Girlhood Page 11

  The days Ruksar describes all exist within a broader context of what life in India is like for girls and young women. Since 2012, when the gang rape of a college student in Delhi made international headlines and sparked outrage, news from India has painted a dark and troubling picture of their lives.

  Widespread violence against women and girls can have an impact on girls’ daily lives. One study found that less than half of the girls living in cities in India said they could go out to meet friends, because of safety concerns.89 The same study found that a significant percentage of girls in the country felt unsafe taking public transportation, going to the movies, or going out to play.

  In this country of one billion people, statistics about the types of violence girls and women face are staggering. About 39,000 rapes were reported to police in 2016, more than 19,000 of those involving children.90 And one study found only one percent of sexual assaults are reported, because women are afraid to go to police.91

  But this isn’t the only type of violence women and girls in the country are likely to face. According to one study, there are 21 million “unwanted” girls in the country—girls whose parents wanted sons, not daughters. These girls will likely have fewer educational opportunities and poorer nutrition than their brothers.92

  The same study found that there are a total of 63 million “missing” women in the entire population of India. This number includes the two million each year who don’t literally go missing, but who instead face neglect and disease, as well as female fetuses that are aborted because of a preference for boys over girls.93 ◊

  Translated from Hindi

  March 27, 2019

  7 a.m.—I woke up and made breakfast. I have a meeting in the school today so I have to finish all my work early.

  9:30 a.m.—I have cooked the food and am now preparing for the meeting. People from outside are going to come so I am a little nervous but also excited as they will be good people.

  10 a.m.—Now I am going to get the kids and go for the meeting.

  1 p.m.—I am back home. I really enjoyed meeting those people and they did as well they said. I also felt a little bad as some of the children could not speak but doesn’t matter. Now I am going to go eat.

  2 p.m.—I am taking 4 children to the school to get their admission forms and get them admitted to school.

  2:30 p.m.—We could not get the admission forms. They have called us [back on] Friday. I will go later with the kids. Today my mom has gone to the village. I am missing her.

  3 p.m.—Going to study now.

  4:30 p.m.—I am done studying for today. I was supposed to go to a friend’s house. They have a dinner at their place. All my friends are there. I could not go as Ammi [Mother] didn’t let me. I am feeling very bad and am crying.

  7 p.m.—Going to teach the kids.

  9 p.m.—The kids have left. I am going to cook food.

  10:20 p.m.—Going to eat dinner.

  11 p.m.—Going to sleep. I am still crying.

  April 2, 2019

  Today I woke up at 5 a.m. I have to do all the work early today as I have to make papad [a thin crispy food] later, so going to start cooking.

  8:30 a.m.—Food is ready, I will go make papad.

  11 a.m.—The papad are ready so I will go to work for a while.

  12 noon—Going to teach for a while.

  1:30 p.m.—Going to serve food now.

  2 p.m.—Going to wash clothes now.

  3:10 p.m.—Clothes are washed. Going to study.

  5 p.m.—I am done studying. My sister has washed the utensils. Going to cook dinner.

  7 p.m.—The kids have come to study. A few guests are coming over later.

  8:30 p.m.—I have let the kids go. The guests are here.

  10 p.m.—The guests have left so I will eat now.

  10:30 p.m.—There is a [religious] function here today. I am going there. The priest is here giving a speech. Women are seated in a separate section. Everyone is seated. Snacks are served.

  3:15 a.m.—Now we are going home. Today we have to start fasting for Ramadan* so I will go make tea for myself as I cannot eat anything all day today. I am very sleepy.

  4 p.m.—I am going to sleep. Goodbye.

  April 4, 2019

  8:30 p.m.—Have let the kids go after studying. Ammi is making the vegetable. I am cooking the rice and chapatti [a type of bread].

  9:45 p.m.—Food is ready. I am going to clean. All the work is done.

  10 p.m.—Just sitting for a bit.

  10:10 p.m.—Going to eat food now. There was a fight in the neighborhood. A boy hit his mother and sister. He swore at the sister about some boy. He is threatening to get back at her tomorrow. The mother is challenging him, saying, “Let’s see what you can do.”

  1:20 a.m.—Am going to sleep now. Ammi is angry and says I won’t go to anyone’s house now.

  Thank you to Girl Icon and the Milaan Foundation for connecting me with Ruksar.

  * Traditionally, during the month of Ramadan, Muslims around the world will fast every day from sunrise to sunset.

  Ruoxiao

  18 years old

  Kunming, Yunnan, China, and the United Kingdom

  What are your favorite subjects in school?

  Further maths

  What do you want to do when you grow up? What are your dreams?

  To become a physicist

  How do you like to spend your time when you are not at school?

  Playing piano / erhu / guqin, Chinese painting, playing Rubik’s Cube

  Tell us about guqin.

