Looking for Chengdu: A Woman's Adventures in China

""Foreign miss! Don't worry about your bag so much. We Chinese have fine things of our own. We don't want your foreign things."" This comment--uttered by an annoyed observer while Gates, a professor of anthropology at Stanford, was waiting in an endless line for bus tickets during one of the trips she took to China between 1987 and 1996--in many ways encapsulates what Gates found: a China as ethnocentric as in the 19th century when the West ""discovered"" it, and similarly poor and inefficient. Gates, whose fluent Mandarin allowed her to make intimate contact with 100 ordinary women, discovers much of daily life in bustling Chengdu (the capital of Sichuan Province), which is a quarter of the size of Beijing. What she has learned of the plight of contemporary Chinese women is that those who choose celibacy and are willing to stitch their way through as spinster seamstresses often make it; so do women who are lucky enough to find jobs in state-run factories--as long as they don't opt for more than one pregnancy. One woman who became pregnant to restore the hormonal imbalance caused by her voluntary abortion of an accidental second pregnancy years earlier--before the one-child-only law--was fired from her state job. She opened a store in quarters shared with her daughter, husband, mother, stepfather, mother-in-law and father-in-law, and now manages cooking for the family, along with the shop. Overall, women's lives are hard, as they have been for most of China's history. Gates's acerbic, down-to-earth journal entries do an excellent job of conveying their shape and texture. (Nov.)