“Washing dishes? That’s women’s work.”
That’s how Yao, my first Chinese boyfriend, ended one late Saturday night dinner at his apartment.
Up until that moment, he romanced me the entire day like any real gentleman — from running to the hospital for my medicine, to regaling me with a delicious homemade dinner of fried rice. All afternoon he told me to rest, relax, take it easy — I still felt exhausted from my recent illness, and had only just regained my appetite. Didn’t anyone ever tell him that sexist slurs are hard for girlfriends to swallow?
“What do mean, ‘women’s work?’ Are you telling me you won’t do the dishes, ever?” I asked.
“It’s not my job.”
I glowered at him. “So who’s going to do the dishes then?”
“Just leave them for my mom,” he said. He immediately jumped up from his seat and wandered over to the bedroom to start watching Saturday night football games.
How could he say that? Didn’t he realize he was dating a feminist who grew up in a household where both mom and dad were breadwinners, and didn’t believe in things like “women’s work”? I wrestled with these, and many more, questions about the man I was dating, and the future we might face ahead of us. But never, ever did I hold the one thought that all too often gets slapped on a guy like Yao — that he was just another sexist Chinese man I should never have dated in the first place. Continue reading “A Story of Sexism, Chinese Men and Who Should Wash the Dishes”