In this clearly written and extensively detailed ethnography, Yunxiang Yan explores issues of intimacy, love, and youth culture in contemporary China. Recent writings in the popular press and in some academic circles have tended to treat these issues as a largely metropolitan preoccupation. Implicitly writing against this oversight, Yan shows how desires for youth autonomy, individual agency, and emotional expression are not simply the purview of the new young hipsters who hang out in Starbuck’s, frequent expensive nightclubs, or spend their days chatting on the Internet in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. These desires and the social changes they have unleashed have made their way into family life in China’s rural villages. And yet, as Yan goes to some lengths to argue, these desires and changes are not simply the effect of the recent capitalist transformation of China. Youth autonomy, desires for independence, and the quest to be liberated once and for all from the “ancestors’ shadow” (p. 218) owe as much to the history of Chinese socialism as they do to the economic reforms that began in earnest in China in the early 1980s.

Yan’s historical ethnography takes place in a village in southern Heilongjiang Province called Xiajia. Those familiar with Yan’s first book on Xiajia, The Flow of Gifts, published in 1996, will know that the author lived there as a young man between 1971and 1978. Many years later he returned to Xiajia to conduct his doctorate research. He returned again, making seven different field trips to Xiajia between 1989 and 1999. This long-term engagement with Xiajia provided Yan with deep personal relations with villagers and government officials and access to household registration records and birth planning files. Whereas The Flow of Gifts focused primarily on how human sentiment, as opposed to instrumental concerns, shaped gift giving, Private Life under Socialism focuses on the emergence of individualism in what Yan calls the “private spaces” of social life, especially the family. To make his case, Yan conducted informal and formal interviews with many of Xiajia’s approximately 1,500 residents and followed the lives of more than two dozen individuals. Writing in the first person for much of the book, Yan gracefully brings many of these individuals to life. Readers experience them as subjects searching for a better life, but also as complicated persons. Many of them express contradictory moral positions, as they attempt to make sense of the history of collectivism, the sexual mores of elders, the ostentatious consumer behavior of neighbors, and even the reasons behind the suicide of a fellow villager. Most poignantly, Yan paints a picture of the elderly in Xiajia, especially those from poorer families, living a life of near desperation; the positions of power they once enjoyed in the family and community are undermined by aggressive sons and their spouses, who now occupy the best domestic spaces in village households, spend family income on expensive new furniture and consumer goods, and ignore the pleas of the elderly for frugality and common sense. In short, the moral world of the elderly, once grounded in and supported by the collective practices of socialism, has become anachronistic in a world in which consumption practices and individual autonomy have emerged as the new logics of social and family life.

Yan’s task is not simply to provide a detailed ethnographic account of Xiajia; he is also interested in taking on the Western anthropological tradition that has tended to view the Chinese family as the entry point to any understanding of Chinese social life. He, thus, intersperses individual reflections and his own observations of weddings, funerals, public displays of affection, family disputes, and so on, with a critical treatment of the images and theories of collective behavior and corporate rationality that have long defined the study of the Chinese family. This, in fact, is the main theoretical focus of the book: to show how the “Xiajia case demonstrates the increasingly important role played by the individual in the transformation of private life, which has by and large been overlooked in previous studies that relied on the corporate model of the Chinese family” (p. 219). Given that much of the book focuses on the rearrangement of domestic spatiality under the reforms and its effects on both village youth and the elderly, one might reasonably assume that Yan is drawing a sharp historical line between the collective and postcollective periods. He eschews this interpretation. Although this argument for the lack of a clear-cut historical rupture is not as thoroughly documented as one would like, Yan argues that almost everything that has taken place in family life in Xiajia since the early 1980s has its roots in the early stages of socialist practice. In the 1950s, for example, the Chinese Communist Party took the project for family reform (which began in many urban centers as far back as the 1930s and 1940s) to the grassroots. The party linked family reform to other aspects of socialist transformation (collectivization, rural industrialization, the recruitment of women into positions of power in the socialist state apparatus) and began the process of parental disempowerment and disenfranchisement that eventually emerged full force in the 1980s and 1990s.

Given his long personal and professional engagement in Xiajia village, readers should not be surprised that Yan does not remain entirely neutral in his views of the astonishing changes that have come to this particular place. On the one hand, I like how Yan reveals, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, his distaste for ostentatious consumerism, the reckless disrespect for parents and elders, and the production of what he calls the “uncivil individual.” And yet, on the other hand, his moral passion is never fully transformed into any kind of political vision. As readers, we never really learn what he thinks about the history of socialism in general and the rise of market capitalism, for example. Nor do we get a political reading on the development of the extreme egotism and concomitant lack of any sense of civic duty among village youth. We get good, old-fashioned anthropological concern for worlds transformed, and we get moral distaste. We get little sense of where the author thinks Xiajia should go from here: A return to the socialist past? Back to prerevolutionary social orders in which the young respected and deferred to the old? Or forward into a more morally and ethically based capitalist future, if such a thing is even possible? In the end, as we move through this rich, sometimes riveting, and often depressing account of private life under socialism and beyond, we get no sense of the question on many a mind in China: What now is to be done?