Special China Hui'an Woman


Advertisement
China's flag
Asia » China » Fujian » Quanzhou
April 14th 2011
Published: April 14th 2011
Edit Blog Post

This content requires Flash
To view this content, JavaScript must be enabled, and you need the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player.
Download the free Flash Player now!
 Video Playlist:

1: Unique Hui'an Woman Inn 1809 secs
by Evan ZHANG Yaming

Coastal Southeastern China's Hui'an women are catching the world's eye. ZENG Meixia (see the photos), a 29-year-old Hui'an woman, at Dazuo Hui'an Woman Folklore Village where she lives, runs a service center dedicated to providing help for those photographers and painters who are interested in Hui'an women folklore.Only in this year she has already received hundreds of artists , and to her surprise, some of them are from outside mainland China, including David Paskett, the current President of the Royal Watercolor Society of UK.

When talking about Laowai, American Sara Friedman is the one who Hui'an women in Dazuo village won't leave out. She spent much of her time from 1993 to 2002 in Dazou being a visiting scholar to Xiamen University, where she used to chat with the locals even in Hui'an dialect and became a bosom friend of some young Hui'an women so that she often thought she was a total Hui'an woman, of which she has been proud. When she taught at Washington University she also published a book on Hui'an women titled 'Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China '. You may not believe that the first language Sara's daughter heard when she came to the world was not American English but Chinese Mandarin.She wants her daughter to be able to communicate with Hui'an women when they visit Hui'an next time.

Undoubtedly, the distinctive dress style of Hui'an women is the most attractive to photographers and painters. As a doggerel goes, they are feudalistic in the head but democratic in the belly, saving tops but wasting trouses. Traditional Hui'an women wear a yellow bamboo hat with a large piece of flower pattern scarf around more than half their faces, and their blue coats are so short that people can find their navels at a glance but their black pants are baggy so that someone joked that they could simply hold four bedrooms plus one living room. For that, some anthropologists had made efforts to identify the Hui'an woman as some minority ethnic group of China but failed. Hui'an women are Hans, same as China's president Hu and Premier Wen.

More than their appearance, Hui'an women is better known to outside is their industrious and virtuous qualities. Before 1990s almost all men in Hui'an women's town made a living as a fisherman. They went to sea far from their home land even for months one time, so Hui'an women had to shoulder all the responsibilities for raising children, taking care of aged parents, cultivating farmland, doing daily housework, and even arranging house building. This situation got improved as Hui'an grew into the most important stone products production base of China. Many of Hui'an men choose to work at a nearby factory,yet you can also find so many young Hui'an women cutting, polishing and carving rocks in every workshop. They do and earn the same as their husbands. It is, nevertheless, Hui'an women that do most of the housework after coming home from work as their mothers did as a so-called housewife in the past, without any complaints, which they probably believe is their born responsibilities.

Women in China are often said to hold up half the sky by the news media but I'd like to say Hui'an women do more than half at least for their own families. It's the very combination of both traditional spirit and modern spirit makes today's Hui'an women hold an unique fascination for outsiders.

Cousin ZENG Meixia and her Hui'an Woman Photographer Hostel
Shot by Quanzhou Television, China
Please watch the above documentary or just copy the following link and get a more comfortable playing, if you are in mainland China,
http://v.youku.com/v_playlist/f5740381o1p1.html


Additional photos below
Photos: 5, Displayed: 5


Advertisement



Tot: 0.119s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0634s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.1mb