Jie Yan

This is about a friend who committed suicide two weeks ago. She was my roommate during the four undergraduate years.

Xiao was born in March 1972 as the youngest daughter of a common working family. After spending the first 18 years of her life in a city in western China, she became a student majoring in Early Childhood Education in Beijing Normal University. Her family and friends were very proud of her since BNU is one of the top universities in China. She made a lot of friends and got pretty good grades upon graduation. In 1995, she went to a fast developing city in the south of China and got a job in a big preschool education center as the president assistant. She did very well with her job and got relatively high salary. In 1998, she got married. From the photos she sent to me, her life seems very happy. However, in May 10th 2000, I got email from friends saying that she committed suicide, since her husband had another woman and wanted a divorce. This was really stunning. From my impression, she was a very out-going, optimistic person who would never seek ending her own life as a solution to her problems in life.

Being the eldest girl in my close friends circle, she was healthy, energetic, easy to make new friends and quick at adapting to new environments. When friends got into trouble, she was often the first one to show care and offer help. This had made her a popular figure among friends. However, she was impulsive too, with her behaviors sometimes driven by her mood.

What made her they way she was and made her to commit suicide then? Let's take a look at her life with a group socialization theory and Gilligan's theory of woman's psychological development.

Being the only daughter and youngest child in her family, Xiao was very cherished by her parents and two elder brothers. While she grew up, she got used to being in the center of attention from others. It was since then, she became used to being high in the "attention structure"-- in Harris's term, both in the family and peer group. Also since she was very good at imitating people, she picked up new things from adults, media and people around her very easily, which often made her the model to be imitated by her peers. According to group socialization theory, she became the chain that connected the culture of adult society and the culture of young children's peer group. While the penalties for being different from the majority of the group members are mainly imposed on these in the middle and lower ranks of the attention structure, she often became the one who made the boundaries of the peer group and defined what is acceptable behavior, because comparing to her playmates, she was relatively more mature. In Harris's words, she was the one who can influence the group other than only follow the rules of the group, an innovator, not just a follower.

She was in the center and the leader position of her peer groups most of the time, even after she went to college and entered young adulthood. During the four college years, she was often the one who brought new fashion style, new terms to use as well as new plan on play, travel, dormitory decoration etc.. She was also the first one to have boyfriend among my college classmates. In a word, she was in a popular position in her peer group during childhood and early adulthood. According to Harris, high or low status in the peer group has permanent effects on the personality, or can influence one's self-esteem when grow up. It seems that she turned out quite fit into the theory: after graduation, she got a well-paid job, made a lot of new friends in a totally new environment, and got married with a decent young man. Her life seems full of sunshine. But why, I kept asking myself, she chose to die after only 2 years of marriage?

Things changed after she got married. It doesn't look like it has changed much at first glance. She still has a lot of friends, her parent's family, and her own career. However, her network of relationships changed. According to Gilligan, Female identity formation takes place in a context of ongoing relationship, with the elusive mystery of women's development lies in its recognition of the continuing importance of attachment in the human life cycle. Now all the emphasis in her life shifted to her husband. Her former center and leader position in her peer group gave way to her new role as a wife, or at least, her role in the peer group weighted less important than her husband now. If her life before marriage was defined by the leader role of peer group, now it was more defined by her relationship with a man. The husband and wife relationship went on well during the first one and half years, which made the importance of her relationship with other friends and peers faded away into the "background" of life. But all of a sudden, her husband wanted a divorce in order to marry another woman. She was so unprepared for this that she broke down immediately. As Gilligan said in her book, female gender identity is threatened by separation and women's failure to separate then becomes by definition a failure to develop. At that moment, she was far away from her parents' family and old friends circle, after all her emotional investment in her marriage suddenly was gone, she felt she was left with almost nothing (either friends or husband) and life was so meaningless. So she choose to end her life.

Is this the reason for her suicide? I really don't know now. But for a young woman who was so used to be the center of friends' and peer's attention and once had a husband who she had thought that could rely on for the rest of her life, the failure of the relationships means the failure of her life. Her life was defined by relationships, first by the social peer groups, then by her marriage. When the most important relationship ends, her life ends. I still don't know if she had a child, whether she would commit suicide? A new relationship, an attachment and feeling of care and sense of responsibility for a child maybe a new meaning for her to go on. But nobody knows that now.

Here I used both Harris and Gilligan's theories to account for how she became the way she was. I found that Harris's theory is more well fit into Xiao's life when she was a child, adolescent and young adult, and can explain the outcome of her life before she committed suicide, but hard to explain her choice of death. Harris's theory is good at explain development in the group context, while Gilligan's theory is better at explain individual development through the whole life span. With Gilligan's theory of woman's psychological development, the logic was more clear on Xiao's whole life. The central theme of her life is relationship and attachment with others as a woman. She was successful when her relationship was successful, and her life fail when her relationship fail. The failure of her marriage just happened to be the trigger of that event.