China

Y.

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A friend of mine married to a man from a powerful family in China. One day after an quarrel, he attacked her from behind and kicked her really hard after she fell. One of her bones was broken and she suffered concussion. She went to live with her parents and dared not call the police. Her husband went to her parents’ apartment and banged on the door and shouted at them. ‘Luckily’ she divorced him in the end. The crime happened to me was not so physical but also very traumatising. My health is damaged, but when I tried to tell people about this, I didn’t get much support. A man I used to respect, my sort-of mentor said something like: is it worth throwing away your career for such a ‘minor crime’? Is truth more important than success? Now I don’t know if I still have a career with such health in such environment. China is the only country where women’s suicide rate is higher than men.The suicide rate of women and children in China is one of the highest in the world. China has the most distorted sex ratio. Sometimes, sexism=massacre.

Y.

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I used to be in some intellectual circle (poets and writers) in China. Here are a few things I heard among them: somebody writes this way because she is a women / from a certain class. All poets/poetry are brothers. A mother’s love should be gentle, a father’s love should be harsh. Once I calculated the gender ratio in this circle. It’s probably harder to succeed here than to be a female politician.

Y.

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When I was born, my father was on a work trip. And according to my mother, he was aloof when he saw me because I was a girl. She made me feel that she divorced partly because of my gender. And my aunt used to say things like I should learn cooking because I was a girl and her son didn’t need to because he was a boy. At school violence against girls from boys is not unusual. There were sometimes sexist comments from boys in class and teachers wouldn’t correct them. I chose science instead of humanity in high school, after which my mother kept saying girls couldn’t do well in science, girls are not good at maths. Before this I won twice in mathematical competitions in my province, but later I slowly lost confidence in science and developed some sort of phobia about it. I don’t know if there is any causal link here, but I do remember I was afraid when I heard comments like this. There were even articles in the newspaper saying that girls didn’t perform so well in school when they grew up because they started to have periods.

Cheyanne

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I’m an american living in China. I have been cat called in America and found it very upsetting in the past. Here in China however, I get attention constantly just for being white. There are not a lot of foreigners where I am and I get pointed at by little children, women, and men alike. This doesn’t bother me so much because I understand I’m very strange looking to them and probably a brand new experience. But the thing that does bother me is the Chinese men who follow me down the street yelling “pretty lady” in Mandarin and sometimes taking pictures of my body. If I was in America I feel like I could tell them off, report them, or take their pictures or something but here there is the issue of cultural sensitivity. I don’t want to get in trouble, I don’t want to be the “ugly American tourist”, and I don’t know enough Chinese to really say that much anyway. When I go out with my husband this never happens, but alone I feel like a piece of white meat.