A couple of weeks ago, J toddled off to the supermarket to get some much-needed grocery staples while I kept an eye on The Wast and Little Dinosaur as they trudged through their homework. Lucky me. When J came home, he had an anecdote to tell me that was, at first, quite amusing and then, upon reflection, quite sad.

The lady at the checkout was a young Indian. As she scanned J’s trolley-load (and he can buy the darndest things, by the way), she asked where he was from. This is a standard question in these parts, so he was quite happy to say it was Poland. She then asked if he was married. Uh yes, he replied. Hadn’t she noticed the wife and two small kids tagging along several times every week on the grocery rounds? Oh. In that case, she asked, did he have any Polish friends who were looking for a wife? The checkout lady presented herself well, could speak good English, and even pointed out her name from the nametag. You know where to find me if there’s someone available, she said in conclusion.

After my eyebrows rose at the thought of someone even slightly propositioning my husband, I had to admit to a deep sadness. You see, it’s usually either the greedy or intelligent who are looking for an orang putih husband. Let me give you another two anecdotes before I continue.

Last year, I was on a training session with several colleagues and one of my Chinese Singaporean peers, while explaining the horrendously low birth rate in Singapore, drew a diagram for the rest of us. It was a simple 2×2 matrix. Across the top were 2 columns marked: Men, Women. Down the side were 2 columns: Educated, Non-educated. The problem, Tan (not his real name) explained, was this: the Educated men :: he drew an arrow from Men/Educated to … :: want to marry the Non-educated women :: … Women/Non-educated :: because, in his words, “nothing scares an Asian man more than an intellligent, assertive woman”. The Non-educated men :: arrow from Men/Non-educated to … :: also want to marry the Non-educated women :: … Women/Non-educated :: because that’s who they’re most comfortable with. Can you see the problem here? :: circles Women/Educated :: With both educated and non-educated men after the non-educated women, Tan pointed out, the local educated women are left out in the cold. Their only option is to marry orang putih men and, in all probability, subsequently hightail it out of Dodge (or Singapore, as the case may be).

ASIDE: Now, Singaporean men generally make the claim that educated Singaporean women are waaaaay too fussy and only concerned about the 4Cs: career, credit card, condo and car. (Or should that be 5Cs, since credit card is a double C? Anyway, you know what I mean.) Whether a man actually has a good heart, and is warm and honest, is of no concern to the modern Singaporean woman, the men say, if he doesn’t also have a six-figure annual salary to go with it. And that would cut a bit more ice with me if it hadn’t been a professional Singaporean male himself who drew and explained the 2×2 matrix. Let’s move on.

One of my new friends is a married Indian lady whom I shall call Parvathy. And, while we were chatting, she told me how happy she was to be married to her husband, a serious and straightforward fellow Indian who believed in equality and had a live-and-let-live attitude to life. Parvathy told me she couldn’t imagine being in India, with the kind of Indian men around. “Oh, the stories I’ve heard,” she said over our cups of tea. “Do you know that some men expect their women to wash their feet every morning when they get up from bed? And I’ve even heard of some women having to drink the water from that basin as a sign of their fidelity. Have you heard of such nonsense? When they have their periods, the wives have to sleep on the floor next to the bed because they’re considered unclean. They have to wake up an hour before their husband, make the breakfast and the more extreme men will even demand that the wife strew the path from the bedroom to the dining room with flower petals to show their devotion. The wife then has to kneel in front of the husband and do some obesiances to prove that she knows he’s the master of the house.” She shook her hand at me. “I don’t do any of that and if Ramesh (her husband) ever expected me to, he’d be out on his ear! That’s why,” she concluded, “I could never marry a man from India.”

It’s very easy to say that these are the practices of uneducated people, and so dismiss the appalling sexism inherent in my anecdotes, but that’s not true. I’ve heard similar stories from relatives of doctors, lawyers, accountants and teachers. And, as noted above, it spans races. Even the so-called decadent, “Westernised” Eurasians are not immune to this kind of atrocious discrimination, as I can personally attest.

So, to get back to the checkout lady, she was probably considering all the options and coming to the realisation that the only chance she had to escape a life of compliant drudgery at best — or violent death at worst — was to try and marry an orang putih. Only, you and I know that they’re not always all they’re cracked up to be either, don’t we?

ADDITIONAL: I’ve only just found out about the Quiverfull movement in the States (here’s a Salon article on it and here is a blog from a woman who helps support other women coming out of fundamentalist movements … a worthy goal). In essence, Quiverfull (a white-majority movement … so far) adheres to a strictly patriachal view of the Bible, and is anti-abortion, mostly anti-contraceptive and anti-feminist (women belong in the home, preferably pregnant, and leaving all decision-making to the husband). So you can read about it for yourself, here is Quiverfull’s main website.

What is interesting about Quiverfull, and movements like it, is that it takes its cultural norm of gender equity (a notion that hasn’t reached Asia yet) and subverts it through religion. I say that because Quiverfull is most active in the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, all of whom have supposedly very strong views on the equality of men and women. So, if you can’t get ‘em through culture (as Asia does in any case), get ‘em through religion.

I’ll probably explore this thought a little more in future blogs but, for now, I’ll leave the last word with Cheryl, the woman who set up the support group for other women trying to escape from the tar pit of fundamentalism. This is what she says on her site:

Since my excommunication [from the Quiverfull community] I have worked hard to make sense of my experiences and to place them in the larger context of a world in which all women are still second-class citizens, and in which women in fundamentalist religious [and cultural, I'd like to add here --kaz] groups of many kinds remain, for all intents and purposes, the property of their husbands.