News

Close glimpse at realities facing migrant women

By Christine Laskowski (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-21 12:48

If Oprah Winfrey had a book club in China, Miss Chopsticks would definitely be one of its selections.

The first novel by noted Anglo-Chinese journalist Xue Xinran, whose pen name is simply Xinran, fits the bill for a popular read, lacking deep artistic merit, yet offering a narrative with morsels of insight about China. The approach is more akin to the work of Nora Ephron than Steinbeck, but there's nothing egregious in that; Ephron usually tells a good tale.

Miss Chopsticks is a charming story of three migrant sisters who move to Nanjing from rural Anhui province seeking the money and opportunities that their village cannot offer. As female peasants, they are second-class citizens in an already marginalized segment of Chinese society and the challenges they face - from forced marriages to exclusion from basic education - seem endless.

Xinran's story, as well as the novel's title, is built on a metaphor that captures the attitude toward women common in the Chinese countryside: women are "chopsticks" and men "roofbeams". The bias even manifests itself in the sisters' names, if you can call them that. Their father was so disappointed he did not have a son that he never bothered to name his six daughters. Their names are simply the order in which they were born.

For Three, Five and Six, life in the big city could not be more alien. Nanjing in their eyes is not a city just a few hundred miles away, it's a different planet. As a foreigner, I found this aspect of the book is the most elucidating, even if the characters present their impressions and beliefs in a way that is uncharacteristically astute.

Close glimpse at realities facing migrant women

The world they have come from is guided by superstitions. Five's quilt at work smells because "she couldn't remember which month her mother said she wasn't supposed to wash (it), and she was afraid of offending the Nine Star Goddess, giver of sons" so it remains unwashed. From their shock at the way men and women interact as equals to the anxiety of simply riding in a car, Xinran's characters confront the reality that China's economy is growing at a remarkable rate, but many in the countryside have been left behind - centuries behind.

Miss Chopsticks, as the cute title suggests, does not confront the more severe, disturbing realities of migrant women in major cities. If that is not the story Xinran wants to tell, fine, but a bit incongruously, she does a sufficient job of presenting how life for them in the countryside is pretty abysmal.

But what dashes the believability of the brighter story she does tell is that every stranger they meet goes out of their way to find them work, helping them to discover some latent "talent" or passion: Three has a knack for arranging produce, which lands her a job at a restaurant; Five can gauge the temperature of a pool of water by touching it, getting her noticed at the spa where she works; and Six is a bibliophile and gets a job as a waitress at a teahouse. And while their stories are based on real women the author met in major cities across China, they are inordinately lucky.

So it's a migrant women's fairytale - a journey spurred by tragedy, a life buttressed by the kindness of strangers, full of jokes and pearls of Chinese wisdom for the girls, topped with a love story and a happily-ever-after.

I'd classify it as something to pass along to mom.

Xinran is also author of What the Chinese Don't Eat, Sky Burial, China Witness and The Good Women of China.