This is an extended version of my Times Literary Supplement essay on the Chinese writer Lijia Zhang's novel Lotus from June 2017. The original is here.
Earlier this month, as part of the Asia House Bagri
Foundation literature festival, writer Lijia Zhang tackled gender, exploitation
and equality in an event celebrating her novel, Lotus, about the lives
of women in China’s sex industry. She was interviewed by Jemimah Steinfeld,
author of Little Emperors and Material Girls: Sex and Youth In Modern China,
a fresh and informative study of the sexual mores and personal expectations of
the relatively privileged post-Mao generation.
Zhang was a hugely charismatic and inspiring presence, personally
funny and self-deprecating but serious, well-versed and insightful about
China’s challenges. As she described in her memoir, Socialism is Great!,
she grew up in a housing compound with her mother, who worked in a rocket factory,
as did everyone they knew. Zhang dreamed of becoming a writer and won some
writing competitions, but was put to work at the rocket factory from the age of
sixteen to twenty-six. “I hated my life,” she said. She taught herself English
by listening to the BBC on the radio. “The government didn’t like it [foreign
media] so there was a lot of interference on the frequency. But every night I
glued my ears to the sound of a crackling radio.” Meanwhile, people around her
mocked her ambitions: “They said it was like a toad who dreams of eating swan’s
meat.” She got to London to study creative writing at Goldsmiths and by 1991 was
living in Oxford, when she was asked by a Chinese publishing company to write a
book about the Western impression of Chairman Mao. She said, “I interviewed
plenty of people about it. But the book didn’t pass Chinese censorship. After
that, I vowed only to write in English.”
Now based in Beijing, although travelling widely, she reports
and comments on the complicated reality behind China’s economic success and
increasing power. Zhang is hardly alone in chronicling these issues and writes
alongside a number of excellent contemporary commentators: I’d recommend
anything by the journalist Xinran; Scattered Sand by Hsiao-Hung Pai and Factory
Girls by Leslie T Chang, which look at labour exploitation and
rural-to-city migration; One Child by Mei Fong, which explores the
abuses and consequences of China’s one child policy; and Leftover Women
by Leta Hong Fincher, which tracks China’s increasing gender inequality.
Zhang’s novel Lotus is a rich, enjoyable read, by
turns shocking, hilarious, gritty and poetic. It was inspired by Zhang’s own grandmother,
who was forced to become a “flower girl” in the 1930s. Zhang described her grandmother’s life as one
of “terrible, extraordinary hardship”. She was orphaned at the age of six or
seven and her aunt’s family adopted her and worked her like a slave. “When she
blossomed into a beautiful young woman, her uncle sold her to a brothel, and
that is where she met my grandfather. On the job. And just as you don’t
associate your grandmother with a prostitute, you don’t associate your
grandfather with a john.” Zhang’s grandfather, a grain dealer, later committed
suicide, afraid of being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Despite her
tough life, said Zhang, her grandmother “always said how lucky she was. She
survived the Japanese war, the rape of Nanjing, my grandfather died, she was so
poor. She brought us up. For me she belonged to the generation of older Chinese
women who could take suffering without bitterness.”
Lotus is dedicated to her, although it’s set in the
contemporary southern town of Shenzhen and reflects the transformations of
modern China: rapid urbanisation and industrialisation; the movement of workers
from rural areas to cities; the reification of money and success contrasting
with poverty and lack of opportunity among the populace; the surveillance-heavy,
police-state communism wrapped around a heart of fierce survivalist capitalism;
increasing gender inequality decades after Mao’s edict that women “hold up half
the sky”; the commodification, sale and consumption of everything from counterfeit
handbags to women’s bodies.
Shenzhen is the ultimate ‘new China’ city, says Zhang: “It’s
a new city, very dynamic, just across the water from Hong Kong. It’s known as a
‘mistress village’ – a place where businessmen keep their mistresses.” The idea
for the novel came from a reporting trip there: “I innocently went into a hair
salon to get my hair cut. The girls started giggling and admitted, ‘We don’t
know how to cut hair.’ I looked on the floor and realised there were no hair
clippings.” The women were from the poor Sichuan and Hunan provinces and had
worked on factory production lines, but said they’d opted for prostitution
because the pay and conditions were better – “and the seed of Lotus was
planted,” said Zhang.
