At eight o'clock in the evening, passengers poured out. The boy with the newly bought keyboard is going back to the single apartment to play games all night, and the middle-aged man next to him has just been transferred to the city and has to walk back to his single-rented home.
In 2021, a "New Solitary Living Era Report" (released by the Shell Research Institute according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics) preliminarily predicts that the number of people living alone in mainland China may reach 150 million to 200 million in 2030, and the rate of living alone may exceed 30%. The results of the seventh national population census also show that young people aged 20 to 49 living alone in urban areas concentrated in first-tier and key second-tier cities are building a "new era of living alone".
Tonight, outside this subway entrance, there will also be an adult woman walking back to her home where she lives alone.
"There must be something wrong with her."
This guess may be that she has a psychological or physical problem? Hurt by love? Bad personality? Overly picky about the 10,000-year-old "mother list"? In short, she is "not normal", even if she is healthy, financially independent, and self-fed.
A still from the first season of Fleabag (2016).
A still from "Door Lock" (2021).
When an adult urban woman who is healthy, financially independent and self-reliant chooses to live alone, it is still inevitable to make the following comments around her: Psychological or physical problems? Hurt by love? Bad personality? Overly picky about the 10,000-year mother list? In short, she is "not normal".
Unlike the attribution of other people who live alone—such as elderly people living alone (children are the reason) and minors (parents are the reason)—people's choice of urban women to live alone is always accompanied by some kind of evaluation of the person. Urban men living alone, of course, will also be criticized and have some stereotypes, and there are some extreme statements such as "anti-social" and "perverted" in the description of film and television dramas, but this is also because some of them violate the law and violate social customs. The act itself has nothing to do with gender. And people have more or less various gender biases against urban women who live alone.
None of this is friendly.
In modern cities, most of us actually live alone at some point, such as at the beginning of graduation and work, when we are single, on a long business trip, after a fight with our family or partner and moving out to live alone, after the death of an elderly partner, etc. Living alone is an inevitable experience for almost everyone. Only urban women live alone, and they are far more prejudiced than cared for, and are vulnerable to malicious speculation and even personal attacks.
The author lives in the city, and this year marks her eighth year living alone. Today is Women's Day, she talks about her choices, the difficulties and injustices she encounters, and her skills for creating convenience and happiness from the details of life such as household appliances, "I always believe that any adult woman who chooses to live alone under the conditions of self-care and economic allowing, she herself has no problem with this choice."
Written by Kong Xue
"It is miserable for women to live alone": an impression
In recent years, urban women living alone as a social phenomenon has often become a hot topic of discussion.
Take a few pop culture as examples: In 2020, the Chinese version of the mystery novel "Scream" was popular on Douban, and the novel began with the case of a woman dying in a solitary apartment. In 2021, the Chinese version of the movie "Door Lock" was released in the mainland, which caused multiple rounds of discussion due to concerns about the safety of women living alone. In 2022, in the hot talk show variety show, actor Bird Bird shared the daily details of women's vigilance when they live alone. In addition, online communities such as the Douban group, which mainly focus on women living alone, have become increasingly active, and vlogs (video web logs) with safety guidelines for women living alone, daily life, and home display "room tours" (referring to "visiting boudoirs") have emerged on the Xiaohongshu of station B.
A still from "Door Lock" (2021).
Compared with various "reflected" stereotypes, spontaneous women living alone are always more positive and happy in daily sharing. With the increase in women who buy or rent houses independently, actively do not marry or are single, and the number of women living alone in urban areas is increasing, and related topics are frequently emerging, but the prejudice against women living alone in society seems to have not decreased.
My understanding of women's choice to live alone is this:
Urban women choose to live alone, the first condition is that they can take care of themselves because they can live on their own because they are financially able to do so. Most of them like to be quiet and comfortable, and some have high sensitivity to noise, hygiene, interpersonal and so on. This is a rich and diverse group, which can be married or single, introverted or extroverted, lonely foodies, or solo travelers. Some people use it as a transitional state before entering married life (quite a few urban women living alone), and some go with the flow. For example, Naoko Takagi, a picture book writer known for her one-person living series of manga, published a two-person series and a new mother series after living alone for N years, and transferred from living alone for more than ten years to living in a multi-person family. There are also people who enjoy living alone into old age, and Japanese author Chizuko Ueno has written several books about women aging alone and dying.
Not every woman is suitable for living alone, and not every woman who lives alone actively chooses and enjoys it, but women who have insisted on living alone for many years have their own reasons to be happy and can draw life energy from solitude. Living alone is a rich soil, some people let the joy of life, self-growth, etc. bubble up like small mushrooms, and some people will explode in the huge loneliness of the mushroom cloud. It is a neutral lifestyle and state. People choose to live alone, and living alone is also screening people.
