot. Se tapahtui Naumburgin torilla. Hovipoika oli
viivähtänyt jonkin ostoksen vuoksi ja aikoi juuri lähteä ratsastamaan
tavoittaakseen everstinsä, joka tällä kertaa komensi etujoukkoja ja oli
jo lähtenyt kaupungista. Yhä sankemmaksi käyvän ihmisjoukon
likistäessä häntä ja hänen hevostaan taloja vastaan, Leubelfing näki
ahtaalla torilla näyn, jonka ihmissilmät ovat vain kerran nähneet, kun
rauhanruhtinas useita satoja vuosia sitten aasintamman seljässä
saapui Jerusalemiin. Tosin istui Kustaa muhkean sotaoriin selässä
haarniskoitujen, uljailla ratsuilla ajavien miesten ympäröimänä; mutta
Pohjan kuningasta saartoi satoihin nouseva ihmisjoukko kiihkeiden
tunteiden vallassa: vaimoja, jotka molemmin käsin nostivat lapsiaan
riemuitsevien päitten yli, miehiä, jotka ojensivat käsiään saadakseen
painaa Kustaan oikeata kättä, nuoria tyttöjä, jotka suutelivat hänen
jalustimiaan, köyhää väkeä, joka heittäytyi polvilleen hänen eteensä
pelkäämättä että kuninkaan hevonen kavioillaan survoisi — hevonen
astui muuten lauhkeasti ja rauhallisesti — rohkeata, rakkauden ja
innostuksen huumaamaa kansaa, jonka hengen omaisuuden
kuningas oli pelastanut. Ilmeisesti liikutettuna kumartuen ratsultaan
seudun pappisvanhuksen puoleen, joka vasten kuninkaan tahtoa
suuteli tämän kättä aivan Leubelfingin silmien edessä, sanoi Kustaa
ääneen: »kansa kunnioittaa minua kuin Jumalaa. Se on liikaa ja
muistuttaa minua kuolemastani. Vanhus, minä ratsastan
pakanallisen jumalattaren Victorian ja kristityn kuolemanenkelin
seurassa.»
Kyyneleet nousivat hovipojan silmiin. Mutta nähdessään ikkunassa

vastapäätä kuningattaren, jolle kuningas viittasi hellät jäähyväiset,
hovipoika tunsi polttavaa mustasukkaisuutta rinnassaan.
Kun ruotsalaiset joukot tuskin viikkoa myöhemmin kokoontuivat

Lützenin lakealle kentälle, marssi Åke Tott kuninkaan vaunujen
lähellä. Leubelfing huomasi pilvenhattarain alla petolinnun liitävän ja
mitä itsepintaisimmin pysyttelevän kuninkaallisen ryhmän yllä
välittämättä pyssynlaukauksista, joilla sitä koetettiin karkoittaa. Hän
ajatteli lauenburgilaista. Uhkasiko hänen kostonsa kuningasta?
Hovipoika kävi hyvin levottomaksi. Hämärän tullessa hänen
rauhattomuutensa yhä kasvoi ja kun jo oli aivan pimeä, kannusti hän
hevostaan, välittämättä antamastaan kunniasanasta, ja hävisi
everstin näkyvistä, joka huusi hänelle »petturi».
Täyttä laukkaa ratsastettuaan saavutti hän kuninkaan vaunut ja

yhtyi seurueeseen, joka odotetun suuren taistelun edellisenä
päivänä ei näkynyt häntä huomaavan tai hänestä välittävän.
Kuningas aikoi viettää yönsä vaunuissa, mutta kylmyys pakoitti
hänet jättämään ne ja hakemaan suojaa vaatimattomasta
talonpoikaistalosta. Päivän valjetessa tungeskelivat käskyläiset
matalassa tuvassa, missä kuningas jo istui karttojensa ääressä.
Ruotsalaiset joukot olivat järjestetyt, saksalaiset rykmentit vielä
järjestämättä. Kuninkaan ystävällinen kamaripalvelija oli tuntenut
Leubelfingin, vaan ei vaatinut häntä tilille, ja niin oli tämä taas
päässyt Ruotsin vaakunan koristamalle jakkaralleen, jolla hän ennen
oli istunut kuninkaan vieressä, ja nurkkaan vetäytyneenä hän pysyi
tuntemattomana vaihtuvain sotilashahmojen takana.
Kuningas oli antanut viimeisetkin käskynsä ja tullut mitä

