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Rural Chinese life has little resonance with the Western reading or televisionviewing public, so this chapter offers a brief, but very valuable, glimpse at the gender and labor realities of the contemporary countryside. This chapter comes from James and Ann Tyson’s innovative Chinese Awakenings (1995). In the early 1990s—a mere five years following the widespread institutionalization of China’s “capitalist” economic reforms—these two journalists traveled throughout China, living with ordinary people and speaking with them about the details of their lives. This chapter recounts some of the history of Zhao Xinlan , in many ways a typical middle-aged resident of rural China. Zhao’s own life is increasingly comfortable materially; among her household possessions is a television, and her home boasts electricity. Rural life since the economic reforms of the late 1980s has paid a price, however: many men have been enticed into cities, leaving behind wives who now have the double burden of household and agricultural labor to shoulder alone. In the humid and subtropical climate of Zhao’s village of Xiaodian, Henan, 90 percent of the farm labor is performed by women. Zhao tells of the bitterness of her own mother’s life, as she was virtually sold to Zhao’s father when still very young because of her family’s poverty. Women were considered the property of their husbands’ families. Since 1949, the selling of daughters has been outlawed, curtailing the practice somewhat, and women of Zhao’s generation grew up with increased security. Yet boys were and still are valued over girls, and girls are still regarded as dependents being raised for their future husbands’ families. The increasing responsibility of rural women has not resulted in equal valuation of boys and girls, however. You will read in this story about the enduring preference for boys and some of the increasing difficulties that poor women face in the China of recent years. Paradoxically, it is women who, according to the often-quoted Maoist dictum, “hold up half of the sky” but have suffered the greatest burden of the new inequities introduced by China’s profit-driven reforms. The Soviet ideologue Bukharin once spoke of the Bolsheviks “riding to socialism on the nag of the peasants,” a bitter sarcasm that, with slight modi249 JAMES TYSON AND ANN TYSON 13 “The Moon Reflecting the Sunlight” The Village Woman fication, suitably describes the path of China’s economic reforms: riding to prosperity on the backs of women. Although Zhao Xinlan’s recollections and observations give us pause, it is crucial to recognize that her experience is better than that of many others. The dramatic decline in family integrity and values , paired with the numerous difficult labors of the female head of the rural household (see fig.13.1), has transformed the countryside into a site of anomie and, increasingly, suicide. China has more than 300,000 suicides per year, and the highest rate of death is among rural women. In fact, 90 percent of these suicides occur in the countryside; so great is the number of women that their deaths account for more than 56 percent of suicides among women worldwide . Zhao’s story is nowhere near as bleak, but it does provide telling documentation of contemporary upheaval, to wit, the transformation of the rural economy and the sexual division of labor that has taken women from liberation to indenture.—Eds. Zhao Xinlan rises early, quaffs a ladleful of cool water, and leaves her farmhouse before the June day grows too hot. She walks a mile down a dirt path to thefamilyplot,passingacreafteracreofgoldenwheatthatseemstotouchthe sky. As she walks, a migrating cuckoo pipes its whimsical song from a nearby poplar.ForZhao,thecuckoo’scallisthesurestsignthatharvesttimehascome again to her village in China’s heartland. “Cuckoo, cuckoo. Sprinkle vinegar on the noodles. First harvest the barley and then the wheat,” Zhao hums as she walks, reciting the summer harvest rhyme she learned as a girl. Zhao’s song does little, however, to lighten the backbreaking task that lies ahead. She sets to work, stooping and cutting the bundles of ripened grain with a sickle. Her body is wiry; her hands are rough and tanned dark brown. As in many summers past, Zhao will bring in the harvest alone, laboring to feed her three boys without help from her husband, a coal miner in a distant city. “I do all the work, the man’s half as well as the woman’s,” says Zhao, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “If...

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