4 ideas
A young woman taken by Japanese soldiers is forced into sexual service, then used by the resistance to pass intelligence from inside the occupiers' camp. When she comes home sick, her neighbours treat her as defiled and gossip about her, not as someone who sacrificed for them. Her body served both the enemy and her own side, yet the shame attaches only to her.
Ding Ling's 'Thoughts on March 8' argues that women in revolutionary Yan'an were still judged whichever way they chose. A woman who married and had children was mocked as a backward housewife, and one who stayed single and worked was gossiped about as unwomanly. Official equality did not dissolve these everyday standards. The essay's frankness contributed to her censure during the 1942 Rectification campaign.
Zhenzhen turns down both the pity of the villagers and a well-meaning marriage offer from her old suitor, because accepting either would define her by her damage. Instead she leaves to study and seek treatment elsewhere. On this view, her agency lies in declining the story others have written for her, even kind versions of it.
In 'Miss Sophia's Diary', a young woman records her sexual attraction to a man she despises, along with boredom, illness, and contempt for her own feelings, in a private diary. The diary form lets her desire and self-disgust appear uncensored, without the moral tidying of an outside narrator. This makes female subjectivity contradictory and self-aware rather than idealized.