But over the years, my solitary life has been understood like this:
The first time I rented my small independent home with my salary, I celebrated it as a holiday, but I was the only one. Both men and women, from industry intellectuals to master's professors, my mentors and friends thought I was "abnormal" and suggested that I "live like a woman". The landlord said "you live in this house with a girl, it's too big". Years later, when I bought a house, a friend came as a guest, and when I walked in the door, I said, "The shoe cabinet is not wide enough to fit a man's boots." There are also people who know numerology and want to show me "where is the problem" in feng shui, so that I do not have "spiritual problems".
With a borderless bias, people manipulate the feelings of debt of women living alone: they are worried, they become unstable "social units", do not benefit the social marriage and childbearing rate, and increase the security risk (as potential victims). Women who live alone for a long time carry several mountains on their backs, which stem from the departure from the values of modern family and marriage, the escape from becoming a wife and mother at the right age, and the derailment or retardation that has not yet been "stable" and "normal". People also acquiesce to my shortcomings, thinking that I am waiting for "true love" and that my house is waiting for a man. Thinking back to many years ago, a married woman saw a tiny tattoo on my wrist and asked: What if your husband doesn't like it in the future? She tacitly accepted that the body of an unmarried woman had to make choices for waiting for an ethereal man. In the same way, people now think of me as "alone in my empty room" from the comfort of my own home.
A still from "Clean" (2004).
We are still in the value of "women living alone is miserable", using "problematic" and "abnormal" to ugly urban women living alone. Many people do not accept such women: like some women who dream of taking wedding photos, they look forward to their own home; Like some women, who desire to marry and have children, they long for freedom and freedom. They have no problems, they are not isolated and they are not imprisoned. They are a clear representative of how economically independent women live in this era, dealing with the big world and self-consistency in the small world.
A few years before I lived alone, domestic public opinion had not been so lively about women living alone. Almost no one around me encouraged me. The initial resonance came from actress Yuki Tenkai. She once said that she lived alone because she didn't like to have others in the family, and if she had a boyfriend, she would live next door. I have been wondering for many years: Why can't my lover live at my door? If people always fall in love with someone, can I love myself first?
Yes. OK. Perhaps more women will answer this way now. I don't advocate solitude, just as May Satto, author of "Diary of Solitude," never glorified solitude, and in her sequel, "The Pain of the Past," women are reminded to choose carefully. But for women who seriously decide to live alone in the city today, I would say that our society is not moving fast, but women don't have to wait, don't compromise if they want to.
From imagining difficulties to creating convenience
It is customary to think that women who live alone are easy to victimize and that women who marry into the family are safer, as if the phrase "it's always the husband" (meaning that the husband is seriously suspected), counted by real wife murders, is just an old fable.
Living alone for several years, I went through the process from imagining difficulties to creating convenience. In the first year, I was also afraid that fake, high-fidelity shiny, and real monitoring equipment had been hung outside my door. At that time, various safety guidelines were not yet popular, and I bought small equipment such as door blockers based on my experience of staying in hotels. I was afraid of the sudden noise in the night, and I was quieter in and out of the corridor than the criminals lurking.
But I soon discovered that as long as I choose a secure community, the biggest challenge of living alone is not safety, but forgetting the keys! After unlocking the lock several times at a high expense, I painfully changed the affordable smart lock.
The problem was solved with a whoosh. At that moment, I began to wonder, how many problems and hidden dangers of living alone can be easily solved?
In the following years, I used monitoring doorbells with video, stay monitoring and alarm functions, equipped with door and window alarms, fire extinguishing equipment, gas alarms and other safety facilities, was "planted" with various food boxes and food preservation methods in various solitary living guides, and also considered purchasing smart bracelets that could monitor vital signs during the epidemic.
In the end, living alone has only one inconvenience: a skirt that requires an extra-long chain from behind to wear. I put it in the laundry donation box downstairs. There is no shortage of skirts that women can wear themselves.
《不求上进的玉子》 (Moratoriamu Tamako, 2013) 剧照.
When adding these conveniences, I always had one premise: there is no problem with women living alone. There are many inconveniences for women living alone, but it is not they who should retreat. It's time to move forward with social environment and awareness, community safety and life services, daily home design, smart home and health devices, and so on. Among the many artifacts, I did not choose products such as the "boyfriend on the curtain" projector lamp because I did not like the setting that "it is safe to have a man in the home". If I need an axe and hold it in my own hand, please don't give me a male doll and shove the axe into his hand.
In general, especially in the past three or four years, the popularity of smart homes and smart wearable health devices, the emergence of various solo living guides and vlogs, the rising awareness of female mutual aid, and the increase of various women's conscious groups and online mutual aid communities have greatly facilitated my solitary life from the material and spiritual levels. It is worth mentioning that the keen business market embraced me far before social awareness. Now according to various safety guidelines, a set of good things for living alone is not as expensive as a box of whitening pills that girls are looking after for whitening.
