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is a good woman.
    By the way, I have put the same question to western men over the past year. They differ on just one point: a good woman does not need to provide a boy for the family tree –
but
she should be beautiful and clever. Even more requirements than from the Chinese men! Is it possible for anyone to be a good woman?

29th August 2003
    In a four-star hotel in China, one woman’s cup of tea is another woman’s daily wages
    I was in the second-floor coffee shop of the Grand Central Hotel in Nanjing last year, waiting for the director of my old radio station. I had all my attention concentrated on my reading, when a voice spoke in my ear: ‘Are you Xinran?’ A cleaner was standing before me. She was polishing the dazzlingly bright metal railing beside me with a cloth, but her eyes were fixed on me.
    ‘Yes? I’m Xinran. Is there something I can do for you?’
    ‘No, nothing, I just wanted to tell you that the cup of tea you’re drinking costs as much as my whole family earns in a day.’ She turned her back on me and left.
    I was stupefied. That cup of tea cost 15 yuan (£1.15) and it was the cheapest beverage in the four-star hotel. I am not wealthy: in a place like this, I could only be a tea-drinker, but she said I was drinking the daily income of her entire family. The cleaning woman and her words lingered on in my mind.
    Two days later, I stopped her politely as she was leaving by the back door of the hotel. ‘I saw you were at work at six o’clock this morning,’ I said. ‘That’s really hard work.’
    ‘It’s nothing. I’m used to it. There are people who’d love to find hard labour like this and can’t get it!’ She told me she’d been working eight hours a day at the hotel for the best part of a year. ‘Is it tiring?’ I asked.
    ‘How could it be anything else? There are a lot of cleaners in this hotel – you might not think there was that much for any one person to do, but none of us dares to stop and rest, and aftereight hours we’re too tired to move. But my child, my husband and the two old folk all have to eat, so I have to go to the market to buy vegetables, cook supper and do the housework.’
    She said none of the cleaners took the half-hour break they were entitled to because they were scared. ‘We may just get 15 yuan for a day, but we’re paid by the day, and I can’t do weekends either. But it was hard enough to get this job. My husband’s been laid off too. If neither of us does anything, what is the family supposed to eat, and how will we get the child to school?’
    They would need a huge sum of money to send her six-year-old to school the following year, she said. ‘Isn’t there a system of compulsory education now?’ I asked.
    ‘It says in the papers that there’s compulsory education, but what school doesn’t demand support fees? That’s 4–5,000 yuan at the least – 10,000 for some – and no school if you don’t pay. But how can a child manage without school?’
    I asked her if she liked her work. ‘What does it matter? I’ve done well to have found this job, so many can’t even do that. You go to the labour exchange and look at all those people searching for a job. If an employer comes in, the people looking for work are desperate enough to tear him to pieces. There are too many out of work these days.
    ‘I got someone to fix [this job] for me. The first three months of my wages weren’t enough to cover the “connection fees”. And I have an advantage – I’m young. The really sad ones are the women of 40 and 50 who lose their jobs: people looking for workers think they’re too old. The insurance people say it’s not economical to insure older people. It’s awful for the women laid-off – all those people like broken bricks thrown away by the roadside. You can’t make them into a wall, at most you can use them to fill in the ditches by the side of the road, but far more of them are rubbish to be carted off to the tip.’
    She said her