I keep saying that China is different from everything I know. Although I have been to China many times and even lived there for six months, I still don’t understand a lot of things. Reading books about China should help me to better understand. I just read the novel “Miss Chopsticks” from Xinran. It starts with an author’s note that already explains a lot:
It was in 1997 in a small village in the northern province of Shanxi, where a woman had committed suicide by drinking pesticide because she could not give birth to a boy – or, as the Chinese put it, she could not “lay eggs”. Virtually no one in the village would attend her funeral. Her husbands comment: “You can’t blame them. They don’t want her bad luck to rub off on them. Besides, it is her fault that she only managed to give birth to a handful of chopsticks and no roof-beam.”
This seems to be the manner in which the Chinese view the differences between men and women. While men are believed to be the strong providers, who hold up the roof of the household, women are merely fragile, workaday tolls, to be used and then discarded.
The book tells the story about three sisters from rural China who make their own lives in Nanjing. Sisters Three, Five and Six may not have much formal education, but they know that their mother is a failure because she has produced only six daughters (chopsticks) and no son (roofbeam). Chopsticks (girls) are seen as less valued than roofbeams (sons) for a number of different traditional cultural reasons, and a family without sons has far less face (standing).
This novel gives a fascinating picture of the new entrepreneurial China, as seen through the eyes of naive country girls who have never used porcelain toilets, ridden in a car or encountered a bignose (Caucasian) in person. But the ultimate message is one of hope for a different future. In the words of their father: “Is it possible that our chopstick girls will be able to hold up the roof?”
