I didn’t think much of it when the police took away five of my friends and fellow feminist activists in early March for planning a protest against sexual harassment on public transportation in Beijing. Similar arrests had happened to all of us before, and we were always let go after a few hours of interrogation. But when my friends didn’t come home that evening or the following day, I realized it was different this time. Given that I had planned and participated in many activities with them, I worried that I could be the next target and be forced to provide “evidence” against my friends. So, I fled Beijing and went into hiding.
The arrests sparked nationwide online protests and petitions by young people, especially university students. We hadn’t expected that the international community would also react so strongly: Human rights organizations and Western leaders, such as Hillary Clinton, voiced their condemnation. The domestic and international pressure led to my friends’ release after a month of detention. Of course, it didn’t help that the police also failed to gather any concrete criminal evidence against them.
I’ve since returned to Beijing, but this incident prompted me to examine my own activism and question whether I have made the right choices. When I was growing up in the 1990s in Sichuan Province, I found many cultural traditions and practices puzzling. At home, I addressed my mothers’ parents as “waipo” and “waigong,” or “outside grandma” and “outside grandpa,” because I was told that my father’s family mattered more. In school, my teachers held higher academic expectations for boys than they did for girls because they believed boys were smarter than girls.
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