Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly left Shanghai with their perception of Shanghainese women embedded in 1,999 reels of film they took to be developed in Paris.
The project, lasting four or five months, photographed women of all types and levels - celebrities and stars, models and ordinary people - and left Rheims thinking women in Shanghai were a mystery.
The two French artists were inspired to do this project by Mian Mian's novel, "Candies", a bestseller in France. Interestingly enough, the novel, which depicted the heroine and her friends as hysterical, drug-taking rock singers and delinquents, didn't receive much acclaim in Shanghai.
Few people would agree the characters were at all representative of Shanghainese women. The city is too practical a place for self-indulgence, or even for much rock music in this contemporary age of rapid economic development and social change.
Pretty creatures
Shanghai women are known as beautiful and delicate throughout China. Their taste for clothing leads national fashion, and young women show equal, if not more, competitiveness in their careers than men.
At home they are known as tricky wives that make their husbands do as they say.
All of this, can only be achieved through great ambition, intelligence, and resolution.
Visitors to Shanghai may also be surprised at its women's waistline. Not only for westerners, but for those in many other parts of the country, Shanghai women are too slender. Yet visitors should be more surprised to hear these over-slim young women talk about dieting and exercise regimes to lose weight.
In addition Shanghai women are more familiar with fashion brand names than anyone else in China. But that doesn't mean they are likely to spend half their monthly salary on a scarf. The Xiangyang market can give a better illustration of Shanghai style than the high-end Plaza 66.
Family dominance
A Shanghai taxi driver gave his explanation for various protests happening frequently in Beijing but rarely in Shanghai. "Women control the family here. They are in charge of its financial power. Even if the husband was furious about something and wanted to take action with his colleagues, the wife would pull him back."
Sociologist Xu Anqi of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences didn't confirm the idea that Shanghai women enjoy higher social status than their counterparts in other parts of China. But she did admit: "There are not so many different standards for men and women in Shanghai."
That is, double standards exist in China concerning the behaviour of men and women. Women are often faced stricter social standards. For example, it is considered a worse sin for a wife to betray her husband than the reverse.
There are more divorces due to infidelity by wives than by husbands. Xu explained that some women, because of a lack of economic independence, would not file for divorce even when they found their husband engaged in extramarital affairs. Yet few men would accept an unfaithful wife.
Additionally, women generally enter affairs due to emotional attachment as opposed to desire. Once they are truly in love with their partner in an extramarital affair, they would often ask for divorce.
Career pressure
An expatriate artist, Magdallene Ektoras, has experienced life in Greece, Australia and Shanghai. She found women in Shanghai faced the same issues as those in the west: "Women struggle for balance between career, family, travel and self-improvement," she said. "It is the same everywhere in the modern world."
Women in Shanghai have to face more challenges, she believed, because of the quick changes in the city. "They have to cope with these rapid changes all the time." As for Shanghai women's reputation as hard on men, she offered a proverb: "Men have their say, but women have their way."
"Maybe their ways of communication are different, but the objective is the same." She didn't agree with some people's criticism of Shanghai women for pressing hard on men. "I don't know why they are perceived in this way. It is unfair to categorize women with stereotypes." It is a kind of mis-interpretation, and even showed prejudice.
Rheims and Bramly took their unsolved mystery about women in Shanghai back to Paris. Their solution will come out in exhibitions and publications in Europe, America and Japan, but surely not in Shanghai. "The book, with many pictures, would be expensive. There may not be a market ready for it in the Chinese mainland," they said.
That is true. Westerners often say that, Shanghai is not China. In many parts of China, women are not so well-dressed as in Shanghai, and the life style is also different. When Shanghai women enjoy the TV series "Sex and the City", available on the pirate DVD market, and identify themselves with the characters, they are equally conscious that there is still a giant economic gap between other Chinese women and themselves.
It is this sober and pragmatic awareness that put Shanghai women firmly in reality, away from self-indulgence and abandon. They know well what they want - a better life, promotion, material things, and they set out to do their best to pursue them.
(Shanghai Star December 10, 2002)
