❀ Main Page
❀ Three Generations
❀ Fan Yusu Decided to Live Off a Rich Man
❀ Chinese Migrant Workers: Staging 1965’s Shanghai in 2017’s Picun
❀ Chinese Queer Feminist Poetic Intimacies: A Translation Play
❀ Daybreak
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“Fan Yusu Decided to Live Off a Rich Man” is a response to Hui Faye Xiao’s “‘I Am Fan Yusu’: Baomu Writing and Grassroots Feminism against the Postsocialist Patriarchy” (Chapter 10) from Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, co-edited by Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao.
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On a Friday afternoon in early March 2023, the twenty-two-year-old woman I had been sponsoring for eight years told me she was getting married. I remember feeling momentarily lost in thought when I received the message, to the point that my boss called my name three times before I realised someone was speaking to me. It then took me more than twenty minutes to finish handing over the minutes of the morning meeting and the outline for the next report to my visibly displeased supervisor. Even now, when I have just unlocked my phone, I doubted whether I had read the WeChat message. The rows of characters looked like a grey mist that drifted past my eyes, and after the more immediate reality disrupted them, they seemed to have never existed in the first place. But unfortunately, the message was real.
I began sponsoring Fan Yusu when I graduated from university and started my first job. I was twenty-two at the time, her age now. Eight years later, I myself hadn’t even yet approached the threshold of marriage, but the girl who had come from Xiangyang, Hubei province to Beijing as a first-year junior high school student and whom I had been sponsoring sent me an electronic invitation to her wedding. I walked to the stairwell and called Fan Yusu.
This was the first time in eight years that I had managed to reach her. At the beginning, she was too young to have or afford a phone. Later, when she got into university, she used her scholarship money and the money I sponsored her to buy an outdated second-hand smartphone. I taught her to go to the mobile business office in town 44 miles away from the village where she lived to get a phone card and WeChat, and that’s how we became WeChat friends.
In those eight years, I hardly ever contacted her. I was her sponsor, but I had no intention of being her mentor in life. I didn’t want her to follow my worldview just because she benefited from me. I wanted to do a good deed for God, but I didn’t want to be the Bible. I would transfer the tuition fees to her card in advance every quarter, and I would receive a blessing message from her on Chinese Festivals. I thought that would be the only and best intersection of our lives.
I forgot how the conversation started or ended that day. I only remembered a plain and slightly hoarse female voice saying to me, “Thank you so much for sponsoring me all these years. I’m sorry I don’t have a good family background, and I’ve suffered a lot. The school I graduated from is also very ordinary. I know my biggest advantage is my good looks and youth, and marriage is a second chance at life. This man is the one who can change my destiny. He is thirteen years older than me and has very good financial conditions. His family is well-off, and he himself is a wealthy businessman. He’s eager to have children, and I’m now thinking of getting pregnant and having a few children as soon as possible.” And with that, Fan Yusu decided to go after a rich older man.
After hanging up the phone, I looked blankly at the cloudy Beijing sky, from which a light mist hung, outside the stairwell window. After the tremendous shock, my mind was blank with neither disappointment nor anger, only a sense of helplessness and faint absurdity. I never imagined myself becoming a philanthropist or a great sacrificer, but perhaps everyone who has been using half of their salary to support impoverished female students since graduating from university has an idealistic dream in their hearts. I rarely tell acquaintances about this small thing that I could have bragged about, but I never thought that this unilateral effort would result in such an outcome.
I posted this story on a social media platform—Red.
To my surprise, when I woke up the following morning, the article had received nearly five thousand comments. Most were indignant on my behalf, feeling that my sincerity had been wasted. They, like me, were both disappointed and angry. They said:
“The higher education degree is just a dowry she bought for herself.”
“Girl helps girl for eight years has now transformed into a spoiled wife (Jiaoqi).”
“Do you believe that she will beg for sons (Jie nanbao) on Little Red Book after she gets married?”
“Can’t you make her pay your money back?”
“Anger at her misfortune, sadness at her lack of struggle.”
“Can truly rich men find impoverished students attractive? Don’t be ridiculous!”
“How many rural girls who want to study have no money to go to university? She, on the other hand, graduated seamlessly and became a full-time housewife.”