ihmeellisimmän mielialan valtaan. Hän nousi hitaasti ja kääntyi
läsnäolevien puoleen, jotka olivat pelkkiä saksalaisia ja joista
useampi kuin yksi oli Nürnbergin luona leirissä saanut häneltä
ankaran nuhdesaarnan. Tunsiko hän sen valtakunnan totuutta ja
laupeutta, jota hän luuli olevansa lähellä? Hän viittoi kädellään ja
puhui hiljaa, miltei uneksien, pikemmin eloisine silmineen kuin
huulillaan, jotka tuskin liikkuivat. »Herrat ja ystävät, tänään lienee
minun hetkeni tullut. Siksi tahtoisin jättää teille testamenttini. En
suinkaan huolehtiakseni sodasta — pitäkööt elossa olevat siitä
huolen. Vaan — paitsi autuudestani — minun muistostani teissä!
Olen tullut meren yli pää täynnä kaikenlaisia ajatuksia, mutta
väkevämpi kaikkea muuta oli vilpittömästi sanoen huoli sanan
puhtaudesta. Breitenfeldin voiton jälkeen olisin voinut tarjota
keisarille siedettävät rauhanehdot ja turvattuani evankeliumin palata
saaliineni petoeläimen tavoin Ruotsini rotkoihin. Mutta mielessäni
olivat Saksan asiat. Hiukan tosin teki mieleni teidän kruunuanne,
herrat! Mutta sanon vilpittömästi: suurempi kuin kunnianhimoni oli
huoli valtakunnasta! Habsburgilaiselle ei se saa enää mitenkään
kuulua, sillä tämä on evankelinen valtakunta. Nyt te ajattelette ja
sanotte: vieras kuningas ei saa meitä hallita! Ja te olette oikeassa.
Sillä on kirjoitettu: muukalainen älköön perikö valtakuntaa. Lopuksi
ajattelin lapseni kättä ja erästä kolmetoistavuotiasta…» Hänen
hiljainen puheensa hukkui majapaikan ohi kulkevan türingiläisen
ratsuväen rykmentin myrskyisään lauluun, josta erikoisesti eroittuivat
sanat:
»Mutt’ pimeyden vallat me

Voitamme Herran kautta…»
Kuningas kuunteli ja jättäen puheensa kesken sanoi: »Ei muuta,

kaikki on kunnossa», ja päästi herrat menemään. Hän laskeutui
polvilleen rukoilemaan.
Hovipoika näki lauenburgilaisen astuvan sisään ja hänen

sydämensä alkoi rajusti sykkiä. Tavalliseen ratsupukuun puettuna
hän lähestyi kuningasta matelevasti ja herpoutuneena ja ojensi
kätensä kuningasta kohti tämän hitaasti noustessa. Hän heittäytyi
maahan Kustaan eteen, syleili hänen polviaan, nyyhkytti ja rukoili
häneltä armoa tuhlaajapojan liikuttavin sanoin: »Isä, minä olen
rikkonut taivasta vastaan ja sinun edessäsi», ja taas uudelleen:
»Olen rikkonut taivasta vastaan ja sinun edessäsi enkä ole
mahdollinen pojaksesi kutsuttaa», ja hän taivutti katuvana päätään.
Kuningas nosti hänet maasta ja sulki hänet syliinsä.
Hovipojan kauhistuneissa silmissä häipyivät molemmat toisiaan

