Menopause and Midlife Aging in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Findings from Ethnographic Research in China
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Menopause and Midlife Aging in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Findings from Ethnographic Research in China Jeanne L. Shea 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Based on longitudinal mixed methods ethnographic research conducted in China from the mid-1990s to 2018, this article argues that Chinese lay language use divides what Americans and Canadians refer to as “menopause” into two distinct though overlapping concepts of the narrow juejing or end of menstruation and the broader non-genderspecific gengnianqi or “transition between middle and old age.” While comparison with research done by Lock in Japan shows that Japanese language uses a similar set of two overlapping yet distinct terms called heikei and könenki, there are important differences between Chinese and Japanese views and experiences of female midlife amidst the similarities. While views and experiences of juejing in China are very similar to notions of heikei in Japan, gengnianqi is quite different from könenki. Like in Japan, the end of menstruation tends to be welcomed by women in China. Also like in Japan, midlife women in China had a lower prevalence of hot flashes than that found in the US and Canada. Also similar to Japan, Chinese women rarely associate hot flashes with embarrassment. However, unlike in the Japanese sample, the Chinese women reported a higher rate of irritability than even the American and Canadian samples. Contrasting with könenki, which is primarly associated with bodily aches and self-restraint in Japan, gengnianqi is commonly viewed as a time of vulnerability to irritable outbursts which must be allowed, though managed carefully. Overall, I show how menopause and midlife aging as concepts and as lived experiences are subject to variation related to differences in language, cultural ideas and practices, local biologies, and culturally-mediated generational experiences of historical change. Keywords China . Chinese . Menopause . Middle age . Midlife
* Jeanne L. Shea [email protected]
1
Anthropology Department, University of Vermont, 509 Williams Hall, 72 University Place, Burlington, VT 05405, USA
Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology
Opening Vignette It was summer 2017, and I was sitting in restaurant booth in Shanghai with two Chinese colleagues. Let’s call them Zhang Weidong and Ding Rui (pseudonyms, surname listed first here, following the Chinese style). It was not yet 5:00 pm, and we were having an early bird dinner together while we talked about community-based supports for aging in place. Suddenly at one point, a middle-aged woman, who had come into the restaurant not long before with what appeared to be her husband, stood up from her seat in the booth and began yelling in an angry voice at the young wait staff. “How dare you treat me like that? You have left me here waiting. I have been waiting for a long time! You have not yet brought me anything to drink! You have not asked for my order! How do you think you can do that to me?” The shouting was entirely out of place in
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