4

The Cosmopolitan Daughter of Funü

Anne’s Life Story

As the previous chapters have shown, in the post-Mao era, the Maoist woman, rural women, and lesbians all appear to have been constructed as less than real women, positioned as the abjected other of the hyperfeminine nüxing who occupies center stage and is now largely perceived as the norm in post-Mao gender construction.

In this chapter, I investigate the life story of an apparently successful cosmopolitan nüxing, Anne. She has had the experience of studying, working, and living abroad, returning to China in 2003 and becoming general manager of a multinational company with its head office in Beijing. As a young, attractive, urban woman with transnational experience and a prestigious job, she seems to be the very embodiment of the post-Mao image of the nüxing—yet she felt unable to inhabit that position. Did Anne, the cosmopolitan daughter of her Maoist funü mother, still carry the specter of the funü in her, when she traveled across different cultural, ideological, national, and economic boundaries and gender systems? Exposed to competing discourses of what it means to be a woman, how has the Maoist past played out in Anne’s personal gender project? How has the gender legacy of the Mao era figured and interacted with other cultural and ideological sources in her resistance to what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan called “various patriarchies in multiple locations” (1994, 22)? These are the questions this chapter explores.

To situate Anne’s story, the following section briefly outlines the economic and political transformations that have taken place in China since the end of the Mao era and China’s increasing interactions with the outside world.

Context: Economic Reform and Transnational Experiences

The economic reform started in 1978 that transformed the centrally controlled socialist economy and the state-monopolized production and consumption of the Mao era has been replaced by a relatively free market-oriented economy. This transition brought about rapid economic development and improved living standards for many Chinese people, and growing income translated into increased purchasing power and the desire to consume. As a result, a consumer revolution emerged in the 1980s. Since the late 1980s, a growing income gap has created differentiated lifestyles and consumer markets. A new elite class has emerged, replacing the old political elites of high-ranking CCP cadres, forming a rising Chinese middle class. Among its members are private business owners, new cultural elites, and professionals working in foreign-invested enterprises.

After many decades of isolation from the West (but not from the communist bloc and some Third World countries) during the height of the Cold War, Deng Xiaoping’s (邓小平) reforms brought about an “open-door policy,” aimed at integrating China into the world economy and the neoliberal globalization. This policy attracted foreign investment, and with the presence of foreign businesses came a new generation of Chinese professionals working for them. The tightening of the political environment after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown led to a decline in foreign investment. Deng’s 1992 tour of south China brought about a renewed policy of further economic reform, combining strict state control of domestic political affairs with a more liberal policy toward foreign investment, including many preferential policies to encourage it, from manufacturing to high technology and the financial sectors. This development created even more demand for a highly educated urban workforce.

In April 1998, an estimated total of 310,570 foreign companies were registered in China, and 17.5 million Chinese were working in the foreign business sector, many of them in middle and senior management (W.-W. Zhang 2000). As for Beijing, where Anne worked, in 1997 approximately 5,000 foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) and more than 6,000 representative offices were operating, employing more than 300,000 Chinese. The number of FIEs in Beijing reached 15,000 in 2009, and they have 700,000 Chinese employees (Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics 1997, 2009). Foreign companies offer higher salaries, global prestige, and the opportunity to receive training and travel abroad, providing extensive exposure to the world outside of China and cosmopolitan lifestyles. These elements give people working for foreign companies higher social status, and consequently they attract public attention and media coverage (W.-W. Zhang 2000; Duthie 2005). Margaret Pearson (1997, 207) describes the new elite in the foreign business sector as having high incomes, high educational levels, and prestigious status because of the companies they represent. They are referred to as the bailing jieceng (白领阶层, white-collar strata) and those working in middle and upper management positions are referred to as yapishi (雅皮士, yuppies); this Chinese term has connotations of a global orientation, trendiness, and sophistication (Q. Zhang 2005).

Song and Hird (2014) found that despite the assumption that women and men have equal career opportunities, there exist very distinctive understandings of what women and men are capable of in the workplace, grounded in a biomedical model of innate gendered attributes, which impedes and limits women’s career prospects. The market economic policies and global consumer culture promoted a new hegemonic masculinity that overlaps with a transnational business masculinity, which emphases business acumen, professional knowledge, material gain, and self-advancement with the well-dressed, English-speaking, urbane, white-collar man as its embodiment.

However, as Yan Yuxiang (2002) notes, among yuppies, women tend to perform better than their male counterparts and are more likely to stay with their jobs; many of them now hold midlevel managerial positions in joint ventures and foreign companies. Different attitudes in corporate cultures and a gendered working environment contribute to women excelling in FIEs. Working for a foreign company provides opportunities for many young Chinese women to break out of a traditional career path. Compared to their counterparts working for Chinese companies, those working in foreign ones often hold higher positions and are promoted faster. In the traditional state-owned work unit or enterprise, male dominance is prevalent, especially with the backlash of conservative gender discourse in the post-Mao era. Many such work units and state enterprises are reluctant to hire female employees, which makes it more difficult for female university graduates to find jobs than their male counterparts. While gendered (and racial) divisions of labor exist in foreign companies, the principle of meritocracy (to at least some degree) making performance an important measure for reward and promotion, and this gives some women a better chance to compete more fairly with their male colleagues. This is especially evident in those areas such as the retail trades and the marketing of consumer products.

In her study of white-collar women working for multinational companies (MNCs) in Shanghai, Laurie Duthie (2005) identifies several reasons for the higher success rate of women in foreign companies. The first is their better language skills, since most MNCs require a good command of a foreign language for employment at the management level. Because of the common stereotype that women have more facility for learning another language, foreign languages are a female-dominated field of study in Chinese universities. Second, men and women have different career paths in MNCs, with men tending to be concentrated in sales, and women working as personal assistants to people in higher management levels. Many women work in proximity to expatriate executives, and the mentorship they receive helps them move up the corporate ladder. Such opportunities have become more common since the Asian economic crisis of the mid-1990s, when many companies accelerated localization to lower costs.

Based on my experience of working at an MNC for four years in Beijing in the late 1990s, I believe these women’s successes can be at least partly attributed to the intersection between gender and race, which creates a niche for women to stay at MNCs and eventually have a better chance of promotion. At least in the 1990s, the principle of meritocracy only applies to certain local positions, whereas higher management levels remain very racialized on a global scale. Since top personnel are usually from headquarters, and many positions are reserved for expatriates, who are mostly white or overseas Chinese, there was little chance for Chinese natives to break the racial glass ceiling (see also Duthie 2005). As a result, some midlevel male managers choose to leave after gaining enough experience, going to work for Chinese companies or starting their own businesses. Many women, on the other hand, have lower expectations and are less ambitious to make it to the top, and therefore tend to stay in midlevel positions, though they may transfer from one company to another. Furthermore, there is a common stereotype that holds that women in general, and “Oriental” women in particular, are more docile than their male counterparts and are more open to adopting a foreign culture and work style.

Alongside the open-door policy is a strong pro-Western trend toward globalization that started in the 1980s. One good illustration is provided by the TV documentary River Elegy (or Deathsong of the River), broadcast in 1988, which criticized Chinese traditional culture and called for Westernization so that China could pursue national glory in the modern world.1 The shift from the “Culture Fever” and radicalism of the 1980s to the renewed neo-authoritarianism, neoconservatism, and extreme control of the 1990s was brought about by the gunshots of 1989. The difficult international environment for China after Tiananmen, the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the forces of globalization led to fear of disorder and social and political collapse, resulting in the emergence of a Chinese neoconservatism. The rise of a “new Confucianism” in the 1990s coincided with the CCP’s need to find a unifying ideology to fill the vacuum left by the loss of faith in Mao’s version of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. The revival of interest in traditional Chinese philosophy was used to attract support from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese, with the aim of building a global pan-Chinese identity.

Rather than creating a backlash of total opposition to Westernization and a return to nationalism, as some feared, this shift led to what Yan Yuxiang called “managed globalization,” in which “the Chinese state has been playing an important role in forming a national consensus, facilitating China’s participation in the globalization process, controlling the direction of economic integration, and balancing the pros and cons of cultural globalization” (2002, 20). Globalization is seen as an inevitable stage in China’s modernization and as providing an opportunity for the country to catch up with the developed economies. Yan notes that in positioning themselves as active participants with something to offer to the emerging global culture and viewing it as a balanced two-way process, many Chinese have demonstrated a strong appetite to accept, localize, and eventually appropriate elements of imported foreign culture. He describes this as a Chinese type of cultural globalization, distinct from the West-centered, challenge-response paradigm of global-local interaction, “a managed process in which the state plays a leading role, and the elite and the populace work together to actively claim ownership of the emerging global culture” (Yan 2002, 24).

The manifestations of this Chinese-style cultural globalization in Chinese intellectual life and cultural activities are referred to as the “postmodern phenomenon.” It is seen in architecture, with global and local characteristics in new transnational spaces, and in the double orientation toward the local and the global in Chinese avant-garde art.2 However, in this managed globalization there is an uneasy tension between tradition and innovation, or what Geremie Barmé (1999) calls the “old Chinese-foreign dilemma,” generating a “Chinese narcissism” that reaffirms a sense of national uniqueness and moral superiority, through a trend to “Occidentalism.” These tendencies are also evident in the construction of transnational Chinese identities among diasporic populations.

China’s open-door policy and increasing economic power provided more opportunities for many citizens to study and travel abroad or emigrate, cross borders, and transcend national boundaries. I follow the use of the term “transnational” by Grewal and Kaplan (1994, 2001, 663), who have criticized how “categories of identity and affiliation that apply to non-U.S. cultures and situations” have been left unexplored (1994, 19). They argue that the term “transnational,” rather than the term “international,” allows us “to trace circuits that are produced by problematic political, economic, and social phenomena” (1994, 73).3 The transnational experience provides many Chinese people with resources to construct and symbolize their new (often hybrid) subjectivities (Barmé 1993; M. M. Yang 1997), and some of them participate in a “modern Chinese transnationalism,” which “generates new and distinctive social arrangements, cultural discourses, practices, and subjectivities” (Ong and Nonini 1997, 11).4 As Ong and Nonini (1997) argue, forging a new transnational Chinese identity not only breaks down the old East–West binary categories and traditional ways of defining Chinese identity based on place of birth or cultural heritage (Tu 1994; Tu et al. 1992)5 but also reconfigures differences of class, gender, race, and nationality in its articulation of a diaspora-based Chinese identity that represents “discrepant cosmopolitanisms,” as described by James Clifford and G. E. Marcus (1986, 99).

By asserting a fraternal solidarity, a cultural logic for Asian capitalism, Chinese transnationalism has decentered Western hegemony and challenged US and Japanese domination in the Asia Pacific region (Dirlik 1998; Ong 1997). On the other hand, although Chinese transnationalism is diasporic, fluid, border crossing, and hybrid, it is not intrinsically subversive of power structures. The alternative Chinese modernities that it proposes, or the new “imaginaries and regimes of domination” (Ong 1997, 195), are based on the essentialization of Chineseness as Confucian, and represent a self-(re)orientalization, an ethnic self-celebration that ultimately reifies Western concepts of Chineseness as “other-ness.” However, the (self-re-) making of new global Chinese subjects (in the name of business and commercial profit) casts aside the feminization associated with Western versions of Orientalism, promoting instead the “hard” masculinity of triumphalist Chinese capitalism, that reasserts a new global form of Chinese patriarchy over migrant workers, women, and children. Ong’s critique points to the importance of exploring how gender plays a central role in configuring transnationalism. As Charlie Yi Zhang (2014, 2016) demonstrates, gender is essential for legitimizing the adoption of neoliberal practices and the attempt to construct a neoliberal model alternative to the Western paradigm by the Chinese state.