syleilevät sumuun. »Oliko tämä, saattoiko tämä olla totta? Oliko
kuninkaan pyhyys tehnyt heittiössä ihmeen? Vai oliko tämä pirullista
teeskentelyä? Käyttikö tuo riettaista riettain väärin puhtaimman
sielun lausumia sanoja?» Näin arvaili ja epäili hovipoika miltei
suunniltaan ja ohimot takoen. Hetket kuluivat. Ilmoitettiin, että
hevoset olivat valmiina, ja kuningas huusi nahkapaitaansa.
Kamaripalvelija ilmestyi vasemmassa kädessä nahkapaita ja
oikeassa kiiltävä haarniska, jonka kaulanaukosta hän piti kiinni.
Hovipoika tempasi häneltä luodinkestävän panssarin ja aikoi auttaa
kuningasta pukeutumaan siihen. Mutta hämmästymättä ollenkaan
hovipoikansa läsnäolosta kieltäytyi Kustaa sitä ottamasta. Hän katsoi
Leubelfingiin sanomattoman ystävällisesti ja silitti tämän kiharaista
tukkaa, kuten hänen tapansa oli. »Gust», sanoi hän, »en voi ottaa
sitä. Se painaa. Anna nahkapaita.»
Kohta senjälkeen lähti kuningas täyttä laukkaa ratsastamaan,

lauenburgilainen ja Leubelfing kintereillään.
V.
Ruotsalaisten taistelulinjan takana olevan Meuchenin kylän

pappilassa istui puoliyön aikaan leskimies, maisteri Todenus
raamattunsa ääressä, lukien taloudenhoitajattarelleen, Ida-rouvalle,
joka oli hento ihminen ja leski hänkin, Davidin katumussalmeja.
Maisteri — muuten asekelpoinen mies, jolla oli karkeat, harmaat
viikset ja jolta pari nuoruusvuotta oli kulunut sotapalveluksessa —
rukoili Ida-rouvan kanssa palavasti protestanttisen sankarin
puolesta, joka vähän matkan päässä olevalla taistelutantereella oli
joko voittanut tai voitettu — kumpaako, hän ei tiennyt. Samalla
ryskytettiin kiivaasti porttia, ja aaveihin uskova Ida-rouva aavisti
saavansa kuulla kuolonsanomia.
Niin olikin. Kun pappi oli avannut portin, horjui häntä vastaan nuori
mies kuolonkalpeana, kuumeisesti tuijottavin silmin, paljain päin,
otsassa ammottava haava. Hänen takanaan nosti toinen hevosen
selästä kuollutta, raskasta miestä. Oudoksi tekevistä haavoista
huolimatta tunsi pappi vainajan Ruotsin kuninkaaksi, jonka tulon
Leipzigiin hän oli nähnyt ja jonka kuva, onnistunut puuveistos, riippui
hänen huoneessaan. Syvästi liikutettuna peitti hän käsin kasvonsa ja
alkoi nyyhkyttää.
Kuumeisesti toimeliaana ja nopeasti puhuen pyysi haavoittunut
nuorukainen, että hänen kuninkaansa laskettaisi paareille vieressä
olevaan kirkkoon. Ensiksi pyysi hän kuitenkin lämmintä vettä ja
pesusienen pestäkseen kuninkaan verisen ja haavojen peittämän
pään. Toverinsa avulla laski hän vainajan, joka oli hänelle liian
raskas nostaa, vaivaiselle vuoteelle, vaipui itse sille istumaan ja
katseli hellästi vahankalpeita kasvoja. Kun hän aikoi kostuttaa niitä
sienellä, meni hän tajuttomaksi ja liukui pitkälleen vainajan ruumiille.
Hänen toverinsa nosti hänet ylös ja huomasi tarkemmin katsottuaan
paitsi otsassa myös toisen haavan rinnassa. Uudesta repeämästä,
joka oli takissa toisen, sydämen kohdalla olevan paikatun repeämän
vieressä, tihkui verta. Avatessaan varovasti toverinsa pukua,
ruotsalainen kornetti ei uskonut silmiään. »Voi sun peijakas!» änkytti
hän, ja Ida-rouva, joka piteli pesuvatia, punehtui tulipunaiseksi.
Samalla temmattiin ovi auki, ja eversti Åke Tott tuli sisään. Hänen
oli täytynyt muona-asioissa lähteä takaisin, mutta toimitettuaan asiat
hän oli rientänyt heti takaisin taistelukentälle ja, tyhjentäessään lasin
paloviinaa kylätiellä, kapakan edessä, kuullut tarinoitavan
satulassaan horjuvasta ratsastajasta, joka oli pitänyt ruumista
edessään hevosen selässä.
»Onko se totta, onko se mahdollista?» huusi hän, syöksyi

