Strong Shanghai girls are proud to be tomboys

By Hu Han Source:Global Times Published: 2015-11-30 18:53:06

How ironic that in a city that has historically prided itself on the slimness of its women, with the form-fitting qipao dress as the most enduring symbol of Shanghai's shapeliness, local girls are now being ridiculed as "tomboys" just because we are more fit than men.

China's General Administration of Sport recently issued the National Physical Fitness Report for 2014, revealing that Shanghai citizens are the fittest in the entire nation, with more women than men meeting national fitness standards.

Following the report, "nühanzi," a derogatory Chinese term to mean tomboy, became a trending topic on Weibo, arousing heated online discussions lead primarily by bitter men and jealous women from other provinces who can't stomach the fact that Shanghai is home to the most fit women.

As a female university student in Shanghai, I am surrounded by lithe young girls. With females on our campus heavily outnumbering males, Shanghai International Studies University's (SISU) student body has some of the city's nicest student bodies. It's something out of a guy's fantasy.

"Should it be normal that we are all weak and vulnerable?" asked my roommate Rachel in our dormitory the other evening as we disrobed before bedtime, revealing her taut torso. While I helped comb Rachel's silken hair and rub lotion on her slender legs, her question got me thinking about nühanzi and how the term is being misused.

Unlike my parents' generation, who were told that "women hold up half of China's sky" and expected Chinese females to be tough, rugged and, well, manly, my generation (post-90s) have been fed a steady diet of soap operas, tasteless romance novels and surgically altered superstars where young Chinese women are portrayed as dainty and helpless.

Thus, our society now has this stereotype of women being fragile, naïve and wholly dependent on men to save us from ourselves. From the moment we come of age, girls in China are told to just sit back and let the men handle everything. The sham institution of marriage in today's China further perpetuates this by telling single women to forget love and just go after a man who can financially provide for us.

And yet, many Chinese women today find Chinese men to be utterly unreliable. Those who marry rich guys wind up being treated like just another possession, and those who marry into poverty are left alone for the better part of a year while their migrant worker husbands are away in some other province. In both instances, women realize that they must face most things in life independently and self-sufficiently. Hence the term nühanzi has emerged to define the feminist consciousness of modern Chinese women.

"Nühanzi can attend a social party wearing an elegant evening gown and high heels but can also roll up her sleeves and knock a nail into a wall," said my other roommate Carrie as we showered together after gym class. She was helping me lather my shampoo when I broached the subject of femininity. Carrie is what I would call a true tomboy and actually takes pride in being a nühanzi. By day she is tough-as-nails, but at night, after slipping into her accentuating qipao, she is transformed Cinderella-like.

And true to her nühanzi spirit, Carrie has left a long trail of rejected suitors across our campus, rebuffing even the most eligible beaux. Not that our school has many; some of the guys at SISU are unusually effeminate and act quite spoiled. My third roommate Natasha calls them "mama's boys," which I suppose is the male opposite of a nühanzi.

Natasha's ire toward mama's boys, and their over-dependency on their parents, is justified. "I've been living away from home even since I entered the university," Natasha told me while we were curled up together under my blanket during a recent cold night. "With no one taking care of me, I have to take care of myself." It's understandable, then, that she would be so derisive toward any male who is unable to do the same.

But it wasn't until last Saturday night, when all the girls in my dorm room were having a pillow fight in our nighties, when it literally hit me in the head that not only are the girls of SISU not a single guy's fantasy - we are a single Chinese man's worst nightmare. Physically and mentally strong, they desire us but can't handle us. So they cower behind their computers and call us nühanzi as an insult, not realizing that it's the ultimate compliment.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Times.

Posted in: TwoCents, Metro Shanghai, Pulse

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