Reconstructing Women’s Time for the “Unplanned” in Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters

Abstract

Released at a time when the social costs of the One-Child Policy in China were being reassessed, aspiring documentarian Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters (2021) serves as a poignant commentary on another pressing demand placed upon women in the nation, namely reproducing more children to alleviate labor shortages. As official discourses, led by president Xi Jingping’s speech in 2021, began to revive traditional family values and women’s particular role in the domestic sphere, My Sisters’ taboo-breaking portrayal of a “disintegrated” family that highlights the gendered implications of the policy and China’s modernization becomes particularly timely in reenergizing women’s discontent with domesticity and conventional gender norms. By delving into the undocumented and unmeasurable traumas of abandonment, everyday patriarchal violence, and the unrecognized feminine labor endured by the “unplanned” person, Wang stresses the need to overcome the cruel predictability that characterizes the time of national modernization and cultural amnesia, in which women’s sacrifice appears to be the only conceivable option. My Sisters therefore represents a leap of hope towards envisioning a new future through the untold narrative of a delegitimized time, in memory of all the female victims and survivors of the policy, which can potentially disrupt the gendered violence that History both sells and prescribes.

Notes

1 For more information, see Huang, “Spending A Thousand Hours.”

2 The original short film can be accessed via https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNzM1MDQyNzg0.html?spm=a2hcb.profile.app.5∼5!2 ∼ 5∼5!3 ∼ 5!2 ∼ 5∼5!11∼A.

3 Li, “Equality and Gender Equality,” 73.

4 Wang, “Feminist Struggles,” 122.

5 Quoted from the director’s statement appearing in the screening event poster at HKU. See https://www.hkihss.hku.hk/en/events/screening-of-home-video-a-story-of-birth-20151120/. The opening draws from interviews of Wang Qiong. See Deng, “Being Born.”

6 Gail, Gender of Memory, 24.

7 Ibid., 266.

8 The term evokes Julia Kristeva’s eponymous essay “Women’s Time.”

9 Zhu, Imagining Sisterhood, xiii.

10 Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary, 5.

11 Edwards, “Petitions, Addictions and Dire Situations.”

12 Greenhalgh, Cultivating Global Citizens; Greenhalgh, “Missile Science, Population Science.”

13 See Dikötter, Sex, Culture, and Modernity; Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature.

14 Greenhalgh, Just One Child, 71–72.

15 Ibid., 98.

16 Ibid., 126–65.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 264–65.

19 Wang, “Feminist Struggles,” 131–32.

20 Greenhalgh and Winckler, Governing China’s Population, 254.

21 Qian, New Articles on Population, 132.

22 Wang, Outsourced Children, 6.

23 Tan, “Changing Mindsets,” 8.

24 Cai, “Missing Girls or Hidden Girls?,” 802.

25 Johnson, Wanting a Daughter, 38.

26 Zhang and Zhang, “Estimates of Sex-Selective Abortion,” 48–51.

27 Li, Zhu and Feldman, “Gender Differences,” 83–109.

28 Xi, Civilized Reproduction.

29 Greenhalgh, “Planned Births,” 186.

30 Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary, 30–31.

31 Greenhalgh and Winckler, Governing China’s Population, 247.

32 Kristeva, “Women’s Time.”

33 Wang Qiong 王琼, director, Jia ting lu xiang 家庭录像 (All About My Sisters), Wang Qiong Studios, 2021, 2 hr., 55 min., timestamp 1: 26:50–1:29:00.

34 Ibid.

35 Wang, “Interview with MFA June Wang (’22)” 家庭录像.

36 Anagnost, National Past-Times, 17.

37 Rofel, Other Modernities, 14.

38 Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 92.

39 Chen, “Speaking Nearby,” 87.

40 For example, It’s a Girl: The Three Deadliest Words in the World (2012) by Evan Grae Davis and One Child Nation by Nanfu Wang and Lynn Zhang. For a critique of the latter, see Li, Greenhalgh and Thornber, “What a Picture of China’s One-Child Policy Leaves Out.”

41 Robinson, “From ‘Public’ to ‘Private.’”

42 Berry and Rofel, “Introduction,” 138.

43 Wang, “The Amateur’s Lightning Rod,” 20.

44 Ibid., 24.

45 Edwards, “Petitions, Addictions and Dire Situations.”

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., 69.

49 Edwards, “Every Official Knows.”

50 Ibid.

51 Sniadecki, “The Cruelty of the Social,” 59–60.

52 Wang, “I Am One of Them,” 226.

53 Dong, “The Crisis of Social Reproduction,” 14.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yawen Li

Yawen Li is a doctoral candidate in English and comparative literature at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. Her PhD research proposes China’s reform as a renewed historical starting point for rethinking issues of postcoloniality and postsocialist futures within the cultural context of the Global South. Yawen’s public-facing and academic articles in Chinese and English have appeared in Jiemian News, The Paper, Made in China, Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Asian Interactions, COVID-19 in International Media (2021), and in the forthcoming The Palgrave Companion to Literature and Memory.