Author Leta Hong Fincher explains how term ‘leftover women’ is Chinese propaganda

Songs and pompoms Both my parents were China scholars. My mother, who is Chinese American, is a linguist, and my father, who was white American, was a historian. When I was six, they both got tenure at the Australian National University, so we moved to Canberra, where I spent most of my childhood. My mother spoke Mandarin at home, so when I went on to study Chinese at university, I had a huge advantage.

We made many trips to China, starting in the early 1970s. You couldn’t travel independently then, but a delegation of Chinese Americans was invited to visit after the secret talks between Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai that paved the way for Richard Nixon’s visit. My mother got a place on that trip and brought me with her. I was very young, but I still have isolated memories of little children with their cheeks painted red, waving pompoms and chanting songs under big banners saying, “Welcome, aunties and uncles!”

Mud huts and trains I vividly remember a visit to my mother’s ancestral village, outside Xiamen, in 1979. Many people there were named Hong, like us, but they lived in mud huts and were malnourished and stunted. I was 11 and I towered over everybody. But with that excep­tion, I didn’t see the real suffering. People were extremely friendly, and I always felt welcomed and happy there. I loved taking the train – it was such an adventure, and the rice paddies I could see from the window were beautiful. I obviously had quite a romanticised vision of the country.

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Escaping SARS I did a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies at Harvard, and a master’s at Stanford, and then decided to become a journalist. After a few years, I got a job for Radio Free Asia in Hong Kong, helping to launch their Mandarin language service and reporting on the run up to the handover. Later I moved to Beijing, to become a correspondent for Voice of America. I met my husband, the journalist Michael Forsythe, there, and was pregnant when Sars broke out. It was clear that the government had been covering up the death toll, so I flew to Washington DC to have my baby and we decided to stay there.

His property Several years later we returned to Beijing. I spent nine months waiting for my journalist’s visa but it never came, so I enrolled to do a PhD in the department of sociology at Tsinghua University – the first American to do so. I studied the sociology of work and started to look into Beijing’s real estate frenzy. We lived downtown and on every street corner there were young real estate agents holding up signs for apartments. I conducted interviews and quickly learned that the home purchasing phenomenon is very gendered. Parents tend to buy homes for their sons but not for their daughters, and women often contribute to down payments but don’t put their names on the property deeds. I chose this as the focus of my PhD and later decided to write a book about it.