kuninkaansa luo ja tarttui hänen käteensä, johon hänen kyyneleensä
alkoivat valua. Kääntyessään hetken kuluttua hän huomasi
nuorukaisen, joka oli pitkällään tajuttomana lepotuolissa.
»Helvetissä», huusi hän vihaisena, »pitipäs tuon Gustelin sittenkin
takertua kuninkaaseensa!»
»Näin tämän nuoren herran, tämän toverini», huomautti kornetti

varovasti, »täyttä laukkaa ratsastavan yli taistelukentän kuollut
kuningas edessään hevosen selässä. Hän on uhrannut henkensä
kuninkaan tähden!»
»Minun tähtenipäs», keskeytti hänet pitkä mies, jolla oli vanhan

naisen kasvot. Se oli kauppaherra Laubfinger. Periäkseen
melkoisen, sodan kautta vaaraan joutuneen velan oli hän rohjennut
lähteä turvallisesta Leipzigistä ja epäröiden lähestynyt
taistelutannerta. Jouduttuaan muonarattaita täyteen ahdetulle
kylätielle koetti hän saavuttaa everstin saadakseen häneltä
turvallisuuskirjan. Sydän pelkkää kiitollisuutta ja vapautuksen
tunnetta täynnä hän kertoi läsnäoleville juurta jaksain perheensä
historian. »Gustel, Gustel», itki hän, »vieläkö tunnet serkkusi? Miten
voin maksaa sinulle, mitä olet puolestani tehnyt?»
»Sillä, herrani, että pidätte kuononne kiinni!» ärjäsi eversti hänelle.
Pappi astui väliin ja puhui rauhallisesti ja vakavasti: »Arvoisat

läsnäolijat, te tunnette tämän maailman. Se on häväistyshalua
täynnä.» Ida-rouva huokasi. »Ja varsinkin silloin, kun jalo ja suuri
mies ajaa jaloa, suurta asiaa. Jos pieninkään epäluulo himmentäisi
tätä muistoa», hän osoitti äänetöntä kuningasta, »minkä taruhenkilön
tekisikään herjausjanoinen paavilaisuus sääskiraukasta», hän osoitti
tajutonta hovipoikaa, »joka on polttanut siipensä maineen
auringossa! Yhtä varma kuin olemassaolostani olen siitä, ettei
kuningas-vainaja tiennyt tästä tytöstä mitään.»
»Samoin minä, herra pastori», vakuutti eversti, »minäkin olen siitä

yhtä varma kuin autuudestani, uskon kautta ilman lain töitä».
»Varmasti», vahvisti Laubfinger. »Muuten olisi kuningas lähettänyt

hänet pois ja etsityttänyt minua.»
»Voi sun peijakas», päivitteli kornetti ja Ida-rouva huokasi.
»Minä olen sanan palvelija, te, herra eversti, olette harmaapäinen,

te, kornetti aatelismies, se koskee teidän etuanne ja hyötyänne,
herra Laubfinger, Ida-rouvasta minä takaan: me emme siitä hiisku.»
Hovipoika avasi kuolevat silmänsä. Hänen katseensa harhaili

pelokkaasti ympäri huonetta ja pysähtyi Åke Tottiin: »Kummityttösi ei
totellut sinua, ei voinut… olen suuri syntinen.»
»Hourailette», keskeytti hänet pappi ankarana. »Olette hovipoika