Within the ten minutes when I brushed my teeth and washed my face, there were hundreds more similar comments under the post I wrote out of a whim. Because I was afraid she would see this article, I hastily deleted it.
I decided to attend her wedding.
In the phone call, I had already declined her invitation, so I still wasn’t planning to “attend” the ceremony. We had never met in person, and we were even strangers to each other’s voices. Her hoarse voice was not quite the same as the voice of the girl I had imagined many times in my spare time. Our relationship was still far from attending her “posh” wedding. But I wanted to see it for myself.
I don’t know if it was out of anger or a grudge. I didn’t want this to become a regret that I would never want to mention again in my life. Although I didn’t think I could get any compensation from peeking at this wedding, I still wanted to go and see. To see the girl I had supported for eight years, and the older man who wanted her to get pregnant and have children as soon as possible. I didn’t plan to let her find out I was there; I just wanted to see the bride’s face and the groom’s demeanour at the door. Perhaps I could find some evidence of her happiness from her face under the white veil.
It was another afternoon, and I took the Subway to the Bulgari Hotel on the other side of Beijing, carrying a wedding gift which was equal to half a year of her tuition fees, and dressed in a relatively decent outfit. Only by dressing like a guest at a wedding could my spying not attract attention, and I could escape “legitimately” if I was accidentally discovered by anyone. As an office worker in Beijing, I had never set foot in a luxury hotel, so I couldn’t guess where the banquet hall might be after entering the venue. I awkwardly approached a staff member in the lobby and asked her where the wedding reception was. She looked slightly surprised and said, “Madam, we are not hosting any wedding today. Could it be that you have got the date wrong?” I opened the invitation on my phone, which clearly stated the date, time, and location of the wedding, and showed it to her. However, she checked the wedding schedule and informed me that they had never arranged a wedding for Miss Fan Yusu.
I was shocked and tried to figure out what was going on. I couldn’t help but wonder: Did Fan Yusuo get abandoned by that “financially free” man? Did he find a younger, prettier girl who could give him more children? Or did Fan Yusuo’s impoverished family make the man feel that it went against the “traditional” principle of matching families?
I called her for the second time.
It took a long time for her to answer the phone, and there was obvious awkwardness and evasion in her voice. I asked her why the wedding was not going ahead. She hesitated for a moment and said: There never was a wedding.
This was a situation I had never thought of.
Fan Yusu’s voice became noticeably relaxed, and she said, “Sister, are you in Beijing? Let’s meet up and talk.”
I took the Subway all the way back to Changping, and when I got out of the station, the sky was pitch-black. That’s how I met Fan Yusu for the first time, in a McDonald’s.
The real Fan Yusu looked like the opposite of a spoiled wife. She wasn’t fair-skinned, petite, or thin. Her wrinkled hands resting on the McDonald’s table reminded me of my grandmother who had worked the fields her entire life. She was wearing a yellowing warm-coloured sweater and Adidas sweatpants, with a short student-like ponytail and no glasses. Her chair was draped with a pink long down jacket with the collar and cuffs fraying.
I didn’t know how to start the conversation, and she sensed my discomfort, so she made the opening gambit: “Sister, I never got married. The wedding was a lie. I thought you wouldn’t come, so I made an electronic invitation and found a male classmate to pose as my fiancé. I thought you would scold me and make me pay you back, and we would never speak again after you found out. I really didn’t expect you to attend the wedding.”
She was right. If I could accept it, I wouldn’t have shown up at the wedding.
