Abstract
Having grown up in a peasant home characterized by poverty and domestic violence, Wen longed for a freeing love. She witnessed how her father, a victim of structural injustice in the economy, could also subject his own home to physical oppression. Uneducated, Wen’s mother found a language in the Bible to express the unspeakable pains in life. Wen’s peasant parents worked hard to purchase her a township hukou, hoping for her to break free from the bondage of inherited class status. She succeeded academically and became a member of the urban professional community. But wounded by two failed romances, Wen’s hope for marriage became a bird with broken wings. She lives with the pains of culturally despised singlehood.
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Notes
- 1.
Mu is the Chinese unit of land measurement which equals around 920 square yards.
- 2.
Loss of productive farmland to industrial enterprises was a serious problem in rural China since the 1990s. See Wei Song and Mingliang Liu, “Farmland Conversion Decreases Regional and National Quality in China,” Land Degradation and Development, March 27, 2016. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ldr.2518
- 3.
Lu Xun (Lu Hsun) is a leading Chinese literary critic in the 1930s.
- 4.
Here she uses a Chinese idiom, nu qi bu zheng, ai qi bu xing.
- 5.
See note 1 of Chap. 6. About the hukou system in general, see “China’s Hukou System,” The Diplomat, July 14, 2017. https://thediplomat.com/2017/07/chinas-hukou-system/ About black market for urban hukou, see “Scandals over Fake Hukou Reveal Black Market,” Xinhua News, quoted in Shanghai Daily, January 30, 2013. https://archive.shine.cn/opinion/chinese-perspectives/Scandals-over-fake-hukou-reveal-black-market/shdaily.shtml
- 6.
Since the 2000s, many independent Christian publishing companies mushroomed in urban China. Although only state-owned publishers are granted ISBN numbers by the government, these smaller Christian publishers can purchase unused numbers from these state publishers. With this came many opportunities to translate Christian literature from the West and publish for popular distribution channels. John Maust, “Publishing for China’s Millions,” Lausanne World Pulse Archives, June of 2011. https://www.lausanneworldpulse.com/international_publishing-php/1426/06-2011
- 7.
WeChat is a popular social media in China. Since the Chinese regime blocked Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the super-app WeChat, which was designed for easy monitoring by the government, filled the void with over 938 million monthly users in 2017. Hillary McLauchlin, “We (Chat) the People: Technology and Social Control in China,” Harvard Politics Website, December 31, 2017. http://harvardpolitics.com/world/wechat-the-people-technology-and-social-control-in-china/
- 8.
A 2007 Chinese Spiritual Life Survey was conducted by an independent marketing research company Horizon Research Group.
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Narration by Wen (age thirty seven, editor for a Christian publishing company)
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Ma, L. (2019). Mustard Seeds. In: Christianity, Femininity and Social Change in Contemporary China. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31802-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31802-4_7
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