The patriotic education of China: Military women’s social stigma and sexual suffering in revolution era

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Notes

1 For confidential reasons, Chen Guang and all other names used in this paper are pseudonyms.

2 Deeply influenced by the Chinese cosmological account of the “complementary balance” of life (see Chu 2010), Chinese women—especially for those elderly women who were born in wartime and had gone through many unpredictable things—were inclined to dwell upon the “cause-and-effect cycle” (karma) that leads people’s life to suffering or happiness at different times for different reasons, including and especially the reasons related to a person’s previous life and/or next life.

3 The narrator Zhang-Gen (fictitious name), born in 1931 in Fujian Province, was the only daughter in a peasant family. When she was 15 years old, she coincidently met a soldier on the street, and then the man followed her back home. On the very next day, this soldier came to her family again and proposed to marry her. Because her parents did not dare to refuse the demand from “a man in uniform,” they agreed to this marriage arrangement.

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Szu-Nuo Chou

Szu-Nuo Chou is a Ph.D. candidate in Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at University of Ottawa. She spent her childhood in a Chinese ethnic enclave in Taiwan, where only military personnel and civil war refugees could reside. This experience has brought out her interests into the specificity of the Chinese wartime im/migrants, and grounded her research on diasporic women wartime memories and exile experiences. Szu-Nuo has been trained as an applied anthropologist, and interested in culture studies, ethnography, feminist methodology, and Chinese family networks.