“Well, Sister, since we are both here, I won’t hide it from you. I’m doing housekeeping now, you know, like a cleaning lady, cleaning people’s houses. My employer is a big tycoon who made it onto the Hurun Rich List. He bought a big villa in the Aobei area for his mistress, the “little” wife. The main wife lives in Fanhai. They are not too far apart but enough for the two households to be separated. The mistress has a son and a daughter. The tycoon employs a martial arts coach who graduated from Shaolin for the son, and he set up a 300-square-metre area with plum-blossom poles, sandbags, and parallel bars in the office building he built, just for the illegitimate son to use. He also employs a top student from Renmin University of China, with full room and board, as the children’s private tutor. Apart from teaching the children lessons, the tutor is responsible for picking them up and dropping them off them places, such as taking them to learn martial arts. I have been doing farm work since I was very young, and have been responsible for tidying up the village’s houses since elementary school. Being hardworking and resilient, I was allowed to work full-time after I finished college without stealing or being dishonest. The female employer is twenty-five years younger than my employer. Sometimes when I work the night shift, I would come across her sitting on the couch, exquisitely made-up, waiting for her “husband” to come home. Her figure is more enchanting than a model’s, and her face is more beautiful than that of the actress Fan Bingbing. However, she still flatters my employer intentionally, like an empress in a palace drama, sacrificing her dignity and begging for food. Perhaps her past life was already filled with enough hardship, and she didn’t want to struggle anymore. As for me, the lady of the house seemed quite satisfied with me as I appeared average-looking, strong, and honest. The fortune teller said that Madam and old cleaners are incompatible, so all of their servants are young, plain-looking girls from the countryside. In Madam’s household, my main responsibility is to clean the children’s rooms, wipe the tables and cabinets, and disinfect the entire house once a month using child-friendly disinfectant. I use the bottle with French writing to mop the floor and the German one to clean the table. Madam had not been to university, but the fortune teller had said that she needed a housekeeper who had received higher education to ensure the children’s room would have good fengshui/fortune. Being rich, she pays me generously, at least more than what I would have earned from a regular job in Beijing after graduating from college.
“I lied to you because I did not want you to know that the female university student whom you supported from the village to Beijing ended up becoming a housekeeper, cleaning someone else’s toilet every day. In the end, it was the hard work and experience that I accumulated from doing tough jobs in the village that helped me find a passable job in Beijing. Madam kept me because she noticed that I did not have the spoiled experience of a city child. When they saw my hands, they knew that I was capable of doing all the cleaning. Sometimes, when I am cleaning Madam’s children’s room, I remember the knowledge that I accumulated in college, and how my professors would stand on the podium of the lecture hall giving speeches about precious findings and human ideals. It seems like I was dreaming in that tiny maid’s room of only five square metres squared. When I open my eyes, I feel like I am a migrant worker from Xiangyang who never attended school and who came to Beijing to try her luck. Those days when I organised book clubs on the grassy field of the university campus seem like a fairy tale.”
She told me about her cautious crush during college, which began when the boy discreetly alerted her to a stain on her trousers from her period, and ended when she found out that the boy’s parents were famous hosts on China Central Television. She told me that her favorite book in college was To Kill a Mockingbird and her favorite movie was Love Letter by Japanese director Shunji Iwai. She said she also read poems by feminist poets in college and read Ueno Chizuko’s Misogyny with her roommates.
She told me about her hometown, her mother, and her siblings. The mountain behind her village, and the river that flowed in front of her cabin.
“I have memories of my father as a shadow of a tree. He was there, but he was useless. My father didn’t talk much, and he was in poor health, so he couldn’t do any physical labour. With five kids in the house, my mother had to support us all on her own.
“From a young age, my older brother had a strong desire to learn, but he wasn’t naturally gifted academically. He stayed up late studying every night, but failed to get into college after a year of trying. He tried again the following year, but still didn’t get in. People in our village referred to people like my older brother as “crazy for literature”, and said they wouldn’t be able to find a spouse. But we had a strong mother who could turn black into white and make my brother’s weaknesses seem like strengths. With our mother’s imposing presence, our impoverished family managed to find a plain and honest wife for my older brother, who was like a springtime locust tree in bloom.
“Five months after the elder sister was born, she developed a high fever and contracted meningitis. At the time, transport was difficult, so Mother had her fleet-footed uncle carry the eldest sister to the central hospital in Xiangyang City, 40 miles away. They stayed in the hospital, but the sister’s illness could not be cured. Though the fever subsided, the girl became mentally disabled. She was rendered foolish, but Mother never gave up hope. Mother believed that she could change this reality, placing her faith in Western medicine, Chinese medicine, and miracle healers, never abandoning even the most remote chance. There were often people coming to the house to report that someone had become a saint or a spirit in some far-off place. Mother would then have Father take the elder sister to obtain talismans and drink holy water. They burned the talismans into ashes and mixed them with the holy water, then drank it down into the eldest sister’s belly. Hope after hope, disappointment after disappointment. Mother never gave up. For twenty years, Mother sought every possible cure and remedy for my eldest sister’s illness, but she could not be cured. In the year the elder sister turned twenty, she had another high fever that could not be treated, and she died.
