Nannies for Foreigners: The Enchantment of Chinese Womanhood in the Age of Millennial Capitalism
In one episode of a popular TV serial aired in China in 2001, a middle-aged Shanghainese woman works as a nanny for a young Canadian English teacher who is eager to learn Chinese and the Chinese way of life. The nanny shows up for work in the morning and announces to her employer (who is offscreen) that she is going down to the market to shop for the day’s groceries. As he busily dresses himself for work, the Canadian cheerily calls out (in Chinese) from the bedroom: “Let us be lewd together!” To the nanny’s astonishment, he walks out and repeats the line with an innocent and infectious smile. After a few rounds of probing, further confusion, and clumsy clarification, it finally becomes clear that the hapless Canadian has mispronounced the Chinese word for “going down the stairs” (xialou) as “being lewd” (xialiu).
This comical sequence is just one of the many hilarious moments in this twenty-part television serial about cross-cultural contact and conflict. Nannies for Foreigners (Shewai baomu, directed by Zhuang Hongsheng) was produced by the Shanghai Television Station, broadcast to appreciative domestic audiences in major Chinese cities from 2001 to 2002, and is now enjoying a still wider reception through video sales at home and abroad. It tells the story of three unemployed women who find a new calling in providing domestic services to Shanghai’s fastgrowing expatriate community. In dramatizing cultural clashes and cross-cultural bonding, the episodes combine realism and melodrama, stereotype and thoughtful reflection, exoticism and a will to knowledge. The serial boasts an unusually large cast of foreign actors who, with their peculiar habits and varying abilities to struggle through their lines in Chinese, generate considerable comedy and dramatic appeal. But it is the three Chinese women who, in their idiosyncratic and endearing ways, act out the hopes, desires, and anxieties of a China that is relentlessly reinventing itself vis-à-vis its others.
In this essay, I explore the ideological currents at play in this TV serial, paying particular attention to the intersecting discourses of gender, culture, race, and class and to the relationships between nationalism, (self-)Orientalism, and the occult economy of millennial capitalism. I argue that the serial figures the Chinese nannies as apprentices in a modern, cosmopolitan subjectivity and similarly figures the foreigners’ homes as a training ground for that subjectivity. As the site of cultural and emotional clashes and negotiations, these homes become a quasi-public sphere where Chinese women engage in transitional object play to mourn the loss of socialism and to effect their (and China’s) rebirth as citizens of the world. This process entails not only the displacement of class by cultural and gender dynamics but also the enchantment of womanly virtue as the secret engine of China’s march to the neoliberal world order.
Neoliberalism: A Chinese Fairy Tale
The story of China’s economic reforms in the closing decades of the twentieth century is well known. Scholars and journalists have scrutinized the difficulties, promises, and implications of a vast socialist country embarking upon a path of freewheeling capitalist development with little intention or effort to pursue concomitant political liberalization. Observers and critics have called special attention to the human costs of dismantling the socialist relations of production and the infrastructure of social welfare. They point out that despite official rhetoric, China is going down the slippery slope of unbridled capitalism that has already engendered serious social problems such as high unemployment rates, staggering disparity of income, human rights abuses, rampant corruption, the AIDS pandemic, and environmental degradation, among others. Scholars in women’s studies have also shown that women have largely borne the brunt of these adverse trends. The drastic downscaling of the state sector, for example, has resulted in the disproportionate laying off of female workers, subjecting large segments of the urban female population to the hardships of unemployment or the vagaries of temporary, low-paying, and little-respected jobs. This particular trend, which Wang Zheng calls “gendered lay-offs,” affects primarily middle-aged, less-skilled women, who are considered liabilities in their workplace and who are ill-equipped to compete with the better-educated younger generation — from female entrepreneurs (nü qiyejia) and white-collared beauties (bailing liren) to tri-service escort girls (sanpei nü) and migrant girls (dagong mei) ( Wang 2003).1
How does the state tell the story of those unglamorous older women for whom the “rice bowl of youth” ( Zhang 2000) is decidedly out of reach? One of the earliest high-profile efforts to cast light upon the unspectacular plight of older underemployed women is the film Pretty Mother (Piaoliang mama), directed by Sun Zhou (2000). Starring Gong Li, who garnered international fame playing the eternal Oriental woman in such films as Raise the Red Lantern and Shanghai Triad, the film tells the story of a divorced mother who scrambles to earn some extra cash in order to give her young hearing-impaired son some semblance of a normal childhood (by buying expensive hearing aid devices, among other things). She tries to peddle petty commodities on the street and is busted by the police; while working for a bachelor as a paid-by-the-hour housemaid (zhongdian gong), she barely escapes an attempted rape. The film’s choice of a handicapped boy is arguably a pandering ploy designed to tug at the viewer’s heartstrings. But it also contributes to the ideological fiction that the greatest challenge facing middleaged women is not the loss of income and social standing but is rather the inability to be a good mother. Their salvation, it follows, lies not in finding a new career but in the extravagant sacrifices they make on behalf of their families. Even if they have to go on peddling in the street or scrubbing the floors of a stranger’s house, so long as they do so for the sake of their loved ones, they can still be beautiful (as the film’s title implies) at middle age.
