Shanghai after 4 hours sleep in 3 days and the hottest Szechuan meal known to man
Three days isn’t long enough to do more than scratch lightly at the surface of a place but my time at the Creative Social in Shanghai did bring home the scale of the changes that China has undergone. There are no more Period Police for a start…
We heard about the dreaded Period Police from writer and journalist Lijia Zhang. Her memoir, Socialism Is Great, record her life as a young worker in a missile factory in Nanjing. She had wanted to be a writer but, aged 16, her mother took her out of school in order for Lijia to take over her job at the factory. She thought she was doing her daughter a great favour as a job at the factory meant security for life: “The factory was a mini state of its own,” Lijia said, “it fed us, there were hospitals, a library, a kindergarten school, we had indoctrination at its meeting halls. Our whole life was contained there.” But it was a life that was totally controlled by the state: “We weren’t allowed lipstick, or high heels. The width of our trousers was controlled.” And every month the women among the factory’s 10,000 workers had to line up before the dreaded Period Police to prove that they were not pregnant and thereby obtain their ration of sanitary towels.
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