[Tired of housework and an unhappy
marriage, a 56-year-old woman has been on a six-month jaunt across China that
has challenged deep-rooted gender norms.]
By Joy Dong and Vivian Wang
Su Min, a 56-year-old retiree from
Henan Province in central China,
has never been happier.
“I’ve been a wife, a mother and a
grandmother,” Ms. Su said. “I came out this time to find myself.”
After fulfilling her family’s
expectations of dutiful Chinese womanhood, Ms. Su is embracing a new identity:
fearless road-tripper and internet sensation. For six months, she has been on a
solo drive across China, documenting her journey for more than 1.35 million
followers across several social media platforms.
Her main appeal is not the scenic
vistas she captures, though those are plentiful. It is the intimate revelations
she mixes in with them, about her abusive marriage, dissatisfaction with
domestic life and newfound freedom. Her blunt but vulnerable demeanor has
made Ms. Su — a former factory worker with a high school education — an
accidental feminist icon of a sort rarely seen in China.
Older women send her messages about
how painfully familiar her story feels, and greet her at each destination
bearing fruit and home-cooked meals. For younger women, she is a font of advice
about marriage and child-rearing. “I wish my mother could be like Auntie Su and
live for herself, instead of being trapped and locked in by life,” read a
comment on one of her videos.
Her unexpected popularity speaks to
the collision of two major forces in Chinese society: the rapid spread of the
internet, and a flourishing awareness of gender equality in a country where
traditional gender roles are still deeply rooted, especially among older
generations.
“Before, I thought I was the only
person in the world who wasn’t happy,” Ms. Su said in an interview from inside
her beige tent. She was leaving tropical Hainan, China’s southernmost province,
headed for Guilin, a city famed for its lush hills, about 500 miles away.
Only after sharing her videos
online, she said, “did I realize there were so many people like me.”
Before last fall, Ms. Su had rarely
traveled. But she had long been enamored with the idea of driving. Growing up
in Tibet, she sometimes missed the school bus home and had to walk 12 miles
through the mountains, she said. Each time a truck passed by, she imagined
sitting behind the wheel, safe and comfortable. But cars were rare, and having
one seemed impossible.
At 18, she moved to Henan and
worked in a fertilizer factory. Five years later, she married her husband. They
had met only a few times — not uncommon at the time — but she thought marriage
might be a way out of the endless chores she shouldered at home.
Instead, she said, she found
herself laden with even more housework, as well as verbal and physical abuse.
Her husband would disappear for long stretches and then hit her if she asked
where he had been, she said; once, he beat her with a broom.
Still, Ms. Su said, she never
considered leaving, worried about a social stigma that is still pervasive in
much of China.
She resigned herself to her life at
home. Her daughter gave birth to twins in 2017, and Ms. Su was in charge of
watching them — a task that she was happy to do, but that kept her tied to her
home. Though age had cooled her husband’s temper, they barely spoke. When they
did, they argued.
She sought solace in novels about
time-travel and romantic Korean soap operas but still felt deeply lonely.
During especially heated arguments with her husband, she would faint, she said.
A doctor eventually told her she had depression.
Then, in late 2019, she came across
a video online of someone introducing their camping gear while on a solo road
trip. She remembered her childhood dream of driving — the freedom and comfort
it had represented.
Over the following months, she
devoured every video she could find about road trips. She took copious notes:
which apps they used to find campsites, which tricks they had for saving money.
(Showers at public bathhouses, she learned, could be bought in bulk).
Soon, she made up her mind: Once
her grandsons entered preschool, she would embark on a trip of her own. She had
bought a small white Volkswagen hatchback several years earlier, with her
savings and a monthly pension of around $300.
Her family was resistant. Ms. Su
reassured her daughter that she would be safe. She ignored her husband, who she
said mocked her.
On Sep. 24, she fixed her tent to
the top of the car, packed a mini-fridge and rice cooker, and set off from her
home in the city of Zhengzhou.
She posted video updates as she
drove, and in October, one of them went viral on Douyin, the Chinese TikTok. In
it, she described how oppressed she had felt by housework and her husband.
“Why do I want to take a road
trip?” she sighed. “Life at home is truly too upsetting.”
Millions watched the video, sharing
it with hashtags like “runaway wife.”
Ms. Su continued across the
country, visiting historical Xi’an, mountainous Sichuan and the old town of
Lijiang — covering more than 8,500 miles so far. She saved on highway tolls by
taking country routes. At night, she unfolded her tent atop her car like an
accordion, feeling safer up high. Before setting out again each morning, she
draped her wet towel on a clothesline strung across the back seat.
In her videos, she marveled at her
newfound freedom. She could drive as fast as she wanted, brake as hard as she
liked. At each stop, she made new friends, she said. Wrapping dumplings on
camera in a Hainan parking lot in February, she laughed when tourists passing
by asked who was traveling with her.
“I love eating hot peppers, but my
family doesn’t like them, so I had to make myself not eat peppers,” she said in
an interview. “Now after coming out, I can eat peppers every day.”
She has sometimes encountered
hostility. Once, she said, a man asked how she could air her family’s private
affairs and said he would beat her if they ever met in person.
She replied, “Good thing I haven’t
met you.”
Ms. Su’s daughter, Du Xiaoyang, who
visited her in Hainan last month, said her mother was a new person.
“Anything she wants to do, she just
does, whereas before she seemed afraid of everything,” Ms. Du said.
In March, Net-a-Porter, the luxury
shopping website, even featured Ms. Su in an advertisement for International
Women’s Day.
Still, Ms. Su blushes when asked
about her new fame. She also says she is not yet qualified to claim the mantle
of feminist. “It took me so many years to realize that I had to live for
myself.”
She paused: “It’s something I’m
waking up to, not something that I just am.”
There are limits to what she is
willing to change. Though she is determined to move out if her husband
continues to treat her badly, she says she doesn’t want a divorce, knowing that
her daughter would feel obliged to care for him if she left.
But she tries not to dwell upon
that eventual homecoming. First, she plans to cover all of China. That could
take a few years.
“Now that I’ve finally come out,
now that I want to leave behind that life, I need time to let it melt away,”
she said. “There are many things that, as time passes, may have an outcome you
never imagined.”
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent. Previously, she covered New York State politics for the metro desk. She was raised in Chicago and graduated from Yale University. @vwang3