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 fast-growing 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