In her latest collection of short stories set in contemporary China, award-winning writer Yao Emei reveals that, as goes the song, “it’s hard to be a woman”, but not just sometimes: all the time. Alternately macabre, heart-rending and shocking, the four tales comprehensively skewer the aspirational notion of the happy family. No matter how hard Yao’s female characters work to get married, have children and put the rice on the table, they are continually thwarted by their menfolk generating crises which their long-suffering wives, mothers and daughters must clean up.
This is exemplified in the first story, “It Runs in the Family”, where Zichen, the layabout student grandson, is arrested on suspicion of killing his girlfriend by throwing her off a bridge. His aunt, the unnamed narrator, contrives with her sister to get him off the charges. They enlist the help of Deng Shize, the police chief, who was once Sister’s intended but, when faced with the choice of arresting her father for racketeering or marrying Sister, picks the former. They manage to get Zichen committed to a psychiatric hospital instead of jail. This turns out to be a worse punishment as he is medicated into madness. The sisters consider changing the other grandson’s name to a female one in the hope that the bad luck which affects the other men in the family will pass him by.
Unwanted babies are the gruesome topic for the second tale. Li Nan secures a job as a cleaner in the maternity hospital where she gave birth as a means of discovering what happened to her son. Unmarried at the time, she gave him up for adoption after his father shirked any responsibility for them. Her investigations reveal a far more sinister game is in play.
There are similar dark twists in the third and final stories. “Skeletons in the Closet” examines an adulterous affair between the young Xiao Wei and Dr Feng, the husband of her older colleague. When the relationship ends, Xiao Wei realizes she has been taken for a ride—not just in the doctor’s fancy car—and finds a way to wreak revenge. In the last tale, Dad loses the family house in gambling debts and persuades his wife and son to embrace homelessness as a means of saving money and “to escape from being controlled by material things”. While they find ingenious solutions for day-to-day living, a breakdown in the family unit is inevitable and salvation comes only at the ultimate cost.
Despite each story having a different translator, Yao’s bitingly satirical style is maintained throughout. The tone can become poetic, but it is never mawkish; the emotional heft is all the greater because of the economy of the language. A particularly pithy description is of the new red shoes of Xiao Wei’s rival which “carry her lithe, swift steps like wheels of fire.”
Yao occasionally lets her female characters wonder if their woes result from unlucky genes or bad karma, but not for long. Hope which clings to the notion that “the system” will adjudicate fairly is quickly dismissed. Deng Shize, for example, is in a position to help the sisters but “he was part of the system, a system that held many constraints over him.” Parents behaving badly also take a rap but Yao most clearly identifies female disempowerment as the main culprit. In the second story, Li Nan excuses her irresponsible lover simply because he is a man:
No man likes to have children or do housework – that is why they can’t help cheating … She thought men were always on their own path, but that women were all too often dragged down by childbirth and housework and ended up on quite a different track. Or perhaps that the two tracks ran in parallel, and women walked theirs, exhausted and hideously hunched over. Men don’t like the sort of women who spread their legs to try and span two roads!
Yao’s women aren’t entirely blameless. They make bad decisions too, although these are generally prompted by a need to fulfill some kind of societal expectation, such as getting married. Stepping out of line (being unfilial) brings sanction for women which also allows men to get away with their misdeeds, as Xiao Wei realities:
Shame will prevent the young woman from causing trouble for Dr Feng … Perfect, right? An affair that never happened, a scandal that digests itself … Shouldn’t someone step in and stop the cycle?
It’s not all doom and gloom. In Yao’s stories, some men do get their comeuppance, usually by the hands of a woman and not through official sources. Poetic justice is achieved, but then this is fiction after all. Yao leaves unanswered the question of whether anyone will stop the cycle in real life.