The discourse of female virtue has deep cultural roots and continues to resonate with audiences by turning women’s drab plights into visual spectacles. With China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, changing representations of disadvantaged women became central to China’s bid to become a key player in the global economy and synchronize with the pounding pulse of modernity. The TV serial Nannies for Foreigners is a prime example of this tantalizing new vision of Chinese womanhood: instead of assuming their habitual role of the heroic victim, Chinese women have begun to play the role of the vanguard — the bridge between a traditional, stagnant China and a vibrant new world order of millennial capitalism.
Jean and John Comaroff propose “millennial capitalism” as a category for understanding the “Second Coming” of capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century — capitalism that “presents itself as a gospel of salvation” (2001: 2). They identify its three main characteristics as the rise of occult economies (new forms of enchantment), hyphen-nation (a nation-state whose status and fetishes are uncertain), and the neoliberal discourse of civil society. For the Comaroffs, these are the corollaries of the millennial moment’s epochal shifts in the constitutive relationship of production to consumption and in the displacement of class by gender, race, and generation “as indices of identity, affect, and political action” (3). The implications of these epochal shifts, particularly for the marginal and the disempowered, have been occluded by the culture of neoliberalism, which has spread the gospel of the free market with astounding efficiency, gaining receptive audiences both among the former antagonists of the capitalist world and among new and old victims of globalization (1 – 56).
Since the early 1990s, the culture of neoliberalism has, with the assistance of the postsocialist state and a global ensemble of cheerleaders, become the reigning, if not officially enshrined, ideology in China. The heroic figures emerging from the roaring 1990s are consumers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, white-collared beauties, pop idols, bestselling teenage novelists, and sex diarists, all of whom derive their aura from associating with the occult economies of millennial capitalism. According to the Comaroffs, occult economies are characterized by the seeking of wealth through magical means, that is, “techniques that defy explanation in the conventional terms of practical reason” (19). Around the globe, such efforts can include gambling and speculating, pyramid schemes, new fee-for-service religious movements, fortune-telling-cum-counseling, e-mail divination, and zombie conjuring, all of which are animated by the allure of casino capitalism, or the idea of getting something for nothing. In fin de siècle China, occult economies may assume somewhat different, locally idiosyncratic guises, but they are no less propelled by the casino capitalist spirit. One need only think of the massive appeal of various forms of quasi-religious movements (not least the Falun Gong), the feverish popularity of lotto and pyramid schemes, and the unstoppable revival of the national gambling game, mahjong ( Festa 2006), to stop repeating the hackneyed dictum that modernity has spelled the demise of enchantment.
The return of enchantment has supplied the most powerful means for the ideological operation of misrecognition by casting a dense fog of mystification between neoliberal policies and their social consequences. People are intent on seeing “arcane forces intervening in the production of value, diverting its flow toward a new elect” ( Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 25). The new elect in China are the aforementioned heroic figures of the reform era, who seem preternaturally endowed with a knack for navigating those arcane forces. In the ideological discourse of neoliberalism that speaks fondly of the “miracle” of economic take-off, the marginalized and the disempowered are seen simply as the less fortunate, and they are encouraged to project “their feelings of erasure and loss” onto these arcane forces. State-sponsored economic reforms offer “the prospect that everyone would be set free to accumulate and speculate, to consume, and to indulge repressed cravings in a universe of less government, greater privatization, more opulence, infinite enterprise” (25). The fact that older unemployed women are not free to accumulate, speculate, and consume can therefore be attributed to their withering age (even if they are only in their forties and fifties), a force of nature that helps to provide an incontrovertible alibi for neoliberal capitalism’s disregard for social justice.
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Notes
I presented an earlier version of this article in the seminar “Performing Imperialism and Cultural Otherness in Modern East Asia” at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting (Pennsylvania State University, March 2005) and in the workshop “The Art and Politics of East Asia” at the University of Chicago (April 2005). I wish to thank the respective organizers and participants for affording me a stimulating and receptive forum in which I received much-needed feedback. I am also grateful to Mark Selden for his edifying comments. And a heartfelt thank you to Paul Festa, for being, as always, my first reader and most astute critic.
- “White-collared beauties” are usually college-educated young women with excellent foreign language skills who hold high-paying jobs and live a fashionable lifestyle. “Tri-service escort girls” are young women with little education who work in bars, cafés, salons, and nightclubs and offer escort services to male clients (accompanying men in dining, singing, dancing, and likely other activities).