Friday, September 29, 2006

Today I spent sitting in the Times bookshop at Changi Airport. I've always known I love to read, but sometimes I think I'm competing with the space on the floor with the children... like we'll see who leaves first.. HEH. Not me. Of course I triumphed, since I managed to finish half a book without being chased out. I tell you, this requires skill and knowing how to hide from the cashier.


Anyway, I am so super touched by the book I read. It's called 'The Good Women of China' by Xue XinRan. I'm going to HIGHLY recommend this book because it's so good! It's the true life account of how XinRan, a radio journalist/DJ, begins a new on-air programme that gives voice to the suppressed women of China during their 'opening-up' period after the Cultural Revolution, and the stories that begin to unfold from there. They're stories of incest, oppression, sexism, and the relationship between men and women at its most raw. In a country that's long dominated by men and their ideas, what makes a woman good? What is a good woman- do they exist? Do women strive to meet standards that have been set by men, and then only find that they are so daunting whole generations of females never meet the mark? What do they live for, anyway? What are they worth?

Fact is stranger then fiction. It's a book that documents the real life stories of women in China, and yet these stories are so heart-wrenching, so emotional that you can't believe it wasn't ripped from a soap opera. And as you read you you see the world through a different perspective- the perspective of women who never had the chance to express or reach the potential they were truly capable of, and then have to suffer the perception that they're not good enough, or even worse, that they're not good.

So how then are women good?

"If we don’t look down on ourselves,
we are good.
If we know how to love,
how to give love,
how to feel toward other people,
then we are good. "

It inevitably makes you draw comparisons to your own life, and to the women around you. How many women are celebrated? Why can't womanhood be more celebrated? How many mothers and girls give selflessly of themselves, their lives and their dreams in devotion to a man and his ideas?

Shouldn't the world learn how to appreciate women? It's isn't equality that is difficult since it is so subjective, but mere appreciation to a sex that has been undervalued and undermined for years. To our mothers, and their mothers, and the women of before, the good women who have made this world what it is today, and given up their places so the women today may stand firm.

debbie at 12:31 PM