What the Chinese Don't Eat Read Free

to want to understand Chinese women?
    I told a friend who worked at the university about Old Chen’s warning.
    ‘Xinran,’ he said, ‘have you ever been inside a sponge cake factory?’
    ‘No,’ I replied, confused.
    ‘Well, I have. So I never eat sponge cake.’ He suggested that I try visiting a bakery to see what he meant.
    The manager at the bakery did not know why I had come but he was impressed by my devotion to my job: he said that he had never seen a journalist up so early to gather material. It was not yet fully light; under the dim light of the factory lamps, seven or eight female workers were breaking eggs into a large vat. They were yawning and clearing their throats with a dreadful hawking noise. The intermittent sound of spitting made me feel uneasy.
    As I left the factory, I remembered something a fellow journalist had once told me: the dirtiest things in the world are not toilets or sewers, but food factories and restaurant kitchens. I resolved never to eat sponge cake again, but could not work out how what I had seen related to the question of understanding women.
    I rang my friend, who seemed disappointed with my lack of perception.
    ‘You have seen what those beautiful, soft cakes went through to become what they are. If you had only looked at them in the shop, you would never have known. However, although you might succeed in describing how badly managed the factory is and how it contravenes health regulations, do you think it will stop people wanting to eat sponge cake? It’s the same with Chinese women. Even if you manage to get access to their homes and their memories, will you be able to judge or change the laws by which they live their lives? Besides, how many women will actually be willing to give up their self-respect and talk to you? I’m afraid I think that your colleague is indeed wise.’
    This is an edited extract from
The Good Women of China.

11th July 2003
    Where the son shines. She is an icon in China, a pioneering journalist and its first radio agony aunt. In 1997 she moved to London to write the haunting stories she had heard into a book. In the first of a fortnightly column, Xinran finds out why for so many a boy is worth more than a girl
    A few months ago I had a coffee and a chat with a friend, who mentioned that a friend of hers was unhappy because his wife was pregnant with a girl. This meant that his family’s first seed had not been properly sown. When I heard this I could not quite believe my ears: ‘Is he British? A modern, educated westerner?’ ‘Absolutely,’ she replied. This surprise set me thinking: so idolising men and degrading women was not a Chinese characteristic, or a problem in developing countries. Time, civilisation and modernisation had brought progress to the world, but they had not brought everyone’s education and consciousness into the 21st century.
    At a launch party for my book, a reporter from a women’s magazine gave me a newspaper article on the imbalance of the sexes among young people in China; she hoped that I would write a personal view on the subject. I do not usually read the papers while surrounded by bouquets of flowers and fine wines: first, wine is apt to make the words on the newspaper ‘come in pairs’, second, the notes of congratulation in bouquets are liable to turn a person of no account into a universal expert. But all my resolutions went out of the window with the headline: Chinese men cannot find wives. Was this true? Were we Chinese really facing a breaking off of the family line?
    By the time I got home, while lights were still burning in thousands of London homes, all my Chinese friends were asleep,dreaming the dreams of a Nanjing summer. I could only just restrain my flustered heart and impatient fingers.
    At two in the morning, I got through to a friend who works in an important government office. Her telephone manner was businesslike. ‘Xinran, you’re still so incorrigibly naive, so easily swayed by propaganda