Merchants' Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China

III - Work and Activism in a Gendered Age

III Work and Activism in a Gendered Age Part III — Work and Activism in a Gendered Age 166 How have the historical moments in the postwar decades, when the border between Hong Kong and mainland China hardened and softened, affected the subjectivities of women and their positioning? Has their gendered activism contributed to wider civic participation and political engagement? Helen Siu uses Anson Chan’s generation of women in politics to illustrate how postwar manufacturing and the needs of a colonial meritocracy in Hong Kong have allowed educated women to excel beyond their own imaginations. They seem to have straddled the demands of locality, nation, and the world to perform in cultural styles that gained unusual charisma in the public mind. From the early 1970s to the late 1990s, a period the chapter focuses on, they reached the zenith of their respectability by preserving certain “traditions” of Chinese mercantile society while reaching far in their worldly domain. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, statistics on the education, wealth, and high placement of women in government and business only confirm the accumulated achievements of these postwar generations and the public acceptance of their positioning. In Po-king Choi’s chapter, the lives of working daughters in the 1970s were harsh, but Hong Kong’s world industrial assembly line allowed space beyond the cultural environment of home where the nurturing of sons remained top priority and where daughters were expected to sacrifice for such family priorities. Night schools, nascent radio and film, and fan clubs created cultural aspirations for success and fulfillment for factory daughters. Although her chapter focuses on the active construction of moral selves by these women through multiple roles of daughter, worker, wife, and mother, Choi points to their union activism and the pursuit of other social causes that came with the dramatic shift of factories from Hong Kong to Guangdong across the border. In Hong Kong as it moved through decades of industrialization and deindustrialization, these working women’s agency have added to the public arena where their voices are heard and their emotions felt. Across the border in China, women activists, especially those who enjoyed education and government provisions in the cities, made gains through their public lives. Yan Lijun, Taotao Zhang, and Yang Meijian portray the career tracks of several women who came of age during the Maoist period when political rhetoric and revolutionary commitments dominated every aspect of people’s lives and work. Through military service and education, they were able to link individual aspirations with limited political tracks to gain mobility. Some took advantage of the close proximity of Guangdong to Hong Kong by stowing away. They “escaped” the system altogether. The oral histories capture their energies in agentive moments and their sober self-reflections in the post-reform era. 167 Part III — Work and Activism in a Gendered Age The chapter by Pheng Cheah deals with the contemporary period when the South China region has been profoundly transformed by neoliberal global economy. As the border between China and Hong Kong is blurred by the volatile flows of capital, commodities, people, and images, women’s subjectivities are correspondingly complicated, destabilized, and not bounded by territorial sensitivities. Ching-kwan Lee and Ngai Pun have written on gendered labor issues and particular factory regimes, focusing on the dagongmei. As in historical times, the region presents women workers with a mixture of dangers, trauma, and opportunities as social norms are transgressed. As a world factory and a booming region for brashly luxurious consumption, South China has attracted tens of millions of migrants from other provinces. Their pursuits and struggles have become a significant part of a gendered human landscape. They juggle with a lingering socialist bureaucratic structure and its entrenched discrimination towards migrants, with unbridled market forces triggered by global capital, and with the wasteful vanity of officials determined to catch up with lost time. Pheng Cheah’s chapter uses a close reading of film to highlight representations of the lives of women when they choose mobility paths far beyond the factory floor. It captures the desperate energies, structural consequences, painful self-reflection, and deadening weight of collective pretense in the most intimate corners of these women’s lives. ...