As typists and secretaries

The morning session dealt with the issue of gender as we are likely to encounter it during our service. We were told that in general, single female volunteers seem to have it more difficult than male volunteers. One of the female volunteers who has been here a year related how although her male counterpart at their site is lousy at Chinese while she is quite good, when they go out, people in general say they cannot understand her Chinese but complement her companion's. And in general males are taken more seriously. That is just a fact on the ground to deal with. On the other hand, the females are not pressured to drink at banquets the way males are. In general, there seems to be very specific gender roles. We had our Chinese teachers serve as a panel to answer some questions about gender in China. When someone asked whether a man could engage in traditionally female activities while still maintaining his respect as a man, they agreed that while he could do things like cook, embrodiery was definitely out of the question. And when we enquired whether women were involved in politics the answer, given without the least bit of irony was, "Yes, as typists and secretaries." When was asked the panel of our Chinese language teachers whether a woman can be successful in business or politics, they said yes she could, but she would probably have to sacrifice her family. As to why the same was not true of men they only responded that the woman needed to take care of the family.
Of course as in many countries where there is public gender discrepancies women here often assert their power in private, and in general women can be said to be the true force in many households. Of course, no country is without gender discrepancies; they simply assert themselves in different ways, and are sometimes more overt and sometimes less overt. I haven't made a close study of these things so far, but it will definitely be something to keep my eye on during my time over here.

And speaking of my time over here, the second half of our morning session dealt with the concept of mental health and the volunteers state of mind. There are predictable highs and lows in one's service, we are told, and at some time or other during one's first six months almost everyone will begin to wonder what the hell one is doing here. This is true regardless of your location. Supposedly if you can make it through the first six months, you generally make it through the rest of your service.

In the afternoon, instead of language class we did a mock run of going to the bus or train station from which we have to depart on Monday. We were just told the name of the station and nothing about how to get there and were just supposed to ask for directions. Because I am the only one who is not taking a bus or train out of town, I could go with whichever group I wanted and chose the group that was going to the bus station for busses to Chongqing, since the few people I will probably visit are in Chongqing. Its about a four hour bus ride and I will probably head up there about one weekend a month I bet. On the other side of this equation is the fact that I am the only one of our group staying in Chengdu so I will probably be pretty popular since people will invariably for one reason or another be coming back to Chengdu, especially for medical stuff (one bright side of staying in Chengdu in that this is where the Peace Corps medical facillity is).