This richly informative book on Asian women is written by one of Australia's finest correspondents in the region. Currently based in Jakarta, the author draws on her experiences during many years travelling round south-east Asia. She profiles more than 30 wives, mistresses and matriarchs, mostly letting her subjects do the talking, sometimes with laughter and tears.
We see the world from their perspective, whether it is Cory Aquino in the Philippines, a Viet Cong guerrilla in Vietnam, a Filipina maid in Hong Kong, a "rich bitch" wife in Burma, or a teenage prostitute in Bangkok. Williams presents a fascinating, complex picture of Asian women, who are often stereotyped in the West as shy, submissive oriental beauties. Their lives are almost invariably shaped by the patriarchal nature of Eastern societies, with the women "like the rear legs of an elephant, always following in the footsteps of the front feet", as a Thai woman put it.
Most Asian communities share the belief of Confucius, the Chinese court official who 1,400 years ago, in defining ways to achieve harmony in society, ruled that man is the representative of Heaven, and that "woman yields obedience to the instructions of man and helps to carry out his principles". In the turmoil of change in the 20th century, many Asian women have negotiated a path to the top in business or in politics by association with a powerful father or husband whose principles they helped to carry out.
The Thai woman quoted above ran a successful transport business which she inherited from her father. Cory Aquino assumed the presidency of the Philippines after the assassination of her husband, Benigno Nonoy Aquino. In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi leads the democracy movement, spur red on by the responsibility she feels to her father, Burma's independence hero, Aung San. (And in Malaysia, since the book was written, Anwar Ibrahim's wife, Wan Azizah, has emerged as the focus for the reform movement in place of her jailed husband.)
Williams tells revealingly how a male voter in Muslim Pakistan explained his support for a woman, Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the revered Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: "I would vote for Bhutto's dog, so I would vote for his daughter," he said.
But for millions of impoverished and submissive women in Asia there are few escape routes. One open to Filipina women is to work as domestic helpers in Hong Kong (the less attractive ones are preferred by employers who don't trust their husbands). These women have to live apart from their own children so that they can achieve a better life when they return home, hoping, sometimes vainly, that their spouses in the Philippines are not squandering their earnings on other women.
Williams mulls over the pressures which induce a Filipina woman to chose near servitude in a foreign city. "Perhaps she believes that the success she hankers for in the Philippines might be as great as the disappointments she has endured." Not all Asian societies force women to compromise with men. In Singapore, where Confucian discrimination against the education of girls has been swept away, so many young, independent women are choosing not to marry that a worried government has instituted "love boat" cruises to encourage romance and childbirth.
And in some Asian societies Confucius never got a look in. On the Indonesian island of Sumatra the cultural values of the matrilineal Minang people still govern daily life. The author tells of old ladies sitting around clucking sympathetically over the fact that a visitor had four boys and one girl. "What a pity she had only one child," they say.
Conor O'Clery is Asia Correspondent of The Irish Times
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