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The women of China

By Cireena Simcox - posted Thursday, 3 April 2008


With the approaching Olympic Games, the recent riots in Tibet, the trading alliances that are being made all over the world, and the on-going purging of corruption, China is very rarely out of the news these days.

Although on one level most Westerners are fully aware of China’s emergence into capitalist society it seems that, on another level, the spectre of China as the Yellow Peril - how many grew up thinking of it - is little changed in many minds.

Although the “opening up" took place 30 years ago there is still much ignorance about modern China, and what is known relates to the world of commerce, industry or politics. Although women are involved in these fields, it is largely a male-centred view that people have of the “mysterious Orient” with little or no thought given to those who “hold up half of the sky”: the women of China.

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Current Chinese generational gaps illustrate how far the country has come since World War II. And, among women, this sometimes results in huge divides between the realities of young women and their grandmothers which are wider than those in any Western country.

The first “divide” one notices is purely physical: it’s a question of development. Down any street, in any city or village, old Chinese ladies shuffle along on tiny feet, eyes downcast and hand trustingly tucked into a companion’s arm. Usually a grandmother will be accompanied by her middle-aged daughter. Taller, more robust and slightly broader, these women’s feet are planted squarely into sensible black shoes, they wear navy blue, maroon or black, and favour tailored jackets with pants or straight skirts. However, it is when these women in turn are accompanied by their taller, rangier daughters that the contrasts can be most clearly remarked upon.

Of course these are broad generalisations and not every one of the approximately half billion women of China can be slipped neatly into these categories. But in such a highly populated country there are enough who do broadly adhere to these paradigms to form generalised societal groups.

It is not simply in their way of dressing that the generations differ so much from one another. The oldest group - the grandmothers and great grandmothers who were born before World War II - are those who still remember the world of Chinese fable. A land where women with bound feet hobbled painfully through courtyards. Where coloured fish swam lazily under ornamental bridges, where people wore wide woven hats and coloured pyjamas and the clothes of the wealthy glowed and shone in the myriad of silk textures for which China was famed.

Even if they were too late to have encountered China as a Dynastic country, these women were surrounded by those who had been brought up within the strict hierarchy of social class. They were familiar with Confucianism and the ancient stories of China’s past were more real to them than the world beyond their town gates.

These tiny bodies have given birth to the large families which were the countries great strength as well as its biggest weakness. They grew up accepting that men ruled the world with stern omnipotence and that women were leaves in the wind of fortune.

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Their future was decided for them at birth - they were subservient to their parents and family, then their husband and mother-in-law, and, once the sons they had nurtured grew, they became subservient to them. They bowed their heads and survived as the greatest winds of change of all blew through their country and their survival into old age is a monument to the strength which is contained in their diminutive forms.

The middle-aged women are the feisty ones. They haggle on either side of market counters, staunchly battling for the best deal or the biggest bargain. They can be seen taking or picking up their grandchildren outside every school in the land: comparing - often with devastating frankness - the looks, intelligence, progress or demeanour of “their” babies or children to those of their elderly peers; briskly taking their charges onto the backs of bicycles, the wells of scooters or pushing them in bright plastic novelty vehicles; and elbowing into the crowds around local street vendors to ensure food reaches those small mouths almost as soon as they leave the school gates.

They are the ones who came of age during the wars, the unrest, the purges, the re-education programs, the cultural revolution and, most importantly, the famines. Unlike their mothers who could look back on peaceful childhoods and a slower, more tranquil way of life, they spent their younger years gnawed by constant hunger and living in a world of drabness and utility.

Their food intake was rationed and doled out by factories or schools, and yet they still cut these meager portions down whenever their country demanded it. Some of them reached adulthood never knowing the feeling of a full belly. Many of these women, like their mothers, were not educated: either because education was considered to be wasted on girls or, later, because education itself became an elitist concept.

Many of them learned instead to march alongside their men, to lay bricks, stoke furnaces, drive trucks, clear rubble by hand, smelt iron and clean out latrines. They also learned that while a woman was entitled to work alongside a man in any task, she could never think as well as a man or reason as well as a man and therefore she was not worth as much as a man. At the same time they learned to efface themselves, to melt into the background, never to court notice or stand out from the crowd.

Thus she learned to fight tooth and claw for the welfare of her family, to go to great lengths to feed and clothes them, but to remember at all times that these skills were her primary value not only to her husband, but to the country. Without them she was worthless.

To both these generations the modern young Chinese woman is somewhat of an enigma. Like her grandmother, she has learnt that the femininity of a woman can bring much attention but her attractions are not confined to a family courtyard. However, like her mother, she has learned also to efface herself and in any situation that holds the potential for embarrassment or loss of face, she can melt into the background. Thus she doesn’t often appear at a disadvantage.

But unlike of the women who came before her, she has one great advantage. She is educated. Born after the “opening of China” to the West, her influences are not solely Chinese. On the large-screen TV in her lounge she can watch foreign movies. From the computer in her bedroom she can summon the world.

Her mother can reflect on the contrasts in her life: the times of desperate want and privation, followed by the years of struggle to arrive at a life in which, at times, she feels uneasy, faced as she is with things she was once taught to regard as elitist luxuries. But the daughter has known nothing other than to be part of a treasured generation for whom no dreams are unreachable.

While her mother and grandmother were married either in their teens or early 20s, this young woman’s education stretches into her mid-20s. As does her childhood. Her mother’s childhood may have been curtailed around her 12th year and her grandmother’s even earlier: but this young woman, in her Mickey Mouse or Betty Boop T-shirts, toting her Winnie the Pooh handbag, and with diamante butterflies in her hair, doesn’t even need to consider having children until her career is on track in her late 20s or early 30s.

The chasms between these three women might be too deep even to contemplate crossing in some cultures but in China they are bound together with the strong, insoluble grip of “family”: the bond that supercedes all others .Disparate as they may appear, far removed from each others experiences, they continue to offer strength and safety and stability as the unique family bond has done in China for millenia.

They are also bound together in the knowledge that, no matter what careers or jobs they undertake, their main value lies in their contribution to the family and continuance. As long as family stays strong they will survive as they have always done. Wars, politics, the ambitions of men or their obsession with power and glory? The average Chinese woman is not yet too interested. She believes that the half of the sky which she holds up is labeled “family”.

But what will her daughter think?

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About the Author

Cireena Simcox has been a journalist and columnist for the last 20 years and has written a book titled Finding Margaret Cavendish. She is also an actor and playwright .

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All articles by Cireena Simcox

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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