“How can you not get married? In a woman’s life, she always has to get married and have children.”
That day I was talking to my mother and casually said, “I may not want to get married or have children,” but she very firmly rejected my idea. I was a bit shocked and angry at that moment. Not because she was against it, but because it never occurred to her that I could do without it.
I realized that this was not only a conflict of ideas between my mother and me, but also a recurring problem for many Chinese women growing up – as East Asian women, we all live in a patriarchal society, where we are always taught to be good, take care of the family, get married and have children, and become “other people’s good girls”. We are always taught to be good, to take care of our families, to get married and have children, and to be “other people’s good girls. But if we don’t follow the “established path”, does it mean that we are not understood or even accepted?
This conversation ignited my thinking about women’s freedom to marry. I began to ask: In this era, do women really have the freedom not to get married? Or is this “freedom” just a packaged illusion?
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