by Karoline Kan
Of all the Western holidays, Halloween confused me the most. I didn’t understand why a group of adults would dress up in weird costumes or as ghosts and demons. I decided to wear a tight red dress, a pair of long red-silk gloves, and black high heels. I asked my hairdresser to tie up my hair, which I topped with a crown. I had no idea what my costume was. The hairdresser said I looked like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I laughed and decided to go with that.
When I arrived at the party, I knew my costume would be the last thing people talked about, which was a relief. Look-alikes of Harry Potter, Chairman Mao and a Red Guard, Catwoman, Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, and even the infamous BBC host Jimmy Savile, who had been accused of sexually assaulting minors, were there. The DJs pumped pop music, and I bopped along awkwardly while I waited for Andrew.
At about nine o’clock, I saw him come in. He wasn’t dressed up at all! When he approached me, I looked into his blue eyes and saw their fire again. I knew that dating a foreigner would be the worst idea now if my goal was to settle down and work, but I couldn’t help feeling excited about him. Chinese girls who dated foreigners were often perceived as bad girls or opportunists looking for visas or green cards. Since I wasn’t seeking either, my family would think I was unhinged. But I had the right to be with whomever I wanted, and so we began seeing each other.
We watched old films together, went to clubs and jazz bars and to lectures given by famous authors visiting the city. Andrew’s friends invited us to their barbecues. He carried a small notebook everywhere he went and kept a copy of the New Yorker on his desk. He had graduated from Oxford, and it seemed as if he had read every book and knew everything. I felt like I was falling in love with him.
After dating for weeks, I wanted to know if we were serious. To me, if he had not formally asked me if we were boyfriend and girlfriend, we were just friends. Because of my experience with Wei, I had to be more cautious.
The more I liked him, the more I worried. I asked a British friend about it. A Chinese guy would have already asked me to be exclusive long ago; each day that went by drove me crazy with anxiety.
My British friend said there wasn’t such a rule in the UK.
“Then how do you know if you’re boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“Somehow you know.”
“Then what if the woman thinks they’re in a serious relationship, and he thinks they are not. Could he date other people?” Of course I was thinking about Wei.
“In the beginning, it’s not against the rules if you date different people,” he said. “That’s why people date, right? To meet different people, and see if one of them could become someone for a long-term, serious relationship.”
I did not like this Western way of dating.
Another reason why I wanted to be sure is because I had the impression that Andrew wanted to go further than a kiss. I was curious, but wondered, if one day I got married to someone else, would my future husband mind that I had sex with other men? I knew that as a modern woman I should not care about such bullshit, but unfortunately, I still did. It would be me who suffered the consequences and judgment, not Andrew.
Soon after my confusing conversation with my friend, I found myself lying in bed with Andrew on Valentine’s Day.
I could see the shadow of the trees out the window. It looked like a fairy tale and I felt as if I had finally met my prince. A few cats were howling on the roof, and his neighbor’s dog was barking at them. Andrew caressed me like he always did, and I decided to tell him that I was ready. I felt in great control of my own body, and this was the feeling I wanted when losing my virginity. Whether Andrew was a foreigner or not, I knew that once again I would choose to go for what I wanted and not what Chinese tradition wanted for me. I would not regret it. I didn’t want to be a perfect porcelain piece waiting for somebody to pick me up from a market shelf; I wanted to be a new woman, and experience life to the fullest.
Chapter Fourteen
“A Leftover Woman”
I bought Song, Chunting’s son, a panda hat for his fourth birthday. He put on the hat, walked to the mirror, giggling, and came back to thank me with a kiss. My heart melted. Although I had been against Chunting’s decision to have him, he had grown to be just as important to me as she was.
Chunting and Ling lived with his mother, Xianglan, in Houmi Village. Chunting was now a housewife. Ling delivered chicken guts from a slaughterhouse to the local fish farm and earned 500 yuan a day—a good wage, which he could supplement by working over the weekends, and more than most people his age earned, even those with a university degree. But his boss never paid Ling the full amount. Like many other laborers, Ling had no written contract, and his boss would invent all sorts of excuses not to pay him on time and in full. Chunting complained a lot if Ling didn’t bring home the money that he was due.
“You will understand why money matters once you’re married,” Chunting scolded me when I asked her why she was giving Ling such a hard time.
In Houmi, everyone knew she had been pregnant when they got married. Though young people thought little of it, older people gossiped about them. But guangguns, unwed and childless, were even more embarrassing to their parents than an unplanned pregnancy. A grandson was a grandson, after all. As the old saying went, “Those who couldn’t pick the grapes from the vine always said the grapes were sour.”
Chunting and I met less often now that she had a four-year-old son and I was working in Beijing. But whenever I went home, we would spend a night or two together. We both found it difficult to fathom each other’s lives, so we would talk long into the night. My decision to be a journalist was alien to her. Her decision to settle into factory work bothered me. I tried not to be disappointed in her, and was infuriated that she felt the same about me. She talked about money endlessly, and all her decisions seemed to revolve around it. Money didn’t mean as much to me as a job that I could be proud of. But almost no one around me seemed to understand that—not my parents, my former classmates, and not my cousin and best friend, Chunting. The mutual disapproval grew and grew and almost became like a knife between us. Though we loved each other, we didn’t agree on anything. I thought she was conforming, and she thought I was foolish. No matter where our conversation started, we always ended up back in the same place.
