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| Ninna Sun (Sun Xiaomin) |
I’ve been thinking
lately about Ninna Sun.
Ninna was one of my
only two true friends in China who was not an expat. I have a tendency to
befriend older women – especially in Asia - so my other friend was Zhang
Fangshan, who was in her 70s, retired and was a volunteer in the Guanyin shrine
at the nicest temple in town.
Ninna is about my age,
but our lives and experiences couldn’t have been more different. Her father was
a factory worker from Jiangsu, and her mother a Sichuanese woman who died
fairly early in Ninna’s life. When the Chinese government moved many of the
factories of Jiangsu to Guizhou, where they hoped they’d be less detectable by
US surveillance, Mr. Sun moved with the jobs, and Ninna was born in Kaili,
which boasts a large Miao ethnic minority population. As a Han Chinese, Ninna
received better treatment in school and life, and managed to learn good
standard Chinese unaffected by regional accents as well as become strong in
English. While I was growing up in middle class rural America, she was growing
up in working class rural China. She is, of course, an only child. She worked a
poorly paid secretarial job at the school where I was a well-paid teacher. While I was placated, she was fired for being
“too friendly” with the foreign teachers, when her job was to be nice to us and
then report back on our goings-on to the school.
I mention this – and
Ninna – because she really was one of my only non-expat friends in China. I
didn’t trust any of the other local workers at the school, and while plenty of
other Zunyi residents invited me around, it was clearly a status symbol, a
“look at this foreigner who is my friend! I am so cool that I have a foreign
friend!” It was a pleasure to have the company of someone who genuinely liked
me for me, and not for the status I provided when invited over for dinner.
It’s still a matter of
great…what’s the word? Consternation? Sadness?...that when, after we became
Friends For Real, the school asked Ninna about what I was up to in my spare
time (which was nothing threatening, weird or illicit, mind you, just normal
foreigner exploring China stuff). She refused to tell them, because she
realized it was unfair to me to be my friend one minute, and spy on me the
next.
She got fired for that.
Ninna, like most women
– like most people – wanted to meet someone nice, fall in love, get married and
all that fun stuff, and when I met her, she had a boyfriend. I never met him,
because they broke up not long after I moved to China. He ended it because he
felt Ninna was “too fat” and “not feminine enough” - she had a normal build for
a Chinese girl, a facial structure and body type that would be considered
classically beautiful by those standards. I think she wore what in the USA
would be a size four. She was heartbroken, despite the fact that the guy was
clearly a loser.
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| Zhang Fangshan, my friend from Xiangshan (Fragrant Mountain) Temple |
My list, in no
particular order and probably with something forgotten because I’ve never
actually written this out before, rather had it as a nebulous set of ideals in
my head:
-
He’s got
to be kind and good
-
We have to
find each other attractive and have a strong emotional connection
-
He’s got
to be honest
-
He’s got
to get my sense of humor and other elements of my personality (maybe not
everything, but you know, enough)
-
He’s got
to be a feminist, which includes pitching in with housework and no expectations
of typical gender roles
-
We’ve got
to have strong communication skills
-
We’ve got
to love each other
-
He’s got
to be intelligent and open-minded
-
No
addictions, no hard drugs, no emotional or mental problems
-
He’s got
to love, or at least like, travel and be OK with the sort of lifestyle I crave
-
We’ve got
to be able to be ourselves around each other
-
Being
religious is fine as long as he doesn’t try to convert me
-
He doesn’t
have to be a high earner or provider, but NO SLACKERS
-
I’d say I did pretty
well with Brendan, who slam dunks all those criteria (sometimes there are
communication gaps but we both sincerely work on bridging them and are doing a
great job) plus I get some bonuses: great sense of humor and a hottie to boot,
who peels chick peas when I want to make hummus and de-eyeballs squid when I
want to make seafood.
All this, and I’m far
from perfect.
