What the Chinese Don't Eat (3 page)

At a launch party for my book, a reporter from a women’s magazine gave me a newspaper article on the imbalance of the sexes among young people in China; she hoped that I would write a personal view on the subject. I do not usually read the papers while surrounded by bouquets of flowers and fine wines: first, wine is apt to make the words on the newspaper ‘come in pairs’, second, the notes of congratulation in bouquets are liable to turn a person of no account into a universal expert. But all my resolutions went out of the window with the headline: Chinese men cannot find wives. Was this true? Were we Chinese really facing a breaking off of the family line?

By the time I got home, while lights were still burning in thousands of London homes, all my Chinese friends were asleep,
dreaming the dreams of a Nanjing summer. I could only just restrain my flustered heart and impatient fingers.

At two in the morning, I got through to a friend who works in an important government office. Her telephone manner was businesslike. ‘Xinran, you’re still so incorrigibly naive, so easily swayed by propaganda in the western media.

‘It’s true that for many male graduates, especially in the more developed regions, lack of power or money mean it’s hard to find a wife. There are too few girls in the cities and the quality of country girls is too low. There’s no way round it, we have controlled our population explosion but we have no way to stop people from trying to control the sex of their child, in order to “keep the family incense lit”. In the big cities the ratio of 20 boys to every girl is far, far bigger than the 6:1 we had originally reckoned on.

‘Of course the government has a firm policy against this; we had one before and we have one now. But how many people will really take notice? Who can resist traditional values, and parents who believe property is “an encouragement and reward for sons and grandsons”. You know Xinran, journalists discovering problems and governments solving them are two very different things.

‘We sent many officials to explain to people at the grassroots level that there is no distinction between the sexes in our economic and taxation policies, and that if we get an imbalance in the population, everybody’s “incense will go out”; some peasant cadres even tore down the houses of families who had had six girls and still wanted to have a son. But if you look at the banquets that are given at the birth of a son, and the personal damage and divorce cases that result from giving birth to a girl, it will be clear to you that in human behaviour, “It is easier to clean up the leaves than the roots.”

‘What is to be done? Relax the policy of population control? Xinran, has western so-called civilisation turned you into an idiot? You know we have always allowed an extra birth in the countryside, sometimes even three. There can only be the most rigorous implementation of the one-child policy in the big cities, and this is why our city boys can’t find wives. But can the few developed cities with their limited economic development support so many impoverished peasants? If China becomes like Somalia or the Sudan after we relax the population control policy, what will we do? Won’t future generations curse our name? Better to have young men with problems finding a wife, than leaving future generations of women with nothing with which to feed or clothe their children.

‘Don’t fret for no reason, Xinran; we Chinese won’t be left without a future, people learn best from their own hardships. Yes, yes, I agree with you, the price of this lesson is too high, and too painful.

‘Is your boy PanPan well? Don’t worry, you can have my daughter as a daughter-in-law, we have the “golden girl” that everyone’s trying to get. And how’s your book doing? Do the foreigners believe it? To be honest, Chinese women in the few generations before us have had it so hard that even their own children don’t dare believe it.

‘All right, go and get some sleep. I have to go to a meeting. Thank you.’

When I put down the phone, I suddenly felt a great distance between China and the rest of the world. China has been striding forward towards today at such a quick pace that she has had no time to appreciate the historical scenery, to think about her fellow-travellers through history, or even to consider whether we should give our battle-weary bodies a rest, after exhausting ourselves with the inner and outer conflicts of the past 100 years.

When I took up my pen and wrote down what I had learned, I found that there were none of my own views in it, but everything I want to say was already there. I thought about this English gentleman who wanted to have a son: maybe he believes in the traditional Chinese view that ‘there are three sorts of unfilial behaviour, of which the worst is to have no heirs’. But without a doubt, he needed somebody’s daughter to give him a son.

In the west, a kiss is just a kiss. If only that were true where I come from

I am a Chinese woman. According to our culture, which is very closed and hidden, we don’t kiss each other. The only exceptions are for little children and married couples in bed. Two years ago, while I was teaching Chinese culture at London University, I told my students: ‘Don’t kiss me, please. I am Chinese and not used to being kissed.’ But my traditional Chinese reserve was overturned by my students in the space of an hour.

It was my birthday and I was giving a summer course. I was running late, which is unusual as I always liked to be the first person in the classroom so that I could say hello to my students one by one when they came to their lesson. When I rushed in, everybody was there already, all 22 of them, standing by the door instead of sitting. Suddenly they came to me and kissed me on my face one by one. ‘Happy birthday, Xinran!’ they said. I knew I shouldn’t complain when they gave me a kiss as a birthday present, but we had to start our lesson at once because I had so much to teach them in their short course.

During the lesson I felt that something was up with my students, but I could not find out what it was while I devoted myself to teaching. Forty-five minutes later, at the end of the period, one student stood up and said, ‘Xinran, would you like to go to the toilet?’

‘What? Why? Oh, come on, this is my own business, I don’t need you to make suggestions about the toilet, do I?’

More and more voices spoke out. ‘Come on, Xinran, you should go and relax on your birthday!’

‘What’s wrong with you all?’ I was totally lost.

They started laughing and had strange looks on their faces.

‘OK, I am going! I can’t believe all of you force your teacher to go to the toilet on her birthday!’ I thought they wouldn’t calm down unless I went.

As I passed through a long hall full of other students, more laughter followed my steps.

