A New Life Through Ancient Wisdom

[title type="subtitle-h6"]Wenlu Yu[/title][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text]In the beginning God created a girl. And the essence of the girl was without form, and void. And her elders said, let her be a [tooltip position="top" text="shūnǚ (淑女): the Chinese term for lady"]shūnǚ (淑女)1[/tooltip].  And she was a shūnǚ. They saw that her manners were good, and they sought to keep her from corruptive influences. And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. Then the Church said, let her become one of us. So Christians made a partition to separate the believing from the unchurched, and she was subsumed into their fold. And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.The night that stretched between that second day and the advancing third felt interminable, but according to biblical tradition, the third day presents the moment of triumph, when hope is resurrected and new meaning is infused into life; so I held on. While it is unequivocal that the two most significant epochs of my youth—two years of accelerated education in Chinese womanhood and four years of fervent participation in my church’s high school branch—worked in tandem to lay the foundations for me to become the person that I am today, it was only in creating distance between the dominant discourses within those institutions and myself that I was able to meaningfully engage with, as well as not lose value for, the ideologies themselves. In that sense, my significant breaks from both my extended family in China as well as the Church marked the dawning of my third day.After having made the U.S. my home, I was sent to China, a country I barely knew, at the age of nine. Not being used to foreigners—let alone ones that sprung from their midst, my relatives were appalled at my ignorance of Chinese customs, and so my extensive education on Chineseness began almost as soon as I landed. My acculturation happened as quickly as my language skills were mastered: Within a few months, I became indistinguishable from native girls. My aunt often reprimanded me with, “girls don’t do that!” (subtext: proper Chinese girls do not slouch, etc.), but I still did not want to see myself as a Chinese girl, especially as it seemed to be exclusively associated with restrictions. That all changed one day, when I discovered the marathon of “Dream of the Red Chamber” playing on my aunt’s television and was mesmerized.As a child, I was never admired for my looks, which I doubt would have affected my sense of self had my cousin and almost-sister not been consistently praised for possessing immaculate facial features. However, as I entered my preteen years, people began to note that I possessed hints of an old-world loveliness that was no less valued in modern China. Meanwhile, my cousin, with her sharp, almost Anglo features, was excluded from this realm of beauty and excellence that I seemed born to inhabit. Not only was I now comely, I was special—blessed with the physical features with which to enclose those most beautiful of womanly traits which were passed down through generations of great scholars and beauties.Though it was probably only a handful of people, at the age of ten it felt to me like all of China agreed that I resembled [tooltip position="top" text="One of the most famous literary creations in China"]Lin Daiyu 2[/tooltip]. Transcending her fictional status, Lin (and the actress who portrayed her perfectly) was held up to be the epitome of Chinese femininity, with beauty that is determined by both the external sexual and internal moral dimensions, for it is said that in ancient China, there was no dichotomy between body and mind, physical attractiveness and inner beauty. The shūnǚ, or classical Chinese lady, is beautiful and possesses a sharp but reserved intelligence. Her outward grace flows naturally from lifelong devotion to the cultivation of virtues and the attainment of knowledge, and is but the physical manifestation of that which lies deep within her. This emphasis on substance and character facilitates depth, authenticity and maturity, and resists imitation. I found myself admiring Lin so much that, while I very much enjoyed my childhood, I nevertheless looked forward to blossoming into something like the beautiful creature who captivated me despite the unintelligibility of much of her show. Through Lin, my view of adulthood, and specifically womanhood, became inextricably tied to being Chinese.I returned to the U.S. upon entering junior high, and even after a far longer period of adjustment and cultural/linguistic catch-up, my resolve to become a shūnǚ was just as firm as it was in China, while, paradoxically, my cousin lost her interest completely. The ceaseless cutthroat competition and consequently fierce goal-chasing of the Chinese educational system left her without any appetite for core identity-formation, whereas the relative leisure of the American public school system allowed me to continue to unpack this extremely Chinese notion of female identity, exploring and considering it for myself. I have since realized that my aspiration for achieving shūnǚ status was much hoped for by my relatives, as the alignment of my physical, mental and moral attributes to the Chinese ideal signified, in their minds, hope for the survival of national identity in the offspring of the Chinese Diaspora. Memories of the humiliating effects of Western imperialism remained fresh in the collective Chinese consciousness, and in my young body they sought to reclaim what Western imperialism and the fanaticism of China’s Cultural Revolution threatened to destroy. Encouraging my identification with the Chinese feminine ideal was possibly calculated to spur me towards emulation, thus making me my own enforcer of national identity after I left China.My return to the U.S. was preceded by my parents’ insurances of jobs, and quickly followed by a lifestyle upgrade which included moving from an apartment in the city to a house in the suburbs. Now I was not the only one who needed new friends. My family began attending a Chinese American church that had an English-language youth group for the Americanized offspring of main churchgoers. As I had nothing in common with the other teens and preferred not to socialize with them, I mostly listened to and learned from the leaders, whose teachings on God’s emphasis of the heart over outward displays resonated with me. It felt like my incomplete education in becoming a shūnǚ was being extended in a new context. I was ready to respect a deity who could perceive clearly and judge people based on their hearts, and I was moved by teachings of His love and acceptance for all who choose Him. It was a drastic and welcome change from the unforgiving culture from whence I had just come, where severe distinctions existed between “good girl” and “bad girl,” and “lady” and “tramp.”However, not long after my