Women Speak

Women Speak
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese
Literal meaning Ten women speak

Women Speak is a 1988 Chinese article written by Beijing-based Xiang Ya (向娅) about sexual revolution in the country as it "opened up". The piece includes supposedly "tape-recorded" interviews of 10 anonymous urban women in their 30s and 40s, who discussed their highly private love/sex lives and thoughts. It was translated to English by Diana B. Kingsbury in her 1994 translated anthology I Wish I Were a Wolf.

Women Speak was adapted into a 1989 film Golden Fingernails directed by Bao Zhifang.

Author

Zhao Shaoling (赵绍玲), who used the pen name Xiang Ya, was born in 1951 in Lingshou County, Hebei. In 1969, as part of the Down to the Countryside Movement she was "sent-down" to Inner Mongolia where she worked for 3 years in a rural army unit. In 1974, she was transferred to an electrical equipment plant in Beijing, after which she found employment with the National Library of China. She attended night school and graduated with a degree in Chinese literature in 1985. She published her first article in 1984.[1]

The interviews

Each interview reads like a long monologue, with the interviewer barely present. No names are mentioned. Like the author, all interviewees in the 30s were "sent-down" to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

Reception

Li Xiaojiang wrote that Women Speak "did not incite a whirlwind when it appeared in 1988 because, for most intellectual and career women, a base of social equality and group consciousness had already been laid".[2]

Adaptation

In Golden Fingernails, the experiences of four of these women (A, C, E, and F) are interwoven into one story.

References

  1. Kingsbury, Diana B. (1994). I Wish I Were a Wolf: The New Voice in Chinese Women's Literature. New World Press. p. 250. ISBN 7-80005-124-2.
  2. Li Xiaojiang (2002). "Resisting While Holding the Tradition—Claims for Right Raised in Literature by Chinese Women Writers in the New Period". In Chen, Peng-hsiang; Crothers Dilley, Whitney. Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Rodopi. pp. 109–16. ISBN 90-420-0727-3.
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