49 pages • 1 hour read
The Leftover Woman
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Background
Authorial Context: Jean Kwok
Kwok is a Chinese American author who emigrated with her family from Hong Kong when she was a young girl. They settled in New York City and were so under-resourced that Kwok worked in a Chinatown clothing factory during her childhood. She was an intellectually gifted student and was accepted first into Hunter College High School, a public secondary school for high-achieving students, and then to Harvard University. Although she planned to study science, she switched majors upon realizing that her true passion was English. After the completion of her bachelor of arts, she pursued a master of arts in fiction from Columbia University and worked for a time as an English professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She currently divides her time between the Netherlands and New York City and is a full-time writer.
Kwok’s work examines the lives of immigrants and their communities in the United States and abroad. Although a writer of fiction, her novels draw on her own experiences as a young immigrant in New York City and as a young adult in rigorous, gifted-and-talented school programming. She is thematically interested in cultural dissonance, language, complex dynamics within immigrant families, the way that home country cultures are alternately retained and lost, and the pervasive experiences of racism in the lives of immigrants of color.
Kwok has written four novels: Girl in Translation, Mambo in Chinatown, Searching for Sylvie Lee, and The Leftover Woman. Her debut novel, Girl in Translation, features a young protagonist who, like Kwok, works in a garment factory while attending a private school surrounded by affluent pupils. This narrative shares with The Leftover Woman an interest in the difficult conditions endured by many immigrants in New York City and the way those conditions shape and re-shape identity. Characters in both Girl in Translation and The Leftover Woman must contend with anti-Asian prejudice and anti-immigrant bias and feel as though they have to hide certain aspects of their personalities from white Americans. Racism is an undercurrent that runs through each narrative, and although there are multiple thematic threads woven into these stories, Kwok wants her readers to understand the impact that anti-Asian racism in particular has on immigrants and their children.
Mambo in Chinatown shares many of these themes, and its protagonist must navigate between her familial duties and her work as a dancer. Kwok drew on her own experiences for this novel as well: She worked as a professional ballroom dancer between earning her degrees at Harvard and Columbia. Searching for Sylvie Lee, like The Leftover Woman, features a mystery rooted in the complexities of village life in rural China and explores the way that secrets, lies, and hidden jealousies impact family dynamics. All of Kwok’s novels engage in some way with the politics of gender as they intersect with immigration and race, and her writing is deeply devoted to the experiences of Asian and Asian American women.
Historical Context: China’s One-Child Policy
China’s one-child Policy was a population control measure implemented between 1979 and 2015 to curb population growth and alleviate poverty. The policy allowed most families to produce only one child and was enforced by imposing fines on families who produced more than one child, requiring IUD implantation after women bore their first children, and other policies. Because of the cultural preference for male offspring, it also resulted in the abortion, death, abandonment, and adoption of countless female babies. The policy had far-reaching social, cultural, demographic, and economic impacts on China, and resulted in a massive uptick in Chinese adoptees in the United States. It is still seen as highly controversial, and its effects are hotly debated. The policy was developed as a result of overpopulation during the 1970s and was meant to address hunger, poverty, and other social issues. It was criticized by many rural parents who relied on their children to perform agricultural labor, and allowances were eventually made for families in remote areas dependent on farm work. By the mid-1980s, the policy was loosened, and in 2015 families were officially allowed two children. In 2021, all limits were removed, and in a sharp reversal, financial incentives were put in place to encourage families to have more children.
The impact of this policy was felt disproportionally by women. China’s patriarchal societal organization privileged male children above female children, and because families were limited to one child, girls were at risk. Abortions were common, but so too was infanticide. Surviving girls were often placed in orphanages or funneled into foreign adoption programs. Fifi’s adoption in The Leftover Woman happens during this period, and her fictional story is in many ways representative of the real-life stories of Chinese babies and their families. Although the government of China credits the policy with lifting the country out of poverty, it resulted in a population-wide gender imbalance and has been criticized both for its direct impact on Chinese women and the extent to which it bolstered gender discrimination and gender-based violence.
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