Wen Chen's View

At the start of elementary school, I often found myself wondering why I couldn’t understand what many of my friends conversed about, despite our common learning grounds. What was vacation like? What was it like to have aunts, uncles, and cousins? My friends were shocked when I asked them these questions and couldn’t fathom why I had never met any of my relatives. I didn’t have an answer either. It wasn’t until the last few years of elementary school that I could understand my family’s circumstances. When my parents first came to the U.S. for graduate school, they picked up the practice of Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese meditation practice. However, in 1999, only a year before they were due to graduate and return to China, the Chinese government began mass persecution of Falun Gong, sending millions of meditators to prisons where they were tortured, forced into slave labor, and killed. Many became victims of the state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, allowing international patien...

Did ancient Chinese women work? Weren't they restricted from getting an education and forced to stay at home? That is only partially true because ancient Chinese society was very different from nowadays. A typical family had multiple generations living together with dozens, even hundreds of people in the same household. In the agricultural society, they need to be fully self-sustainable. Each family produced all the food (rice, wheat, meat, poultry) and necessities (fabrics and clothes). Each person had a role in this "family factory." So technically speaking, most women worked in their "family factory." They usually did not come out to work unless they lost their family support. It was more than men working in fields growing crops and women staying at home preparing food. Women need to learn how to raise silkworms, collect silk, and turn them into fabrics. They made threads from cotton and then incorporate them into cloth to make everyday wear for the family. T...