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On second thought this was a poor and lazy suggestion (made after being rudely awakened by an errant delivery man and trying to fall back asleep); I've forgotten where a proper collection of interviews was, and it looked like Bossen cites some of those women after collecting thousands of interviews under the scope of the project, so I linked to the article, but really there's no reason to recommend the book itself if it doesn't provide their narratives in as raw a form as possible. If you have better suggestions, please share.
Bossen, being a cultural anthropologist, is doing the usual orthodox Marxist «social being determines consciousness» thing where unappealing cultural practices are chalked up to expressions of the preceding profit motive. Her interpretation is not as valuable as opinions of those women, specifically for purposes of commenting on the morality of the practice.
Personally I think that the Chinese really are stricter with their kids, and Chinese kids really are more tolerant of discomfort, severe discipline and obeying social demands. Sometimes the racists compare Chinese people to ants and such because of this; but if anything, overpowering inhibitory control is a particularly human trait, the hallmark of neurological maturity (there's an obvious effortpost here). Like I've suggested in my original response to @Lepidus, the «Chinese mentality» may be a product of a common evolutionary trend in complex societies that has advanced further in the Chinese than in Europeans, a trend we would do well to account for and perhaps counteract.
In any case, parents abusing and distorting children with the rational goal of providing them a higher-status future are the historical norm; and causing physical deformities to fit children into the socially approved mold is quite on par with what we're doing by confining them to schools (yes, yes the EB schtick). 10-12 of the most formative years of our lives spent in the framework where our most rewarded virtues are obedience and patience toward absurdity, our peers are mostly uncultured swine obsessed with prison-tier hierarchical competition, and our authority figures are the equivalent of power-tripping reddit jannies – and I think this is the typical school experience for an above-average kid in a non-exceptional school – is abject moral catastrophe, one that also perpetuates these evils into adulthood. This is only not seen as horror for the same reason some Chinese excuse footbinding: false consciousness and accurate recognition of good intentions behind the horror. There is no real cruelty in what is done to children.
Love can be pretty terrifying is all.
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