An Ethical Challenge--How We Should Talk about Issues Regarding Rural Migrant Women --A Critical Reading on Xinran's book Miss Chopsticks.

The recent surge of rural migrants has attracted a great deal of attention from scholars both in and outside China. Various disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology have all exhibited a strong interest in this topic. In addition to academic writing, creative literature also focuses on the rural migrants. Encouraged by Xinran's recent book Miss Chopsticks, this paper criticizes the book's oversimplification of the experiences of the rural migrant workers and the monolithic way the book provided of understanding rural migrant female workers as docile laborers. In revisiting Miss Chopsticks, after a close and critical reading with the help of other scholars' discussion on Chinese women's agency and power, the paper argues that Xinran's writing of female rural migrant workers created three misunderstandings: 1) Chinese women, in particular rural women, hardly have any agency in terms of actively constructing their own futures, 2) few tensions exist between the economic reform and the understanding of rural migrant workers' identities, and 3) the only way to understand power is in terms of domination and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]