Abstract

How did the kitchen become a primary site through which reform-era Shanghai transformed everyday life, domestic modernity, and gendered subjectivity during the early decades of Reform and Opening Up? This article examines how the material, spatial, and affective reorganization of the kitchen shaped the emergence of a distinctive domestic modernity in Shanghai from the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s. Drawing on documentary film, Culture and Life, newspaper reports,
memoirs, literary representations, and historical surveys, it traces the uneven transition from shared shikumen kitchens to more privatized apartment kitchens and analyzes the changing meanings attached to food preparation, household technology, and domestic space. It argues that the kitchen did not simply reflect reform but helped translate its abstract promises into everyday practices of cooking, arranging, economizing, and consuming. In this process, xiaokang (moderate prosperity) emerged less as abundance than as a moral and affective order grounded in moderation, balance, and manageable comfort. The article further shows that this domestic modernity was deeply gendered, as women were increasingly positioned as the primary managers of domestic modernization. By centering the kitchen, it reframes Reform and Opening Up not as a sudden
rupture, but as an uneven reconfiguration of socialist everyday life through
the intimate spaces of the home.

Keywords: xiaokang, kitchen modernity, everydayness