Women in Chinatown

from Getting Together (circa 1972); Chinese-American Workers: Past & Present

The following article was written by an Asian sister who worked in the I Wor Kuen Free Health Clinic in New York The article is based both on her experience as a child and adolescent growing up in New York Chinatown and on her contact with other working class women while working at the Clinic.

Women have been in a lower position than men in most societies for thousands of years. Women took the role of taking care of the home and raising the children while men took the role of doing most of the heavy labor and bringing home the food. This has continued right into present-day capitalist society because the rulers benefit by keeping women, half the population, in a position of near slavery. In Goldflower's Story (see back issues of Getting Together), Goldflower talked about how women in feudal China were bought like slaves for their husband's household, and then were forced to put in long hours in the fields. This is a lot like women's position here in Chinatown where women do all the household and child-raising work and at the same time have to hold down sweatshop jobs at rock bottom wages.

Through our Free Health Clinic we have come into contact with women who told us about the oppression that women face everyday. One woman we know told us her daily schedule. She gets up around 7 a.m. and feeds the family, the rushes the kids to school. Before, when the children were not old enough to go to school, she took them to the sweatshop, hoping there will be some work for her. On a long day, she'll work till lunch time and then run home to feed the kids lunch. Then she runs back to work till 3 p.m., picks up the kids, and takes them to Chinese school, after which she proceeds to work a couple more hours. Then she goes shopping, picks up the kids from Chinese school, goes home to cook dinner and to help the kids with school work. She barely makes enough money to help clothe the children and to give them nickels and dimes to spend for snacks and school supplies, though her work is very hard and her hours are long. Even with both herself and her husband working, the family had to get food stamps to survive. She, and the many mothers her in Chinatown, are obvious victims of a society that is based only on making money for the rich and not on serving the people's needs.

Another women we know who has been bringing her child to I Wor Kuen for tutoring, told us about her home life. She is a quiet woman with many fears, especially of her husband's temper. One day she came in with a cast on her arm and we asked her what happened. She told us: "My husband comes home from work at 4 a.m. every night and gets me out of bed and beats me. I try to hide the ugly bruises from the children, but this time he came home from work drunk and hit me so hard that he broke my arm. I have thought of running away many times, but h says he'll follow me wherever I go and kill me if I leave him. I can't do anything about it. I just make the best of it for the children; they are all I have right now." Another woman told us that her husband even beats her in front of her family friends.

This is a common nightmare existence for many married women. Usually a man waits till after marriage before he starts beating his wife because that's when the society gives the go-ahead signal for men to take out their pressures on their wives.

Wife-beating is one of men's only socially acceptable outlets for their frustrations; it makes women the victims of men's everyday tensions resulting from working life in America. It is considered "normal social behavior" when women take the beatings and men get rid of tensions that build up from trying to make a living in this society.

One friend of ours is 19 now and has two children already. She dropped out of high school to get married so as to get out of her parents' house. She wound up tied down to her own house and kids and had to cut herself off from her old friends and social life. She went to night school to get her high school diploma, and wanted to go on to college part time. But her husband told her that a wife's place is in the home.

One of the high school girls said: "My parents think the old way. They want me to get good grades in school, come home early and help around the house. That's all. My father is only happy when I am home all the time. But you should see my house; there's nothing to do there. So I come out or sneak out to Chinatown to hang around and meet my friends to see a movie or something. And now my parents say I am going bad. They say I don't listen to them anymore. But it's so hard for me to tell them I don't want to live in a cage all my life."

Another of our friends said, "I got a bad reputation in Chinatown. My parents' friends say I am wild because I go out with too many boys and hang around the streets with my friends. I don't see anything wrong with that. Even my boyfriend gives me the third degree whenever I want to go somewhere I feel he has the right to do what he wants I don t want him to feel trapped. But I think that girls should have the same rights as boys to do what we want."

We feel the need to change this urgent situation, by encouraging women to organize each other We are half the population à we can shake the foundations of our oppression and do our part to reorder American society to meet the needs of all our people We can begin by supporting other women through taking care of each other s welfare