Talk by Becky Yang Hsu. How do people in China assess whether they are living good lives, and whether they are happy? People sometimes assume that money is the name of the game. Yet neither money nor the pursuit of pleasure are able to capture how people in China go about living their lives. In Happiness in China, Hsu shows how, as people in China make everyday decisions, they organize their deliberations around moral reference points, the most salient involving family obligations. Self-assessments of happiness emphasize carrying out family responsibilities, corresponding roughly to age, even as family structures are changing.

This event is sponsored by the Anthropology Department, East Asian Studies, Multidisciplinary Studies Center, the Humanities Center, Carnegie Corporation of New York and is an International Education Week program sponsored by the Office for Global Engagement.