As we sat flipping through magazines one night, I told Chunting I was going to be in a play called The Leftover Monologues, inspired by the American writer Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues.
She was baffled.
“Vagina, what?” she blurted out.
I tried to hide my irritation by explaining that it was a collection of stories about gender, sex, relationships, marriage, and being a woman in modern China.
“Leftover women” refers to those who haven’t married by the time they reach twenty-eight years old. The term was all over the media, constantly in my face. I was immediately sickened by it. To call women “leftovers” was to stamp them with a fate of being lesser, an object that could be thrown away, as if women had an expiration date like food on a supermarket shelf, with no value greater than the age of their bodies.
No matter how hard I studied and worked, it didn’t matter. At twenty-five, I was getting closer and closer to my “expiration date.” The pressure was not only on me, and the stigma that my parents would face with a leftover daughter haunted me every day. I thought about it all the time, and was reminded of it everywhere. The play would help me become a part of a community of women who thought as I did.
Feminist notions of empowerment and equality were entirely new to me, as they were for many other young Chinese women, but they also felt like home. Feminism was also stigmatized, but I had watched my mom and Laolao and knew they had traveled quietly on the same path and suffered alone. I loved the community of feminists I met when doing the play.
Chunting listened to me go on and on about the play and the importance of China’s feminist movement. Then she said, in annoyance: “All that stuff doesn’t matte
r.”
I wanted to scream and run out the door. We had been so close growing up, and now she had become just the kind of woman I didn’t like.
Many of my friends and family in the village also didn’t like my newfound ideas. They believed feminists were trying to upend traditional expectations between men and women and that the old customs were the best expression of love. Ads on TV and in shopping malls reminded Chinese women every day that, as they aged, their value declined. Whether it was the latest hair-color product or anti-aging creams, everything was sold as a way for women to stay beautiful in order to be loved, and to make sure their husbands never left.
While Chunting thought this meant women should be treated “as delicate as a flower,” the old ways sounded more like punishment or imprisonment to me. But such values were widely subscribed to, so at times I questioned myself.
I had tried to keep my distance from feminism, but a nascent feminist movement was taking shape in China, mostly in the big cities. Leaders of the movement advocated against domestic violence, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination—all serious issues that were otherwise rarely talked about. After knowing what happened to Laolao’s generation with the foot binding and lack of schooling, and all that Mom had been through with the One-Child Policy, I felt strongly about making changes for my own generation and for those in the future.
I was taught that a good girl should be considerate, loyal to her partner, and demure. I was told to pay close attention to my appearance. Boys, on the other hand, were encouraged to be strong, sporty, decisive, and independent. In high school, the girls were always scolded and told to “respect themselves,” an indirect way of saying “remain abstinent,” but the boys never suffered the same humiliation. Few women made it to top government positions or boardrooms; after all, they were “delicate flowers” and unsuited for those jobs. And even though statistically girls tended to outperform boys academically, it was implied that the boys had “greater potential.” If they studied or worked harder, they would soon surpass the girls. A successful man was rewarded for his hard work; a successful woman was just lucky.
My parents treated Yunxiang and me mostly equally, but their expectations for us still differed. They believed Yunxiang’s priority should be his career, while mine should be finding a successful husband and having loving children. As soon as I made it to university, my mom shifted her focus from my academic life to my love life. Each time when I went home, my conversation with her would go into relationship talk within ten minutes. No matter how I tried to change the subject, Mom turned it back. She worried that all the good men would be taken soon if I didn’t rush myself into the competition. She also worried about my biological clock: “A woman’s time is very valuable. Soon your eggs will not be as healthy.”
Each time I had a new date, I had to keep it secret; otherwise, she’d insist on seeing his photo, and if I went on more than three dates, she would urge me to bring him home to meet her.
“That play sounds like a group of old ladies complaining about their husbands and sons,” Chunting joked. “You’d better not become a leftover woman.”
“How could you repeat that?” I shot back, now red with anger.
She looked at me for a long time. She had grown accustomed to this new side of me, the one who could get so fired up about social issues, but I could not help but protest her ignorance. I just couldn’t sit there and accept it. I didn’t care that she was my cousin, that we had played together in the snow and had bathed together when we were little. I wanted Chunting to change her ways, just as I wanted China to change, but she wouldn’t. Then, suddenly, I saw a glimpse of hope.
“Yeah, it is a bit insulting,” she said, as if realizing this for the first time. Then she smiled, suddenly playful again. “Is it serious with the guy you’re dating? If not, better to end it and find someone else.”
