nowadays no one was treated differently on grounds of gender; but older people insisted that you have to pay attention to how people behave, not what they say. The arrival of a baby boy is greeted with celebration, the birth of a girl with condolence. Official statistics say that newborn boys outnumber girls by 118 to 100 in spite of the fact that, according to my friends, boys cost more. Parents have to start saving to buy a house or a flat for a son from the day of his birth, because no man has a hope of marrying unless he can provide a home for his bride—and girls can afford to be increasingly picky these days, in this as in much else.
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The past played no part in Chang’s conversations with the factory girls who had migrated from their villages to operate the assembly lines that produce the clothes we wear, the computer parts we need, the shoes, hats, handbags, games and gadgets that make the Western world go round. They work up to 13 hours a day, live in cold, dirty, overcrowded dormitories and eat poor food. They have no free time, health insurance, holidays or pension provision beyond the paltry state minimum. Three years ago their average wage was between 500 and 800 yuan—roughly £50-80—a month. Today, a shortage of labour means that young women in their 20s, the elite of the migrant workforce, can earn three times as much, or more. They return to their villages at New Year bearing gifts: anoraks, trainers, sweets and toys for the children, pretty jackets for their mothers. They also inject unprecedented sums of money into the rural economy. Young unmarried women now subsidise their parents, pay for the education of younger brothers and sisters, distribute handouts to elderly relatives, and command growing respect from the village as well as from their families. Some go back home to settle, bringing capital and know-how. A friend told me about her female cousin who returned to farm the land in the village where their grandparents lived in a mud house with paper windows. People like this are beginning to put up glass-and-stone two-storey houses in the country, conspicuous proof of an alien world of development and enterprise. Factory girls may look victimised to outsiders, who take them to be helpless, ill-paid and insecure, easy prey to sexual and financial exploitation, stuck on the lowest and most vulnerable level of society. “But that’s not how they see themselves,” says Chang. In their own eyes they are proud, resourceful, energetic risk-takers at the cutting edge of a social revolution.
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Heads always nodded in my audience when I said that all of us have bones to bury, things that are never talked about in families, things a whole nation might prefer to forget. People in China now dismiss their ugly memories just as people all over Europe dismissed the Holocaust for many years after the war. “Children can’t bear to remember what happened to their parents,” says Xinran, who recorded the life stories of men and women in their 70s and 80s in “China Witness” (2008), the only one of her books that remains banned today even in translation. Buck insisted that our grandparents’ world belongs also to us. The past made us what we are now, and we forget it at our peril. At the end of my last talk at Nanjing university, a student pointed out that burying the bones has a further meaning in China, where the dead are traditionally returned to the earth from which they came so that they may find peace. He might have added that it is only when the past has been acknowledged and accepted that it can finally be laid to rest.