第274页 Money

Chinese women are more likely to commit suicide than Chinese men. More than half of the female suicides in the world take place in China, where the suicide rate for women is nearly five times than world average. China is the only country on earth in which more women kill themsleves than men. 
读到这段话还是挺震惊的，不知道数据出处是哪里。不过，以前看过吴飞的《浮生取义--对华北某县自杀现象的文化解读》，里面所取案例大部分也都是女性。
A total of 66 percent of China's agricultural workers are female. Social scientists believe that this imbalance is partly responsible for the high female suicide rate, which occurs predominantly in the countryside.Rarely do these rural deaths seem to be the result of poverty; in fact, most happen within a relatively affluent and well-educated class of peasants. ...
But Janelle's career path most likely would have involved returing to her hometown to teach, which probably had ben a depressing prospect for somebody so bright. I suspected that she had recognized clearly her own potentials, as well as the bleakness of her future: to become a rural schoolteacher, marry young, raise a child. In the end it was more--or less--than she could bear.
Chinese women were also much better educated than ever before--but in a sense this only served to make them more aware of their plight. Like so many aspects of Chinese life, the issue of women's independence had reached a transitional stage, and it seemed to be a particularly painful one.
I guess this is hard for everyone, no matter male or female, living in developed countries or in developing ones.
Everything was further complicated by the influence of traditional collective thinking. The longer I lived in Fuling, the more I was struck by the view of the individual--in my opinion, this was the biggest difference between what I had known in the West and what I saw in Sichuan. For people in Fuling, the sense of self seemed largely external, you were identified by the way that the others viewed you. That had always been the goal of Confucianism, which defined the individual's place strictly in relation to the people around her: she was somebody's daughter, somebody else's wife, somebody else's mother; and each role had its specific obligations. This was an excellent way to preserve social harmony, but once that harmony was broken the lack of self-identity made it difficult to put things back together again. I sensed this whenever I read personal accounts of victimization during during the Cultural Revolution, because these stories were surprisingly full of shame--one day a person was a good Communist, and the next day the winds changed and he was a mortified Counter-Revolutionary forced into the "airplane" stance at a rally, his arms outstretched and bent painfully back. The shift in itself was not so remarkable--irrational political purges happened the world over--but the strange part was that so many of these victims were racked by shame, clearly believing that they were somehow flawed. It was like a target of McCarthyism immediately breaking down and admitting that he was wrong, or a Holocause victim hating herself because she was indeed a "dirty jew". Often it seemed that in China there was no internal compass that was able to withstand these events.Chinese women are more likely to commit suicide than Chinese men. More than half of the female suicides in the world take place in China, where the suicide rate for women is nearly five times than world average. China is the only country on earth in which more women kill themsleves than men. 
读到这段话还是挺震惊的，不知道数据出处是哪里。不过，以前看过吴飞的《浮生取义--对华北某县自杀现象的文化解读》，里面所取案例大部分也都是女性。
A total of 66 percent of China's agricultural workers are female. Social scientists believe that this imbalance is partly responsible for the high female suicide rate, which occurs predominantly in the countryside.Rarely do these rural deaths seem to be the result of poverty; in fact, most happen within a relatively affluent and well-educated class of peasants. ...
But Janelle's career path most likely would have involved returing to her hometown to teach, which probably had ben a depressing prospect for somebody so bright. I suspected that she had recognized clearly her own potentials, as well as the bleakness of her future: to become a rural schoolteacher, marry young, raise a child. In the end it was more--or less--than she could bear.
Chinese women were also much better educated than ever before--but in a sense this only served to make them more aware of their plight. Like so many aspects of Chinese life, the issue of women's independence had reached a transitional stage, and it seemed to be a particularly painful one.
I guess this is hard for everyone, no matter male or female, living in developed countries or in developing ones.
Everything was further complicated by the influence of traditional collective thinking. The longer I lived in Fuling, the more I was struck by the view of the individual--in my opinion, this was the biggest difference between what I had known in the West and what I saw in Sichuan. For people in Fuling, the sense of self seemed largely external, you were identified by the way that the others viewed you. That had always been the goal of Confucianism, which defined the individual's place strictly in relation to the people around her: she was somebody's daughter, somebody else's wife, somebody else's mother; and each role had its specific obligations. This was an excellent way to preserve social harmony, but once that harmony was broken the lack of self-identity made it difficult to put things back together again. I sensed this whenever I read personal accounts of victimization during during the Cultural Revolution, because these stories were surprisingly full of shame--one day a person was a good Communist, and the next day the winds changed and he was a mortified Counter-Revolutionary forced into the "airplane" stance at a rally, his arms outstretched and bent painfully back. The shift in itself was not so remarkable--irrational political purges happened the world over--but the strange part was that so many of these victims were racked by shame, clearly believing that they were somehow flawed. It was like a target of McCarthyism immediately breaking down and admitting that he was wrong, or a Holocause victim hating herself because she was indeed a "dirty jew". Often it seemed that in China there was no internal compass that was able to withstand these events.
There wasn't a tradition of anchoring one's identity to a fixed set of values regardless of what others thought, and in certain periods this had contributed to the country's disasters. The Cultural Revolution showed how Chinese society could become completely unhinged, but to a lesser extent there were bound to be problems during any sort of transitional period. And in recent decades nothing had been more disruptive to social roles and expectations than Reform and Opening. 
Group mentality seemed particularly troublesome for women, who lived under a strange combination of strictness and uncertainty. When compared to men, their traditional role in Chinese society was much more narrow, but the new economy resulted in frighteningly vague expectations and demands. On the whole these changes were undoubtedly positive, but they were happening so quickly that freedom could easily look overwhelming to somebody who was caught in the middle.
Being different wasn't liberating, as it sometimes is in America, and this was especially true for women from a peasant background, who were unlikely to feel comfortable ignoring the opinions of others and blazing new ground. The result was that they became outsiders not so muc by choice as by helpless inclination, which naturally made them feel that they were the ones at fault.
Often money lay at the heart of these stresses. Peasant women saw their husbands go off in search of work, gaining financial security but leaving their spouses isolated, and sometimes this loneliness destroyed them. Women could earn money themselves; this was a way to becoming independent, but a career could also result in the frustration of sexism and the criticism of people who felt that a woman shouldn't strive in this way.