Th e Transnational Rural in Alicia Little’s My Diary in a Chinese Farm 155
Nationalist Discourse and Women in Rural China
Little’s visit to the Chinese rural location perhaps confronts the idealized rep-
resentation of British rurality with the reality of the other’s presence. Here, the
ambiguity of Little’s attitude toward Chinese women comes into focus. Th e
descriptions of Chinese women in the farmer’s house and the house she moved
to aft er the robbery are markedly diff erent. Little describes a woman on the
farm as ‘roughed,’ ‘disfi guring’ and ‘not suckling her child’. Aft er the robbery, she
moves to another house, which obviously shows variation in class and location.
She describes women in her new house in the following way:
their elder sister of 13, a really very pretty girl in her today’s toilette with bright brown
eyes, and a graceful, alert step, in spite of tiniest feet ... all her hair in a twist on the top
of her head stuck all over with very pretty pins, made of imitation pearls and blue Jay’s
wings and jewels feathers, with a cap (or bonnet) all round it, Jay’s wings and jewels
ornamenting this, gold pins fastening her hair at the back, three bandeaux of artifi cial
fl owers round her forehead, whirls of them at the side and a very pretty disposition of
them down the back of her head and neck. She wore a lovely rose brocade over jacket
with black satin collar, a mauve under jacket, which did not show, and trousers of a
rather richer rose, all embroidered too.^56It is possible to see Little travelling from an ethnography of otherness to one that
enables an agency of multiply defi ned others. Th is conscious sympathy presents
an indirect discourse used to represent English characters of diff erent classes. Lit-
tle’s attitude toward the whiteness of women in the new house is signifi cant. She
relates Chinese women to ‘pearls’, ‘Jay’s wings’ and ‘jewels’, which are emblems of
Victorian purity.^57 She tries to elevate the purity of women above the darkness
of rural women, the darkness which is frequently associated with the other. It is
suggested that ‘China had always been dirty, and Chinese dirt was only the sign
of a cultural vice crying out to be cured’.^58 Th is alien whiteness embodies the
covert racial hierarchies but marks cross-cultural admiration.
Th is pushes the reading of Little’s dairy further by turning to debates on gen-
der and rural ideologies. I argue that women in Chinese rurality embody both
desire and dread. I have outlined the constraints imposed on women’s role to the
hybrid, relational and fi xed nature of diff erent rural gendered identities behind
women’s daily lives. Poverty, ignorance, class exploitation, imperialism and patri-
archal values restrict Little’s observation. Little tracks the anti-idyllization into
the image of China and its people:
[the] daughter of the house immediately set to work to help her mother in getting
out of a sort of nettle the fi bre used for making grass cloth and worked at this pretty
well all day, when not suckling her child. Th e breaking the stalks without breaking
the outside skin made the peeling this skin off seem to require some knack, and I did
not try it. But I found it easy enough to strip the fi bre from the skin, when I had the