"Leftover" and proud - women's voices in China

The Economist
Women's voices
"Leftover" and proud
Aug 1st 2014
BEIJING

IT ISN'T easy being young and female in China. The pressure to marry begins from your early to mid-twenties, often with your own mother ringing you on a daily basis to encourage you to settle. Education and job opportunities are rigged towards men in a broadly chauvinistic culture. Harrassment in the work place, and domestic violence at home, are rife and difficult to bring to court. The standard of beauty is narrow and exacting, often infantalising. Virginity is prized, sexual freedom stigmatised. China has taken a large step backwards from the ideal that women, in Mao’s well-worn phrase, “hold up half the sky”.

It is encouraging to see women give voice to justified complaints. Last November, 17 university students participated in a photographic protest of sexual defiance. Around the same time, Xiao Meili, a 24-year-old women’s rights activist, embarked on a 144-day, 2300km walk from Beijing to Guangzhou to raise awareness about sexual assault (in Chinese). An earlier campaign was a spin-off of the Occupy movement, “Occupy the men’s toilets”. Now, in Beijing, women’s issues have come to the stage in a dramatised collection of personal stories called “The Leftover Monologues”.

The play, which opened July 26th at a café in central Beijing with repeat shows to follow, was a spin on the American feminist play “The Vagina Monologues”, but with Chinese characteristics. “Leftover” is an insulting term in Chinese applied to women in their mid-twenties or older, often with a high level of education or professional accomplishment, who are cast by society (including the All China Women’s Federation, an official state organ) as too picky and unappealing for marriage material. (This is all nicely laid out in a new book, "Leftover Women", by Leta Hong Fincher.)

In the performance, fifteen women (and three men) took back the term for their own. Titles of the monologues, almost all of which were personal experiences delivered by non-actors, included “To be leftover is better” and “Leftover – I’m willing!”. “To be a leftover woman,” Feng Yajun, a 24-year-old sales professional said on stage, “is to be hidden in a corner... But we are already emerging from it. This transformation in China is coming to light, so I say, 'I want to be a leftover woman!'”

MORE at http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/08/womens-voices