Transnational feminist writings have inspired me to investigate the ways various patriarchies in multiple locations have collaborated and borrowed from each other in serving their interests and oppressing women and to “think about gender in a world whose boundaries have changed […] and how women become ‘women’ (or other kinds of gendered subjects) around the world” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 79). Transnational politics maintains and reproduces gender and racial hierarchies across national boundaries (see, for instance, Enloe 2000) and restructures the global division of labor along gender, race and class lines, as discussed by Saskia Sassen (1998). Yet the gaps, fissures, and ambivalences between multiple competing patriarchies also open up space for women to transgress national boundaries and gender norms (see, for example, Freeman 1999). Furthermore, when China enters a transnational era, the socialist past and Maoist gender legacy shape the ways it interacts with the world and participate in the construction of Chinese transnational subjectivities.

Anne’s Life Story

Outline

I first met Anne in the late 1990s, when I joined an MNC in Beijing where she was the middle-level manager. We were colleagues for four years and remained close friends. Anne was born in 1971, and was thirty-five years old at the time of the interview. Her parents both obtained a university education in the 1950s and worked for the military. Her father was a nuclear missile scientist, and her mother, who studied mathematics at university, worked at the same facility as Anne’s father. Her parents moved from a satellite ground station in northwest China to another military base in Shanxi Province (northern China), where Anne was born. On the military base they lived in gaoganlou (高干楼, apartment buildings reserved for high-ranking officials). Anne was brought up by her laolao (姥姥, maternal grandmother), who lived with them. In 1976, when Anne was five years old, her mother decided to move to Beijing so the children could receive a better education and have better future opportunities. The children settled in Beijing with their mother, and their father went on working at the northern military base. He was eventually transferred to Beijing in the 1980s.6

Anne studied Western financial management at a university in Beijing, and her first job was as an accountant in a state-owned enterprise. Her mother later found her another job in marketing for a foreign company. In 1995, at the age of twenty-four, Anne went to the United Kingdom to study for an MBA. While she was in England, she had a Chinese English boyfriend who was unemployed and stole her money. During her time with him, she had two abortions. She was later involved with a man in the Chinese mafia who harassed her after she broke up with him. Anne went to a Christian church in England for a year but became disillusioned with Christianity after a disappointing discussion with a priest.

Anne earned her degree, went back to China in 1997, and joined a US MNC’s branch office in Beijing as a manager. She first met her husband, a Chinese American, in an online chat room; they met eventually and fell in love. In 1999, the company offered her a position in one of its offices in the United States, and Anne got married there. In 2003, she left her husband and moved back to Beijing for good. She initially joined a Chinese company there but could not fit into the company’s corporate culture. At the time of the interview, in 2007, Anne was the general manager of the China branch of a marketing services MNC.

At that time she was in a relationship with a married man (nationality not mentioned). She said that she did not have any concrete goals in her life and two years ago had begun to feel that she no longer had any desire to live. At the end of our interview, Anne said: “I used to feel that I was extraordinary, but then I found out that I am not different. … So to sum up my life in one sentence, nothing is at all significant. Ha-ha-ha (laughing out loud), that’s it.”

The Three Key Figures

Anne organized her account of the events and people in her life story around a plotline of self-development. She interpreted these events as necessary steps to the full development of her current self and the people as sponsors who contributed to her status as an apparently successful cosmopolitan woman. In her narrative, she constantly reflected on how she grew out of certain experiences, the lessons she learned from people in her life, and their impact on her personal and intellectual development.

In the early part of Anne’s life, three people primarily influenced the formation of her gender subjectivity: her mother, her maternal grandmother (called laolao, 姥姥, in her northern Chinese dialect), and her father. These three people represent different attitudes toward life, and each influenced some aspect of Anne’s present sense of self. She discussed her relationship with them in different ways, expressing ambivalence toward the traditional female virtues that laolao represents, a positive identification with the utopian communist ideas of Maoist women’s liberation as embodied in her mother, and a total rejection of the Maoist authoritarianism exemplified by her father. These influences provided important sources for Anne’s gender project.

MOTHER: THE IDEAL WOMAN WHO BRIDGES THE MAO AND POST-MAO ERAS

Anne’s mother was born in 1934. She supported herself while completing a university degree in the 1950s in a stereotypically male discipline: mathematics. Like the typical Maoist funü, she was devoted to building the socialist nation and put her career before having a family and raising children. In describing her parents’ lives and priorities, Anne used terms that often appeared in state discourses in the Mao era:

My parents had my older sister eight years after they were married. At that time, they were the rexue qingnian (热血青年, warm-blooded youth) who wanted to xianshen (献身 sacrifice oneself) in the cause of national defense. So they devoted their whole heart to their research, and yixin pu zai shiye shang (一心扑在事业上, all their energy to their careers). (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

In this quote, the agents in the narratives are “my parents,” “they.” “They” are the same kind of people, having same priority in life, and committed equally to nation and to their careers. Although the conversation is about having children, this topic usually has gendered implications for people involved. However, in this narrative, having children, committing to the nation, and career are all talked about in gender-neutral terms. Underneath the narrative is the assumption that the decision to have children affects the work of both the wife and the husband, that they are equally contributing citizens to socialist state building through their research, and that their career (note that the term she used is shiye (事业, career), rather than gongzuo (工作, work) is equally important. The Maoist rhetoric that often described labor heroes and heroines, such as rexue qingnian, xianshen, yixin pu zai shiye shang, provides the narrative language to explain the purpose and attitude; the Maoist idea of “men and women are the same” is taken for granted and supplies underlying logic for the narrative.

Her mother’s devotion to the revolutionary cause and her career success earned her respect from others and inspired awe in her daughter:

My mother henbang (很棒, rocks)! … When I was little … we wrote essays, we wrote about who were our ouxiang (偶像, idols). … At that time, what was in their mind was that the idols should be all those famous people, the weiren (伟人, great men). I remember very clearly … I said that my idol, or the most important person who influenced my life, was my mom. Why my mom? … I just felt that my mom was liaobuqi (了不起, extraordinary), and she was a person who existed in real life. … I could see every bit of her impact on my life … my mom is the person I respect the most in this world, because at work she is very successful, and at home she is a very outstanding person, too. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

Anne’s choice of her mother over the “great men” (weiren) is an implicit critique of the revolutionary models promoted in the Mao era. Different from the revolutionary heroines in propaganda, Anne’s mother excelled at work and at home, thus providing her a gendered model. Her mother worked as a scientist. The family’s dual income made them better off than many others with only one breadwinner, and her mother was a source of pride for Anne. Her mother was also good at crafts. Anne talked about how she made clothes and knitted sweaters with beautiful patterns in trendy styles. She embroidered bedcovers, curtains, and tablecloths that made their home pretty and cozy. Anne remembered proudly that after class her teachers would gather to look at her sweaters and want to know how they were made.

Anne’s narrative about her mother deviates from stereotypical representations of the one-dimensional, masculinized Maoist woman, who is the brainwashed political victim of communist ideology. Anne presented a multidimensional image of a woman who is both successful in her career and a caring, domestically capable wife and mother, enjoying her life at home and at work. I asked Anne how her mother could manage to do so much while working full-time; she replied that her mother’s hands were fast, and she was always occupied.7 What she did not mention is that her laolao was taking care of the housework and looking after Anne, her sister, and their male cousin, who also lived with Anne’s family for a while, so that her mother could afford to spend time on crafts and home improvements. While conforming to many characteristics of the Maoist funü, Anne’s mother was also different from the peasant/worker image because she was well educated and had a jiatingfunü mother at home helping lighten her double burden.

In Anne’s narrative, her mother is presented as extremely open-minded, free spirited, and daring in pursuing what she sees best for herself and her family. She is depicted as a free agent who has her own opinions and an independent mind.

My mom saw that for kids growing up in our big courtyard, what was the best prospect? … Boys join the army; as for girls, the better option was to become a military doctor, or be a tontxunbing (通讯兵, communications soldier). So my mom said, education is a big issue, and kids have no prospects for the future here. … My mom is actually a person with a very, very, very kaifang (开放, open mind). And then, she felt that those conditions would constrain the development of her kids, for their future, and their happiness. So she didn’t want her kids to be in this environment, she hoped that they could have freedom, could have their own free thoughts, and free development. So when I was five years old, my mom, by herself … at that time, there was no such thing as resigning. But she resigned … her supervisor was shocked. So she took my sister and went to Beijing, just by herself, looking for a job. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

Anne uses the post-Mao term kaifang (open) to describe her mother and explains the motivation of her decision using the discourse of the modern, free individual, who takes advantage of every opportunity in life to achieve full potential and pursue happiness, and for whom personal development is essential. Anne’s mother wanted to find an environment where her two daughters could compete equally with men and fulfill their potential, instead of taking up a noncombat position that has limited career potentials.

Rather than becoming out of date, Anne’s mother is a winner in both the socialist era and the market economy. She adjusted quickly from working in the state bureaucratic system to the market-oriented economy and earned enough money to be able to send Anne to study in the United Kingdom:

After she retired, she went to xiahai (下海, work for a business). … People there all respected her a lot. She did very well, and helped the company earn a lot of money … there are many things in our home that were earned by my mom. So her career was very successful. In the government, there is a lot of politics, renji guanxi (人际关系, interpersonal relations) and bureaucracy. She dealt with them very well. … My father went to a military company after he retired, and it felt very painful for him. Kanbuguan (看不惯, nothing could meet his values or expectations there), because their practices and value system conflicted with his previous experience. But my mom didn’t … she learned very easily to deal with the business environment, and was very successful. My father criticized my mom’s adaptability as being “cunning,” which I disagree with. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

Anne emphasizes that her mother is very qianwei (前卫, avant-garde) and “open-minded.” In her view she represents the perfect woman who conquers all, transcending history and achieving success on every front, in both eras. This exceptional mother provides a source of positive gender identification and a role model for Anne, who said: “My mom shaped who I am … I feel that I am very lucky, because of the assets my mom gave me.”