‘Oh my God!’ I saw myself in the mirror. My face was covered with colourful kiss marks. They had been there throughout the 45 minutes I was teaching my colourful-lipped students.

I went back to the classroom in tears. My students were waiting for me quietly. I stood there and faced them without a sound, and they looked at me with their watchful eyes. After a long time in silence I said, ‘Come here, let me kiss you, now it’s my turn.’ I kissed them one by one with many thanks and love from my deep heart.

Since then, I have enjoyed this beautiful western bodylanguage with people – but only in the west, not in China.

My neighbour, after hearing this story, asked me, ‘But what’s wrong with kissing?’

In the west no one can believe that kissing has cost the lives of many Chinese women. When I was working as a radio presenter in Shanghai, I once received a suicide note from a 19-year-old girl. She wrote:

Three weeks later, after she died, Xiao Yu’s first letter begging for help finally arrived.

Is there any female on earth who could meet the five male requirements of a good woman?

When I was doing my radio phone-in programme, I used to get so many calls and letters complaining about how difficult it was to be a good woman. I wanted to know why, so I did some research. I asked my male listeners two questions: 1) How many good women have there been in your family? 2) What is your view of a good woman?

Three weeks later I had received nearly 1,000 replies. Fewer than 20 of them said that they had had good women in their lives. I was shocked. I could not understand why – until I read the five requirements for a good woman that they gave in their letters.

A good woman, they thought, should 1) never go out and express her views to society; 2) provide a son for her husband’s family tree; 3) never lose her temper and always be soft and smile at her men; 4) never burn food when she cooks and never mix colours when she washes; 5) be good in bed and have a good figure to show off.

I could not and still cannot imagine how many women in this world could match up to that standard. I realised that I for one was certainly not a good woman in most Chinese men’s eyes. Because I had a well-known talk show, I was ‘too open to be good’.

At that point, I thought there must be something wrong with Chinese culture and education, which could not make men and women equal. Then last year I met a Chinese man who grew up in the west. I asked him what his view of a good woman
was. His answer was exactly the same as that of the un-westerneducated Chinese men.

I realised that no degree or PhD could change a traditional view. Did we realise, I asked, how high a price women who wanted to be good paid for this stand?

Someone sent me the diary of a dying Chinese girl back in 1990. Her father abused her. When she asked for help from her mother, she was told to ‘be quiet’, otherwise people would call her a bad woman. The only way for the poor girl to avoid her father’s attacks and still ‘be a good girl’ was to harm herself so that she could be sent to hospital, where she would be safe. One day she found that the touch of a fly was so much more beautiful than that of a human that she tried to keep a fly as a pet. She was so frightened at the thought of being sent home that she killed herself by rubbing a dead fly into the cut in her arm. Her name was Hong-Xue; she was 17.

In 1995 I was asked for help. A married couple in the countryside could not have a baby. It had been nearly three years. I could hardly believe the reasons they gave me: they never touched each other during their marriage.

I asked the man: ‘Have you ever wanted to touch your wife?’ ‘Yes, all the time.’ ‘Why haven’t you?’ ‘I want to be a good man.’ His voice was very low.

‘Do you know the difference between a ‘husband’ and a ‘man’ with a woman?’ He did not say anything.

I turned to his wife: ‘Have you ever wanted to be hugged and kissed by him?’ ‘Why do you ask me this? I am a good woman, as everybody knows in our village.’ From her eyes I could see I was a ‘bad woman’.

I asked in a more diplomatic way. ‘Do you know where you are from?’ She looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘From my parents.’

‘Do you know why and how?’

‘They sleep together.’

‘Do you believe they lay there without touching each other?’

‘How could I know? Why do you ask me about such sexual hooligan things?’ I could see anger in her eyes now.

‘OK, OK, do you know how pigs and chickens produce their babies?’ I felt so sorry to ask her this, but I had to. ‘Of course! But they are animal, and we are …’ She did not finish her sentence.

‘Yes, we are a kind of animal too.’ I was sure she had got it by now. To be certain, I drew a picture to show them what should happen when a married couple sleep together. Neither of them looked at my drawing, but they picked it up and left. Eighteen months later, they came to visit me with their lovely baby boy.

I think if a woman knows how to love, how to feel love and how to try to love, she is a good woman.

By the way, I have put the same question to western men over the past year. They differ on just one point: a good woman does not need to provide a boy for the family tree –
but
she should be beautiful and clever. Even more requirements than from the Chinese men! Is it possible for anyone to be a good woman?

In a four-star hotel in China, one woman’s cup of tea is another woman’s daily wages

I was in the second-floor coffee shop of the Grand Central Hotel in Nanjing last year, waiting for the director of my old radio station. I had all my attention concentrated on my reading, when a voice spoke in my ear: ‘Are you Xinran?’ A cleaner was standing before me. She was polishing the dazzlingly bright metal railing beside me with a cloth, but her eyes were fixed on me.

‘Yes? I’m Xinran. Is there something I can do for you?’

‘No, nothing, I just wanted to tell you that the cup of tea you’re drinking costs as much as my whole family earns in a day.’ She turned her back on me and left.

I was stupefied. That cup of tea cost 15 yuan (£1.15) and it was the cheapest beverage in the four-star hotel. I am not wealthy: in a place like this, I could only be a tea-drinker, but she said I was drinking the daily income of her entire family. The cleaning woman and her words lingered on in my mind.

Two days later, I stopped her politely as she was leaving by the back door of the hotel. ‘I saw you were at work at six o’clock this morning,’ I said. ‘That’s really hard work.’