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Strength Against Misogyny | A bimonthly column by Alisa Nie

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Ladiescorner.ca is excited to announce the start of a writing residency with University of Alberta’s fourth year Chinese student in the Honour English Program: Alisa Nie.

Alisa brings to us the warmth and diversity as a minority ethnic Chinese woman studying in Canada. Her observations and lived in experiences are refreshing and make for an enlightening read.

We are excited Alisa has chosen us to share her stories with.  We hope you enjoy her stories as much as we have enjoyed bringing them.

 

Herstory: How the Female-Centered Stories in My Culture Strengthen Me against Misogyny in Patriarchal Stories

 

     “Isn’t it interesting that people think of the sun as male and the moon as female all over the world?” My friend once claimed when we hung out in a café and chatted about mythology.

     “That’s an absolutely correct statement despite that it is wrong.” I playfully razzed: “That’s true if you are talking about Daoism and Inca religion and Greek and Roman mythologies. Yet, Sol, the sun goddess, is the elder sister of Mani, the moon god, in Norse myths. Similar things happen for Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi in Japanese myths. Ra and Khons in Egyptian myths are both males. Also, in the myth of my culture, Shun and Biya are both elder sisters of the goddess of cloud.”

     “Sorry, but what do you mean by ‘my culture’?” My friend was quite surprised, “Aren’t we both Chinese? Who are Shun and Biya?”

     I laughed: “I am Manchu Chinese, my Han Chinese friend. Haven’t I ever told you?”

Being a Manchu Female

 

 Another reason is that our people are not very visually distinctive. People assume I belong to the Han majority when I am in China, while people in Canada frequently mistake me for Japanese. 

     However, ethnicity is much more about shades of skin and shapes of faces. Even though my appearance is not very different from my Han friends, I was soaked in highly dissimilar fables and myths at a young age. Like many other ethnicities, Manchu society changed from matriarchy to patriarchy during feudalism, but our mythologies remain with numerous matriarchal features. In our Shamanism belief, almost all divines are female. My mama (this word means grandmother in Manchu language) told me about our creation story. She told me that the original three goddesses created the world. She told me stories about humans, which more frequently centered on heroines than heroes. She pointed at the crows and told me to respect them because they are the goddesses of the night and forests, just like the falcons are the goddesses of the day and sky.

The Outcome of Soaking in Female-Centered Stories at a Young Age

     Those stories shaped my perspective as a reader, made me assume that women are usually the story’s protagonists. Unconsciously, I read female as the main character whenever I read works of literature as a girl. When I think of Iliad, I think of Athena and Hera. I read Notre Dame as a story centered on Esmeralda. I see the mysterious Morgan le Fay, rather than King Arthur and his knights, as the embodiment of Britannic culture. I see Othello as no lesser villain than Iago, while Desdemona is the tragic heroine. 

     I do acknowledge that brave, wise, just, and independent female characters are rare in most stories in the world, but isn’t it the same with male characters? In my eyes, Medea is no more problematic than Theseus, and the princesses in Grimms’ Fairy Tales are no less complicated than their prince lovers. Society remains patriarchal, and the discrimination against women remains strong, but I find shelters in books. Those Manchu stories shield me from the attack of patriarchal text. This shield cannot eliminate misogynist ideas in the original works, but it does protect me from feeling shamed and belittled. At the age of sixteen, I decided to take English Literature as my major in university, fearlessly and ruthlessly, almost totally ignorant of the toxic hatred against women underneath most texts.

     Even now, after I realized the misogynist ideas in the texts, the female-centered stories still strengthen me. It provides me the power to laugh at the stories in which women represent evil, irrationality, and unreliability. Why cannot I? Those are nothing but stories, and I have soaked in other kinds of stories ever since I was a girl. I know myths in which the goddesses create women earlier than men. I know stories about how women are pure heroines while men are traitors and carriers of evil. I have my cultural shield with me, and thus the misogynist stories shall never ever implant self-hatred in my mind.

 

Alisa Nie (Ninggunta)

Alisa is a fourth-year Chinese student in Honor English Program, University of Alberta.

Link to other write ups: You may want to read this – Goals for 2022

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