She focused on prostitution as a way to reflect China’s
national quandaries: “internal migration, the rural/urban divide, tradition and
modernity, the growing gap between men and women. Prostitution is an
interesting window to explore social change, and a brothel is not a bad place
to stage a novel because at the heart of every drama is moral conflict.”
Lotus reflects the resurgence of very old forms of
sexual exploitation and sex-for-survival which Mao had once eradicated. “In the
olden days, the way for a man to show his prestige and wealth was by keeping
concubines,” Zhang said. “In 1949, with the establishment of the People’s
Republic, the government banned all prostitution. But things changed in the
[post-Mao] reform era, with growing wealth, relaxed social control and a
growing hedonistic tendency.” She noted, “STDs are growing fast among older
Chinese men. They’ve suddenly got money and they feel they missed out on
something. Meanwhile, wives of their generation are not supposed to be
interested in sex.” Asked about why Chinese men use prostitutes, Zhang said,
“Power. They also say they’re lonely. And sometimes it’s young people looking
for adventure.” The growth of corporate culture is also tagged to the rise in
prostitution: “In China, business deals are done over dining tables. But these
days, wining and dining is not enough. Prostitution is becoming the blueprint
of business.”
Lotus is a humane novel honouring stigmatised,
usually unheard women who are often referred to by the pejorative term,
“chickens”. Yet, according to Zhang, “Every
single Chinese city, small or big, has an unlabelled red light district. The
sex industry is huge in China. The more prosperous the city is, the more
developed its sex trade. The vast majority of women are obliged [to work in the
industry] through some very unfortunate circumstances and desperate situations.
Prostitution is one of the very few options open to them.”
Zhang’s fictional characters are streetwise, brutalised into
toughness, yet also full of tenderness, hope, humour and camaraderie. Her
research came from forays into massage parlours and hair salons, accompanying a
Tianjin-based NGO worker who was distributing condoms. It’s hard for NGOs to
exist in authoritarian China, where the government prefers to be in control
even of social outreach initiatives; and it’s even harder for those who try to
help prostitutes.
Zhang commented that post-Cultural Revolution changes might
have enabled corporate growth, but didn’t do much for social welfare or social
equality: “[Post-Mao leader] Deng Xiaoping’s reforms afforded some
opportunities for educated, urban women. But the market economy has undermined
gender equality. The government retreated from its role and let the market take
over, but the market doesn’t always treat women kindly. Women are bearing the
brunt of the shift from the planned economy to the free market economy: women
have to attain higher grades to be admitted to universities, women are the ones
who are laid off first, women over forty-five are sacked from companies,
companies can stipulate that they want only young and pretty women.”
Zhang’s research showed that prostitutes are vulnerable not
just to psychotically violent men “who see them as women of loose morals who
deserve to be punished”, they are also subject to police harassment and abuse. Despite
prostitution being considered a social evil, said Zhang, “it’s placed under
administrative law, not criminal law, so it’s dealt with through fines and
sanctions. The police interpret the laws themselves. They beat up the women and
extract ‘confessions’, put them in detention with no legal representation. They
have leeway for corruption, abuse and a violation of the women’s rights.”
Meanwhile, she said, measures to curb prostitution “don’t tackle fundamental
social problems. The root of the problem is the growing gender gap and a thin
social safety net.”
Having spoken in front of an avid audience of journalists,
diplomats and Sinophiles (myself included – I lived for most of last year in
Beijing and have been visiting China since 2014), is Lijia Zhang hopeful that
gender equality will improve in this fascinating and rapidly transforming
country? When it comes to change driven from the top down, she isn’t hopeful: “Female
political participation is low – women make up less than a quarter of the
National People’s Congress and well under a fifth of the Standing Committee.
And the top level of government is just one big boys’ club.”
