Love Troubles

Focusing on the impacts of inequality on the affective lives of rural migrant workers and the differences between the realism and resilience of the subaltern intimacy on one hand and the elitist yet often distorted portrait of the intimate turn in social inequality on the other, Love Troubles makes a superb contribution to the studies of the moral world of migrant workers and the emotional cost of China’s rapid economic development. This brilliant, empathic, and highly sophisticated book is filled with insights from cover to cover and will likely establish itself as a new classic in the sociology of emotional inequality and cultural politics. -- Yunxiang Yan * Professor UCLA, Author of Private Life under Socialism and The Individualization of Chinese Society *
As Wanning Sun explains in ... this important pathbreaking study of the personal lives of the new Chinese proletariat, we might well conclude that if love really is chicken soup for the soul, those at the bottom of China’s social and economic heap struggle for a sip. -- Linda Jaivin * Inside Story *
[Love Troubles] fills an important gap in knowledge about the intimate consequences of social inequality, a widespread but unnoticed problem in a rapidly modernizing and urbanizing China. It not only reveals the myriad ways in which political, social, economic, cultural, and moral forces conspire to disrupt rural migrant workers’ pursuit of love and intimacy but also offers a new useful analytical approach to examining social inequality through the lens of personal affect, in which romance and intimacy are intimately intertwined with inequity in a socially and economically stratified China. * The China Journal *
Reading this important, pathbreaking study of the personal lives of the new Chinese proletariat, we might well conclude that if love really is chicken soup for the soul, those at the bottom of China’s social and economic heap struggle for a sip. * Inside Story *