Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture

5. Chinese Women as Exotica

5 Chinese Women as Exotica Free woman, be free as the moon is freed from the eclipse of the sun. With a free mind, in no debt, enjoy what has been given to you. Get rid of the tendency to judge yourself above, below, or equal to others. “Songs of the Nuns,” Therigatha Most Chinese who migrated to Cuba and other countries in the Americas, particularly in the early years, were men. “There were 56 Chinese females in Cuba in 1862, 32 in 1872, and 81 in 1877,” according to Denise Helly (29).1 As of December 8, 2005, only 30 native Chinese women remain on the island. For this reason, cultural products resulting from the Chinese presence in Cuba tend to pertain to men and their “bachelor societies.” With time many of these men intermarried with black and Creole women; others brought Chinese wives from the homeland. It is the mestizo, or multiethnic, daughters resulting from mixed marriages who are often depicted as characters in Cuban and Cuban American literature. The first European writers to travel to China often included in their works commentaries about the role of women in that society. For instance, in 1575, Miguel de Luarca, a Spanish soldier, exposed the intricacies of Chinese punishment for unfaithful wives.2 Likewise, anthropologists have often stressed the subordinate situation of dependency and oppression that women suffer in the patriarchal and patrilineal societies of traditional, rural China. Chinese women were not even allowed to inherit property from their parents: When they married, they exchanged their dependence on fathers and brothers for absolute dependence on husbands, and later in life, sons. Without divorce as an option to protect themselves against ill treat- Chinese Women as Exotica 73 ment, women went to great lengths to develop the strongest bond possible between themselves and their sons in order that the latter would rise to their mothers’ defense when necessary. So single minded were many women in developing such relationships with their sons that they often made life miserable for their daughters-in-law, who were seen as competitors for their sons’ affections. (Haviland 264–65) These social practices have often been associated with a Confucian textual tradition. However, Alejandro Lee Chan and other critics have pointed out that, contrary to popular belief, one should not ascribe the origin of these misogynistic traditions to Confucius’s writings, but to his translators and interpreters (Lee Chan 46). Indeed, for centuries many Chinese women endured conditions of semislavery . Many were not allowed to leave the house except when absolutely necessary, and then only in the company of their father or husband. Arranged marriages usually took place when girls were between the ages of ten and fifteen. If the husband died, the eldest son became the head of the household. This traditional social exclusion of women was brought to Havana ’s Chinatown and is often echoed in their literary and cultural representation , as can be noticed in Chuffat Latour’s Apunte histórico de los chinos en Cuba. In this sense, Lisa Yun states, “Chinese women mostly appear in Chuffat’s text as social capital for the merchant male community. Repeatedly , successful merchants were described as being heads of family, as being married to either white ‘cubana’ or ‘china’ women, and as having produced educated children” (38). Yet the works analyzed here contain exceptions to this general rule. In her study Teachers of the Inner Chambers, Dorothy Ko argues that literate gentrywomen in seventeenth-century Jiangnan, China, were neither silenced nor oppressed; rather, they exerted influence on family affairs and, consequently , on politics. In addition, in spite of mobility limitations resulting from the practice of footbinding, they traveled with their husbands as well as with other women. Ko reveals that, thanks to the socioeconomic improvements in the region, there existed a “growing availability and acceptance of women’s education, which, by the seventeenth century, created a visible cohort of gentrywomen with a literary and classical education” (Teachers 11). Although it is true that in seventeenth-century China the percentage of women within the population of educated people was very small, the visibility of literate and erudite women, and their valorization in local histories, is proof that women were able to go beyond domestic confines and receive an education. As Ko explains, these women became published and anthol- 74 Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture ogized poets, recognized painters, and teachers. Curiously, some...