MCLC: it's hard to say I love you

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: it's hard to say I love you
***********************************************************

Source: China File (2/14/14):
http://www.chinafile.com/its-hard-say-i-love-you-chinese

It’s Hard to Say ‘I Love You’ in Chinese
By ROSEANN LAKE

“We didn’t say ‘I love you,’” said Dr. Kaiping Peng, Associate Professor
of Psychology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. I’d
ventured over to his China office on the campus of Beijing’s mighty
Tsinghua University to talk to him about the romantic prospects of China’s
rising fleets of well-educated, unmarried Chinese known as shengnü, or
“leftover women,” but our conversation quickly took a historical detour.
Though these days Peng wears Diesel jeans and spends his time jetting
between Berkeley and Beijing, when he was a young, love-struck student
during the Cultural Revolution things were different. “We said, ‘wo xihuan
ni,’ (‘I like you’),” to express our deepest romantic feelings. Only in
the more educated classes, where partners spoke English, were “I love
you’s,” ever exchanged—and never in Chinese. “‘Wo ai ni,’ or the Chinese
equivalent of ‘I love you,’ is a thing of the last thirty years,” he told
me. “Before then, you just showed love through holding hands, kissing, or
maybe writing or doing something nice—but you never said it.”

This was hard for me to get my head around. “I love you,” is probably
about the third phrase Chinese students learn in English class after
“hello” and “nice to meet you.” In China, I’ve seen it on everything from
notebooks to bed sheets, from wall stickers to breakfast treats. My
dentist once gave me a promotional keychain that said “I love you” on it
after I had a cleaning. Yet, never having been privy to a Chinese world of
close romantic attachment (things never did work out with my dentist), I
had naively assumed that “wo ai ni” was used much like its English
equivalent.

“No,” Guang Lu, a thirty-one-year-old investment banker with a strong
affinity for Shakespeare, tells me. “The newness of those words still
makes them very difficult for us to say.”

Could the reason for that be chemical?

Beginning in June 2010, with funding from a grant issued by the Chinese
Ministry of Science and Technology, a team of scientists began to look at
Chinese brains. The team was comprised of Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist
at Stony Brook University; Dr. Lucy Brown, a Clinical Professor of
Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Dr. Xuchu Weng of the
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Chinese Academy of
Sciences in Beijing, and Dr. Xiaomeng Xu, now Assistant Professor of
Psychology at Idaho State University. By the time their study was over in
August 2012, they would revolutionize the understanding of the Chinese
brain and its relation to romance. Their work began in Beijing, where they
recruited eighteen Chinese college students who reported being “deeply in
love.” The students, who had been in relationships for an average of seven
months, were put into a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
machine at the Beijing MRI Center for Brain Research and shown a sequence
of pictures for thirty seconds at a time. These included pictures of
neutral, familiar acquaintances as a control, followed by a smiling
picture of their sweetheart.

When viewing a headshot of their special someone, all of the participants
showed vibrant activity in the dopamine-rewards system of the brain known
as the ventral tegmental area, or VTA. Previous neurological studies have
shown that this is a completely normal brain response; when a person falls
in love, the VTA, as well as another nearby part of the brain—the
caudate—is active. Stimulation of the VTA generally is associated with a
cocaine high, the high a person might feel after winning a large sum of
money, or with the “can’t think, can’t eat, can’t sleep” headiness of new
love.

To control for cross-cultural differences, the team compared the brain
scans of their Chinese student subjects with brain scans of American
university students (of non-Chinese ancestry) who also reported being
“intensely in love.” When comparing the American brains—scanned in an
earlier, separate study
<http://jn.physiology.org/content/94/1/327.short>—and the Chinese brain
scans, the results were virtually indistinguishable. The areas and levels
of activity in the rewards system of the brain were very similar across
cultures. Until, upon taking a closer look at the scans with fMRI
technology—which breaks the brain down into 76,000 minuscule voxels, or
cubes—the researchers noticed a pattern of additional activity in the
brains of Chinese participants.

“We weren’t sure of how to make sense of it when we saw it,” said Dr.
Aron, who oversaw the study in tandem with Dr. Xuchu Weng. In addition to
activity in the VTA, Chinese participants’ brains showed activity in the
orbitofrontal region of the brain, which is involved with learning from
negative feedback <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17997112>. In an
attempt to make sense of what this activity could mean, the scientists
asked ten questions designed to gauge where the thinking of each
participant lay on a scale between “traditional” and “modern.” Traditional
respondents were defined as those who were sympathetic to the view that
“obeying authority and respecting the elderly are values that children
should learn.” Modern respondents were those who leaned towards the view
that “if married life is too painful, divorce is perhaps a way to solve
the problem.” When comparing the answers with the brain scans, the
scientists detected a pattern. Participants who answered most
traditionally showed the most activity around an area of the brain also
associated with learning from negative feedback, the right nucleus
accumbens. The scientists’ discovery of this never-before-documented brain
activity in response to romantic stimulus raised several new questions.

In interpreting the results of the scans, Dr. Aron is careful to point out
that, when viewing pictures of their beloveds, the most traditional
Chinese participants showed activity in the rewards area of the brain as
strong as all other members of the group. “It’s not about a difference in
the intensity of their love,” he stresses, “but in a complex pattern of
brain activity which suggests that how they’re coping with the intensity
of their love is different. There are feelings and thinking that are going
on that are different.”