Anne’s mother’s story sheds light on two aspects of women’s success in the Mao and post-Mao eras. On one hand, her success was sustained and subsidized by Anne’s grandmother’s free domestic labor. On the other hand, the success of some post-Mao nüxing like Anne and her mother is built on the often taken-for-granted legacy of women’s liberation movement of the Mao era. It could be said that those who are socially privileged often remain privileged even though regimes change; however, even as the daughter of a widowed mother with no male in the family, Anne’s mother managed to receive a higher education and was able to compete with her male counterparts and excel. Although her individual aptitudes and efforts were definitely a factor, the broader environment of the socialist agenda for women’s liberation and gender equality was also crucial. The Maoist gender project provided increased access to education for many women, encouraged women’s participation in the public labor force, and made it possible for many women to enter or imagine entering traditionally male-dominated occupations. This example shows that the Maoist funü and post-Mao nüxing are not necessarily separate, conflicting, and contradictory subjects but may share the same roots. Some aspects of both can be synthesized or transplanted from one to another and can even be embodied in the same woman. As for the post-Mao generation, some of them received a dual legacy from the Maoist agenda for women: on one hand, the goal of equality with men laid an ideological and social foundation for many women to participate and succeed in the post-Mao market economy; on the other hand, some of their Maoist mothers and mentors provided positive role models and inspired them to become successful career women.

While Anne clearly recognized her mother’s influence, since her early childhood, it was only on reflection that she also acknowledged her grandmother, laolao, as an important figure in her life: “Laolao did not consciously attempt to shape me, but when I think about it, it could be said that her influences are there” (Anne interview 2006).

LAOLAO, THE “TRADITIONAL CHINESE WOMAN”

Anne’s maternal grandfather, a traditional Chinese-style schoolteacher who was Christian, died when Anne’s mother was seven years old. Laolao, her maternal grandmother, was illiterate. She remained a widow, living with her mother-in-law, went through a lot of hardships, and managed to send Anne’s mother to school. When Anne’s mother married, Laolao became the housekeeper and lived with her daughter’s family. Laolao was a Christian, following the faith of her husband. Even though she could not practice Christianity during the Mao era, as it was banned, she often sang religious songs to Anne when she was little. Laolao was ninety-nine years old when I interviewed Anne; she suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and was under twenty-four-hour care.

She [Laolao] insisted that my mom receive an education. At that time, it was still very fengjian (封建, feudal), that was jiefangqian (解放前, before the liberation). Actually she received a lot of pressure to get remarried. As a widow, with no man in the family, she had to be very jianqiang (坚强, strong), and … actually she had many fanpan (反叛, rebellious) … aspects in her gexing (个性, personality). … It is only over the last two years that I have started to realize that there are many aspects of my personality that are deeply influenced by my laolao, as well as my mom. … I can see the commonalities among us … I don’t have those chuantong (传统, traditional) aspects that my laolao has, but there are some common gexing (个性, personal traits), such as being persistent, or not caring about what others think. In the West they emphasize this; in Western culture, there is the idea of yiren weiben (以人为本, being people-oriented) and rendao zhuyi (人道主义, humanism). But in China, they were very much against it. But my laolao, in that kind of feudal environment, actually had a lot of ideas that were people-oriented. Now I can stick to my own ideas. … For me, it is natural; it is the way it should be. It is something in the blood. My mom, too, is like this. So in this regard, I really took after them. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

In this narrative, Anne delineated a female family tradition of courage, rebellion, and independent-mindedness that is “in the blood” and carried on through the maternal line, across three generations of women. This sense of history, of an ongoing female heritage, facilitates positive identification with a certain model of gender subjectivity. However, compared with Anne’s fully positive identification with her mother, her attitude toward her laolao is more ambivalent, complex, and often charged with sorrow and guilt. Her identification with her laolao is selective and partial, rejecting the “traditional” elements.

I recall that when I was little … I often drove laolao crazy. I remember very clearly that once I made my laolao so upset that she cried. … I was not nice to her. … I didn’t listen to her, I talked back to her … um … (crying) … also, I feel …(crying) … laolao was really very lonely. … When she was in the countryside, maybe she used to have her sisters and people she lived with, but since she came to live with my mother … those were actually environments she was not familiar with at all. Also, to be honest … even though they are mother and daughter, the gap between them is very, very big. My laolao didn’t have much education. … She was illiterate, because she didn’t go to school (crying), so, I feel maybe, with my mom, maybe the communication … such as … in this … that … in this civilized … in the city, with those intellectuals … she felt … she must have felt “out of place” [originally in English], you know, and with my mom, there are many things they couldn’t communicate or understand about each other … so actually she was lonely in her heart … (crying) even later, like when we had a TV … she watched TV, but she didn’t fully understand (crying) … and then she would often ask “what’s going on?” … But then she interrupted us watching, and I felt annoyed, and didn’t … it is not that I didn’t explain to her, sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. She felt we … well, she didn’t want to ask anymore, she was afraid of us being annoyed. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

In chapter 1 I argued that the construction of the Maoist funü operated through the exclusion of jiatingfunü, or “women of the family,” by erasing them from the realm of gender representation. These “other” women are the constitutive other against which the Maoist funü is defined, and their marginalized existence was often, ironically enough, crucial for sustaining the funü’s “liberation.” Just as in Lin’s story in chapter 1, the Maoist funü mother’s participation in the paid labor force and her success in a career were made possible by the domestic labor of another jiatingfunü in the family. If Anne’s laolao had not come to live with her family, it would have been much harder for her parents to devote all their energy to the cause of national defense and their careers. In particular, considering that the women’s liberation in the Mao era did little to change the gender division of labor at home, Anne’s mother’s success as the “perfect woman” would not have been possible without the laolao taking up the less glorious role. Anne’s initial lack of acknowledgment of her grandmother’s contribution reflects the marginalization and alienation, even invisibility, these jiatingfunü experienced. Because she was illiterate and economically dependent, laolao’s traditional status as a senior deserving of respect was often challenged by her little granddaughter. She was alienated from her well-educated daughter, isolated in the community, and sometimes cold-shouldered in the family.

Although she now recognizes the important role her laolao played, Anne learned the lesson when she was little that being a jiatingfunü, a traditional woman, would not be valued and respected; rather, she had to become like her mother—ambitious, well educated, and independent. Being indebted to her laolao puts Anne in a moral dilemma, since she rejects her grandmother’s model of femininity and the “traditional values” she embodies, yet without her neither Anne nor her mother could have lived the lives they did.

Anne’s sense of guilt was revealed in long silences as she narrated, hesitating in her diction, and even weeping. Her narrative conveys the unequal power relations and even exploitation between three generations of women. The alienation between her laolao and her mother came from the gap in their educational levels and different lifestyles and because they were positioned differently by the Maoist gender discourse. Their differentiated social positions left their mark in family relations. While Anne’s mother enjoyed the life of a “productive” socialist citizen and successful career woman, her laolao became the abjected but necessary other, relegated to the invisible background and denied social value. This relationship between the normative and the abject casts a long shadow over Anne’s tale of strong intergenerational female bonding.

Anne feels guilty because she benefited from her laolao’s labor and because she could not return the same love and devotion when her laolao needed her. Maria Lugones (1987, 3) discusses her unwillingness to identify with her mother because doing so would mean being open to being abused like her. Lugones explains, “What is wrong is that I was taught to identify with a victim of enslavement, what is wrong is that I was taught to practice the enslavement of my mother and to learn to become a slave through this practice” (1987, 5).

This is precisely where Anne’s pain lies. To give the same level of love and sacrifice to her grandmother would mean for Anne to be the same kind of “traditional” woman that her grandmother was, to adopt a role neither she nor her mother were trained for or willing to play. As Lugones (1987) points out, to be a woman of a certain class, a woman was taught to perceive arrogantly, to separate herself from and abandon the mother, while longing not to abandon her. This separation leaves one disturbed. Lugones thinks the unwillingness to be what the mother was leaves her feeling unintegrated, feeling a lack of self, and being pained at the failure.

Anne’s ambivalent attitude to the self-sacrificing traditional women is shared by many women (and the Maoist funü), since their success depends on rejecting and abandoning the “mother.” The “guilty daughter” therefore can never repay her debt, and there is no redemption. Lugones (1987) suggests that loving the mother is possible through a rethinking of love, through traveling to each other’s worlds. Would putting aside arrogance and finding the way to love her again be enough? Anne seems do not think so.

Now, in retrospect, … (crying) … I was not nice to laolao before … now you can be nice to her … but what good can you do for her? She doesn’t need much materially, and then, as for emotional aspects, even if you could give something, she couldn’t enjoy it any more. To be honest … my feelings toward laolao are very true, but if you really asked me to take care of her … right now, who is taking care of her? It is the young caregivers we hired. Well I can pay the money. … But this is worth nothing. If you really asked me to … don’t even mention quitting my job to take care of her, even just to stay with her for one day … to take care of her from morning to night, by myself, I can’t do it. Sometimes I doubt … really, you see this love … feeling … is … I can talk about it, I can cry about it, but, but why can’t I do it? … I feel deeply self-blaming. I feel human beings are so hypocritical. I can’t care for her, just, just, I am not a good person. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

Anne’s and her mother’s strategies for easing the guilt is to hire “other women” to perform the tasks. In the city, it is often rural migrant women and laid-off female workers who work in the informal care-giving sector. While Anne’s guilt toward Laolao is evident in the narrative, there is also an implicit and unstated guilt underneath it: her guilt toward the hired caregivers. Anne was able to not become a woman like her laolao by taking advantage of those who could not refuse to be (in Lugones’s words) “enslaved.”

It seems that to become a “successful” woman, whether in the Mao or post-Mao eras, the pain from the failure of identification and love is inevitable, as women’s success is often built on the undervalued services of “other (non)women” and the consequent abandoning of them. This failure is a gendered one. Traditional gender norms in China ascribed the role of default caregiver to women, and this did not change in the Mao era. Even though women were expected to work outside the home, they were still responsible for most of the domestic work and child care. The gender division of labor first made Laolao the unpaid and undervalued caregiver in the household, and then inscribes the gendered guilt onto Anne and possibly her mother as well. Now the circle continues and goes out of the family, through the hired caregivers.

FATHER: THE SYMBOL OF MAOIST AUTHORITARIANISM

Anne hardly mentions her father in the first part of her life story. Wondering why, I asked her to tell me more about him in my follow-up questions. Her response revealed that his absence reflects her rejection to what he represents and resistance to his influence in her life. Anne started her narrative about her father by asserting that “he has no impact on me”:

My father? He has no impact on me. No, not “no impact,” but a negative impact. He is a man who always obeys the rules. My mom encouraged me to think freely, but my father tried to control me with rules. So those are the rules I want to break. My father was a military officer. … You know, in the army … also an “authority” [originally in English], you can’t … if someone ranks higher than you, then whatever he says is right. … When I was little, his requirements for me were like military-style management, and like the way a military officer commands his subordinate. … My father is a military man, and that is in every cell of him, in the way he walks and so on. … My father is very traditional, orthodox, and very honest. He wouldn’t have the kind of courage my mother has, the kind of open mind or xianjinxing (先进性, progressiveness). He has none of that. When my mother left the army and came to Beijing looking for a job, he didn’t agree. He was strongly against it. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

Here Anne’s father is represented as the opposite of her mother and as an obedient and loyal communist. During the Cultural Revolution, official propaganda interpreted the history and current state of the PRC as an ongoing liangtiao luxiang douzheng (两条路线斗争, two-line struggle): socialism versus capitalism, and revolution versus revisionism. In Anne’s narrative, this dual ideological struggle is also metaphorically present within her family, divided by gender: her father represents a rigid, masculine way of being and thinking, including rules and discipline, hierarchy and obedience, and blind loyalty to the party and authority. Her mother, Laolao, and Anne represent an attitude that is liberal and open-minded, independent and rebellious, and in line with the principles of Western individualism and humanism. Anne takes a clear stance in this two-line struggle at home by strongly identifying with her mother and rejecting everything her father represents.

