bitter

I’ve returned from my trip to rural Hebei Province, where I was primarily visiting a project that establishes small groups to help prevent women’s suicides—rural Chinese women have the highest rate of suicide of any group in the world. I think the highlight was meeting this woman, Li Guimin, who was simultaneously tragic and inspiring, which sums up a lot of lives here, really. The Chinese have a saying, to chi ku, which means to “eat bitterness.” The “bitter” here has much the same meaning as when it is used in American slang (as in a college student saying “I got a C- on my midterm” and his friend replying “Bitter!”) but without the sarcasm. Many people here say that the Chinese are good at chi ku, and there is probably some truth to this. Li Guimin is a 49 year-old woman who is now raising her year-and-a-half old grandson because his mother died mysteriously in her sleep one night and his father, Li Guimin’s son, is working out of the village as a migrant worker, one of millions here. At the same time, however, Li Guimin is a smart and savvy woman who is the head of her village’s suicide prevention groups. There is another saying in Chinese, “nanzhuwai, nuzhunei” which basically means “Men are responsible for outside affairs and women are responsible for inside affairs.” Li noted that now “nuzhuwai” but that “nanbuzhunei.” In other words, women are now also responsible for outside affairs, but men have not taken their share of the “inside” responsibilities. This cracked me up, since this seems to be a problem faced by feminism around the world. (I refer you to my favorite piece of feminist writing, from around 1970, titled “The Politics of Housework.”)

Here is Li and her grandson:



I also just spent two days at a training to promote women’s political participation at a school run by Rural Women outside of Beijing. “Training” is a mania in the NGO sector here these days—much of the time, so far as I can tell, it consists of people sitting around for three hours at a stretch listening to speeches. They seem to have a patience here for this sort of thing that we lack. One hypothesis I have for this relates to the years of communism here—when you have to stand in long lines just to buy a pair of socks, what does it matter that you might have to sit for hours listening to the leaders rattle on (Fidel Castro is apparently supremely talented at this)? While of course in capitalism, time, along with just about everything else, is money. This hypothesis is belied by the fact, however, that queue-jumping is one of the “four pests” they are seeking to eradicate on the road to the Olympics, and no one here really seems to be content to stand in lines at all.

One purpose of all this training is ostensibly to “raise the quality” of those attending. One reason frequently provided for why China is poor (in the county town where I stayed while in the countryside, a monthly income of about $200 is considered quite good) is that its people, and especially its peasants, and even more so its peasant women, have “low quality (suzhi di). Rural Women, the organization, does critique this line of thinking, and I was asked at the training yesterday to give a bit of a talk about how westerners/Americans view this subject. I basically stated that “low quality” is just an excuse the government uses to justify increasing gaps between the rich and poor here (along with the mass of people living on $200 a month, or less), whereas really some of the problem lies in governmental policy. Another American present, representing one of the training’s sponsors, later told Xie Lihua that I had “balls” to say that in front of a room of Chinese people.

Speaking of increasing gaps between rich and poor: new developments of the “villas” increasingly popular among China’s nouveau riche that I passed on the way to the school included “MacAllen Estates,” “Napa Valley,” “Chateau Lafitte Beijing,” and “Vancouver Forest” (where trees are actually quite sparse).