Four Chinese women

The stories I tell below are all true. They are not the life experiences of famous historical women, but simply of ordinary members of my extended family in China. Their misfortunes are certainly not exceptional and so I believe they well illustrate certain widespread aspects of women’s daily life in China.

The first story concerns a cousin. She is a Hunan girl, the older auntie’s daughter. She is now 34. She was married very young to a Chinese husband and had four children by him, in contravention to the then one child policy, the first three were girls and were hidden from the authorities because her husband wanted a son, which finally happened. They worked away in a factory while his parents looked after the children. They argued every day. Sometimes he beat her. She divorced him. In their decision the court awarded the children to the husband on the grounds that the mother had no means to support them  — this is a common outcome in Chinese divorce proceedings. After a while she took up with another man who told her that he loved her. She bore a child with him. It then turned out that he was already married, but at the moment they are still together after two years with the 8 month old child. It is a girl. He told her he would arrange to marry her if she gave birth to a boy, but she does not want any more children. There was some talk that my wife and I would adopt the child, but this is now off the agenda.

The next relation is the one we privately and unkindly refer to as No Chin Cousin. She is also a Hunan girl, Laughing Auntie’s daughter. She is 44. She also married very young. She was married to a Chinese man of the Hakka ethnic minority who works for FedEx. He took to gambling on the stock exchange ten years ago. He lost cumulatively about $200,000. When she found out what had been happening, they divorced. She lost the house which went with his job. Her two sons were awarded to her because 90% of his wages have to pay back his debt, one is at university, and the younger is now being looked after by her with support from the wider family.

A third was married to my wife’s younger brother. She was from Gansu province. She came to Shenzhen when she was 18, met him at work and they were together for 7 years before they married when they were 27. A son was born and after two years a daughter. By then he had taken to going across to Macau on gambling expeditions (Macau’s main industries are gambling and prostitution. Its turnover now exceeds that of Las Vegas, expected to be $27bn this year. It is the only part of China where gambling is legal apart from Hong Hong where betting on horse racing is permitted. Worth visiting but just for the Portuguese architecture). Over four years he lost about $100,000. His wife knew he was gambling but not the extent. To help cover his debts to the banks his mother sold her house and tried to keep the matter quiet, but at this point his wife discovered the scale of his debt and divorced him. He carried on gambling and lost another $100,000. There being no way to pay the debt, he committed suicide at the age of 31, by cutting his wrists and neck. His widow took the children back to Gansu and remarried after one year and she has given birth to another boy. She is now looking to park the first-born boy back with the first husband’s family while keeping the daughter, possibly under pressure from her husband.

This boy vs girl issue is deep-rooted in Chinese culture and as you can see is still prevalent in several of these stories. During the One Child period, sex determinations before birth could be illegally obtained with a little money in an envelope and an abortion arranged; new born girls were frequently murdered or else brought up in secrecy. The boy/girl ratios of registered births in that period varied across the country from a normal 100/105 to 100 to 120/140 to 100. In 2020 there were 32.5 million more men than women in the age range 5 to 39.

Chinese men are by and large in their treatment of women somewhere where westerners were in the 1950s. Feminism has not really made much of an advance yet. Roles of men and women are still generally very traditionally defined. This is not an entirely bad thing in my view, and I find it a refreshing change, I think in western society the roles are no longer clear and apparently it is no longer possible even to define what constitutes a man or a woman. But nevertheless even within a traditional setting it is still perfectly possible to treat women with courtesy and respect, which many Chinese men are incapable of doing.

I do not want to paint all Chinese men as oafs, that would be far from the truth, but there is a fair proportion, particularly in small towns and rural areas who talk at the top of their voices, spit, and smoke in restaurants and public places. Put three or four such together and the crescendo becomes deafening. Smoking while banned from restaurants and many public places is still far more socially acceptable than in the west. In 2023 it was estimated that about a third of doctors smoke!  I was in a café in a small town in the north of Guangdong recently and at the next table were two men. One was doing all the talking, or rather shouting, eating with chopsticks in his left hand while simultaneously smoking with his right. Another time in another restaurant at the next table there were six men all smoking underneath a no smoking sign. I pointed this out to a waitress but she shook her head. I remarked a while ago that in China there is law but no rule of law: an exaggeration, but not without a whiff of truth. Waitresses and shop assistants will generally not tell smokers to stop for fear of losing trade. Or ask them not to make an excessive noise. In yet another restaurant in a small town there was a colossal racket coming from the next room. I need to explain that larger restaurants will often have not just a main dining area but private rooms with a large round table seating up to a dozen for private parties. When it got to the point where I had to raise my voice to make myself heard within my group I asked the waitress to deal with the situation, to no avail. So finally I got up and banged as hard as I could on the partition. Remarkably there was then total silence for about ten seconds, after which conversation there picked up again at a reasonable level. I think I embarrassed my party!

But I have strayed too far from the topic. You will have noted that one of the three examples quoted above centres on domestic violence. This is statistically significant. In 2010 it was reckoned that 24% of women aged between 24 and 60 had been victims. Domestic violence is endemic in China and actually has its roots in Confucianism wherein the man is the master and sole arbiter of the household, the wife merely one of his possessions, and internal violence held to be a private matter. Attitudes began to change and from the 1980s following Reform and Opening, pressure began to build, women’s groups began to be formed, and local legislation began in 2000 in Hunan, but it was not until 2016 that the national law against domestic violence was eventually introduced.

But to return to complete the discussion, the miscreant of my fourth and final tale is not a man. She is the woman’s mother. When the woman was a few months old her mother abandoned the father and the child to go off with another man. She went on to have three more children with two different men but never remarried. She is now 70 and is supported by the three remaining children. The child meanwhile worked barefoot from the age of 6 in the rice fields of northern Guangdong at weekends to help the father, aunt and uncle. After schooling, to escape the physical abuse her aunt doled out she rejoined her mother, working as a professional photographer for six years.  She received no pay, just working for board and lodging. Her mother assaulted her three times leaving permanent damage to her teeth. Then she left her mother’s business and worked in factories, making electronics and then shoes. She opened a hairdressers and employed five people when she was 24, but the shop became a casualty of redevelopment as no alternative low rent shop was available in the immediate area. She first married at the age of 26. Her husband beat her so she left him after two years. When I met her she was penniless and reduced to sleeping on her mother’s sofa. That was fifteen years ago. I have cared for her since, and we married finally last October. Better late than never!

So to summarise, two of our four women suffered physical abuse, two had devious and dishonest husbands, and all four secured divorces, but so far three of them (I dare to postulate!) ultimately formed a stable and happy marriage, two of them with a Chinese, and to the best of my knowledge the rest of the family have adequately happy and secure relationships. But undoubtedly many men’s attitudes to women in China are still archaic, this needs to change, and undoubtedly it will.