Her father is described as oppressive throughout Anne’s narrative, and she attributes the ruin of her first love to his power and status, although he himself was not even aware of the situation. She recounts how she fell in love with her father’s driver, when she was a first-year university student.

I was seventeen years old, and he was twenty. He felt that my father would kill him, because he didn’t go to college … we only dated three times. … He was too scared … so we ended it … for over one to two years since then, I had been feeling really low. … I didn’t have any energy for anything. Then suddenly, one day, I wanted to get out of it. I started to study English like crazy. … The result was that I forgot him, became happy again, and my English … significantly improved. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

The father came to represent the powerful and repressive patriarchy. He personified what she had to overcome to be an autonomous woman living the life she wanted. In this narrative, her decision to study English was instrumental in allowing her to escape from her father’s shadow. She acquired a useful skill and gained access to a different world, one where her father’s power could not reach. If Western thought provided ideological tools for Anne and her mother to challenge her father and the regime he represents, it was English that opened the door to the Western liberal thinking and empowered Anne to challenge her father’s authority.

In her narrative, the two opposite and incompatible ideological stances are constantly in conflict and exist in different languages. The Chinese system represented by her father and the openness associated with the West represented by her mother become parallel to a stereotypical conflict between a supposedly masculine, “logical” way of reasoning, and a “feminine,” transgressive way of challenging that model. Anne privileges the “feminine” over the “masculine”:

We have tried to communicate. … We tried one or two times, and then gave up. Why? Because in the end, his conclusion is that there is no way for the two of us to communicate, because the way I think is messy, chaotic. … So there is no way for us to understand each other. I feel my logic is very good, that is the cause, and then … I reach a conclusion. He said that is not right. It should be like this. So it is totally different. … Also my father is not very good at communicating and expressing himself. So very often, when we were together, we didn’t have much to say. He also doesn’t have much to say. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

As Ann Anagnost notes, “oppositional pairs have a deeply ideological function in all systems of meaning, this is especially true in totalizing systems of meaning in which alternative coding is repressed or the intent is to obliterate prior coding through a revolutionary transformation of values” (1997, 103). Anne’s narrative construction of the domestic two-line struggle exhibits the characteristics of the political culture of the Mao era, in which oppositional pairs of shi, (是, right) and fei (非, wrong) are used to encode social realties and are understood as irreconcilable.

The gendered divide at home is a reflection of the two-line struggle outside the home, which continues in the post-Mao era. Father’s out-of-date orthodox Maoist belief system and rules of conduct made him unable to fit into the post-Mao market economy and corporate culture, whereas the progressiveness of her mother’s liberal thinking is manifested in her smooth fit in the business world. The divide between father and mother resembles the two-line struggle in the early stages of the reform, between the democratic elite and the conservative “elders,” as described in Merle Goldman’s book Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China (1994): her father’s “closed” ideas resonated with those of the antireform conservative CCP “elders,” while her mother’s “open” ones echoed those of the enlightened proponents of reform.

The victory of the feminine/liberal side eventually arrived in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square event led Anne’s father, a long-time loyal CCP member, to want to resign from the party, which meant denouncing the beliefs he had lived for. His forfeit of his political stance brought about a possible reconciliation with the women in his family, since the masculine figure became willing to listen, and learned to listen, to the feminine voice. Anne said that her father has changed in recent years, and they can finally talk a bit more.

Her father’s absence from Anne’s initial narrative reveals an important but hidden constituent in the formation of her gender subjectivity. Her father and the patriarchal authority he represents formed the reference point against which she established her idea of being a woman. Consequently, the formation of her gender subjectivity was constructed as a rejection of certain model of masculinity and opposition to everything it represents. This exemplifies the rejection of the Maoist authoritarian regime as also rejecting certain masculine world-views. For Anne, being self-consciously feminine is a gendered political act of resistance, affirming and valuing qualities that challenge the repressive, patriarchal Maoist regime that was supposed to suppress the humane and the feminine.

What this amounts to is that in this narrative, mother and father signified gender and ideological dichotomies, with no middle ground or commonality. The narrative illustrates that the post-Mao re-essentialization of gender difference is intrinsically linked to the essentialization of different political ideologies. The narrative logic renders invisible any middle ground or continuity between the Mao and post-Mao political paths, as well as between the gender projects of the two eras.

Transnational Experience: From “Communist Heaven” to “Capitalist Hell”

The construction of Anne’s gender subjectivity was further shaped by her first experience abroad, when she left to study for an MBA in the United Kingdom in 1993. She considers her time there as a rite of passage, enabling her transformation from the suppressed, old (false) self to an enlightened, reborn (true) self. Anne felt a genuine sense of liberation in living abroad:

What … changed my life, and made me find the direction of my life, was when I went to study in the UK. … Getting into that environment made me suddenly feet that … I felt like ruyudeshui (如鱼得水, like a fish who just got back into the water). I was really in a place where your mind can be free, where you can develop yourself … when you go to school, the way they teach is totally different from China. I suddenly felt like, Oh, this was … was … was very comfortable, you know. … Studying like that was very easy, and very meaningful. … When I studied in the UK, I learned a way of thinking, … um … that is the way of thinking, that lets you think freely, but there is also a main theme. … So … that is … I had a space for free thinking, and released the benxing (本性, true nature) that’s inside … an inside human nature. Also, I could be myself. Because in China I couldn’t be accepted by others, because others couldn’t accept my candid way of talking. But over there, my style of thinking … that was suppressed in the Chinese environment, gained big, big development, it was a big opening up! Um … After I came back from the UK … I realized that I was more true-speaking than before. I was even more able to … to not care about others’ opinions and finger-pointing. I was even more true to myself. More into ziwo (自我, myself). By “ziwo” I don’t mean selfish or self-centered. I mean being true to oneself, and true to one’s feelings. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

This account clearly conveys Anne’s sense of needing to be liberated from an oppressive regime (and her father’s authority), which discouraged free thinking and candid speaking, forced social conformity, and suppressed “human nature” and individual freedom—all of which prevented her from being “true to herself.” This description echoes with cultural critiques against the Maoist regime since the 1980s, as well as those against “traditional Chinese culture,” for suppressing what is claimed to be human nature. Attitudes in the United Kingdom are described, in contrast, as open, encouraging free thinking and nurturing individuality.

While this criticism is supposedly about a shared, general human condition, the suppression is nonetheless gendered, with stricter control exercised over women, particularly their bodies and sexuality. For women, the pressure for social conformity became higher, in light of the ongoing power of a traditional model of a modest, docile “Chinese” femininity, even during the Mao era (see earlier discussion). Anne’s “liberation” narrative indicates the feelings some women have when they feel they have escaped the grasp of local patriarchy through transnational mobility. The patriarchal control exerted at home loses its hold on them when they cross not only national or geographical boundaries but also cultural ones regarding gender and sexuality. For Anne, the liberation is twofold: the liberation as an individual “free thinker” from an authoritarian regime and its communist ideology, and the liberation as a woman from the gender prescriptions of docile, nonconfrontational, self-erasing femininity.

However, Anne’s joy in her newly gained freedom is overshadowed by the unexpected economic reality she had to face in the United Kingdom, where she experienced social disadvantage for the first time in her life. She grew up on a military base, to a certain extent a miniature, utopian communist society isolated from the outside world and the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Many goods and services were provided free by the danwei (单位, the work unit), from house and furniture, food and clothes, to school and employment. Even the lowest ranking soldiers had their basic needs met, everyone had a job and contributed according to their ability, people all knew each other, and all appear conformed to a common set of rules and code of moral conduct:8

That town was built up by the army; it was a military town. … Kind of like the … in the US, like a university town. Also we were deep inside the mountains … and the villagers couldn’t come in. … It was very free. The environment I grew up in was a bit like an ideal gongchanzhuyi (共产主义, communist) society. It is really like “ye bu bihu, lu bu shiyi” (夜不闭户, 路不拾遗, one needs not lock the door at night, and people would not steal/take the things you left on the road). So I never needed to worry. … The area was remote. The air was fresh and the environment was very beautiful. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

Anne uses the Marxist ideal society of “communism” and the traditional Chinese ideal society of yebubihu, lubushiyi to describe the place where she spent her childhood. It seems that in her narrative the datong (大同, great harmony) society described in Liyun (礼运, Conveyance of Rite) chapter of Liji (礼记, The Book of Rites), one of the classics of Confucianism, is in many ways similar to the dream of a utopian communist society. The latter comes from a myth about a datong society of the past, while the former points to a utopian vision of the future of humanity; both imagine a paradise on Earth.

Coming from this “utopian” setting and from a privileged family, Anne had an easy transition from high school to university and then to the workplace, and her family status had protected her socially and provided economic security. When she first arrived in the United Kingdom, she experienced a dramatic downward movement of her social capital and her ability to work and be recognized, and she lost the sense of privilege and entitlement. In the beginning, she did not expect to experience economic disadvantage as a student from a developing country. She described her early experiences in the United Kingdom as “falling from heaven to hell”:

In the UK, because I didn’t have any concept about money, and never thought at that time about the official exchange rate being 1:13, I spent as if I was still in China. … After just one month, I had spent 3,000 pounds … because when I was in China … my salary was about RMB 3,000 a month. So I didn’t think, that when you spend money here, you had to multiple by 13. … I had no concept, to such an extent that I didn’t even think that I was there to study, and how much the tuition fee was. … When the school started in September, I had already run out of money. When I left [China], my mom gave me 7,000 pounds. … Also, when I left China, I thought, well, I could go find a job. I could go wash dishes. I didn’t feel that this would actually be a very difficult thing. … By September, there were only 600 pounds in my bank account … how could I manage? I couldn’t. I thought I’d better go home, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t just mess up for three months, spend all the money, not even start school, and then run away. So … I was dumbfounded. So … I made an excuse, told my mom that I lost my money, and asked her to send me the tuition fee. But I could only ask her to send me tuition. By then, I started to think that 1,800 pounds, equals how much in RMB, and then think about how much my mom’s monthly salary was. It might be that the 7,000 pounds she gave me was her savings of many years. I finally thought about that, and felt very, very guilty. I couldn’t ask her for living expenses anymore. … So I was so broke. There was one week, I had only five pounds left. … Very miserable … this was a big change in my life; it changed my attitude to money; I started to realize that it is not easy to earn money. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

The financial disaster Anne experienced in her first three months could easily be interpreted as the story of a spoiled kid learning a lesson about real life once she was away from her parents’ protection. However, she was not really being excessive in her spending—she just lived the same way as she had in China. If a young girl from the United Kingdom went to China to study and did the same thing as Anne, she would not run into any financial trouble; instead, she would find herself suddenly thirteen times richer and able to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle. For Anne the experience was descending into hell because she found herself being treated as a second-class citizen (facing economic and racial discrimination) and had to learn to live a life of frugality.