  The sound of guqin is unique in that everyone’s performance is very different. So, it really depends on an individual’s style. This is why I love guqin, because there are no strict rules to follow. The sound of quqin is tiny. Some people say this is a musical instrument [that requires] listening to yourself, so there is a high demand for a quiet environment and a quiet inner heart. The school is quiet, but it is a place with too much worry; it’s inevitable that weird notes pop up. I wish that there was a place [here] for this. It need not to be extremely beautiful with farms and lakes; I only want it to be clear, bright, and quiet—a place of understanding with heart.

  “I love music, and I have a strong interest in classical music, hip-hop, and pop music,” says Ruoxiao.

  She’s an eighteen-year-old girl from Kunming, in the Yunnan province of China. She now attends boarding school in the United Kingdom.

  Ruoxiao pours her passion for music into a wide range of instruments: she plays erhu (a two-stringed instrument that is played with a bow), guqin (a seven-stringed instrument that is played by plucking), guitar, and piano. She also loves traditional Chinese opera—she finds magic in the stories and the songs—and she wishes more people appreciated it like she does.

  When Ruoxiao is home in China, she lives with her parents. She’s an only child, and her father is an engineer and her mother is a CIO, or chief information officer (a senior position in a company’s technology department).

  At school in England, Ruoxiao’s favorite subject is math—she has fourteen math lessons a week, and she writes lyrically about the beauty and elegance she sees in the subject. She wants to be a physicist when she grows up.

  Despite her enthusiasm for her schoolwork and music, Ruoxiao also describes how loneliness and homesickness settled in after the newness of pursuing her dreams and living on another continent slowly wore off.

  “Maybe because I am still young, maybe it’s the effect of the law of diminishing marginal utility, an economics term,” she writes. “New things always make me excited. Although I’m homesick, I never regret the decisions I have made.” ◊

  For the last few decades, news stories about the lives of women and girls in China have often been linked to the country’s one-child policy. This law, which was in p
lace from 1979 to the end of 2015, prohibited families from having more than one child.94 The exception was in the countryside, where families were allowed to have a second child if their first child was a girl or a disabled boy.

  The one-child policy contributed to a vast gender imbalance in China, since many families preferred having a son to a daughter. Of the 1.4 billion people in China, there are 34 million more males than females95—about 120 boys for every 100 girls.96

  This policy also affected what life looked like for girls. It often meant that “girls born in the city, because of lack of competition from brothers, have received unprecedented education opportunities by their families,” according to Dr. Kailing Xie, who studies gender in contemporary China. In the countryside, however, “girls were hidden or neglected by families to have a son,” she explained.

  These are just some of the far-reaching impacts of the country’s one-child policy. It has also affected the economy: housing prices and savings rates have soared, and there has been more trafficking (forced movement of people) of brides.97 ◊

  Translated from Mandarin

  When I was studying in China, I used to hate my unchanging life and that I could see what my life would be in the next ten years: I would attend a second-rate university, get second-rate work, and then be a good wife and mother, playing mahjong with neighbors. So at that time my dream was to live abroad. The many possibilities there inspired me to pursue the beauty of life.

  I have been in the UK for three years, and my dream now is to go back home. Returning to Kunming and enjoying a bowl of rice noodles seems to be the ultimate goal of three months of hard work.

  Nonetheless, I don’t regret my choice to go to the UK. It may be tasteless to eat rice noodles for three months straight. But without eating once I miss it so much. Perhaps people in itself are a contradiction, hating what you already have and always dreaming for the best.

  Maybe because I’m still young, maybe it’s the effect of the law of diminishing marginal utility, an economics term. New things always make me excited. Although I’m homesick, I never regret the decisions I have made.

  * * *

  The Yunnan Provincial Theatre is a place I usually go. Next to the Mabi chicken square, the tickets for the theater are very cheap. The front row only costs 40 RMB, and the rest are even cheaper—only 20 RMB per ticket. The audience in the theater is as I expected—only the elderly and their grandchildren. When the actor appeared, the old men always applaud . . . the timing was spot on, and not even one second behind. Shouting is a form of art.

  The twists and turns of the story and slow tempo make the children bored. Every time I enter the theater, I am shocked by how fast this puts children to sleep, as if they are singing on the stage. The children simply can’t wake up from their dreams.

  Some people say that no one is watching the opera because of the lack of new stories and new ideas. It is necessary to adapt the old dramas and inject fresh blood. However, my personal perception is that it’s adventurous to write ancient events with modern people’s thoughts. To view the drama from another angle, it’s necessary to have a deep understanding of an era and historical figures. You simply cannot rush it, it will take time to get used to it.

  Chinese society is experiencing an unprecedented economic growth. Today, most people are chasing fame and fortune, but [society] lacks people who are willing to slow down to appreciate life. They fear that even if they stop for a second, wealth can slip from their fingers.