While it is impossible for a brain scan to explain why certain Chinese
participants experienced a dash of negativity with their love high, the
neuroscientists suspect <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21229613> that
this neural response may be the byproduct of the way romantic love is
perceived in Chinese culture. They reason that the additional neural
activity may represent a different cultural understanding of romantic
love—one that appears to cause Chinese to approach romance with greater
caution, more mindful of external factors than Americans.

Well before a Communist regime required that an entire nation privilege
revolution over romance, China had a long and tumultuous history with
romantic love. While love-based marriages have existed in most of the
developed world since the late eighteenth century—the time when, according
to marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, choosing one’s own partner began
to replace arranged marriage as a social ideal—the convention came more
slowly to China. Arranged marriage was legal and widely practiced in China
well into the late twentieth century and is not unheard of even today.

“Ancient Chinese literature is laden with tales of electrifying love at
first sight and erotic bliss,” explains Stanford scholar of Chinese
classics Haiyan Lee. But most Chinese love stories carry a similar moral:
if one abides by the codes and prescriptions of the marriage process and
doesn’t deviate from the structures of the familial network, the system
will guarantee safe passage to happiness. But push the limits of passion a
bit too far, Lee says, and one is bound to find oneself married to a
rapturous but cataclysmically evil fox spirit.

Confucian ideals long discouraged romance between spouses by privileging
relationships between men instead. As noted by the late scholar Francis
Hsu in his book Under the Ancestors’ Shadow (Columbia University Press,
1948), Chinese families under Confucianism were gender hierarchies that
subjugated women. The two strongest family relationships were between
father and son and elder and younger brothers. The strength and order of a
family was synonymous with the strength and order of the state. Any man
who deviated from the system and appeared openly affectionate with his
wife was seen as someone of weak character. As Coontz writes in her 2005
book, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, it also was not
unheard of for a Chinese father to rape his son’s wife—free from fear of
any legal retribution—in an attempt to disengage his son’s emotional
attachment to her.

The late anthropologist Elisabeth Croll explained that Chinese
relationship conventions changed overnight upon the Communist Party’s rise
to power in 1949. Arranged marriages were outlawed (nominally, anyway),
and young Chinese were encouraged, through several government campaigns,
to find mates of their own. The campaigns often came with advice on how to
find a spouse based on comradeship and shared revolutionary fervor. A 1964
article in The People’s Daily entitled “What Attitude Should a Husband
take Towards his Wife?” warned that young people who married “on the
impulse of the moment and on the basis of good looks and love at first
sight, disregarding compatibility based on identical political ideas and
mutual understanding” were doomed to “quarrel with each other constantly
and suffer greatly.” By contrast, those who were not physically attractive
but shared “revolutionary feelings” would experience a love “forever
green.”

In August 2012, forty months after taking the brain scans, the
neuroscientists called their eighteen Chinese participants again to see
how “intensely in love” they still were. Six of the participants couldn’t
be reached, but of the remaining dozen, half had broken up with their mate
and half were still together. The neuroscientists then re-examined the
original brain scans and tried to determine patterns that may have
predicted the outcome of the relationships.

By comparing the original scans of each participant with their later
reported levels of relationship happiness, the scientists made more
discoveries. The most groundbreaking involved the identification of two
areas of the brain which, when viewed during the early stages of romantic
love, can be indicative of relationship longevity, satisfaction, and
commitment.

“People who showed low activity in areas of the brain that have been
associated with negative judgments of others were the ones who were still
together,” says Dr. Lucy Brown. “Basically, the brain studies confirmed
that suspending negative judgment of the other person is important for
keeping a relationship together,” she explains. “Common sense tells us
this is necessary, but the studies on Chinese participants really did show
that it’s true, and suggest that it is key for all of us to keep
relationships going, not just a minor aspect of successful relationships.”

The findings of this second part of the study are significant, Brown says,
because they suggest that a couple’s initial feelings of attraction may
indicate the course their relationship will take. “Psychologists sometimes
say that when you’re in the early stages of romantic love, it’s so crazy,
there’s no way of predicting how things will work out,” she says. “Others
insist that there are things established early on that influence the
outcome of the relationship, and at least on a neural level, that appears
to be the case.”

Though the brains that Drs. Aron, Brown, and Xu examined in their
neurological study in Beijing could very well belong to the children or
grandchildren of Chinese who were of marriage age during times of
“revolutionary” love, it’s worth noting that despite how far China has
come since 1949—economically, socially, and in terms of personal
freedom—the experience of romantic love in modern China appears still to
be fraught with some cultural baggage, at least on a neural level.

Though the researchers acknowledge that their work is preliminary, they
say that Chinese participants may engage the parts of their brain that
cause them to “weigh the relationship more carefully, and take negative
aspects into account more readily than Western participants.” Chinese
cupid, in other words, strikes just as deftly as any other, but his arrow
carries a distinctive sting. Is this sting the brain’s conditioned
response to years of governance that has downplayed the individual
relative to the group, to the extent that he or she feels guilty pursuing
something as self-indulgent as romantic love? The notion is certainly
worth considering.

Like Kaiping Peng, who as a young intellectual during the Cultural
Revolution expressed his most romantic feelings in English, Guang Lu, the
young financier with an affinity for Shakespeare, also mines the different
possibilities for expressing his emotions. “For us, ‘I love you,’ is
beautiful in its brevity, universality, and vagueness in another
language,” he tells me, “but ‘wo ai ni,’ is still very unchartered
territory.”