Last September, the death of Yang Huanyi marked the end of a secret sisterhood among the Yao minority people of Guangxi province. They had their own script, based on the dots and curves of embroidery, their own plaintive literature of mutual support, and haunting music. Yang, whose last years were captured in a documentary, Nushu: A Hidden Language of Women in China, was a merry sprite whose memories were full of other women, not men. At a showing in Hong Kong last week, the audience, mostly women, cheered and wept.
To some men, such reactions may say that women merely relish the sense of being victims, despite huge strides towards gender equality made over the last generation. Hong Kong's roster of successful and influential women - from Anson Chan Fang On-sang, Christine Loh Kung-wai and Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai in public life to Marjorie Yang Mun-tak and Laura Cha Shih May-lung in business and finance - is so long that it is hard to argue that men do not take women seriously here.
The evidence that Hong Kong is in the midst of a boom in women's power is compelling. According to the government-sponsored Women's Commission, between 1986 and 2003, the female labour force increased by 552,500, more than twice the rise of 248,600 male workers over the same period. Young Hong Kong women, aged 15 to 24, have a higher literacy rate than men. Despite a wage gap of nearly 20 per cent between men and women, at the Richard Ivey School of Business, women now make up 48 per cent of students. And if Hong Kong cannot rival the percentage of women in decision-making positions of such paragons as Denmark (41 per cent) and Sweden (43 per cent), the women in politics in Hong Kong often seem a cut above the men, in terms of their commitment, values and charisma.
So why is it that Hong Kong women are so moved by the story of nushu?? One reason is that they resonate with the concept of ingenuity in the face of oppression. The Yao script was invented because women were not allowed to learn nanshu, or man's script, another word for Han Chinese characters. Such prohibitions were part of systematic restrictions that still prevail in every region of the world, according to the World Bank. The greatest gaps are in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, yet women in wealthy societies such as Hong Kong continue to face limitations on their legal, social and economic rights. Social pressure and weak legal support remain a constant drag.
The Equal Opportunities Commission, less than 10 years old, has no statutory powers, and under its current, weak leadership, has abandoned the caseload that once made it a thorn in the government's side. Advertising and the media relentlessly celebrate the tai tai ideal of luxuriously pampered females whose status derives from their husband's or father's wealth.
Hong Kong women continue to fight the conditioning of a patriarchal Confucian culture. A case in point: in January, after Harvard president Larry Summers mused in public about women's lack of biological aptitude for the hard sciences, the uproar nearly cost the former US treasury secretary his job. He has since tried to present himself as a 'new kind of man', according to The New York Times.