conversion, the emphasis at church was no longer on God’s grace or goodness but on the strict adherence to rules which would separate me from the unbelieving masses, or “the world.” Personal times of growth in reading and meditating on the Bible were often stressed but I rarely found sufficient freedom for satisfying intellectual engagement with the text. My spirituality was thankfully out of reach from the meddlesome “church family,” but in all the visible areas of my life, it was difficult to escape their censure. Quite often, my church leaders saw in my refusal to conform to expectations the realization of their fear: a massive exodus of young people who want nothing to do with the church.Ironically, many, many of my contemporaries—church attendees who in their youth were perfectly obedient and pliable enough—have said goodbye to having religion in their lives, while I have never wavered in my convictions, although I did distance myself from formal gatherings of Christians in an effort to make me a more thoughtful person of faith. I think perhaps previous experiences with control during my China years made me less impressionable than my age suggested, so that I was protected from both the rhetoric of controlling church leaders as well as the defamation of the antireligious. I saw in the church’s insistence on universal observance to a strict set of moral and even political criteria as fundamentally unchristian, however, I was equally uncomfortable with condemnation of Christianity and of religion in general.This same reduction and subsequent dismissal of a complex matter is also prevalent in China—namely, regarding traditional Chinese femininity. From conversations I have had with some Chinese women as well as from information gleaned from the internet, it seems like the New China no longer places importance on the interiority of its women. In fact, in modern China women’s bodies have become sites of blatant consumerism—surfaces on which the nation’s financial and technological successes may be inscribed. Though most young people refrain from subscribing to old-world notions of femininity, they still admire the aesthetics of it, so a considerable amount of time, care and especially money are spent on achieving the right look—voluminous hair that flows like a jet-black waterfall, shapely eyes that connote innocence, small chins that suggest fragility, and pearly white skin which is indicative of wealth—as well as on displaying the right manners for special occasions, such as job interviews. Eschewing the time-consuming, painstaking cultivation of the interior qualities of the shūnǚ, young women can now expertly mimic the outward shows of traditional Chinese femininity when it suits their needs.This has led to the phenomenon of the Green Tea Bitch: a recently invented Chinese term used to describe women who display a refreshing purity that is like green tea, but are judged to be malicious manipulators at heart. Not unlike critics of America’s selfie culture, Chinese netizens decry this generation of young women as shallow and vapid, but whereas their American counterparts are accused of sexualization that is too overt or explicit, these women are charged with hiding too much of “what they are really like.” The Green Tea Bitch is known to cultivate an air of innocence and refinement: she is careful to be pretty, but not obviously made-up; flirty, yet still very innocent. Under the vulnerable, pretty surface, she is said to be like a black widow weaving a web of lies, ready to strike at the first gullible male she entraps. Though the disparaging title is problematic in a distinctly antifeminist way, I do not doubt the prevalence of such instances where, in a society that still in many ways favors males, young women would use what tools they have to feel empowered, yet the readiness with which people use this label suggests a deeper problem. Most of the accusers are also young Chinese women, such as my cousin, who first informed me of this new trend, and when I asked her about women who are genuinely like green tea—very reserved despite being beautiful and admired, and refined despite her insistence that Chinese girls are free from those expectations; might they be unfairly judged? She replied that there are so few young women in China who are truly like that, one can safely bet that those who exhibit signs of reservedness and refinement must certainly be Green Tea Bitches. I was filled with sadness at her casual relegation of traditional femininity to a historical footnote. To her, the shūnǚ phenomenon ended during the Cultural Revolution, with the exception of a few hold-outs such as her mom, and considering how it was used for policing women’s sexualities and limiting their movements, she is not sorry to see it die. Rather, she is enthusiastic about the rise of the Manly Lady, another new label and the emancipated Chinese female’s answer to the weak, submissive girls of China’s feudal past. How the tables have turned: the “little foreigner,” as was always my nickname in China, has become the tragically nostalgic defender of traditional Chinese values, while the one who helped her mother baptize the nationless child into that very culture has flushed it down the toilet.I struggled with controlling presences throughout my life, and they were effectively administered through ideologies that I admired and which made up important aspects of who I am. Yet, instead of rejecting these things as I inevitably rebelled against those authority figures, I chose to engage with them and to allow them to sit uncomfortably within my mind and body. They are systems fraught with complexity and ambivalence, but are not inherently or wholly evil—though the American popular imagination likes to picture Asian women as enslaved to outdated customs and churches as manufacturers of mindless pulpiteers. For me, the classical Chinese feminine ideal has nothing to do with nationalism, and my faith in God most definitely has nothing to do with Christendom.I remain the unapologetic product of a traditional Chinese upbringing which was then supplemented with scrupulous religious instruction; and while at various points the attempts at control led to immeasurable pain and confusion, I ultimately benefited enormously from both. However, the systems in place by which these traditions are maintained are such sites of oppression and contention, I have had to create distance and withdraw into the essence of the things themselves. Growing up in the U.S., away from the expectation of Confucian femininity, I was free to integrate Asian femininity into my identity without dictation of, or dissuasion from, relatives. Similarly, in my spiritual journey, I have been able to depoliticize that which is most important to me. Thus, I have discovered strength in softness, a voice in quietness and maturity through childlike faith. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]