Startling Plight Of China's Leftover Woman Summary

Introduction

Do you believe in equality? Regardless of gender, age, education, religion, etc. all people should be treated the same. However, not everyone is. This literature review shows that. My literature review is on the Gender Matters set of essays. The first essay is The Startling Plight of China’s Leftover Women by Christina Larsen. This essay is about the unmarried, educated women in China and why they are still unmarried. The second essay is The Invisible Migrant Man: Questioning Gender Privileges by Chloe Lewis. This piece is about the struggles and issues that married male migrants face and have faced. The last is Body-Building In Afghanistan by Oliver Broudy. It is about the men who are unemployed in Afghanistan who spend their time working out. My literature review is written in the following order: Larsen’s essay, Broudy’s

essay, and lastly Lewis’. The factor that best ties all three pieces together is the fact that each of the groups they wrote about was oppressed by someone else.
Smarter and More Educated
Larsen’s essay is about the Chinese women who choose to get educated but struggle to marry. Although according to Larsen more boys are born than girls. In China there is a word for women in their late 20s and early 30s that are unmarried. They are called sheng nu, which means leftover lady. For a long time, Chinese people preferred to have boys rather than girls. Girls were seen as less valuable because someday they would marry and leave their families behind while males would stay with their families and take care of their parents.This definitely is not because women are not as smart. More and more women in China are choosing to get educated. This is true in America as well. Women are beginning to want to have their own careers and not just be be housewives. In America, this is not viewed as a problem, but in China it is because the men want housewives. In China, men want someone to cook and clean for them. In America these responsibilities are shared. According to research cited by Larsen the least likely women to marry in China are the most educated. To quote Larsen “China’s educated women increasingly know what they want out of life. But it’s getting harder and harder to find Mr. Right.”(Larsen 288) To me, this means that the women are not struggling to figure out what they want in life, the only struggle finding a spouse. I personally struggle to see how the Chinese have a problem of not marrying. I think that the better educated someone is, the better. So to hear that the uneducated women are struggling to marry, but the uneducated women are finding spouses is bizarre.
Building Bodies and Re-Building Lives
Something else I find strange is body-building. I never really understood why people spend so much time in the gym. Well, not until now. The essay about body-building starts out with a bit of a humorous take which I think really draws in the reader. I feel as though if this essay had a more serious approach to it, it would not have been as often read. After the fall of the Taliban, the number of gyms in Afghanistan increased rapidly. The author of this essay, Broudy, wanted to know why and so he began a journey. Which led to the essay being written. Working out became so common that store shelves became filled with weight-lifting gear and protein powders. Broudy believes that “There is a lot to learn here about what it means to be strong.”(Broudy 311) After reading the article, I strongly agree with Broudy about this. Part of the reason that so many gyms were put up is that there were so many abandoned buildings. Being that the unemployment rate is so high, a lot of men have an excessive amount of time that they can spend in the gyms. Going to the gym becomes a way of life for them. One of the people Broudy interviewed stated that his list of things to do would go as following “1. Build some factories, so Afghans no longer have to work on the street. 2. Building housing, so Afghans won’t have to live in ruins. 3. Build a new university,so Afghans can learn, and better themselves.”(Broudy 313) I think this goes to show that some of the Afghans want nothing more than to busy themselves and better the country.
“It’s an order that begins with rubble.

From the rubble they build a gym. In the gym, they build their bodies. And with those bodies, tuned for strength and achievement, they build a nation. When you have nothing, no plumbing, no electricity, no heat, a glass of milk for breakfast if you're lucky, when all you have are your own two arms, your own two legs-and sometimes not even that-that’s where you begin.”(Broudy 313) Broudy thinks that one of the reasons the Afghan men are so into body-building is because it puts them in control of something: their own body. Another reason is to keep them from doing drugs as Afghanistan supplies a large portion of the world’s opium. One Afghan man says that “Physical fitness is the basis of good character and good character is the basis of success.”(Broudy 317) According to the author, in order to survive in an inhospitable place like Afghanistan, you have to be a fighter, someone that does not ever give up. Broudy asked a young Afghan boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. The little boy said he wanted to be an engineer. The youth in Afghanistan, at least according to Broudy, want to

build.
Marrying to Move
The men in Afghanistan is just trying to survive the best they can. The same can be said about male marriage migrants. “Migration is often depicted and perceived as ‘quintessentially masculine’ activity ‘imbued with masculine attributes, including risk, adventure and courage’”.(Lewis 330) This quote means that historically, migration has always been viewed as a manly thing. Lewis argues against the ideas that are societally pushed upon men who migrate. Men are often seen as privileged and aggressive while women are seen as emotional and vulnerable. In 1968, the Primary Purpose Rule was put in place. This made it so that men had to show their reason for moving was to marry and not just to immigrate. This made male migrants seem untrustworthy. These strict rules for male migrants made power relationships, but unlike most that are controlled by the man in the relationship, these ones are controlled by the female and her family. Lewis says that “The law does not always serve men well either.”(Lewis 334) This article really pointed out something important out to me. Men are assumed to be the ones with privilege, but they are not always the ones with the privilege. I never really thought about this until I came to college. Here women have a privilege when it comes to going out. Men will buy a woman drinks and a woman is more likely to get into a party than a man. Someone almost always has privilege over others, but now I realize it is not in fact always the male.
Conclusion
I think Larsen did a good job at remaining fairly unbiased. It is hard to detect her stance through the piece. Broudy has a personal connection to his essay, which I think works very well for it. Lewis uses multiple sources which helps her to sound more credible. I have found that these three essays bring forth three different but important issues. I agreed with the authors that these were important enough that they needed to be written about. The body-building men in Afghanistan were oppressed by the Taliban, the educate Chinese women by the society of China, and the migrant men by the laws. one of the essays stood apart from the others though. The Afghan men were struggling because of people of the same gender, while the other two groups of people were oppressed by people of the opposite gender, The men from Afghanistan also actively did something to try to fix their problem. They built gyms to build their bodies. Which gave them something to do rather than just sit around all day. I think this is a good idea to not only find a use of their time, but also to build a sense of community. All in all I think this is a good collection of essays for people to read. Not necessarily for the issue of gender, but simply because these essays are good reads and are filled with interesting information.