Normalization of “Second Wives”: Gender Contestation in Hong Kong

This paper discusses the recent phenomenon of bau yilai (literatly “keeping second wives”) is Hong Kong as the city becomes the nexus of South China's economic expansion. An increasing number of Hong Kong men have established extra-marital relationships across the border with mainland Chinese women. This new form of polygyny is believed to be extremely widespread, non-class specific and defying geographical restriction, almost second nature to male migrant capital and labor. The debate on the bau yilai phenomenon has a markedly moral undertone. Ironically the female campain to contest the perceived revival of polygyny resulted in its normalization. What was to be a re-evaluation of the institutions of marriage and family soon became a reinforcement of their patriarchal foundation. And as the phenomenon became commercially exploited and consumed everyday as various forms of popular culture, the illegal yilai relationships came to shed off its abnormality. This change shows that in the transitional period to 1997, Hong Kong's relationship with China interplays with the construction of individual identities in a fluid cultural milieu, manifested in the gendered negotiations and interpretations of their future.