In China the word ‘Sheng nu’ means ‘leftover women’ and is a derogatory term made popular by the All-China Women’s Federation that classifies women who remain unmarried after they are 28 years old. It’s part of the pressure that their society place on women to conform and accept that marriage is the only goal they should have in their lives, and it’s causing a great deal of concern that the numbers of them are rising quite rapidly. In this documentary made for Taiwanese TV, newbie filmmaker Tung-yen Chou literally stalked three such women with her camera for four years to try and work out if they had happily chosen to be single, or if life had simply not panned out as they had wanted. Chou also very oddly chose to include a very rotund male 4th Grade schoolteacher by day and drag queen by night for reasons she never shared with us.The three women had very successful careers which seemed to fulfill them, but one by one, they all agreed that their un-wed existences were sad and somewhat miserable. All had dated when they were much younger but now all them threw themselves into their work and never seemed to actually make themselves available for the possibility of a romance or even put themselves in a position to even look for a man.The surprising common element was that all though their cellphones were rarely out of the hands (one of women had several phones) none of them had even tried to find a suitor via any of the many online dating sites.
The one thing they all shared on camera was the fact that they wanted to be loved. Although one of the women was careful to add that she didn’t think it right that she should have to wait to be chosen, and that she wanted instead to do the choosing. That however seemed all very theoretical as none of them have dated for several years.
The drag queen was however not going to wait any longer. Not to be asked out that is, but just to get the chance to be a bride for a day, and so he organized an elaborate photo-shoot so he could at least fulfill that one ambition. He even cried at the end, just like a real wedding.
The documentary was hardly ground-breaking but it did allow us to be voyeurs for just under an hour and look at part of a different and traditional culture where solitude is only seen as a failure and where ‘leftover women’ still feel so distraught that they have missed out on what evidently should be the sole purpose of their lives. Weird to think that in western culture ‘leftover’ is usual a culinary term used for food that is reheated and served up again the next day. Maybe this is something the Chinese should possible consider before casting such aspersions about single women.
P.S. The male equivalent are evidently called guang gun (光棍) meaning bare branches, and is used to refer to men who do not marry and thus do not add ‘branches’ to the family tree!