Part of Anne’s financial trouble was caused by the differences between China’s and the United Kingdom’s educational systems. Before 1997, university education in China was free,9 the government provided an allowance that covered most living expenses for students coming from poor families, and employment was guaranteed after graduation. Anne went to university in the early 1990s and took advantage of the free education. When she went to study in the United Kingdom, she was unprepared for the high tuition fees. Because it was her parents who made the arrangements, and the procedures were handled by an agency that provides services for overseas study, Anne was not involved in all the details, nor was she aware of the need for budgeting. Her financial crisis was partially caused by the transition from a socialist welfare system that provided free universal education to a system where education is only available to those who can afford to pay (at least for foreign students).

Not only was her purchasing power suddenly devalued by a factor of thirteen, she suffered a blow to her social status and self-esteem. Her Chinese credentials and experience were not recognized, and she had no value in the UK labor market, even as a physical laborer:

Then what was I going to do about it? I had to … so, do a labor job, to earn money. … But I got my nose bloodied, job hunting. That is, I couldn’t find a job. I didn’t mean to find an office job. I meant to go to a restaurant, to Chinatown, to be a waitress. I asked everywhere, they didn’t want me … So … I was very frustrated. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

Ironically, after escaping from patriarchal control at home, Anne had to resort to Chinatown, which embodied “oppressive, traditional” Chinese culture, in search of employment. Eventually, the transnational Chinese diasporic network lent Anne a helping hand when a male friend from Shanghai, who owned a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, gave her a waitressing job.

Having escaped the shadow of her father’s social status and patriarchal control over her love life, Anne enjoyed freedom in dating in the United Kingdom. But she was not prepared for the dangers associated with this freedom, when exposed to a different kind of male dominance. While working in the restaurant, she encountered and dated a man who was involved with the Chinese mafia. When Anne broke up with him, she had to run and hide, creating a situation that eventually caused her friend to close his restaurant.

Since I was little, I had been in the army environment. It was a very pure environment. I trusted people very much. No matter what, I would not be suspicious toward others. I also couldn’t understand why someone could be bad. But that … taught me a big lesson. … In the beginning, I really liked him. I didn’t know that he was mafia. … But I only saw the surface, that he brought you to dine and have fun everywhere, that was very happy. Later I found out that this person was actually … for a person, you need not only to look at these things, but also need to look at other aspects. Because of these things, I … for a while, I was drifting around, I had to move very often, and so on. (Anne interview 2006, part 1)

After escaping from this gangster, Anne met another man who exploited her economically and sexually:

That boyfriend, I stayed with him for a long time, and I had abortions twice. I didn’t know about contraception,10 I learned that later. I wanted to marry him. I was twenty-four, and he was twenty. He had no job. I didn’t look at that, I knew nothing about him. Just because he was nice to me. … He stole my money. He’s a rascal. Silly me! He asked me to marry him, and I said yes. I thought I could sacrifice myself, and save him; he was talented in music. We went to clubs … he was a nice person by nature; he didn’t intentionally hurt others, but couldn’t help it. … I thought I could touch his heart and save him … that I could yingyong jiuyi (英勇就义, die a heroic death). (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

Anne grew up in a protected environment economically and socially, and she inhabited a milieu in which gender inequality and sexual exploitation were not acknowledged or considered relevant to her life. Totally innocent about potential male sexual advances, she had no concept of the need for self-protection and no knowledge at all about safe sex or contraception. Unprepared for the gender politics of the West and sexual exploitation by men, she fell into capitalist hell and became the prey.

Anne did not mention the ethnicity of either of these two men, but the context suggests that they were probably both ethnic Chinese living in the United Kingdom. Anne’s experience with transnational Chinese patriarchy taught her a hard lesson about women’s disadvantage and gender oppression. However, rather than regarding herself as a victim in these incidents, she portrays herself as a martyr, implying that she would still opt for pursuing freedom with risk rather than being controlled and protected by the Father. Anne said that she did not hate these men; rather, these experiences made her grow and become stronger. The term she uses, “to die a heroic death” (yingyong jiuyi), is associated with revolutionary communist martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the cause. This metaphor portrays her journey as a heroic act—on the road to freedom there will be sacrifices.

Constructing a Cosmopolitan Nüxing Identity

Anne finished her degree and made it back to China “in one piece” (originally in English), terms that imply a victorious return. Having survived her adventure abroad, she regained her social status in China with increased human capital. As a woman with a foreign MBA degree and experience of living overseas, she got a job working as manager for a US MNC in Beijing, becoming a member of the emerging professional elite. Once established in her well-paid job, Anne embarked on a new gender project: a transformation from “girly girl” to a sophisticated cosmopolitan nüxing, with increased consciousness of her femininity and sexuality.

As Rofel (2007) points out, the call for liberation of human nature from the oppressive political regime of the Mao era necessarily anticipates the construction of new citizen-subjects: cosmopolitan “desiring subjects,” whose emergence depends on the acknowledgment and elaboration of people’s sexual, material, and affective self-interest. Cosmopolitanism is one of the key nodes that bind citizen-subjects to the state and to transnational neoliberal policies in the post–Cold War world and is central to the constitution of a “desiring China.” Rofel argues that this cosmopolitanism consists of two aspects in tension: transcending the local, and renegotiating China’s place in the world.

Anne’s cosmopolitan identity is first reflected in her English name. As discussed in chapter 3, while replacing a given name with a biming (笔名, pen name) or yiming (艺名, art name) is common for writers and artists, changing names is not a practice reserved only for these people. A change in name is often associated with the changing construction of an individual identity (as discussed in Shitou’s case), which shifts and grows along with personal development and the historical cultural context. In twentieth-century China, four waves of name changes can be observed. The first started with the May Fourth movement in the early twentieth century, when many young educated Chinese adopted names conveying “modern” meanings to replace their more traditional names. Many leading intellectuals and cultural figures during that period, such as Lu Xun (original name Zhou Zhangshou, later Zhou Shuren, zhi Yushan), or Ding Ling (original name Jian Wei, then Zhi Bingzhi), adopted new names to indicate their intellectual and political pursuits. The second wave came with the Cultural Revolution, when many abandoned names that were considered reactionary and adopted new ones associated with revolution, communism, and the military, such as hong (红, red), jun (军, military), or bing (兵, soldier). The third, more recent wave is characterized by changing to or acquiring an additional English name. The fourth one comes with the development of online communities, where many people created handles or online names instead of using their real-life names. Each wave indicates the desire to construct certain new identities in a specific historical moment.

Since the 1980s, with the implementation of the open-door policy, the xue waiyu re (学外语热, studying foreign language cult) has become widespread (Ross 1992, 1993). Most Chinese students are asked to adopt an English name when they study English, either at home or abroad.11 Chinese immigrants abroad often create a name in a foreign language to fit in. Similarly, many Chinese working in FIEs use English names at work.12 For these professionals, using English names makes it easier for foreign bosses and customers to remember them; it also signals their openness to Western influence and compliance with the company’s corporate culture, as well as willingness to participate in “international” business culture. While a Chinese name marks their cultural otherness, an English name presents them as being similar to foreign bosses, colleagues, and clients, at least at the semiotic level, thereby downplaying (if not erasing) their difference.

There are multiple reasons for Chinese people to choose to adopt an English name (or not to); these decisions can be interpreted as strategies of compliance or resistance13 and the individuals as victims of cultural and linguistic imperialism or as cosmopolitan free agents. What concerns me more here is how adopting an English name contributes to the construction of a gendered cosmopolitan identity. I do not know how Anne picked her English name or when she started to use it. What is certain is that with the choice of a new name, a new identity emerged and became Anne’s primary identity in her professional life. She never uses her Chinese name in the workplace; it is used only with family and old friends outside of her current social circle.14 Her Chinese given name means progress, a typical politically charged Mao-era name. By adopting an English name for her workplace, Anne put aside her Maoist background as manifested in her given name and the Chinese patriarchal root in her father’s family name, and enacted and performed her new identity as a cosmopolitan nüxing named Anne, an international businesswoman, and a global citizen.15 This naming practice transforms her from a “woman of the family” and a “woman of the nation” into a “woman of the world.”

In discussing the emergence of a cosmopolitan self, Rofel (2007) notes that both locality and time are transcended through the formation of a new “consumer identity.” Consumption is not only about pleasure and freedom but is also a postsocialist technology of the self through which Chinese individuals and the Chinese nation can transcend the specificities of place and period and become part of the “world.” Bodily practices of food consumption, sexual activity, and fashionable clothing become major sites for constructing the desiring subjects who inhabit the transcendent global consumer market. I suggest that language use is another central signifying element, which Rofel does not discuss in detail. These above-mentioned areas are the major sites where Anne’s gender project of becoming a cosmopolitan nüxing are enacted.

Two colleagues and friends from the company where Anne worked, Jacky (a midlevel female manager) and F (who had a relationship with Anne), mentored her on the “technology of the self” in two specific areas: fashion and sex. Both of them are Chinese, born in China, and took on English names. Jacky has worked for various FIEs and dated mostly expats.

The person who made me change is Jacky; she has rich experiences. … I love being pretty, but I didn’t pay attention to how … how to make others think you are pretty—not that I care about others’ opinion, but it is a kind of yishi erniao (一石二鸟, hit two birds with one stone)—or paying more attention to being a woman. I used to have a kind of “little girl” style, but now I pay more attention to matching clothes and to underwear. Jacky helped me to do shopping and to dress up, and told me to read fashion magazines. It was fun. It is not just about following the trends, but also about finding out what suits you. You then have some fashion elements in your style, so you can also be accepted by the dazhong (大众, masses). … Not only dress, but also make-up. She brought me to a place to have my eyebrow tattooed. I didn’t think about those things before. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

By introducing her to fashion and the cultivation of a personal style, Jacky helped produce Anne’s physical metamorphosis from a naive provincial young girl into a sophisticated cosmopolitan nüxing. The gendered signifiers marked on the surface of the body—tattooed eyebrows, make-up, sexy underwear, stylish clothing—are part of her performance of a new consciousness, showing a new awareness of the other’s gaze associated with her own exploration of gender and sexuality.

Jacky, the stylish woman, taught Anne the technology of fashion; F, the sex expert, taught her the pleasure of sex. F was born in Shanghai, emigrated to the United States with his family when he was a child and came back to work in China after finishing his MBA. Anne dated him when they both worked for the same company. In many ways F is a totally Westernized Chinese American, who seeks to be assimilated into the melting pot and become part of the mainstream. Anne criticizes him for his lack of personal style and his attempts to fit the stereotype of the middle-upper-class US businessman, but she credits him for opening up the world of sexuality for her:

He made me realize that I needed to change. … He didn’t say that my style was not good, but … when I was with him, I would want … how to say it … I realized the importance of “sex” (originally in English): what role it plays in a relationship between two persons. I never realized it before, and didn’t pursue it—that is, the pleasure of sex. I didn’t understand and was totally ignorant. Even though I had [sexual] experience, I didn’t understand it. And because of him, I would, I would … you know … um, start to pay attention to my nürende (女人的, women’s, feminine) side … I believe that he had a big impact on my later “sex life” [originally in English] and “love life” [originally in English]. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

In her book Women and Sexuality in China, Harriet Evans (1997) notes that even though the emphasis on a good sex life for marital harmony existed in the 1950s, attention to women’s sexual pleasure emerged only after the 1980s. In post-Mao China, with the reintroduction of Freud’s theory of sexual desire as fundamental to human identity and sexual practice as at the core of psychic life, the concept of free expression of the body’s desires reappeared in Chinese discourse on sexuality. Sexually explicit novels, films, and images exploded in the 1990s and are now prevalent. As Wendy Larson (1997) points out in her discussion of Chen Ran’s writing and the discourse of desire in post-Mao China, sexuality has become an area of escape from a restrictive government. The modern individual desiring subject is prominent in post-Mao literature and popular culture, whereas the Mao era is represented as an era of sexual repression. In the 1990s, “erotics-as-liberation” emphasized sexual desire as the key to personal and national emancipation and as crucial for the reinvigoration of the Chinese subject (generally but not exclusively male).16 Western feminist discourses about female desire, including the glorification of female erotic subjectivity or jouissance and theories of the body as a site of resistance to gender-based oppression, have also influenced China, especially in fiction by women writers.17 Rofel (2007) notes that contemporary discourses about sex in China regards it as not only about pleasure but also about “normality,” and sexual “liberation” is seen as a measure of China’s progress toward humanity.

