When I went to see <i>Women of Asia</i> last Saturday, I knew I was going to see a play that deals with the bonds that bind Asian women together. Shackles, perhaps, is a more accurate word.
I went not because I wanted to explore what women endure under the same yoke of patriarchy that tells women to be sacrificing mothers, selfless wives and dutiful daughters.
Nor did I want to take fresh look at the system which drives a wedge between women with its "bad girl, good girl" dogma, and punishes women who fail to meet the good-girl roles with self-tormenting guilt.
After more than two decades of writing about women's issues, I'm a jaded journalist, an exhausted working mother, and a wife who likes to think of herself as a feminist yet is at her wit's end about what to do with an activist husband who is too busy saving the world to do the dishes. So tell me what's new.
I went to the play to express my sisterhood. Some 20 years ago, I interviewed Asa Gim Palomera, a Korean-American, Onchuma Yuthavong, a Thai, and Mallika Sarabhai, an Indian, all divas in their own theatrical circles, about their dreams of producing this very play together.
Women's dreams almost always take a long and winding road. Often, parts of the dreams must be left behind with some pain. So when playwright and director Asa Palomera finally made Women of Asia a reality in Thailand where it germinated, I felt I had to be there to celebrate a dream come true.
Yet I couldn't help wondering if the problems the play wanted to focus on decades ago are still as pertinent today. By the second episode, I choked up and found the answers. When the play was over, I cried in the privacy of my car like I hadn't done in years.
It was the part about child prostitutes that hit me hardest. It was performed by three young teenage girls _ lovely, lively girls my daughter's age. All of a sudden, the girls on the stage became my girl.
In horror, I watched them tell of their pain when old, lustful men forced themselves upon their tender bodies.
In grief and helplessness, I watched how their screams of fright and pain finally turned into a sneer and cold indifference because that was the only way for them to survive.
The tears that ran down my face were not mine; they were the girls' mothers'.
Those scenes also unlocked many memories I thought I had long forgotten. In my mind, I was back to when I first covered a brothel raid. I met a teen hilltribe girl who was as beautiful and fragile as a porcelain doll. I was so angry then with how society allows poor girls to be treated as sex slaves. Where is my anger now?
A stream of images came to my mind. A trip to Dusit Zoo with five or six hilltribe girls. They were 11-13 years old, all of them extremely happy to enjoy childhood fun, all of them victims of forced prostitution. A chance meeting with a little girl in a hill village. She had just escaped from a brothel and the only thing she could take back with her was a radio.
An interview with a peasant mother in a bamboo shack. She huddled with her small children as the cold wind whispered outside. "I didn't sell my daughter," she said, tears in her eyes, her voice and body shaking. I still could not forgive myself for asking the question. Why didn't she kick me out for such impertinence? It wasn't a matter of politeness. It was a power gap. I, a woman from Bangkok, embodied everything she wanted her daughter to be. How could she inflict such harm on a dream for her girl?
Women of Asia is not all about victimisation. Actually, the main message is how women master the system by using "tradition" to oppress other women to feel powerful themselves, despite the emptiness inside. The mother-in-law dominance, the dowry and wife burning practices, the mama-san culture, the major/minor wife tradition. All these pit women against one another to serve men.
But I do not blame it all on culture. Poverty makes poor women easy prey for the system. Financial independence enables women to break the bondage. Disparity, however, allows rich women to exploit poor women as cheap maids and nannies, thus preventing them from questioning the gender oppression system.
Indeed, we can work to expose this cruel system in our own different ways. But will it help protect girls and women from gender oppression when the system still perpetuates such glaring disparity?
As my hair turns grey, as retirement nears, I'm confronting the reality that so many things still have not changed since I met my "porcelain doll" girl.
The tears I cried were not for those girls' mothers _ they were for myself, for a failed mission, a failed dream.
Sanitsuda Ekachai is Editorial Pages Editor, Bangkok Post.