Hours to Days to Months to Years of Struggle Equals Change
Jervey Tervalon
My wife who worked in Shanghai is one of those bicultural naturals who seem to understand how to manage vastly different societies seamlessly—or at least it appears that way to me. Her English is so good that people often think Chinese is her 2nd language though she was born and raised in northern China. She attended Fudan University in Shanghai and lived in the US where I met her. I’m not a bicultural natural; there is no language other than English that doesn’t make me giggle if I try to speak it. When I first came to Shanghai I was charmed by the newness of everything: new transport, new skylines, super modernism and amazing temples of consumerism. More impressive: there’s a sense of safety; old folks out dancing in unison in the equivalent of a geriatric flash mob late in the evening. Compared to the sense of paralysis in the US, at least in Shanghai you can see the novel concept of tax dollars going creating infrastructure that benefited the residents of Shanghai; something we see far too little of here. From the point of a novelist what excited me were all the great places to write such as the delightfully appointed Starbucks in Xintiandi where I could happily work all day. Shanghai is flush with places to sit endlessly and type away at the keyboard and look out of the window at Chinese hipsters and expats. Then when the work day was done I’d make my way to the (Former) French Concession, a charming area that brings to mind walking on Paris’s Left Bank, to rendezvous with my wife at her job, then on the way home stopping to get a massage and pick up wine for dinner. How could life be better? Jinghuan came to the realization that I seemed to like Shanghai more than she did. Why shouldn’t I? People were pleasant enough to me, and I liked the food and the lifestyle, and I seemed to avoid being trapped in smoke riddled establishments but I didn’t deal with her commute every day, or the bad pollution days when she couldn’t do her five-mile run. Or that it seemed the complexities of her work required sleepless deadline nights because there was never
enough talent available in such a competitive marketplace. She returned to China because of the opportunities of advancement in her field and she had quickly advanced as she hoped. To my eyes she had made a great life for her herself and her son. I was so proud to have her in my life….but even in a changing China; women like my wife sometimes face contempt for being with a foreigner like me, a mixed race African American man. When I ride the train alone I’m treated politely enough, but sometimes when I’m with her, when we’re holding hands, or she has her head on my shoulder, I’ll catch the eye of a man, usually an older man, looking not at me but her. Once, while waiting for the light to change on a busy street, a middle-aged man took a step toward her and glared. Of course, I took a step toward him and glared. He ignored me and continued glaring at her until the light changed. Almost always she’s stoic about those infrequent engagements; explaining to me that reacting to insults only encourages boorish behavior, that restraint was the best policy. I wanted to believe her; but even she has her limits. On a family trip to Hangzhou to visit Buddhist temples we rode the high speed train and after we disembarked we had to queue in a disagreeable hall for a taxi and while we waited for our turn at a taxi, bandit cab drivers--tough looking guys—jokingly harassed a well-heeled couple before us, but eventually we became the center of attention. This badly dressed fat faced taxi driver lingered in front of us and blandly repeated something to me in Chinese. Jinghuan was behind me and on the side, attending to her young son, and though I found the man annoying as he repeated his statement it was comfortably incomprehensible for me. My wife’s restraint disappeared: suddenly she lunged forward, giving a distinctly American gesture of rage to the fat faced man and then she darted away. I stood between her and him and stared deep into his face to no affect. “Don’t react to him. He’s from the countryside; he doesn’t care. You can’t hurt him. Finally, the guy moved away and she calmly explained what had set her off.
“He said your son doesn’t look like you, over and over until I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
After that she seemed to put that moment behind her and I tried too, but not completely; I was still angry. She explained to me that unmarried women with children or women with foreigners are provocations and that unmarried women over 30 are considered to be left over women—undesirable, no matter how accomplished they might be. It seemed to me that it was more a form of sexist intimidation, but she wasn’t intimidated, she wasn’t a left over woman, but an enraged woman. She reminded me of my mother, Lolita Villavaso Tervalon, a very beautiful woman born in raised in New Orleans who would sometimes be called poor white trash. My mother had a very different take on how to handle men who didn’t respect her who or tried to take advantage of her-- and it wasn’t restraint, she believed in something more like combat. She demanded respect from a society that thought she should submit. I suspect that my wife’s anger is the shared anger of many of the so called left-over women and women around the world, and that anger will overwhelm the restraint that allows oppressive customs to survive as women struggle for equality globally, and we all will be the better for it.