Free The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices by Xinran

Mengxing’s encounter, every time I saw people scavenging I would try to guess if they were really ‘fat cats’. Perhaps the scavenger women’s shacks were just their workplaces, and their homes were ultra-modern flats.
    It was the pregnancy of my colleague Xiao Yao that prompted me to get to know the scavenger woman. As soon as Xiao Yao found out she was going to have a baby, she started to look for a nanny. I could understand her starting her search nine months in advance: finding someone reliable to look after a child and do the housework was no easy task.
    My own nanny was a kind, honest and diligent nineteen-year-old country girl, who had fled alone to the big city to escape a forced marriage. She had some native intelligence, but it had never been given the help of education. This placed all sorts of obstacles in her way: she could not tell one banknote from another, or understand the traffic lights. At home she could be reduced to floods of tears because she could not get the lid off the electric rice cooker, or would mistake gourmet pickled eggs for rotten eggs and throw them in the bin. Once, she pointed to a litter bin by the side of the road, telling me in all seriousness that she had put my letters in that ‘postbox’. Every day I would leave careful instructions about what she should and should not do, and would telephone regularly from the office to check that everything was all right. Fortunately, nothing ever went terribly wrong and she and PanPan had a very loving relationship. There was one time, however, when I had been unable to stop myself being angry. It was winter and I arrived home after my programme to find PanPan, then only eighteen months old, sitting in the stairwell of the fifth floor, dressed only in a thin pair of pyjamas. He was so chilled by the bitter cold that he could only cry in faint moans. I hastily gathered him in my arms and woke the sleeping nanny, reproaching myself for not being able to give my child the time or care a mother should.
    I never discussed my own childcare difficulties with my colleagues, but I heard plenty of horror stories from other people. The newspapers were full of them. Careless maids had let children fall from fourth-floor windowsills to their deaths; others, ignorant and foolish, had put children in washing machines for a wash, or shut them in the fridge during a game of hide-and-seek. There were cases of children being kidnapped for money, or beaten.
    Few couples were prepared to ask their parents for help with childcare, as that would involve living under the same roof. Most were prepared to have their lives made a bit more difficult in order to avoid the critical eyes of the older generation. Chinese mothers-in-law, especially the traditional or less educated ones, were legendary for terrorising their sons’ wives, having cowered under their own mothers-in-law in their time. On the other hand, a woman giving up her job to be a full-time mother was impracticable, because it was next to impossible to support a family on an average single income. House-husbands were unheard of.
    Listening to Xiao Yao’s pleas for help to find a trustworthy, affectionate and cheap nanny, Old Chen responded flippantly, ‘There are so many women around picking up scrap, why don’t you ask one of the poor ones to work for you? You wouldn’t have to worry about her running off, and you wouldn’t need to pay her a lot either.’
    People say that men are good at seeing the big picture, and women are good on detail. Like all generalisations, I have never believed this to be true, but Old Chen’s throwaway remarks amazed me with the kind of genius-bordering-on-idiocy that you sometimes find in men. I was not the only one who felt this way. Several of my female colleagues were also beside themselves with excitement: ‘Yes! Why didn’t we think of that before?’
    Confirmation of Chairman Mao’s famous words – ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’ – swiftly