While reconciling with her own trauma, 32-year-old An Chi hopes to bring feminist ideologies to her small hometown
An Chi always wears a hat and mask to cover her face when she goes to visit her grandma in southern China’s Guangdong province. She wishfully thinks this might shield her from the neighbors’ prying eyes, and hide the fact that she’s a 32-year-old unmarried woman without what they consider a proper job.
“As someone who’s relatively unfamiliar to the townspeople, you will become the topic of conversation. They are keen to learn more about you so they can gossip with others,” An tells TWOC under a pseudonym.
Since she left home for college in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, in 2010, An has never pictured herself back in the small town near Zhaoqing again. But in June 2022, after a three-year struggle with depression, An made the surprising decision to quit her job at an internet company and move back to her hometown to work as a full-time content creator on social media platforms. Calling her return a “feminism survival experiment,” An started a channel on Bilibili, a video-streaming platform similar to YouTube, to better document her life and share her thoughts on issues women face in the small town. She also tries her best to attend lectures and other activities hosted by feminist communities outside her hometown and then relay the things she learns back to her friends and family.
“Girls Should be Brave”: A Feminist’s Bumpy Journey in a Chinese Small Town is a story from our issue, “Small Town Saga.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine. Alternatively, you can purchase the digital version from the App Store.
Yang Tingting is a Chinese editor at The World of Chinese. Interested in telling Chinese stories, she writes mainly about culture, language, and society.
