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? The woman looked at me quizzically. “Doubt it.”
“I’ll never be thin enough to buy clothes in your country,” I joked. She smiled
in a way I couldn’t read, evincing perhaps sympathy, perhaps maybe you
aren’t trying hard enough. I was 27, dangling precariously at the edge of
marriageability—and therefore usefulness—and making no attempt to make
myself desirable to potential suitors. Women hold up half the sky, but only
until 27, when the leftover chaff is wheelbarrowed off into the Yangtze river.
? When I first moved to Shanghai, I lived in a dorm with a bunch of girls
fresh out of university. I was the only foreigner. My clearest memory of that
time was their obsession with losing nonexistent weight in order to lure in
potential boyfriends. Barely 22, the countdown had already begun for my
single-minded roommates. It’s been several years, and I’m sure that if any
among them have not settled their dowry of a house, a car, and 5 heads of
livestock, then they are prepping themselves for a lifetime of cat rearing and
ridicule.
? “I’m fine with not being married, you know,” I said. “There are advantages
to being single.”
? “Of course there are,” Yifei said. “Just not here in China.” She changed
her tone and the topic, listing recent grievances. Her boss unfairly scrutinizes
all of her tasks. Her friends are becoming fewer with time. The men treat her
like a wounded deer in winter. The implication is clearly that being a divorced
woman in China is only two steps ahead of being a leper, a fact of which I
need no convincing.
? Although I grew up in America, I had become a “woman” in the Middle
Kingdom. I do wonder how this fact affected me. I was certainly no longer
impervious to the misogyny and double standards that had shaped half a
billion people in this country. The stony shore of my 21st century Western
sensibilities had eroded by Chinese tides. How many of the comforting
words that I offered to friends like Yifei did I, myself, still believe? And, more
importantly, how much of my Western progressive feminism was only talk,
not borne out in practice? China had no monopoly on eating disorders, unfair
treatment, or bullying.
? “You’re lucky, you know,” Yifei rejoined. “No matter what, you can always
just go home.”
? “Yeah,” I said. “But I’ll be a woman, there, too.”
Charmika Monet is an American living and
working in Shanghai as a translator, copywriter,
improv actor, and misty-eyed daydreamer.
For more from HAL Publishing go to
halliterature.com & farenougheast.com
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