August Leubelfing, nürnbergiläisen patriisin, kauppaherra Arbogast
Leubelfingin avioliitossa sinä ja sinä päivänä syntynyt poika,
kuolemaan vaipunut marraskuun seitsemäntenä päivänä tuhat
kuusisataa kolmekymmentä kaksi Lützenin taistelussa päivää ennen
saamistaan haavoista, pugnans cum rege Gustavo Adolpho.»
[»Taistellen kuningas Kustaa Adolfin kanssa.»]
»Fortiter pugnans» [»taistellen urhoollisesti»], korjasi kornetti

innoissaan.
»Näin kirjoitan minä hautakiveenne. Sopikaa nyt Jumalanne

kanssa. Hetkenne on tullut.» Maisteri ei saattanut kokonaan
karkoittaa tylyyttä äänestään. Vaikka hovipoika oli jo eroamaisillaan
maailmasta, ei hän voinut muuta kuin paheksua tämän lapsen
seikkailuhalua, joka oli saattanut hänen sankarinsa maineen
vaaraan.
»En voi vielä kuolla, minulla on vielä paljon sanomista!» korisi

hovipoika. »Kuningas… sumussa… lauenburgilaisen kuula…»
kuolema sulki hänen huulensa, mutta se ei voinut estää hänen
sammuvaa katsettaan vielä kerran etsimästä kuninkaan kasvoja.
Jokainen läsnäolevista teki oman johtopäätöksensä ja täydensi
lauseen omalla tavallaan. Mielenmalttinsa säilyttävä pappi, jonka
isänmaanrakkautta loukkasi ajatus, että saksalainen ruhtinas olisi
salaa murhannut Saksan ja — mikä merkitsi hänelle samaa —
protestanttisuuden asian pelastajan, kehoitti hartaasti heitä kaikkia
hovipojan mukana laskemaan hautaan tämän katkelman puheesta,
jonka kuolema oli särkenyt.
Kun August Leubelfingin kohtalo oli ratkaistu ja hän makasi

elotonna kuninkaansa vieressä, nyyhkytti Laubfinger: »Koska
serkkuni nyt on mennyt ikuisuuteen ja tulee kysymys perinnöstä,
otan minä toki oman nimeni takaisin?» ja hän loi ympärillä oleviin
kysyvän silmäyksen. Maisteri Todenus katseli uljaan nürnbergittären
viattomia kasvoja, joiden ilme oli onnellinen. Ankara mies ei voinut
vastustaa liikutuksen tunnetta. Hän ratkaisi asian: »Ette ota! Te
saatte pysyä Laubfingerinä. Teidän nimellenne tulee kunnia päästä
jalon tytön hautapatsaaseen, tytön, joka vielä kuolemassaankin
rakasti ylevää sankaria. Te olette pelastanut kalleimman
omaisuutenne, rakkaan elämänne. Tyytykää siihen.»
Kirkko lukittiin ja teljettiin kiinni ihmistulvan takia. Huhu, että

kuninkaan ruumis oli siinä, oli levinnyt nopeasti. Ruumiit pestiin ja
pantiin paareille kirkon holviin. Päivä oli jo valjennut. Kun kirkon ovet
avattiin kansanjoukolle, joka kärsimättömänä mutta
kunnioittavannäköisenä tunkeili sisään, lepäsivät ruumiit kahdella
paarilla alttarin edessä, kuningas ylempänä, hovipoika alempana ja
päinvastaiseen suuntaan, niin että hänen päänsä oli kuninkaan
jalkojen kohdalla. Aamuauringon säde — edellisen päivän sumua oli
seurannut sininen, pilvetön taivas — hiipi matalasta kirkonikkunasta
sisään ja kirkasti sankarin kasvot, säästyipä vieno heijastus
hovipojankin kiharaiselle päälle.
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Women Doing Intimacy Gender Family and Modernity in Britain and Hong Kong 1St Ed Edition Stevi Jackson All Chapter

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Women Doing Intimacy: Gender, Family

and Modernity in Britain and Hong

More information about this series at

Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Jackson, S., Ho, P. S. Y., & Na J. N. (2013) ‘Reshaping Tradition?

