What the Chinese Don't Eat (4 page)

‘It’s nothing. I’m used to it. There are people who’d love to find hard labour like this and can’t get it!’ She told me she’d been working eight hours a day at the hotel for the best part of a year. ‘Is it tiring?’ I asked.

‘How could it be anything else? There are a lot of cleaners in this hotel – you might not think there was that much for any one person to do, but none of us dares to stop and rest, and after
eight hours we’re too tired to move. But my child, my husband and the two old folk all have to eat, so I have to go to the market to buy vegetables, cook supper and do the housework.’

She said none of the cleaners took the half-hour break they were entitled to because they were scared. ‘We may just get 15 yuan for a day, but we’re paid by the day, and I can’t do weekends either. But it was hard enough to get this job. My husband’s been laid off too. If neither of us does anything, what is the family supposed to eat, and how will we get the child to school?’

They would need a huge sum of money to send her six-year-old to school the following year, she said. ‘Isn’t there a system of compulsory education now?’ I asked.

‘It says in the papers that there’s compulsory education, but what school doesn’t demand support fees? That’s 4–5,000 yuan at the least – 10,000 for some – and no school if you don’t pay. But how can a child manage without school?’

I asked her if she liked her work. ‘What does it matter? I’ve done well to have found this job, so many can’t even do that. You go to the labour exchange and look at all those people searching for a job. If an employer comes in, the people looking for work are desperate enough to tear him to pieces. There are too many out of work these days.

‘I got someone to fix [this job] for me. The first three months of my wages weren’t enough to cover the “connection fees”. And I have an advantage – I’m young. The really sad ones are the women of 40 and 50 who lose their jobs: people looking for workers think they’re too old. The insurance people say it’s not economical to insure older people. It’s awful for the women laid-off – all those people like broken bricks thrown away by the roadside. You can’t make them into a wall, at most you can use them to fill in the ditches by the side of the road, but far more of them are rubbish to be carted off to the tip.’

She said her husband hadn’t found another job. ‘He’d rather die than do all those low jobs. You know men, always thinking about their face. Still, life is hard enough already, if you don’t iron out your own frown lines, nobody else will do it for you.’

I told her I was sorry. ‘Not to worry. We’re different. You live for the pleasant things in life, I live because I’ve no choice. Goodbye.’

This one sentence really gave me food for thought. Walking in the streets of London, watching women enjoy their shopping trips, I often thought of those women in China living ‘because they must’. My only comfort was that in China, many women know how to ‘iron away’ the ‘frown lines’ of life.

If we say that my cup of tea was a day’s wages for a woman worker, then how many days’ wages are spent by the big businessmen and high-ranking officials who sit every day at the restaurant eating expensive mountain delicacies and seafood, with a new menu every day? What explanation can there be for this in a system whose slogan is to ‘level out the differences between the rich and the poor’?

Translated by Esther Tyldesley

Do the foreigners who adopt our girls know how to feed and love them in their arms and hearts?

Recently I received an email. Had I ever interviewed any women who were forced to give up children because of the ‘one child’ law, which China started in 1981? Yes, many.

One particularly painful memory stands out. On a cold winter morning in 1990, I passed a public toilet in Zhangzhou. A noisy crowd had formed around a little bag of clothes lying in the windy entrance. People were pointing and shouting: ‘Look, look, she is still alive!’

‘Alive? Was this another abandoned baby girl?’ I pushed through the crowd and picked up that little bundle: it was a baby girl, barely a few days’ old. She was frozen blue, but her tiny nose was twitching. I begged for help: ‘We should save her, she is alive!’

‘Stupid woman, do you know what you are doing? How could you manage this poor thing?’

I couldn’t wait for help. I took the baby to the nearest hospital. I paid for first aid for her, but no one in the hospital seemed to be in a hurry to save this dying baby. I took a tape recorder from my backpack and started reporting what I saw. It worked: a doctor stopped and took the baby to the emergency room.

As I waited outside, a nurse said: ‘Please forgive our cold minds. There are too many abandoned baby girls for us to handle. We have helped more than 10, but afterwards, no one has wanted to take responsibility for their future.’

I broadcast this girl’s story on my radio show that night. The phone lines were filled with both angry and sympathetic callers.

Ten days later, I got a letter from a childless couple; they wanted to adopt the baby girl. That same day on my answer machine, I heard a crying voice: ‘Xinran, I am the mother of the baby girl. She was born just four days before you saved her. Thank you so much for taking my daughter to hospital. I watched in the crowd with my heart broken. I followed you and sat outside your radio station all day. Many, many times I almost shouted out to you: “That is my baby!”

‘I know many people hate me; I hate myself even more. But you don’t know how hard life is for a girl in the countryside as the first child of a poor family. When I saw their little bodies bullied by hard work and cruel men, I promised I wouldn’t let my girl have such a hopeless life. Her father is a good man, but we can’t go against our family and the village. We have to have a boy for the family tree.

‘Oh, my money is running out, only two minutes left, it is so expensive.

‘We can’t read or write. But, if you can, please tell my girl in the future to remember that, no matter how her life turns out, my love will live in her blood and my voice in her heart. [I could hear her crying at this point.] Please beg her new family to love her as if she were their own. I will pray for them every day and …’

The message stopped. Three months later, I sent the baby girl to her new family – a schoolteacher and a lawyer – with her new name ‘Better’. Better’s mother never called again.

