دانلود کتاب ازدواج نامحدود – قانون دولتی، قدرت و نابرابری در چین معاصر

minut e s pas t n ine i n the mor ning, on May 10, 2010 , Hou Yuemei, a migrant worker in her late thirties, pulled herself out of a shuttle bus. Her face paled, her back aching, legs sore, her stomach twisting from car sickness. Days of travel—from eastern, coastal China to the western inland, from Yuemei’s workplace in Jiangsu to her native soil in Sichuan— had sapped her strength. But, instead of slowing down, she quickened her pace. Before long, she headed into a dark corridor of an office building, just a few blocks away from the bus station. Inside that corridor was Yuemei’s destination—the Qinchuan People’s Tribunal, where she was about to make her first court appearance. Exactly 215 days earlier, Yuemei fled home after her husband had attacked her, once again leaving bruises all over her body. Amid that assault, she grabbed a kitchen knife to defend herself, an instinctive reaction that saved her life. Only after that did the man back off. Days later, with the help of a coworker, Yuemei escaped Fujian, the place where the couple had been eking out a living as migrant workers, and boarded a bus to Jiangsu, a province hundreds of miles away, similarly awash with cashpaying jobs for migrants hailing from the countryside. For the next few months, Yuemei lived in secrecy and fear, constantly watching her back. The bruises covering her body faded away, but the invisible scars hardly healed. She frequently woke up from night terrors. “The moment I fall asleep, I dream about him beating me repeatedly,” said Yuemei. Working a factory job in Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu, Yuemei saved every penny she could. By the spring of 2010 , she had finally amassed enough cash to hire a legal worker to help with her divorce suit. She was ready to press her case inside a courtroom, hoping to cut ties with a violent, abusive man. That same May, another migrant woman, Miao Shuihua, was contemplating a similar decision. Unlike Yuemei, who journeyed to remote places like Fujian and Jiangsu to search for off-farm employment, Shuihua stayed in rural Sichuan close to her family and her infant son. Although her parents lent a hand from time to time, the responsibility of childrearing squarely fell on Shuihua’s shoulders. Barely thirty, Shuihua had spent the past six years earning minimum wages as a menial laborer in the nearby county seat. Doing so, she hoped, could help balance her family’s income and expenditure on the one hand and care for both the young and the elderly on the other. That hope rarely materialized, though. The gap between her paycheck and the family’s various expenses kept growing. Putting food on the table, paying utility bills, refilling a prescription, getting milk powder and diapers … all the little things that allowed her to raise a family seemed more and more taxing by the day. Shuihua’s husband, whom she described as “an honest man” with a quick temper, scarcely eased her burden. Plowing farmland day in, day out, the man “just couldn’t feed or clothe his family,” Shuihua said. While wrestling with a strained marriage, Shuihua constantly thought about her son. What would happen to him if her marriage could not survive? Could she retain child custody after divorce? Would her husband, a peasant man about to turn forty, let go of his only child, a healthy boy destined to become the sole heir of his family? With these questions in mind, Shuihua sued her husband, later in 2010, expecting the court to mete out fair rulings over divorce and child custody.