Once Iron Girls

Available in English for the first time, Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women brings together twenty-five essays by seven critically acclaimed writers, whose fiction and poetry have become classics in modern Chinese literature. Poetic, metaphoric, and sometimes playful and satiric, the essays discuss the material reality wherein Chinese women live and function. Reflecting on their experiences under Mao and in post-Maoist China, these essays vividly demonstrate that, despite equality of the sexes being the official position and women working equally demanding jobs as men, women are still considered servile to their male counterparts. Taken together, the collection shows Chinese women struggling for identity by discussing the issues that are important in their lives. Unlike Western feminists, they do not want to be seen as different from their male counterparts. Nor do they want to fall into Chinese terminology of being the same as men. Rather, these essays show that women want to be seen first and foremost as human and then as female. By showcasing the politics and poetics of Chinese women's essays to an English audience, Hui Wu's translations uncover the philosophy and purpose behind the literature of a unique generation of Chinese women, whose life experience finds no parallel in China and certainly not in the West.

Hui Wu is professor of English at the University of Texas-Tyler.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Part 2 Bi Shumin
Chapter 3 A Writer's Fate
Chapter 4 Androgyny
Chapter 5 When Can Women Start Enjoying Life?
Chapter 6 Seeking Amazing Women
Part 7 Fang Fang
Chapter 8 Obedience versus Disobedience
Chapter 9 Women's Eyes
Chapter 10 On Women
Chapter 11 May My Dream Come True
Part 12 Han Xiaohui
Chapter 13 Gender Roles in Commercials
Chapter 14 I Don't Want to Be a Woman
Chapter 15 Three Autumnal Phases in a Day
Chapter 16 Women Don't Cry
Part 17 Hu Xin
Chapter 18 Women's Footprints of Pain
Chapter 19 A Pink Humor
Chapter 20 My View on Women
Part 21 Lu Xing'er
Chapter 22 Women's "Sameness" and "Difference"
Chapter 23 On "Femininity"
Chapter 24 One is Not Born a Woman
Chapter 25 Woman and the Crisis
Part 26 Shu Ting
Chapter 27 The Shadow of the Chaste Temple
Chapter 28 Give Her Some Space
Chapter 29 A Mirror of One's Own
Part 30 Zhang Kangkang
Chapter 31 We Need Two Worlds
Chapter 32 The "Grand" Realm versus the "True" Realm
Chapter 33 A Preface for Myself