Double Standards of Men and Women in the Raise the Red Lantern

The Cultural Revolution was a time of much confusion in china. The memoir Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang illustrates the chaos of that time. Ji-li’s experiences during this time period led to her point of view changing. Ji-li starts the Cultural Revolution full of progressive thoughts, but this quickly turns to confusion, and leads to an important choice, something that impacts the rest of her life.

“As one of the Red Guards in the middle school, I was given power through Mao to torture and humiliate our teachers, headmaster or anyone we didn’t like. I didn’t know it was wrong. I thought I was doing the right thing to continue the revolution, to fight and win the class struggle”- Zhao, Lin Qing. As a teenager Zhao was a Red Guard in Guangzhou during the Cultural Revolution. When asked what her impression was a member of the Red Guards, Zhao answered with two words: “naïve and senseless”. She refused answering anything more about her experience. She said, “The memories are still too painful to recall.”

Can you imagine that everyone rejects you just because you are a girl? That actually happened universally in the last century, specifically in the old China. The gender discrimination was deeply rooted in people’s minds and became a traditional Chinese thinking. Wayson Choy illustrates this kind of discrimination really well in his novel The Jade Peony. In the novel, Grandmother continually reminds Jook-Liang that girl-child is useless, it affect Jook-Liang thinks about people, and change the views of various people. Also, it makes her struggle to assimilate to Chinese and Canadian society. Though, she tries her best to revolt

apt at pushing the campaign for women’s suffrage, many do not even stop to consider supposedly oppressive and impoverished communist regimes as the furnaces in which female rights were first forged. The majority of world history consists of the disputes and bloodshed created by men, perpetrated by men, and for men, all while blatantly disregarding women as trivial and powerless. Pre-Communist Revolution women’s rights comprised of sexist stereotypes that strictly limited the amount of achievements that women could accomplish. Traditional Chinese society was formed through strict social structures that defined daily life in the three obediences: women had

In Six Records of a Floating Life, Shen Fu writes of his wife, “Yün came to this world a woman, but she had the feelings and abilities of a man.” (Fu: 89) Shen Fu and Yün considered each other to be intellectual equals. However, their relationship was still constrained within the gender roles set by their society. They lived during the Qing dynasty, which was a prosperous time for China (“The Manchus”: 266) but also a time when, as Professor Scarlett states in the lecture Daily Life in Imperial China, “the outside world was for men and the inside world was for women.” Shen Fu and Yün’s relationship was pushing the bounds of their culture, but they still kept (mostly) within the lines of social acceptability.

In the story “Du Tenth Sinks the Jewel Box in Anger” by Feng Meng-long, courtesans appeared to be kept imprisoned and generally wanting to escape the life of prostitution. There are several contrasting perceptions of women and their work. Often times prostitution can be viewed as a practice of unclean or even immoral activates but in this story, prostitution displays a much more positive illustration than in most other stories. Men and women such as Li Jia, Sung Fu, and madam portrayed these women as inferior and as seen, Du Tenth had been just another commodity to them. By contrast, the author appears to show an alternate side of courtesans, as women of worthiness opposed to what most people assumed they already knew about the life of courtesans. Feng Meng-long wants to demonstrate that even though courtesans work in a non-respectable occupation doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be respected.

Based on Lessons for Women, women in the China were taught that they were unworthy, unsophisticated, unenlightened and by nature unintelligent. (Strayer

This memoir of Ma Bo’s sent shock waves throughout China when it was published and was even first banned by the Communist Government. This passionate story paints a clear picture for what the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution was really like. Many Chinese living today can attest to similar if not identical ordeals as expressed in Ma Bo’s story. The toils of being a young Red Guard in inner China were experienced by many if not millions. The horrors and atrocities were wide spread throughout the country, not just in Inner Mongolia. The experiences illustrated in Blood Red Sunset uniquely belong to Ma Bo’s entire generation of mislead Chinese. As expressed in the books dedication the Cultural Revolution

Woman deserve to be treated with respect, they deserve equal rights. In this paper, I will provide evidence that gender roles have not changed over the period of time between the writing of The Death of Woman Wang and the dragon’s village. The Death of Woman Wang was written by Jonathan Spence; it was published in 1978. The dragon’s village was written by Yuan-Tsung Chen, it was published in 1980.

The book is a written as conversational memoir between two women, Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong about their experience during the first three decades of Mao’s era. The two women had gone through almost similar position and situations in their life, faced equivalent hardships, their approach or attitude towards those experiences in a completely different manner. This book is meticulous in its historical detail, making it a standout among similar memoirs of twentieth-century China. It also tries to add another dimension of the general perspective of historic events. The events are described in a chronological sequence and with the right amount of proper relevant information so the reader can understand the conversation.

In Jan Wong’s entrancing expose Red China Blues, she details her plight to take part in a system of “harmony and perfection” (12) that was Maoist China. Wong discloses her trials and tribulations over a course of three decades that sees her searching for her roots and her transformation of ideologies that span over two distinctive forms of Communist governments. This tale is so enticing in due part to the events the author encountered that radically changed her very existence and more importantly, her personal quest for self-discovery.

As China faced new international pressures and the change to a communist society, gender relations transformed women from servants of men to full independent workers, who finally became soldiers of the communist state. In Jung Chang’s novel, Wild Swans, the three women – grandmother Yu-Fang, mother Bao-Qin and daughter Jung Chang – exemplify the expected gender roles of each generation. I will argue that Confucian society presented few economic opportunities for women to support

Maxine Kingston in “The Women Warrior” presents a traditional Chinese society that anticipates women not to decide what is best for them all by themselves. Kingston creates a woman who goes beyond this ritual culture constraint and who take up

The theme of “voiceless woman” throughout the book “the woman warrior” is of great importance. Maxine Kingston narrates several stories in which gives clear examples on how woman in her family are diminished and silenced by Chinese culture. The author not only provides a voice for herself but also for other women in her family and in her community that did not had the opportunity to speak out and tell their stories.

Although “homosexuality was never directly criminalized” in China, an “anti-hooliganism law…was often used to persecute or intimidate gay men” (UNDP, 2014). This persecution is shown in the opening of the film, which depicts homosexual men routinely harassed for ‘hooliganism’, stigmatized as “disgusting” and physically abused by the police - physical manifestations of state authority. The effeminate depiction of A Lan in contrast to the masculine Shi Xiaohua further reinforces the unequal power relationship between the persecuted and the persecutor by ascribing the marginalized homosexual subject a “structurally submissive discursive position” vis-à-vis the state’s control (Lim, 2006,