2010: How do women live in Shanghai

My colleague Alice was eating audibly from her panel, without turning around, I knew that she's having her breakfast which her father prepares for her and makes her take to the office every day: a bottle of milk or yogurt, a small cake or two pieces of bread (different type everyday), two hard-boiled egg, an apple or a banana. It's a big and rich breakfast and Alice will eat it in a playful way, a few bites in the morning, a few bites before lunch and a few bites in the afternoon and she often have a big portion of it left on her desk by the end of day which she wonders whether to take back home or throw in the garbage bin.

Alice also likes wearing white pants, white shirts and white wool coat and I often marvel: Gee, you bought another white pant, how are you going to maintain it? But of course I know that her mother is the one who wash all her clothes, so she's not worried.

Alice is 34 years old and because she's not married, she still lives with her parents, like most Shanghai girls do before they're married, sooner or later, eventually or hopefully.   

 

Feeling quite indignant, out of envy of course, I turn around to Jane, who's married and a mother of a 6-year old son. "Jane, who wash your cloths?" Jane was not prepared for this attack and replied honestly "My mother or my mother in-law --- Ah, but I wash my own underwear of course".  

Jane, her husband and her son live with her parents so that the parents could help take care of the household. Her in-laws live not far away too. Jane's father did all the cooking and he's reportedly a big fan of cooking, every day he would make eight dishes and a soup for dinner and he always seeks new recipes. Jane earns more than her husband and therefore she does no cooking or washing back at home. However, she also has a soft spot. One day her son asked "mother, why you never cook? I want you to cook this weekend", she hence complied and did one dinner (part of it) on the weekend. The next weekend, she pleaded to her son, "son, I'm rather tired this weekend, can I not cook?" and her son agreed with a condition "OK, then you cook more next weekend".    

 

The other day I talked briefly with an American lady who's a senior executive at a major advertising firm who just did a big research on the condition of Chinese women from where she learned that many young working mothers in Shanghai have to send their child back home in some other cities to be taken care of by the grand parents. "It's so hard" the American lady had commented. Yet my instinct is not "what a difficult thing it is for a mother" � as the traditional value calls for, my instinct on the contrary, according to my experience with the women around me is "what a release".

 

I don't know if I'm in a circle with strange, selfish women. But my gut feeling is not. There's this ex-colleague who's name I already forget, let's call her Daisy coz she is as delicate as a daisy. Daisy looks exactly like a Barbie doll in the window but she also has a young daughter, who lives with her parents some one thousand miles away. And it was said that Daisy didn't want to hold her daughter out of fear that the baby will mess up with her cloths. Now this does not sound nice. I guess it's always the bad, extreme, or scandalous things that people talk about and remember.

 

Yet Daisy is not alone. Here's Jessica. Jessica works for a famous cosmetics company and she married a very successful young man who had been the coveted target of many women indeed. Jessica always complains that her husband only decided to get married because he wanted to have a child. So she gave him a child very soon. And two weeks after delivery of the big mission, she went on a vacation around the world with other girl friends. Now coz the couple work very late and none of their parents live in Shanghai, the baby was sent to live with the grand-parents in another city.

 

Now this is how some women live in Shanghai, the ultimate Chinese city penetrated with thriving, throbbing female desires that you could almost hear, you could almost feel. We ask for too much, and we give too little, and we're always chasing after a moving target. So we're never really happy, not yet.