The play on words in the title of Angelina Chin's important and insightful study of the lives and public perceptions of female workers in early twentieth-century South China points to her main thesis. The emancipation of working women was judged by most elite men and women to be too important and too potentially disruptive to be left to ordinary women themselves. Urged to be free, working women found themselves bound by new limits and constraints.
The bonds thought to need breaking—variously Chinese tradition, criminal mischief, capitalist economics, or colonial power—were attacked from many quarters, including missionaries and their Western and Chinese allies, feminists, labor activists, and anti-imperialists. Laws were passed to abolish the practice of mui tsai (the purchase of young female bondservants to serve elite households). Charities like Hong Kong's Po Leung Kuk (PLK) sorted trafficked women into the “good” and the “fallen” and by category kept them or bound them over for rescue, incarceration, or deportation. Conditions of employment for women as prostitutes, servants, entertainers, waitresses, and hairdressers were regulated by a more intrusive Chinese state. The growing public presence of working women, fueled by economic change and consumer demand, supported a new and more feminized urban service sector that catered to an expanding middle class. Defense of Chinese womanhood was made a matter of British sovereign honor in Hong Kong and a symbol of embattled sovereignty among patriotic Chinese.
However, abolishing female bondage by law did not end the custom. Chinese elites in Hong Kong recast mui tsai as “adopted daughters” while defending the practice as Chinese and humane. Colonial officials in Hong Kong dragged their feet when pressured to abolish brothels on the grounds that regulation rather than abolition of prostitution was in the interest of public health (especially, in this case, the health of white men). Governments in both Hong Kong and Guangzhou turned out to be better at taxing businesses than regulating what went on in brothels, restaurants, and teahouses where women worked. Labor activists might theorize female singers and waitresses as members of the working class but then yield to complaints by male union members that women were “robbing” them of their livelihoods (p. 227).
The interests of female workers tended to get lost in the shuffle of these rival and overlapping elite discourses. Chinese notables in Hong Kong promoted the virtue of purchasing mui tsai partly to resist the power of the colonial state. Modern opinion in Guangzhou agreed that the condition of women was a “social problem” but then looked askance at female service workers who, having won a measure of independence and urban cultural savvy, dressed and acted accordingly. Women encouraged to break the bonds of outmoded tradition (fengsu) were suddenly discovered to be in violation of sound custom (fenghua). Valorizing women as symbolic of China's weakness included women in nationalist discourse without necessarily placing them in political leadership roles or paying their bills.
Chin's study offers an expert unraveling of such discourses and a compelling intellectual history of sexual hypocrisy. She quotes with approval Communist Qu Qiubai's caustic response to demands in the 1920s that working women in public curtail their taste for popular lyrics, high heels, and the new practice of soliciting tips for good service (a smile for a male patron but also changing a baby's diapers for a lunching mother). Qu mocked “those gentlemen with a stern look on their faces condemning women for being luxurious and calling for maintaining fenghua but at the same time enjoying [watching] their sexy thighs” (p. 131).
Working women themselves have the final word in a discourse of their own that Chin carefully reconstructs for the reader. In testimonies from PLK archives, women make their cases for rescue or, alternatively, a return to sex work as preferable to being returned to their home village. Taking advantage of their new economic roles and the radical ideas that had become part of the urban scene they shared, female employees organized for higher pay in the teeth of accusations that they were “prostitutes in disguise” (some were former sex workers), caused “social unrest” by their presence, or as women were biologically unsuited to work in public places like restaurants (pp. 222, 227).
Instead of a conventional account of women's rights in this period, focusing on emancipatory ideals largely left unrealized, Chin's complex and provocative reading of elite and working class writings, voices, and actions unpacks the ideals themselves against a vivid panorama of social and cultural circumstances that includes high-minded rhetoric and the sensationalism of the tabloid press, Hong Kong brothels and rooftop restaurants, and the transformative ideals of intellectuals but also the aspirations and complaints of waitresses.