Reproduced with permission of SAGE publications and the editors

1 Introduction: The Genesis of a Transnational

2 Conceptualising and Investigating the Gendered

3 Interconnected Histories: Locating Women’s Lives

4 What Makes a Family? Meanings and Practices 87

5 Mother–Daughter Relationships 119

6 Love and Sex in Marital and Non-marital Contexts 157

7 Imagined Futures in Uncertain Times 187

8 Concluding Reflections 217

Table 2.1 The young women 39

© The Author(s) 2020 1

2011) and by postcolonial critiques of parochially western theories of

constructed out of scraps of wood, corrugated iron and plastic or in over-

of western culture was also limited in terms of the common-sense know-

to the research collaboration and how we undertook both the fieldwork

theoretical hegemony has become ‘the normal functioning of this econ-

choices. We look to the imagined futures of the daughters in Chapter 7,

© The Author(s) 2020 13

A number of other authors have drawn attention to the parochialism

product of a history of western exploration, adventurism and imperial-

by a hegemonic Eurocentrism as well as by more than a century of social

This opposition between tradition and modernity is often based on

social change in terms of connected histories and intersections between

Re-Thinking Intimacy and Modernity

Qin is distinguished from Jin (close) in the common phrase ‘Jin er bu

This term is also used in Cantonese (the language of natives of Hong

European ascendancy possible in the first place (Bhambra 2007; Dir-

…understanding Europe in terms of global interconnections will provide

In addition to questioning the way modernity has been Eurocentri-

‘elective affinities’; they have ceased to be ‘communities of need’ so that

modern life (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 25–26) or reconstructed

in explaining their decisions, as well as a sense of ‘belonging’ to a new

Modernity or Modernities? the Asian

Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong—as well as Singapore, which is geopolit-

While Chang takes as given accounts of western modernity provided by

with compressed modernity in attending to a complex mix of indige-

back on their own resources. These conditions are often defended by

Hovipoika tarkasti tuota kelpo olentoa tuntien ehdotonta

Vanhus pohti kuulemaansa juttua ja nautti sitten erikoisesti

Kesän lopusta aina elonkorjuun päähän ja aina siihen saakka, kun

Kyyneleet nousivat hovipojan silmiin. Mutta nähdessään ikkunassa

Kun ruotsalaiset joukot tuskin viikkoa myöhemmin kokoontuivat

Täyttä laukkaa ratsastettuaan saavutti hän kuninkaan vaunut ja

Kuningas oli antanut viimeisetkin käskynsä ja tullut mitä

»Mutt’ pimeyden vallat me

Kuningas kuunteli ja jättäen puheensa kesken sanoi: »Ei muuta,

Hovipoika näki lauenburgilaisen astuvan sisään ja hänen

Hovipojan kauhistuneissa silmissä häipyivät molemmat toisiaan

Kohta senjälkeen lähti kuningas täyttä laukkaa ratsastamaan,

Ruotsalaisten taistelulinjan takana olevan Meuchenin kylän

»Onko se totta, onko se mahdollista?» huusi hän, syöksyi

»Näin tämän nuoren herran, tämän toverini», huomautti kornetti

»Minun tähtenipäs», keskeytti hänet pitkä mies, jolla oli vanhan

»Sillä, herrani, että pidätte kuononne kiinni!» ärjäsi eversti hänelle.

Pappi astui väliin ja puhui rauhallisesti ja vakavasti: »Arvoisat

»Samoin minä, herra pastori», vakuutti eversti, »minäkin olen siitä

»Varmasti», vahvisti Laubfinger. »Muuten olisi kuningas lähettänyt