Gender consciousness, a positive evaluation of gender difference and femininity, and the open pursuit of sexual pleasure are key elements that distinguish the post-Mao nüxing from the Maoist funü, and they become critical constituents of a cosmopolitan nüxing subject. The latter is sexually enlightened, open to discussing her sexuality, and takes pride in her ability to enjoy her body and the sexual pleasure it brings. This is reflected in Anne’s open and proud assertions about her sex life, and her enjoyment of her sexuality, including her comments on her current partner, who is a married man: “Our relationship is the kind that combines both body and soul … how to say it, um … he is my best ‘sex partner’ (originally in English)” (Anne interview 2006). The use of English terms in Anne’s sex talk is part of the performance of a cosmopolitan identity, a topic I return to in the section on the storytelling.

The Meaning of Life and the End of the Desiring Subject

While she was working for the US company in 1998, Anne met W in an online chat room. Their online affair led to Anne’s transfer to a branch office of the US company and marriage with W one year later in the United States. W, a Chinese American with an English name, introduced Anne to the US ideal of middle-class family life, far from the economic disadvantages she experienced as a student in the United Kingdom. Anne seemed to have obtained most of the goals a desiring female subject can imagine: a good job in the U.S., a loving husband, a big house, and even a dog. It seemed to be the American dream come true. Although all her material goals were achieved over time, the ideological vacuum proved less easy to remedy. In 2003, Anne left W after five years of marriage and went back to China:

His expectations for life are very simple; we have a 3,000-square-foot house with two garages, and one dog. His goals are that next I want a bigger house with three garages. The third garage will be for his hobby of remodeling antique cars, and then, what comes after that is to change to a house with five garages, because he likes three kinds of antique cars. And then, we will have two kids. And then, right, have one dog, that is enough. Those are his expectations for life. And then, he’d go to work every day, go travel on vacations and holidays. But, as for every day, he thinks life is about routines, such as working around the house on the weekend. … That’s his pursuit, an insipid life, an ordinary life, and a down-to-earth kind of life. That is totally different from me. As for me, don’t even mention five garages, I don’t want even one garage, and don’t want a 3,000-square-foot house. … So for me, these things don’t have much meaning or value, or in other words, owning them does not make me feel happy. So actually, our value systems, our pursuits in life, and definitions of life, are different. So his kind of happiness … I don’t approve of it. I just can’t live that kind of life with him. As for things I want, he could not give them to me … [the differences] some are on the surface, some are essential. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

Although what Anne is describing are W’s ideal of family life and his role in it, they project a gender prescription for his wife: she should be a good wife (and eventually mother) who centers her life on the home and finds satisfaction with a well-off material life and family pleasure: the heart of a US middle-class nuclear family.

The Maoist women’s liberation project reoriented women’s loyalty from the patriarchal family to the communist state. Although it is still a subject of debate whether this liberated Chinese women or actually subjected them to state patriarchy, the shift nonetheless provided the possibility for women to find meaning and fulfillment outside of marriage and the family. Just as it is hard to put “liberated feet” back into shoes designed for bound feet, it is also hard to convince women who came to see the purpose and meaning of their lives as connected to something outside and greater than the family to “return to the home” and find fulfillment and satisfaction there. Furthermore, the post-Mao discourse of personal development and individual fulfillment, combined with a wide range of career and life possibilities opened up by the market economy and open-door policy, provides greater space for many women to imagine possibilities in life include but beyond being a devoted wife and mother. While some women celebrated the newly found/returned possibility of the joys of domesticity, others such as Anne, who grew up expecting more, have found that marriage and family life cannot provide a sufficient sense of fulfillment. Anne had a job in the United States, she worked at the same consulting firm she worked for in Beijing. However, in her narrative she did not mention her job and career in the United States at all. This omission indicates that perhaps working in the United States for a US business did not provide a meaningful life goal for her.

One of the reasons that prompted Anne’s decision to return was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which she says, “impacted me a lot.” This was brought up when I asked her about having children. Anne did not have any children while in the United States. She wanted a baby after she got married, but her then husband wanted to wait a couple of years.

After 9/11, I felt I didn’t want to have a child, I wanted her to be the most happy and free … but security was something not guaranteed. Any corner in the world, there could be something happening, with no reason, that would take away your child’s life. The second thought was that I wanted to go back to China. I felt the uncertainty, and I felt I wanted to be with my jiaren (家人, family). After I came back to China, I felt that was remote, and irrelevant to life here. The fear was gone, but the impact was still there … [about having children] I haven’t fully decided, I still want one, but I feel I am not ready psychologically. My fear, and the negative feelings, might fade over time. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

What Anne returned to is not just her “family” but also her old world, where she would feel safer. Moreover, her relocation is represented as “returning” to her “family” (jiaren), rather than leaving behind or dissolving the family of her own, the one she had formed through marriage. On the surface of the narrative, the events of 9/11 prompted Anne’s return out of consideration for safety. However, given what 9/11 means for the American psyche, its significance for Anne might be deeper. The terrorist attacks were a blow to the American dream of many and the last straw for Anne’s. Her leaving the United States was out of the disappointment with the promise of a safe and good life and disillusion with what the “free world” could offer in terms of the meanings of life.

Anne initially came back to work for a Chinese company but found herself unable to fit into its business culture. She felt the gap was so big that it was not productive for either side, and she soon moved back to the US company where she had worked before. She has been working for foreign companies ever since. Her initial decision to work for a Chinese company might have been out of her desire to use her expertise to contribute to the development of China. Going back to foreign companies indicates the failure of this ambition; it was an act against her will, and she admitted that she could not find fulfillment in her job. She felt that the company and its business could carry on without her; it was a job but not a career.

In the Mao era, working outside the home not only provided women with a job, economic independence, and a social life, it gave new meaning to work and life. For instance, Anne explained that her mother did not have a child for eight years after her marriage because she devoted her heart and life to the cause of national defense. Even though Anne is one of the rare women who have become a general manager in a foreign company, this achievement does not really bring her satisfaction. Compared to her mother’s work and life, which were connected to a grand endeavor, working to earn money for a foreign boss has little connection to the meaning of life for Anne. The post-Mao nüxing gender model tries to compensate for such loss by reemphasizing the value of family and children, but many women have found this to be an unsatisfactory alternative.

Feeling unfulfilled in her career and uncomfortable with conventional family life, where else could she search for meaning in her life? Anne has sought sanctuary in heterosexual romance:

I have never felt fulfilled. … What I have now, what I own, others may admire, but I could give up all of it. … What haven’t I got? What are the things I pursue? Um, what I care the most about in my life is love. … The kind of love that is lingyurou de jiehe (灵与肉的结合, combines spiritual and physical love). I have had a lot of boyfriends. Each time, I was totally devoted to him, but in the end, sometimes, you found that there were places that you didn’t coordinate well, and this was often the case. Sometimes you found that it might be in harmony, very happy, but it stopped there, not moving forward, then at a certain point, you felt it’s not satisfactory any more. Or, sometimes I moved forward, but the other party didn’t. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

Anne seeks fulfillment in love, but it is often elusive, short-lived, and does not provide a long-term, sustainable source of satisfaction. She went on to tell me a story about a couple who had been waiting and searching for each other for over forty years. She said that she used to think that the way she loves was weida (伟大, grand), but compared to their faithful, everlasting love, her love is nothing.

If legendary, ever-lasting love is unattainable, and love in real life is too elusive to hold onto, what else can Anne rely on and derive meaning from? She developed an understanding of the goals in her life from some business training:

What is the motivation of my life? I suddenly found out in a training program I attended for leadership. We were asked to find out how to motivate our teams. One of the exercises was to find out your own “motivation” [originally in English]. I realized that for me, it is the sense of being needed. Two years ago, I first had this thought, and thought … what is the point of living? What is the “objective” [originally in English] in my life? … I feel I don’t have concrete goals. I live for ganjue (感觉, feelings). I pursue feelings … but I have experienced everything, from the most glamorous moment, to the lowest time of living on five pounds a week. I might meet different people, but the type of feeling will be what I have already experienced. There will be nothing new. Why should I continue? I have had them all, I have been there, done that. I would just repeat my life. … Recently, I am down to the bottom again, because I feel no one needs me. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

Compared to terms such as shiming (使命, mission), which indicate a larger meaning and goal for life beyond the individual, the term “motivation” conveys a liberal construction of self that emphasizes individual interest and its fulfillment. For many who grew up in the Mao era, shiminggan (使命感, a sense of mission), is what gives their life purpose and meaning, and the mission used to be to devote one’s life to building socialism and achieving communism.

When Anne told me about her feeling of not wanting to live, I felt the need to intervene as a friend and a researcher. The last hour of our interview switched from her life story to a discussion of how to find possible goals for her life. Even though I felt myself to be using clichés, I asked about conventional options such as having a child, doing charity work, or helping others. Anne rejected these options. She didn’t feel ready, psychologically, to take on the responsibility of having a child. As for charity:

I have been sponsoring children who have dropped out of school. At that moment, I felt happy, but it lasted for just one moment. They didn’t enrich my life. It is done, and then past. That was a process, it happened, but it didn’t really make me happy. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

As Rofel (2007) points out, the construction of the new cosmopolitan Chinese identity is defined in terms of what are assumed to be nonpolitical and benign activities, such as forging a consumer identity through the acquisition of possessions or remaking body images through freedom to explore sexual, material, and affective individual well-being. Embracing personal desires as positive has been accompanied by a rejection of more dangerous political passions and engagements. Anne’s sense of affliction and loss when she apparently has everything reveals the ideological defect of the cosmopolitan “desiring subject” and the limited promise it can offer. To sustain a desiring subject, desired objects have to be constantly supplied. For Anne, the objects of desire have run out—she realized all the promises and was still not happy.

