What It’s Like to Be a Leftover Woman
“I was happy when I was single,” Qiu Hua Mei told me. “I had friends, I went to bars, I went to the theater. I went to language school to learn English and French. I enjoyed my life very much. But when I went home to visit my parents, they would bother me about marriage.”
Her parents were not the only ones. Until recently, Qiu was one of China’s sheng nu, or “leftover women,” a derogatory term popularized by the Chinese government to describe unmarried women in their late 20s and 30s. Hers is the standout story in the new documentary Leftover Women, showing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London on March 13 and 14, and available in the United States now on PBS. It shows the relentless pressure faced by educated, single Chinese women to find a husband.
In China, women are still expected to