“As the little sister grew up, she became a Chinese teacher at a rural middle school. While she taught, her talented boyfriend went to Shanghai in search of a better future. The little sister, who had ten thousand ancient poetry and literature memory cards in her mind, said angrily, ‘Only someone who doesn’t know a single word could be poetic’. She then hastily married an illiterate man from the northeast. Within just five or six years of being married, she gave birth to two daughters. The father’s business began to fail, and he started drinking heavily and abusing his family. The little sister could not bear the violence any longer and decided to take her two children back to her hometown of Xiangyang for help. The man did not try to find them. Later, it was said that he went from Manchuria to Russia and was probably lying drunk on a Moscow street now. The little sister left the abusive alcoholic and returned with her two daughters to Xiangyang. Mother did not show any surprise; she just said calmly, ‘Don’t be afraid’. But immediately, our elder brother treated her like a plague and urged her to leave quickly so as not to cause him any trouble. According to the traditional values of Xiangyang’s rural areas, adult daughters are like water thrown out of a bucket and have no right to their mother’s help. Mother was strong, but she was far from powerful enough to oppose the Three Obediences and the Five Virtues that had existed in China for five thousand years.
“Our younger brother, who had become very successful, developed a fondness for gambling at the age of thirty. Perhaps because of his good fortune in officialdom, he lost every time he gambled. To repay his debts, the young man borrowed money at high interest rates. Soon, he was unable to repay the debts and spent his days evading and hiding from his creditors. Eventually, he was stripped of his official position.”
Fan Yusu said that when she doesn’t work the night shift, she stays in Picun village, where the landlord is the former village committee secretary, equivalent to the president who has been overthrown. She shares a room with another girl, and when the other girl is at work, she sleeps, while Fan Yusu goes out to cleans the room when the girl returns home. She said that when she first arrived in Picun, she was kept awake every night by the roaring planes overhead, but now she can’t even hear the sound of their engines. She marvelled at the amazing ability of the human anatomy to gradually filter out such loud noise.
She asked me if she happened to be as beautiful as the mistress she worked for, would she go after rich men? She said that the mistress not only looked beautiful, but also did yoga went to the gym every day, had a full-body and facial treatment once a week, and hair and nail care every two weeks. A makeup artist would come regularly to her house and try on makeup and clothes for the mistress. She said that people in her village were never able to pursue wealthy men, because as soon as the hand that helped her find a job appeared, she could read both satisfaction and disgust in the eyes of those upper-class people.
She said, “Sis, you’re a city person. Can you teach me? Besides chasing after rich men, is there any other way to buy a better electric wheelchair for my mother who is not yet sixty years old but can only hobble with a crutch, to bring my father who has been bedridden for six years to a top hospital in Beijing for treatment, or to bring my sister who has been homeless for five years with her two children to Beijing for school?”
In a McDonald’s in Changping District, Beijing, a plain-looking girl with her back facing the busy street threw a question bigger than life to me. I, a small and insignificant person, looked at the capital city illuminated by the first lights of night, and continued my eternal silence since entering the door.
When I got home, I saw Fanyu Su had posted in her empty WeChat moment: “My life is a book that I cannot bear to read to the end, and fate has bound me in the clumsiest way.”
How to cite: Liu, Siyu. “Fan Yusu Decided to Live Off a Rich Man.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 Jul. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/07/18/siyu-liu.
Siyu Liu is a senior undergraduate student at Wuhan University, majoring in philosophy. With a sustained passion for both feminist philosophy, female history in China, creative writing, and documentary production, she is exploring the possibility of combining philosophical thought experiments with female suffering and struggles, translating obscure theories to familiar gendered occasions. She focuses on the underprivileged, underrepresented, and rural women’s life and hopes that through her efforts in academia, feminist studies will hear more of those marginalised voices.
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