It’s occurred to me,
though, that I have this list and managed to marry someone who hits it out of
the ballpark in part because, culturally, I have the luxury of having this list.
No, no, wait, hear me
out.
The sexism I
encountered in China was staggering. The director of the school (a woman)
basically hid behind her boyfriend, who was the director in name only because
“businesses need a man at the head”. This same woman, when she did the
unthinkable in rural China in the ‘90s and got divorced, had to threaten to
kill herself right there in court – she brought in a bottle, smashed it against
the judge’s podium, put it to her wrist and said she’d kill herself immediately
– in order to gain custody of her son, and in the process lost everything else.
One of my coworkers was married to a local woman who married her first husband
only because he said he’d kill her if she left him, and when she told her
father, he said “well that means he must really love you”. Of course it was an
abusive marriage, she left, and the entire town blamed her. My drunken slob of
a coworker was the only man in town who’d look at her, and she couldn’t get a
job.
These are anecdotes, but they describe a culture that was deeply engrained and deeply disturbing in Guizhou and, one can presume, other parts of rural China, at the turn of the millennium.
If Ninna, living in
Guizhou - at least I assume she is still living in Guizhou - wanted to get
married and perhaps have children, she certainly could have. She was an
attractive girl with a lovely disposition and strong moral principles. She quit
her next job after the language school, at a medical testing center, because to
save money they weren’t actually testing patients’ blood and instead just
telling everyone who had blood taken that the results were positive. For
serious.
And yet, does Ninna
have the luxury of my Strong List? How
much choice will she have – or has she had – in Kaili, Guizhou, China? Could
she dump a boyfriend who showed a tendency to expect traditional gender roles? Could
she leave a fiancé who made it clear that she was responsible for all of the
housework and future child rearing, and reasonably hope to find another? Did
she have the luxury of leaving a man for being a bit of a dimwit, for being a
stick in the mud, for not adequately respecting her or acknowledging her equal
part in their relationship? Could she simply walk away, as I did, from an
otherwise great guy simply because a.) I didn’t feel a spark and b.) my
traveling, expat lifestyle wouldn’t have worked out with his career as a
US-based lawyer?
Maybe she could, and
certainly if faced with these guys I hope she did – I use past tense because it’s
been years since we’ve been in touch, and I like to think that she did meet
that nice guy and get married. I hope she stayed true to herself and found a
man who loved and respected her for it.
It’s an interesting
question, though, because, let’s be brutally honest. Not that many women
realistically have the luxury of a Strong List as we Western women and women in
developed countries do (I could argue that Taiwanese women and some urban
Chinese women have the luxury of such a list, whereas many rural Chinese women
do not). Plenty of women face the choice of either having high expectations and
demanding respect as an equal and equal help in the home…and getting married.
They can’t necessarily have both.
That’s not right, but
it is honest. It’s not fair, but it is true.
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| A favorite story of mine about the escapades of Jenna and Ninna in Zunyi: one day on the street an old vendor had a children's game where you would spin an arm on a wheel (like Wheel of Fortune) and it would land on an animal from the Chinese Zodiac. Me: "How does this work?" Ninna: "Whatever animal you get, he will make you a sugar sucker of that animal!" - so basically whatever Zodiac animal you got, he'd use hot sugarcane syrup to make you a candy pop of that animal. So we played (Ninna: "Normally they'd say I'm too old for this, but because I'm with a foreigner we can play, because they think you are strange anyway!"). I got a dragon. Ninna: "Oh, that's the luckiest one! You will be very lucky in life. You got a dragon sucker!" Then she spun the wheel. She got a rooster. "Oh, I have a cock," she said, "so he'll make me a cock sucker. It's not as good as a dragon." Ahem. |
And I sincerely hope that, as we churn slowly and painfully towards the future, that the women’s rights movement takes hold in more and more countries and more women can realistically demand respect and other good qualities in a mate and not have to sacrifice chances at partnership and marriage for lack of suitable prospects.
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