On reviewing the record of the interview, I realized that Anne did convey what she really wanted to do but felt unable to achieve: to facilitate change, to have an impact on people and on the world, a desire that is, interestingly, driven by a sense of mission—responsibility for the well-being of others, rather than her own:

I know people don’t change, but I still want to change others, to facilitate change. People have said to me, “Accept it, that is the way things are,” but I can’t accept it—I used to not even admit it. Now I admit it, but I want to change it. Such as people I love, they are not happy. I tried to change them, but they refused. That made me sad, and I don’t understand why. In the past two years, I experienced a lot of this kind of situation. Why do people refuse to be better and happier? They don’t even try. … I feel very … “helpless” [originally in English]. Wunengweili (无能为力, there is nothing one can do about it, powerless). Then why would others need me? You can bring about change, you can see how; you have the experience, and can foresee. … I can see it. So I feel sad, I am not patient. … I want to write an autobiography or make a film about my life, so that it can impact a lot of people. (Anne interview 2006, part 2)

Having lived in the West and come back with rich experiences, Anne thinks that she has learned a lot of lessons and has something enlightening to offer to others. Her sense of mission and dissatisfaction with material and personal success may be related to the influence of Christianity, initially from her laolao. Anne went to a Christian church with an older English lady she met in her first year in the United Kingdom. She later had a disagreement with the priest, stopped going there, and decided to stay away from institutional practices and keep her beliefs to herself.

However, Anne is frustrated as her desire to change the people around her (and China) has encountered rejections at home and in the workplace. The clash of values led to her leaving the Chinese company, she has a conflict with her sister, and experienced tensions with others who refuse to accept her “help.” Working for a foreign company in China and occupying an in-between space between China and the West, Anne feels privileged but also simultaneously dislocated and disconnected. Serving foreign companies makes her feel she is not directly contributing to her own society, and her attempts to instill her values directly by communicating with Chinese people have been met with hostility. Unable to fit into a Western mold or contribute to Chinese society in a meaningful way, she has lost a sense of direction in her life. She finds the intermediate and shifting place of a cosmopolitan female subject to be uninhabitable.

I initially felt frustrated with my inability to help her or suggest a solution as either a friend or a researcher. However, as Rofel (2007) has argued, public discourses of desire in China are open-ended. They are fields of experiment that close down and open up possibilities. People are exploring their own ways of becoming or unbecoming desiring subjects. Some pursue material well-being or divert their energy to raising the next generation. Others seek enlightenment through self-development and personal liberation, while experiencing the joy of subversion by breaking down boundaries, including gender definitions, and exploring new territories. When I was in Beijing in 2007 doing fieldwork on the development of grassroots nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China, I met some young people who worked for foreign companies. They used their spare time and money to set up their own NGOs and engaged in various kinds of social activism. I see their renewed passion of idealism, desire to bring about social change, and a newly found meaning in life in their endeavors. I realized that it is not my responsibility to answer Anne’s questions—she has to work through her way and find her own answer.18

The Storytelling: Hybrid Language and the Cosmopolitan Female Subjectivity

The “Cosmopolitan” Mandarin and Hybrid Language

The interview with Anne was conducted in Mandarin. As mentioned in chapter 2, the standard spoken Mandarin in mainland China, called putonghua (普通话), is derived from Beijing Mandarin or Beijinghua (北京话), a variety of the northern Mandarin dialect group spoken in the Beijing area. Putonghua shares the same phonetic inventory with Beijinghua but filters out many local expressions and phonological features characteristic of Beijing. Anne lives once more in Beijing, but she does not speak with a strong Beijing accent, although she is familiar with Beijing slang and occasionally used it to enhance the dramatic effect of her narration, as in “my mother henbang” (rocks).

Anne’s Mandarin differs from Beijinghua and from the standard mainland Mandarin (putonghua). The term “Mandarin” in English encompasses many varieties within and beyond mainland China. These include putonghua (普通话), the office spoken language in mainland China, Guoyu (国语), spoken in Taiwan, Huayu (华语) in Singapore, and their (accented) variations spoken by overseas Chinese in addition to their own fangyan (regional speeches). Anne’s Mandarin is closer to what Zhang Qing (2005) calls “cosmopolitan” Mandarin—a new cosmopolitan variety constructed with linguistic resources from local and global sources by professionals in foreign businesses. As Zhang Qing (2005) argues, to participate in the transnational Chinese linguistic market and construct a new cosmopolitan professional identity, Chinese yuppies employ a cosmopolitan variety of Mandarin that incorporates multiple varieties from overseas as a common medium for communication with their Chinese colleagues or supervisors coming from outside mainland China. This way of speaking represents sociolinguistic capital and becomes a source of distinction.

Anne’s cosmopolitan Mandarin can be observed in favoring nonlocal variants and using a full tone instead of a neutral tone in her pronunciation of words, which resembles the Hong Kong– and Taiwan-accented Mandarin.19 Anne’s cosmopolitan Mandarin exhibits a distinct linguistic style that is tied to her yapishi (雅皮士, yuppie) identity, a label that refers to those working at middle- and upper-level management positions in FIEs (Q. Zhang 2005).20 This language style situates her as simultaneously belonging to Beijing, China, and a transnational Chinese community and is an important constituent feature of her cosmopolitan nüxing identity.

Anne’s narrative is also sprinkled with expressions associated with an earlier stage of her life and her parents’ political affiliation to Mao era. Two distinct sets of Chinese political vocabulary are deployed in her narrative, from different ideological sources and evoking the Mao and post-Mao eras. For instance, she refers to the communist periodization of Chinese history to map political time onto her individual life. She uses the concept of xin/jiu zhongguo (新/旧中国, old/new China) which divides twentieth-century Chinese history into two halves, the old and new China, with the turning point in 1949 when the PRC was established. The term jiefangqian (解放前, before the liberation), which Anne used, interprets the period before 1949 as a dark age of suffering for China under semicolonialism and imperialism and the rule of the Guomingdang (the Nationalist Party); the time after 1949 is referred as jiefanghou (解放后, after the liberation), as a bright new era under CCP rule. She also uses the Marxist term fengjian (封建, feudal) to structure her narrative of history as a linear process, evolving from slavery to feudal and capitalist regimes driven by class conflict and eventually reaching its teleological apex: communism. The term gongchan zhuyi (共产主义, communist society) is used in Anne’s description of the military base where she lived in her early childhood to evoke a sense of paradise (or datong 大同 in her words) on Earth.

Anne used vocabulary from the Mao era to interpret her parents’ lives when she explained that they postponed having children because they devoted their youth to the communist enterprise. She used political terms associated with a different evaluation system, that of the reform era, in comparing her father and mother: the increasingly negative term zhengtong (正统, orthodoxy) is used to describe the former, and the positively construed kaiming (开明, liberal or open-minded) to refer to her mother, who also represents a quality conveyed by a Marxist terminology, xianjinxing (先进性, progressiveness). According to Marx, the proletarians possess progressiveness because of their class position and their association with advanced social forces of production.21 In the political context of renewing the legitimacy and relevance of the CCP in the new millennium, maintaining xianjinxing meant being flexible and incorporating traditional Chinese and modern global culture into the party’s ideological foundation for continuing to rule, rather than dogmatically clinging to Marxist theory. Anne appropriated this term to highlight her mother’s ability, as a party member and Maoist funü, to keep up with the times by reinventing herself to retain contemporary relevance in a new era. This term constructs Anne’s mother, the funü, as able to transform and reincarnate, rather than becoming obsolete.

Anne’s use of Chinese language is hybrid in both its linguistic roots and its ideological resources. It incorporates different kinds of Mandarins spoken by Chinese globally, exhibits a cosmopolitan flavor, and signifies an upper-class status. Moreover, her cosmopolitan Chinese bears specific historical and geopolitical marks and in particular is imbued with the Marxist and Maoist terms and conceptualizations of history and reality.

Code Switching, English, and Cosmopolitan Identities

While Anne’s yuppie Mandarin incorporates the echoes of the Maoist past, implying the ongoing influence of some communist ideas, the presence of many English expressions in her narrative is even more interesting. Her use of English words (as quoted already in several extracts) requires special attention because it constitutes an important dimension of her interpretation of reality and the construction of her identity. Since the 1990s, with increasing numbers of Chinese employees in FIEs and joint ventures, a new phenomenon of zajiao zhongwen (杂交中文, hybrid Chinese) has emerged (Xiaofei Zhinan 1997, cited in Q. Zhang, 2005, 431).22 The use of hybrid Chinese is common among those who have studied or lived abroad and/or work for foreign businesses, and English is the most often used language in their code-switching practices.23 Anne is one of the three out of the fifteen women I interviewed who had studied or lived outside of China, and the code-switching practice also occurs in their narratives.

Code-switching is a linguistic process in which the speaker changes from one code or language to another.24 It is used to for different reasons and serves various functions, and the code choices vary depending on the speaker, setting, topic, and specific social context (see for instance, J. Lee 2012). As a communication strategy, it could be used to compensate for a speaker’s limited proficiency in one language. It also happens when there is a lack of equivalents or fully nativized terms in the host language (Koll-Stobbe 1994; D. S. Li 1996). It could be used to establish rapport by accommodating to the audience’s speech style. It is also used for communication efficiency in the principle of economy, as a word may become readily available to a speaker sooner in one language than it does in the other or the expression in one language is shorter thus requires less linguistic effort. Code switching could be used as a tool to exercise power, by borrowing the symbolic status of a certain language, through the convergence with or divergence from the other’s code (Jan 2003).

The practice of code switching needs to be seen in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas on the construction of a linguistic market as part of the larger symbolic domain where cultural and commercial linguistic exchanges take place (Bourdieu 1977, 1991). According to Bourdieu, the linguistic market, as part of the larger sociocultural symbolic system, assigns different values to various linguistic products. It legitimizes certain uses of language that come to designate the dominant class and the norm, and material and symbolic rewards go to those who master the legitimate language (Bourdieu 1977).

Bourdieu’s idea helps situate code switching practice within the political economy of language, the social and economic conditions of linguistic practices, and the power relations not only between language users but between languages. Since different values are associated with different languages, the symbolic status of certain language is used to achieve a certain social status through code switching. For instance, Karim and Kanwal’s (2014) study of the practice in Pakistan found that often the high-status language is used in code switching, which is a source of empowerment.

The current hegemony of English in the global linguistic marketplace makes it the prominent language in code switching. Speaking English, for the Chinese as for many others around the world, generates a form of highly valued symbolic capital. In hybrid Chinese, the code that is borrowed is largely from English (the market center), indicating the unequal power relation between languages, nations, and the social economic context in which such practice occurs. Furthermore, what is borrowed from English is not just words but status. Cheung notes that “English in Hong Kong divides people who know the language (the middle class) from those who don’t (the working class),” and code mixing is seen as a symbol of a good education (Cheung 1984, 281). Alastair Pennycook (1998) distinguishes three different interpretations of such language flow in the study of sociolinguistics: the liberal accommodationism stance assigns a role of global communication to English; the linguistic imperialism paradigm views the “English linguistic hegemony” as an uncritical endorsement of capitalism, the Americanization and homogenization of world culture, reflecting the “structural power” of English; finally, the heterogeny position applauds the notion of world Englishes and the creation of different varieties of English around the world and speculates on the “implications of pluricentricity” and “hybridity of Englishes.”

