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Of Shanghai women and their traits

By CHEN WEIHUA
Updated: 2009-09-25 00:00

To many Chinese men around the country, Shanghai women have remained a mystery that is both bewitching and confounding.

In countless movies and posters, the typical woman of Shanghai is seen to be dolling up in cheongsam, sipping coffee, playing mah-jong in the afternoon, holding a cigarette between her slender fingers and dancing her night away with ever changing partners in an elegant ballroom. Indeed, she reminds people of Eileen Chang, a writer who lived in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation and wrote about love and romance in those impossible and surreal times. One of her best known novels, Lust, Caution, was made into a movie by noted director Ang Lee in 2007.

Chang and the women in her novels have carved a deep impression in people’s minds. They are seen to be smart, modern, stylish, elegant, carefree and meticulous, almost obsessive, about every detail of their dresses and accessories.

One signatory word to distinguish a Shanghai woman is dia, which refers to one who talks and acts in so overly gentlely that others can’t resist being charmed or awed. It is often used to describe a woman who deliberately plays up her femininity to capture the hearts of the opposite sex.

As an April Fools’ Day hoax, some Shanghai papers reported last year that the Oxford English Dictionary had included dia as a new word. Words such as diaism, diaist, diaistic and superdiaistic were also listed as its derivatives. Many Shanghai men would rather believe that it was not a hoax.

While Shanghai women are known for their diaism, they are also considered by men as high maintenance partners, or in the local dialect zuo.

Though a right doze of zuo might be seen as acceptable, or even desirable, in the flirting game, an excess in maintenance demand can drive even the most patient men up the wall.

But the economic prosperity of Shanghai has fed outsiders with the wrong impression that our Shanghai women care about nothing but money. As a result, the image of Shanghai women seems to have declined over the years. Gossip columns in the media love to malign Shanghai women as being snobbish, materialistic and even loose in their lives.

In fact, it would be totally wrong trying to generalize about Shanghai women. There are many different types of Shanghai women. Many are well-bred, smart, capable, elegant and caring, but there are those who make a mockery of themselves and the city by wandering around in the day time in their pajamas, spitting on the ground and yelling in public places.

The fact that Shanghai women received so much attention and chitchats nationwide shows that they are different from their sisters in other cities.

As people in the country’s major metropolis, Shanghai women, as a group, have always been the leader in the nation’s modernization drive since more than a century ago. When women in other parts of the country were largely house-bound in the early part of the last century, Shanghai women were frolicking on the beach in the city’s Gaoqiao area and attending schools and learning foreign languages.

Everything good and bad about Shanghai women may not be exaggerated. 

As a man who grows up in the city often known for its feminine character, I like Shanghai women who are smart, capable, strong and tender. I would also appreciate a bit of dia or zuo.