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A few days before Women's Day of March 8, 1978, my five roommates and I were in our college dorm after class.1 Each of us had just received a movie ticket from the administration. To celebrate Women's Day, our college was showing a movie free to all female faculty, staff, and students. Staring at the ticket in her hand, Qiao, the youngest among us, protested: "Yuck! How come now we are counted as WOMEN [funu]?! It sounds so terrible!" Her strong reaction amused us. But we all agreed that we did not like to be categorized as women. For us, funu, the contemporary Chinese term for women, invoked the image of a married woman surrounded by pots and pans, diapers and bottles, sewing and knitting needles, who was hanging around the neighborhood gossiping. Her world was filled with such "trivial" things and her mind was necessarily narrow and backward. We were certainly not WOMEN. We were YOUTH (qingnian), or, if you like, female youth, to which we had no objection.
Our discussion of the meaning of "women" did not go much further that day, but it has emerged from my memory again and again in the past decade of my studying feminism. Each time the scene in my memory generated different questions for me to ponder. Had we internalized male cultural values to such an extent that we denigrated women the same way men did? What were the specific meanings of funu in the Mao era? Did our rejection of the term suggest any facets other than our internalization of patriarchal values? What shaped my perceptions of the terms "youth" and "women" in my early years? What was implied by the word "youth" to which we tried to cling? Scholars of communist societies have often emphasized the manipulation of youth by totalitarian states. But when "youth were identified most fully as agents of change for the whole society,"2 how did this emphasis affect gender production? Since young women in most societies seldom get to be identified as "agents of change for the whole society," how did communist female youth fare with the officially sponsored identity of major agents of social change? These and many more questions led me to revisit my life in the Mao...