Code switching is an important tool for establishing identity. Deborah Cameron suggests that rather than assuming that people talk the way they do because of who they (already) are, we should recognize that we see people as who we think they are because (among other things) of the way they talk (Cameron 1997, 49). Pennycook (2003) takes up Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performativity and suggests that we think about people’s use of language as making them who they are, by performance, rather than revealing a preexisting self. In code switching, the speakers may choose to use a particular language or code as a signal of group membership and shared identity (Myers-Scotton 1993; Tsang 2004; Carrera-Sabat 2006; Yun 2008). Ben Rampton (1995) discusses the phenomenon of “crossing,” when members of certain groups use forms of speech associated with other groups. He argues that the citation of “foreign” terms may be a way of “styling the Other,” a means to “appropriate, explore, reproduce or challenge influential images and stereotypes of groups that they don’t themselves (straightforwardly) belong to” (Rampton 1999, 421). In his insightful analysis of the use of English in Japanese rap music, Pennycook (2003), sees the use of English as a way of “styling the Other” and links it with identity-fashioning and performance (2003, 514).

Because both Anne and I are native Chinese speakers, the use of English terms in her narrative is not for anyone’s lack of proficiency in Chinese. She code switches sometimes for communication efficiency, when there are no equivalents in Chinese readily available. The mix of English also builds rapport in our conversation, and the sharing of English language capability suggests my ability to understand her experiences of working for foreign companies and having studied and lived abroad.

Anne’s use of English words in her narrative is also a symbolic gesture. It helps establish her linguistic identity and signifies her identification with certain cultural affiliations. The incorporation of English is linked to the mobilization of different ideological resources that inform those linguistic constructions and fulfills the purpose of constructing and performing a hybrid identity. The use of English locates Anne as part of the imagined global community of English users, as a participant in transnational culture, and as a cosmopolitan subject and global citizen. It is a project of “semiotic reconstruction” (Pennycook 2003, 524) that function to performs, invents, and (re)fashions a hybrid cosmopolitan gender identity that crosses linguistic and geographical borders.

Furthermore, even though Anne actively constructs her cosmopolitan identity by picking a wide range of linguistic and ideological resources, her choice of English words is conditioned by the unequal power relations between China and the English-speaking world within the global linguistic market and the shifting relationship between China and the West. For instance, Japanese was the popular foreign language of choice for many Chinese in the early twentieth century, whereas in the 1950s and ’60s the official second foreign language for a generation of educated Chinese was Russian. English became the predominant foreign language taught in middle schools in China in the 1970s, along with the ending of the Cold War, when the implementation of reform and the open-door policy spurred the same century-long desire of “catching up” with the West by learning their secrets to wealth and power.25 It is no coincidence that in the Chinese context, English becomes equal to the “international” and a route to be “cosmopolitan.”

Gender and Code Switching

I am interested in how code switching helps construct gender identities, not only through the use of certain code or language but also through its investment in certain content and often in gendered content. Some research finds that women tend to code switch more than men do. However, the use of gender as a variable in analyzing code switching is inconclusive without sufficient contextualizing. For instance, Karim and Kanwal’s (2014) study found that women used more powerful language for this purpose compared with men, to assert their identity through prestigious language. John Lee’s (2012) study found that women seemed more likely to use English names to address others, whereas men more frequently use English words for the principle of economy. Overall, existing studies attempted but found that there is often a lack of consistent pattern of gender differences in code alternation (for instance, Romaine 1989; Cheshire and Gardner-Chloros 1998). As Cheshire and Gardner-Chloros (1998) point out, language attitudes toward code switching may vary cross speech communities, and code-switching practice needs to be studied in relation to the local particularities of gender and the use of language in a given speech community, rather than resorting to a generalized idea of gender difference.

Instead of using gender as a variable to look at the frequency of code switching, an investigation of the particular content or words used in the practice might be more illuminating. For example, in a study of a Greek Cypriot community’s practice of code switching, Katerina Finnis (2014) found that one female participant produced a substantial amount of taboo items (such as “fuck”) in English during the meetings. This draws attention to a gendered motivation of code switching: euphemism—to avoid embracement or create a sense of indirectness (J. Lee 2012, 165–68). For example, John Lee found that Cantonese speakers might use the English word “bra” to avoid mentioning the female body, as the Cantonese name for it contains explicit mentioning of the “breast” (hung1 wai4).26 A foreign term may help cushion the bluntness of its equivalents in the hosting language or stand in for words considered taboo for women to use. The foregoing examples reveal that code switching could be used to reinforce or rebel against the gendered discipline of language use. This is particularly true when there are equivalents of the borrowed words in the hosting language.

In Anne’s narrative, I found that code switching often occurred when the conversation was related to topics on gender, sexuality, and alternative gender identities and practices, and the words borrowed were often related to sex and sexuality or gendered practices. Furthermore, her code switching also happened when there were equivalents in the hosting language.

I argue that Anne’s code-switching practice is a means for her to construct her gender identity by drawing simultaneously on linguistic and cultural sources from and beyond her mother tongue. For example, she uses English terms she learned in her business training to defend her way of doing business and interpret social relations. She describes herself as a “people person,” and discusses the “motivation” of her life. The use of these English words provides Anne with resources necessary to challenge and criticize certain values and practices and interpret and construct alternative versions of femininities. For instance, rather than using the conventional Chinese term guanxi, (关系, network, connections) to refer to her development of relationships with her clients, she describes networking directly in English, as “building rapport.”27

In China, guanxi provides people with access to inside information and opportunities and is believed to be crucial to Chinese business operations (M. M. Yang 1994; Yan 1996a; Müller, Bihn, and Langenberg 2007). Guanxi is used by both men and women in China, yet there is often a gendered difference in its practice. In business, women in general lack access to the well-established male-dominated business networks and may be at a disadvantage if they are unable to foster guanxi to facilitate success (Korabik 1994). In her study of guanxi in China, Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (1994) looks into the influence of gender on guanxi and argues that most women use it for “small things,” whereas men are often involved in the more complicated exercises of guanxi that involve travel or greater interaction with people outside of the immediate circle of family and friends. She notes that since the majority of big or important favors are asked of men, sometimes women have to play on the attraction between the sexes, to use their female charm or offer sexual services, to get men to assist them. Women in business often face pressure to use their charm to get contact with powerful and important men.

As Ong and Nonini argue, both “Chinese ‘family’ and guanxi are central discursive constructs within the newly self-confident regional imaginary of a ‘Greater China’ and ‘the glow of Chinese fraternity’ ” (1997, 21); they are used as “explanatory elements within the postwar celebratory narratives of Chinese business success associated with the economic rise of the Asia Pacific” (Ong and Nonini 1997, 89). Guanxi is also associated with amoral tactics of domination, violence, exploitation, and duplicity and often operates as an exclusionary practice privileging specific kinds of people. It excludes those who do not have access to it and facilitates the exploitation, discipline, abuse, and cheating of the latter.

Guanxi often implies an exclusively masculine business practice in China today, used by Chinese and some foreign businessmen who participate in the “old boys’ club” activities such as dining and drinking together or going to karaoke bars where they flirt or even buy sex with young girls. These activities, which build a sense of male superiority and solidarity by exploiting female sexuality and degrading women, exclude (or are refused by) businesswomen like Anne.

Anne’s code switching on guanxi reveals that although women could occupy managerial positions as men do, the experiences of these positions are gendered, and its practices are often misogynous and exclusionary. Her preference for the English phrase “building rapport” indicates her rejection of the so-called Chinese mode of interpersonal relationships and a masculinist business culture based on fraternal networks and her identification with a more “professional” way of doing business for businesswomen. Clodagh Wylie’s (2004) research on white-collar women in private enterprises in Beijing and Shanghai shows that they take a more “professional” approach than do men to guanxi in business—one that is more forthright, honest, and straightforward. Anne’s choice of a term with different connotations represents her effort to carve out a space within the business world a businesswoman like her can inhabit with dignity. Her code-switching practice thus provides opportunities for her to challenge the sexist business practice and construct an alternative business identity that is legitimized by its “cosmopolitanness” and is more female friendly.

Anne uses many English terms when talking about gender and sexuality, love and relationships, such as “sex life,” “love life,” and “sex partner.” These words evoke desires and practices that are still regarded as unspeakable or have negative connotations for many Chinese. The use of these English terms makes the articulation of these elements possible and legitimizes those gendered aspects of women’s existence that have not yet gained popular recognition and wide acceptance in Chinese language and society. For instance, Anne uses the English phrase “physical attraction” in talking about her criteria for male partners. Compared to Chinese terms such as waibiao (外表, appearance) or waizaimei (外在美, external beauty), which imply a superficial judgment based on physical appearance, “physical attraction” puts the body at the center, emphasizing the embodiment of her desire and the sexual dimension of attraction that is not conveyed by the Chinese terms. Using these terms positions Anne as an agent and conveys her reversal of the desiring gaze onto a male body. It helps her articulate her sexual desire and constructs her as a desiring subject in a sexual relationship.

Anne refers to the married man she was having an affair with as her “partner.” Her use of this term is not just to euphemize the extramarital relationship but to set it on equally dignified and legitimate ground as those in monogamous marital relationships. The use of an English word here reveals the influence of a Western lifestyle and concept of relationship in Anne’s interpretation of her life; more important, it supplies an alternative vocabulary of gender for her to subvert existing gender norms and envision a different gender project.

Conclusion

Anne’s personal gender project of constructing herself as a cosmopolitan nüxing involves challenging various forms of patriarchy in multiple locations and resisting their gender prescriptions, as she trespasses across cultural and national boundaries. It is a journey in search of a space in between the traditional and modern, the Chinese and Western, for the possibility of building a unique gender project: one that draws on multiple gender models while subverting them. Rather than viewing one model as oppressive and all others as liberating, Anne’s relationship to various gender models is complex. She rejects certain aspects but derives inspiration and resources from each model, consciously and unconsciously. For instance, she attempts to escape the Maoist orthodoxy, as represented by her father, and its control over her personal life and sexuality by resorting to Western liberal humanism, as embodied by the English language and the United Kingdom. However, echoes of the women’s liberation discourse of the Mao era, the positive role model of her Maoist funü mother, and the more subtle influence from her Christian grandmother’s altruism lead her reject being the wife in an ideal US nuclear family dream. Her dissatisfaction with material and personal success leaves her lacking a sense of mission or a goal to achieve. The Maoist legacy from which she initially sought to escape nonetheless serves as a reference point for her uncertain future.

Anne’s difficult search for meaning in life as a woman is constructed and performed through conscious construction of her body, appearance, and lifestyle and through the hybrid language narrative she uses to convey her story. The use of multiple cultural and linguistic resources in her narrative illustrates her efforts to translate, synthesize, and appropriate the different ideological components of her life to challenge normative gender prescriptions from past and present, home and abroad. Anne’s gender project is transnational, inseparable from her experience of living abroad. Such experiences, made possible by the current global context, are still available only to well-educated women from privileged backgrounds. She appears to have achieved the dream of many Chinese women, as an affluent, liberated, successful, cosmopolitan nüxing. Yet her personal dissatisfaction exposes that dream as a dangerous illusion and confirms the ongoing power of earlier models, both Maoist and pre-Maoist, to haunt the present.