  It is difficult for Chinese traditional opera to be accepted by the public in such an environment. It’s a shame for the remaining few who wish to inherit this art, but I firmly believe that if there is still someone in the world who likes this drama, then this drama can exist.

  * * *

  Our school has 14 math lessons in the week. There are four sessions on both Monday and Wednesday. A-level math and higher maths are boring: there are a lot of repetitions and a lack of new questions. Students seem to be able to get a high score as long as they take their time. These questions are exactly the opposite reason of why I love mathematics. Mathematics should be more logical, and more challenging, like philosophy, of deducing one thing from another . . . Mathematics is a language that needs communication. Communication makes mathematicians avoid many basic mistakes.

  I like mathematics. I benefited from my four math teachers. My math teacher in elementary school made me realize that mathematics is interesting. My tutors gave me a certain degree of precision, so that I have the confidence to learn mathematics. My junior high school teacher let me know that math problems can be answered from multiple angles. My high school teacher led me to discover that mathematics is a language, a game for bored people, and a key to all fields. I learned the romance of Descartes today,

  r = a(1+cosθ); I feel ecstatic.

  * * *

  It’s not surprising that days become repetitive when you come to the UK alone to study, but the boredom and loneliness gave me a lot more time to think, read, and try new things. The author Mr. Wang Zengqi gives me a lot of inspiration in his books. For example, today, the topic of how to write a short story piqued my interest. His description of writing multiple novels spoke to me; that breathless, full-hearted creation process is extremely short, putting pen to paper in the morning and completing the whole thing by night time, the author fully immersed and unconscious to the passing of time.

  The idea that writing must be done with a pen limits me and inevitably forces me into the constraints of language. Trying to find profound meaning in an ordinary life is difficult, but I also hesitated to get closer to the lives of the ordinary people, as if making them say something bad or do something bad in the story was some great sin. And so the creation process of my first short story was an unhappy one. Although I didn’t end up completing the story, I experienced the process from sunrise to sunset. I guess the thing I felt most guilty about then was that I didn’t revise [study] my schoolwork for that day.

  Ruqaya

  16 years old

  Baghdad, Iraq

  Tell us about your family.

  My father is an engineer and my mother is not working now, but she worked in the past.

  What do you want to do after school?

  I want to study journalism and build an orphanage and a home for the elderly.

  Tell us a little about your friends.

  I have many friends always. I am that girl that everyone loves for no reason. I have a friend named Duha and I have Zainab. We quarrel all the time but love each other.

  What is it like to grow up in a country that has been defined by conflict your entire lifetime?

  Ruqaya, a teenage girl who loves to read and spend time with her friends and family, shows us a little glimpse of life in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, in her diary entries.

  The Iraq we see through Ruqaya’s eyes is one of shopping malls, exams at school, and long chats about marriage and life with friends. This is pointedly different from the Iraq we see in the news: for the last two decades, Iraq has mostly made headlines for war and bloodshedi98—first for the fighting that followed the U.S. and UK’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and then because of the rise of the Islamic State in parts of the country.

  But Ruqaya’s daily life in Baghdad, where she lives with her parents, her brothers, and her aunts, is not dominated by conflict. She writes about reading novels, studying for exams, and spending time with her many friends. “We argue all the time but we love each other.” ◊

  Ruqaya writes often about her friends, teenagers like her, many of whom are married. When I asked her about this, she said, “Most of my friends marry at a young age but I will not marry until I finish my studies.”

  Unlike many of her friends’ parents, Ruqaya’s parents encourage her to pursue her education, and she wants to wait to marry

  until she’s older. She wants to focus on school for now, an
d she wants to be a computer engineer (or a journalist—she gives me different answers each time I ask her this question). She’s seen her friends get married and get pregnant

  in their teenage years, and be forced to drop out of school.

  This, unfortunately, isn’t atypical. Almost one quarter of girls in Iraq marry before they turn eighteen, according to Girls Not Brides, an international organization that works to prevent child marriage around the world.99 And it’s not just Iraq. Child marriages occur across cultures and continents—from the United States to Algeria to Australia.

  “Child marriage usually spells the end to a girl’s education. She is usually expected to leave school and to swap children’s activities like playing for grown-up responsibilities like cooking and cleaning. Once she is out of school, it is very hard to go back,” says Dr. Rachel Yates, Interim Executive Director of Girls Not Brides. “Without a school education, a girl will struggle to get a well-paid job in the future. Child marriage typically traps her in low-paid or informal work, making it hard for her to support her family.”

  There are many reasons why teenage girls in different cultures and communities might be married. An underlying reason is gender inequality.

  “In many parts of the world, a boy is seen as a future earner, somebody who should be educated so that he can grow up to support the whole family. His sister, by contrast, is expected to become a wife and mother,” explains Yates. “Because of this, many families see educating their daughters as a waste of money, and will choose to spend their limited money on keeping boys in school while marrying their daughters off young.”