Afterwards, I started to search for other mothers who had abandoned their girls. This spring, I talked to some near the banks of the Yangtze river. Did they not want to find out where their babies were? ‘I would rather suffer this dark hole inside me if it means she can have a better life. I don’t want to disturb my girl’s life,’ said one. ‘I am very pleased for a rich person to
take my daughter; she has a right to live a good life,’ said another.

One of them asked me: ‘Do you believe those foreigners who adopt our girls know how to feed and love them in their arms and heart?’

Two days ago, I forwarded the email below to my assistant, Leo, in China, with a message: Could we do something for the mothers of our Chinese girl babies? Leo replied: Yes! Give the mothers our email address. Let’s try to build an information bridge for our girls between the west and China.

In China, god is god. Or possibly an emperor. Or a communist leader. Or a rural husband

I got an email from an Irishman last week. He told me he has a Chinese girlfriend who is very beautiful with an extremely gentle and kind mind. But he cannot understand why she prays in front of Buddha at home every evening and goes to the Catholic church every Sunday. He has tried very hard to imagine how those two religions work together in her soul, but he can’t work it out. He asked me if there was something wrong with his girlfriend.

My answer is: she is perfectly all right. She is not the only one who has two beliefs. There are even a good many Chinese women who believe in all the religions of the world. During my researches between 1989 and 1997 in China, I heard and saw so many Chinese women who were struggling ‘to catch up’ their beliefs after religious freedom was declared in 1983. Most Chinese people who prayed were only doing so to ask for wealth or other benefits.

I came across one Christian woman, who had one Buddhist grandparent and one Taoist grandparent. The two were constantly arguing. Away from the joss sticks, the woman had set up a cross. The grandparents constantly scolded her for this, saying she was cursing them to an early death. The girl’s mother believed in some form of qigong [a form of meditative exercise similar to tai chi] and the father believed in the god of wealth. They, too, were always quarrelling: the woman said that the man’s desire for money had damaged her spiritual standing, and the man accused the woman’s evil influences of attacking
his wealth. The little money this family had was spent on religious rituals or holy pictures, but they had grown neither richer nor happier.

Another woman I came across was said to be very religious. In public speeches, she would hail the Communist party as China’s only hope; once off the podium, she would preach Buddhism, telling people that they would be rewarded in their next life according to their deeds in this one. When the wind changed, she would spread word of some form of miraculous qigong. Someone in her work unit said that she would wear a Communist party badge on her coat, fasten a picture of Buddha to her vest and pin a portrait of Great Master Zhang of the Zangmigong sect to her bra. Seeing my look of incredulity, I was told this woman was often mentioned in the newspapers. She was named as a model worker every year, and had been selected as an outstanding party member many times.

Are those Chinese women crazy? No, what they are is frightened since they lost their own human god. Over the last 5,000 years, the Chinese regarded their emperors and political leaders as their god, whose every word could mean the difference between life and death. In the early 20th century, China was plunged into chaos as the feudal system came to an end, and in all this bloodshed, the role of saviour was taken over by the warlords. They all understood that the Chinese could not do without their gods, as props to their spirits. No matter how different the theories of nationalism, democracy, socialism and communism represented by Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong were, most ordinary Chinese in the period from 1920 to 1980 did not look on them as political leaders but as new emperors with modern names – and as their gods.

Given this, it is easy to understand the hysteria of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and the way intellectuals
and peasants and workers alike unquestioningly obeyed their leader’s commands, bowing their heads and allowing their gods to throw them into prison.

I know it is difficult for the rest of the world to understand this aspect of Chinese history. But having observed the zeal with which people from profoundly religious societies offered their most prized possessions – or even their children – to their gods in the past, you will understand the feelings of ordinary Chinese people who need a central power or belief for their security when they are not sure who should be their next god.

In my interviews with around 200 Chinese women, I found that for most uneducated rural women, their god is their husband. As for many young Chinese city women, they are waiting and seeing: as a Chinese girl in Nanjing told me, her belief will depend on what religion is in fashion next! So my reply to the Irishman was: please give your girlfriend more time to decide what she really believes.

Now women in China know what they have been missing, the pain is too hard to bear

Why do so many women commit suicide in China? According to a report in the British medical journal the
Lancet
last year, suicide is China’s fifth biggest killer, with women and girls most at risk. It reported that China is one of the few countries in the world where the female suicide rate is higher than it is for males. Twenty-five per cent more women commit suicide than men.

I don’t know how many other countries this is true for; whether China is the only country in the world where more women commit suicide than men. And I don’t know all the reasons why. But I do know through the many letters I receive some of the reasons why Chinese women give up their lives so easily.

First of all, in ancient times Roman gladiators killed and were killed for people’s pleasure and their own glory, because people did not have the same respect for human life that they do today. Similarly, throughout Chinese history, there has been a culture of people killing themselves for the pleasure and honour of their family and for their own glory, for women to prove their honesty and, often, true love. This culture persists in many parts of China today, particularly in the rural areas of the south-west.

Secondly, quite a number of Chinese women would rather give up their lives than suffer from ‘not being a good woman’, according to the Chinese traditional role. For generations, having a good, clean name has been more important than human life itself. This is doubly true in the impoverished countryside,
where, apart from housework, the importance of reputation is often the only thing they are taught.

What is a good, clean name?As I mentioned in a previous column, it means that a woman must be a virgin before marriage; that she should never be touched by a man apart from her husband; that she should never be seen alone with other men; and that she should not remarry or be with another man after her husband has died. In addition, many Chinese women in the countryside have a status much lower than that of men, even lower than big tools or property. When others do not treat you as a human being, it is difficult to know how to see yourself as one. Less than 100 years ago, the situation wasn’t so different in the west.