Caring for the Small: Gendered Resistance and Solidarity through Chinese Domestic Workers’ Writings

Abstract

In recent years, over 35 million female migrant workers have left their families behind in the countryside to enter the urban middleclass home as domestic helpers thanks to China’s latest boom of urban development and care economy. They are expected to make intensive emotional investment in their daily toils to create an enriching environment for the best material and affective benefits of their employers’ families. Meanwhile, domestic workers’ everyday struggles, concerns, and emotional needs are often brushed under the rug as trivial matters, while mainstream media tend to represent them as insignificant and untrustworthy laborers who are belittled and devalued for their age, gender, class, and lack of symbolic and cultural capital. This essay examines the ways women worker writers bring back these “small matters” to public discourse and articulate their deep concerns for gender equity and social justice. Through their persistent intellectual and organizational labor, the meaning of care is transformed from a naturalized gendered ritual in traditional patriarchal system and commodified labor in the profit-driven care economy into a networking strategy deployed ingeniously by women workers in their active efforts to build up a literary collective that pushes for accumulative micro-changes characterized by cultural creativity, gendered resistance, and grassroots solidarity.

Notes

1 Jessica Gelt, “First ‘Detroit ’67,’ then ‘Shameless,’ now a Temptations musical: Dominique Morisseau’s star rises,” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-dominique-morisseau-20180823-story.html.

2 Picun Writers Group and Jeremy Tiang, “The Picun Writer’s Group: Part Two,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 12, 2019, https://chinachannel.org/author/picun-writers-group/.

3 Ping Zhu, “Why Does Workers’ Literature Matter?” World Literature Today (Spring 2021): 29.

4 Huang Chuanhui 黄传会, China’s New-Generation RuralMigrant Workers (Zhongguo xianshengdai nongmingong 中国新 生代农民工) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe), 1.

5 Wanning Sun, Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 15.

6 Cai Xiang 蔡翔, “Lower Class” (“Diceng” 底层), Zhongshan (1996: 5): 188–93.

7 Lu Xueyi 陆学艺, ed., Survey of Contemporary Chinese Social Strata (Dangdai Zhongguo shehui jieceng diaocha baogao 当代中国社会阶层调查报告) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2002), 48.

8 Wanning Sun, “Inequality and Culture: A New Pathway to Understanding Social Inequality,” in Unequal China: The Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Inequality, eds. Wanning Sun and Yingjie Guo (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 27.

9 Sun, Subaltern China, 31.

10 Mei Ruo, “China’s 35M Domestic Workers, Silent No More,” Sixth Tone, July 22, 2020, http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005964/China%E2%80%99s.

11 Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34.

12 Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇, “Introduction: Remembering the Anonymous,”in Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry, ed. Qin Xiaoyu, trans. Eleanor Goodman (Baffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2016), 22.

13 Sun, Subaltern China, 196.

14 Fan Yusu 范雨素, “Names” (Mingzi 名字), Picun wenxue 2 (2016): 178. This essay is the first piece that Fan has written after joining the Picun Literature Group.

15 Ibid, 142.

16 For a more comprehensive discussion of the changing idea of gongzuo, see Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China (ed. Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), particularly Part One “Perspectives on Work.”

17 Mei, “China’s 35M Domestic Workers.”

18 Yang Honghai 杨宏海, “Dagong Literature: A New Cultural Phenomenon in the Special Zone” (Yi zhong xin de tequ wen-hua xianxiang: Dagong wenxue 种新的特区文化现象：打工文 学). Tequ Shijian yu Lilun (1992:10): 39–42.

19 Arianne Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, On the Move: Women and Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 279.

20 Huang, China’s Next-Generation, 121.

21 Picun wenxue xiaozu, “The Literature Group in the Pi Village: Preserve the Museum of Our Own” (“Picun wenxue xiaozu: Liu xia zhe zuo shuyu women ziji de bowuguan,” WeChat, July 29, 2017, http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/4yuelhe06nBd2ubGTa3yeA.

22 Author’s conversation with Fu Qiuyun at Picun Migrant Workers’ Home on June 22, 2019.

23 Weibo, literally “Microblog,” a Chinese version of a combined Twitter and MySpace. WeChat, or Weixin in Chinese, is another popular social media platform on which the Picun Literature Group has established their official account and published workers’ writings regularly.

24 Unfortunately, Jianjiao buluo announced the permanent closure of all its social media accounts on August 9, 2021. No specific reason was given for this unexpected move.

25 Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), 103.

26 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xiii. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 147.

27 Meng Yu 梦雨, “I Am Not Afraid of Being Infected” (“Wo bu pa yiqing ganran wo” 我不怕疫情感染我), Jianjiao buluo, February 17, 2020, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/itNq_y3RDgfpbB55-Cljrw.

28 Meng, “I Am Not Afraid of Being Infected,” translated by Jackson Martin and Isaac Allred.

29 Cai Yiwen, “China’s Anti-Domestic Violence Law at the Five-Year Mark,” Sixth Tone, March 1, 2021, http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006903/China%E2%80%99s%20Anti-Domestic%20Violence%20Law%20at%20the%20Five-Year%20Mark/.

30 Meng, “I Am Not Afraid.”

31 Dust 尘埃, “History of a Domestic Worker’s Struggles with Domestic Service Companies” (“Yige jiazheng nügong yu zhongjie de douzheng shi” 一个家政女工与中介的斗争史), Xin gongren wenxue 2 (July 2019): 83–86. It was first published at Jianjiao buluo’s social media platform under the title “A Drifting Domestic Woman Worker” (“Beipiao de jiazheng nügong” 北漂 的家政女工) on May 13, 2019 https://www.jianjiaobuluo.com/content/106677. Ma Xiang 马湘, “Women Domestic Workers Reveal Secrets of the Trade” (“Jiazheng nügong wei ni jielu hangye mimi” 家政女工为你揭露行业秘密), Xin gongren wenxue 3 (September 2019): 48–49.

32 Gaetano and Jacka, On the Move, 283.

33 Huang, China’s Next-Generation, 103.

34 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 17.

35 Picun wenxue xiaozu, “The Literature Group in the Pi Village.”

36 Maria Jaschok, Cecilia Milwertz, and Ping-Chun Hsiung, “Introduction,” in Chinese Women Organizing: Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 7.

37 Tani E. Barlow, “Gender and Identity in Ding Ling’s Mother.” Modern Chinese Literature 2, no. 2 (Fall, 1986): 124.

38 An abridged translation of Fan Yusu’s autobiographical essay “I Am Fan Yusu” (“Wo shi Fan Yusu” 我是范雨素) is published in the electronic version of World Literature Today (Spring 2021), https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2021/spring/i-amfan-yusu-fan-yusu. My article “‘I Am Fan Yusu’: Baomu Writing and Grassroots Feminism against the Postsocialist Patriarchy” is included in Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, 243–70, edited by Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2021).

39 Zhu, “Why Does Workers’ Literature Matter?” 29.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hui Faye Xiao

Hui Faye Xiao is a professor of Chinese at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture (2014) and Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China: Morning Sun in the Tiny Times (2020), and the coeditor of Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics (2021). She is currently working on a third monograph tentatively titled “The Hen Cackles in the Morning: Gendered Soundscape and Female Leadership in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.”