Chinese and the City

Somewhere in the madness of the past few weeks, I've found time to finish a precious little gem of a book called Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It absolutely stole my heart. If you have any interest at all in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, pick up this book. It'll be well worth your time.

During the week, during breaks between classes, I've been meeting with my good friends and fellow Chinese majors Lindsey and Leslie for lunch. I think the regular meetings were originally intended to be pseudo-study sessions (we all have classical Chinese together), but lately has morphed into more of a girl talk - slash - complain about the professors and compare homework session. It was a little odd to me in the beginning, since under the kung-fu influence most of my good friends in the past decade have been male, but I'm starting to settle into it. It's kind of like Sex and the City, if the girls in that show ate vegetarian soup instead of drank coffee and talked about academics and politics instead of men. I mean, we talk about men, but not that often. Smart girls have more important things to think about, I guess. Like how to save the world.

So the other day we were sitting in the campus lounge eating our vegetarian soup (Lindsey's a fellow vegan, and I think Leslie feels left out when she's eating meat), and a woman came in and sat down at the table next to us with two very small kids. The smallest one was maybe a year old at the most, and he was making all kinds of cute little-kid noises and banging his plastic spoon on the tabletop. And Lindsey said:

"Oh, look at the baby...."

I have to mention here that babies couldn't be a more foreign topic for the three of us to discuss, but we did find ourselves staring a little bit longer than I think any of us would have liked to admit afterward.

The thing of it is, all three of us have close friends with small kids. And all three of us, it turns out, have at some point wished that we were that kind of person. Not that we had kids, mind you, just that we were the kinds of people who could be content with that kind of a life. These women are women who have direction in their lives without having to scramble to find their self-worths in the pages of a book or between the double-spaced lines of an honors thesis. And the three of us - especially myself and Lindsey, who both plan on pursuing careers as college professors - are looking forward at another decade of school, followed by several more years of establishing our names in academic fields that still remarkably favor men over women. Do the experiences I've had and the people I've met make the sacrifice seem worth it? Yes, of course. But sometimes only marginally.

It's just that it's really freaking hard to be an American woman in the 21st century. It's not that I'm complaining - I'd rather be a woman now than at any other time previous to now; can you picture me cooking and cleaning? Pshaw! - but there's just so much pressure. If you want to be independent and have a career, people think you should be having a family. If you decide to devote your life to a family, people think you are wasting your potential. And of course you have no idea who to listen to, so you end up doing both, just to be on the safe side. And on top of it all, there's still some strange social stigma that keeps men feeling like pansies if they help with the housework. You can't win.