* * *
The truth was, Andrew and I had split up. I felt our relationship lacked something, or that maybe I wasn’t confident enough to feel like his equal. Andrew’s father was a renowned history professor, so Andrew had grown up in an intellectual household and he seemed to know about so many things I didn’t. While discussing issues that appeared in Western newspapers with Andrew, I felt stupid all the time. I admired and loved Andrew a lot, especially when he talked about literature, politics, and art, but his eloquence and talents also made me feel bad about how little I could offer in exchange. I had no idea what he really thought of me, and I was jealous of all the female friends he had, though his research allowed him to meet a lot of people. He was busy working on his book and spent most of his time writing or traveling around the city doing interviews. Instead of openly talking about my doubts and concerns, I chose the typical Chinese route: to be silent and swallow my bitterness. My submissive behavior with him astounded me, but there was a simple reason for it: I felt small compared to him. He was three years older. He had seen more of the world than I had, read more books, had more friends. I never talked about my own family or friends. What could I say? My grandfather had plowed fields and raised cows—that couldn’t be as interesting to him, or so I imagined. Rural life was often portrayed as idyllic in foreign films, but nobody wanted to know the truth of it: just poverty and more poverty—chained to the land, with a relentless cycle of chores day after day.
I was often critical of the government to my Chinese friends and family. With Andrew, I was the opposite. I found myself constantly defending my country. It was easy for me to put him and myself in two unfriendly positions. I couldn’t help but side with the China he was criticizing. He probably thought I was a crazy nationalist. I usually regretted being so irritated with him, but I couldn’t help it. I was afraid he would never truly understand me, given our different backgrounds. It was neither one of our faults.
Nine months after our first date, one Friday afternoon, Andrew asked me out for a walk after work.
It was windy outside, and it looked as if it were going to rain.
He was waiting for me in Raffles City, a nearby shopping mall. I hadn’t seen him for more than a week. He didn’t greet me with a hug as he usually did. We sat close together in a milk tea shop. He ordered me a fruit drink with ice cream.
“I’m going to Hong Kong this weekend to attend a friend’s wedding,” he began.
I nodded, and saw that his eyes looked a little red. I waited for him to continue.
“I have something to tell you,” he said, and I waited. “You’re a great person. We are similar in many ways, but we are also very different. I’ve given it a lot of thought and…there’s no future for us. I know this will hurt, but the sooner we split up, the better it is for you.”
A few years earlier, Wei had said we were too similar to be a couple, and now Andrew said we were too different.
Tears fell down my face, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t let him feel I wanted him too much. I grabbed my coat and fled. Andrew was chasing me but I didn’t stop; I knew what I was doing. I wanted to get out, to get into a taxi. I ran and ran through the cars on Second Ring Road. He was behind me shouting something. I finally found a cab and went home.
It was true, he had hurt me, but I decided to swallow the bitterness.
Chapter Fifteen
Ten Hours for
Eighty Yuan
I’d like to think it was all my feminist talk that inspired Chunting to get a job and depend less on her husband, but that was far from the truth. For Chunting, it was always about the money. The moment Song was old enough, she went back to work.
In the spring of 2016, when Song was six years old, Chunting found a job at the nearby Senyuan Leather Shoe Factory, which made products for export to the US and was only ten minutes from her home. The job did not provide paid holidays or health insurance or allow for time off: She had to work on the weekends. And of the three hundred working on the shop floor, only fifty were men. Many men preferred jobs at the steel or cement-making factories, or trucking, where physical strength co
uld earn them a higher wage. “These men are all losers,” Chunting confided in me, “either too weak or too lazy to find a better job.”
In reality the shoe factory was a poor choice for everyone, women included. Chunting thought working in a factory selling American products meant added value, but it was the same as working in a factory anywhere else.
The shop floor had seven sections: leather cutting, gluing, stitching, hole punching, quality control, pair counting, and boxing. “Americans must be huge,” Chunting told me. “No one in China wears shoes this big.”
Chunting started by cutting leather, and then after a month she moved up to stitching. Her feet would push the sewing machine pedal under her desk, and she used her fingers to adjust the direction of the leather under the needle. About fifty machines operated at the same time; the noise swallowing Chunting’s thoughts until her brain felt empty. “It feels like I am a machine,” she joked. No one wore earplugs. As part of a production line, Chunting’s hours were 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. Once again she felt trapped.
The longest-serving workers were disdainful of new recruits and gave Chunting a hard time. They were also jealous of anyone who achieved a higher rate of pay. One woman who had been at the factory for five years could now perform all the most difficult jobs most efficiently. In her hands, a flat sheet of leather quickly morphed into a shoe. So she was paid more. She wore headphones while she worked and never spoke to anybody. Others became so jealous they refused to do the preparatory work for her, leaving her without leather.
Chunting was positioned on the line between two of these resentful workers, whose job was to feed her similar-size shoe parts, placed together before they got to her so that she could sew them together. Instead of matching up the parts, the women would just heap them over in a jumble.
Chunting tried to talk to their supervisor, but she warned Chunting that her more experienced co-workers would likely take revenge for any repercussion and make it worse for her. “In my experience, after you’ve been here for a while, they’ll be nicer to you,” she advised. “Just wait until other newcomers join.”