This is an oral history project focusing on elderly women born in 1950s and 1960s in China. We aims to record, remember, and review the old stories with young perspectives.
Welcome to the second episode of my grandaunt’s story. In this episode, we will go through her early adulthood. At the age of 17, she became a sent-down youths in the movement of Down-to-the-Countryside. The very next year, Gaokao (National College Entrance Examination) resumed. Despite how diligent and industrious she was, her poor educational experience makes it impossible to pass that exam. So she spent the next three years working like a peasant. As a girl living in the city, she, for the first time, learnt how to weed and plant. Later she was recruited as a female plasterer.
Early in her sent-down experience, my grandaunt stayed at a peasant couple’s house. Recalling from her experience, these peasant couple were really old because they have their coffins ready. But in fact they were just in their late fifties. It was a custom to get the coffin done before the age of sixty. But from the eyes of a 17-year-old girl, they were quite old. We had a similar observation of my grandaunt’s mother. In a family portrait with the generation of my great-grandmother, grandmother and my mom, the great-grandparent look really old. It feels like they were in their late seventies and eighties. But in fact they were just in their late forties, around the same age as my mom. For women, a big factor involved is how many children they bear and take care of. My great-grandmother give birth to nine children in total. It takes huge energy to give birth and take care of each child.
As my grandaunt mentioned, there was in total three counselors (辅导员) during her stay in the countryside and their main responsibility was to supervise the sent-down youths and to communicate with locals. The second counselor abused his power to sexually harassed and assaulted female sent-down youths. It was not an isolated case. The movie Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl tells a similar story of another girl slept with multiple counselors in the hope that she could go back the city.
Before diving into this specific case, let’s talk about sex in general. There are two kinds of sex: one for reproduction and the other for any purposes unrelated to reproduction. I believe for the sex for reproduction, it’s women who have the say. Women make the decision on which genes to pass on and what men can do is to proves why their genes worth passing on. For the other kind of sex, every party involved must be consensual. But rape belongs to neither of them. Rape is essentially an act of demonstration of one’s power, both to the victim and also to his male peers.
Going back to this case, we will look at it from both counselor’s perspective and sent-down youths’ perspectives. For the counselor, he was given unlimited power over these young people. The way he chose to prove his unrestricted power is to rape the girls. Two factors ought to prevent him from doing so: morality and judicial sanction. Morality is an internal source and obviously he didn’t have much. Judicial sanction, an external source, is so small compared to the harm it caused to the victims and also to the society as a whole. In fact, after the consistent reports from the sent-down youths, he was transferred to another place. We may never know if he was ever punished or if he commit another sexual assault.
For the sent-down youths, it’s impossible for any individual to resist or fight back on their own. The only chance is to unite together. But a learned shame of using any sex-related words prevents potential victims to effectively communicate. For example, my grandaunt used vague words like 不地道“ and “动手动脚” to describe this counselor. Another factor is slut shame. She used “不检点“ and “长得也不怎么样” to describe the victim. For the boys, they were less likely to be direct victims of sexual assaults, but they were still subjective other kinds of power abuse.
Two sets of data are noticeable: 20 male and 10 female sent-down youths and six male workers and only one female worker recruited from Petroleum Bureau. My grandaunt also mentioned that she was recruited as one of the female plasterers in a traditionally men-orientated construction field. A positive interpretation is that women are actively participating in the workforce. But it’s also obvious that opportunities for working women are pretty limited. Such difficult situation for working women still exists today. In the documentary Santa’s Workshop (2004), a owner of a Chinese toy factory admits that female factory workers are actually more preferable, because they are diligent, resilient, and uncomplaining. What’s more important is that they cost less than their male counterparts. “Being preferable” in this context is the same with how factory workers in the developing country are more preferred than their counterparts in the developed country. They are preferred because they work more but cost less. Thus, women in the factory and more generally in the workforce all face this dilemma: work more but earn less.