|
Thomas Carter
, July 01, 2014
(view all comments by Thomas Carter)
“Fempat” is a new word that was coined during the controversy surrounding last year’s debut of my own China expat anthology, Unsavory Elements, and while it is wrongly attributed to me, my defining it in media interviews as “those angry, lonely, single female expats in China who are overlooked by western males seeking Chinese girlfriends” only served to secure it in the lexicon of world travel terminology.
The latest collection of stories by expatriate women in Asia, How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit?, was being assembled and edited at the same time as Unsavory’s “fempat” fallout, and editor Shannon Young does not hesitate to touch on the topic in her introduction: “Too often expat women’s voices go unheard. We are labeled and dismissed…”
What follows in theses 26 true tales, however, is not the call to arms by broads abroad male readers not unlike myself might fear it to be, but more of a “traveler’s soliloquy to prove my independence” (borrowed from ever-quotable contributor Kaitlin Solimine) as women of the world.
Neha Mehta compares India’s lack of personal space with Bangkok (“When you object, they get infuriated and suddenly they are no longer human”); American-born Edna Zhou distinguishes ethnicity from nationality in the P.R.C. (“The person’s face changed from being impressed by the foreigner who speaks Mandarin to disgusted at the Chinese girl whose tones weren’t perfect”); and, in one of the collections more potentially divisive essays, privileged expat wife India Harris owns up to being the face of Filipina maid abuse (“Please, ma’am, I need work. My daughter is hungry. I don’t care. That’s your problem”).
Romantic interludes are refreshingly balanced out with rocky relationships: Susan Blumberg-Kason in Hong Kong addresses infidelity in a mixed-race marriage (“Please know that in Chinese culture husbands might cheat, but it doesn’t mean they don’t love their wives”); Jocelyn Eikenburg brings her new Chinese father-in-law along on a Huangshan honeymoon (“He probably just thought all foreigners are a little ‘luan’, promiscuous”); and the aforementioned Kaitlin Solimine lets slip a tragic love story during hard-seat travel through China, admitting “I’m too preoccupied with my own narrative of romantic tragedy.”
Shannon Young does a fine job as editor, weaving fun travel jaunts with intensely personal domestic revelations to keep the pace lively and, dare I say, feminine.
###
|