But the market still has a lot to offer. Walking into supermarkets, large and small electrical appliances suitable for one-person living are far less than similar products of household type, and the proportion of tables and chairs with light materials and texture in home stores is very small. I hope that bulky appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines will add bottom pulleys that are easy to move, dream of sliding wardrobes and shelves like the sliding classroom blackboard, and expect a brand that sells lightweight and oversized desks and recliners that are friendly to women, so that women do not have to step on stools and do not have to grit their teeth to carry them.
Most importantly, I want the commercial market to create more jobs for women with equal pay. Women living alone welcome women in industries such as renovation construction, home appliance plumbing maintenance, security and express delivery into our homes. Let's create a new reality together.
A still from the first season of Fleabag (2016).
In my first year alone, I thought I was going to be so strong that I didn't know what to be vulnerable. In the eighth year, I calmly lived with the fragile, lonely and empty life, and also understood why people fall in love with mountains and seas, stars, or clams and grasshoppers, and became more and more peaceful about living alone.
Things are unpredictable, and living alone can be a part of anyone's life. Not only do women living alone need to turn off the gas with a key to prevent voyeurism, any safety guidelines for women living alone are also applicable to multi-person households; It's not just women who live alone who will be lonely, but there are no few people living when this snake bites. I often use the phrase "to create magic from life" in May Satten's "Diary of Living Alone", and from time to time I poke myself to life. Now I am not keen on self-certification or whitewashing living alone, everything I do is just honest about the life I choose. Regardless of whether there is an intimate relationship or not, people who live alone for a long time often have precipitated rules for dealing with their own relationships with others, and can enjoy a life in which they are responsible for their consequences and self-satisfied coexistence. If you clearly know that you are not suitable for living together, cohabiting, living in groups, etc., it is better to choose to live alone soberly and consciously than to give yourself up to the social torrent.
Small world of humanity
Living alone gives people life wisdom and soul self-consistency, regardless of gender. But for women, the unique significance of living alone lies in the freedom of will and freedom of existence in private space, because living alone gives women a small world without women's virtue and only humanity.
A still from Under the Tuscan Sun (2003).
This is first and foremost reflected in the thorough decision-making power of private life. For example, in the living room, I did not put a sofa or a TV cabinet, it is a simple sports room with a large TV and mirror, which doubles as a flower room, and has raised dozens of pots of affordable indoor flowers and plants. Sometimes I change soil and sometimes dance wildly, even like a big drunken bear with irregular limbs. There is no one in the world who can make me happy more than myself. After owning a solitary home, I never considered whether the shoe cabinet could accommodate men's shoes. it! I care more about whether all the furniture and appliances are convenient for women's lives. After that, one day when I was visiting IKEA, I suddenly realized that all the double rooms, family rooms, parent-child rooms, throw away the cribs, throw away everything for the family, leave only one person's belongings, it is still a home. You see, there are many kinds of homes. My solitary home is also a complete home; I don't live here to wait for a man, just to be who I want to be.
Naturally, women living alone will also dabble in deeper decision-making power, from material to physical to spiritual. When you've spent enough time with yourself, there's little room for self-deception. When there is no way to deceive, you will write, as Ito Hirumi, who laughs at herself as an old Obasan, in the Book of Closed Periods, "I am naked me and do not make a disguise." In recent years, all the topics of women's physical and mental liberation that have been fermented in public opinion, such as not wearing bras, no makeup, no shaving armpits, and saying goodbye to white and thin, can be thoroughly and conveniently practiced by women living alone. For example, to accept Asian yellow skin, appreciate muscle lines, and accept natural aging, then first look at your true self in the mirror comfortably, and then go out the door to be fearless of the other's scrutiny. For example, when more women move from talking about sex to practicing sex and trying to please the "DIY" of the body, these new practices are not out of line without going out of the cabinet under the premise of living alone and not breaking the law and discipline and not disturbing others.
A still from Le hérisson (2009).
In recent years, I have read the works of female writers such as Hiromi Ito, Chizuko Ueno, and Diana Asir. As they get older, they become more honest and humorous about the predicament and transcendence of being an older woman. And I believe that living alone has the same magic as years. When Ito Hiromi is older, she can tell about the physical changes in middle and old age that women are ashamed to mention, such as multiple amenorrhea, fat body, vaginal atrophy, etc., and young women can also redraw the scale of women's lives by living alone and tear off false fig leafs. When women living alone are no longer trapped in safety and abnormality, living alone becomes a shield. The stretch it brings is far greater than the safety hazard.
So, I have never regretted it, no regrets. Although the prejudices I have suffered over the years can fill a sack, I have received some positive encouragement in these two years. For example, a young girl who came to stay at home said, "You let me see that girls are doing well alone." At that moment, a poem crossed my mind: Stars are not afraid of what looks like autumn fireflies. When the moon is thin and the stars are thin, it makes sense when the stars are lit.
In "Beginning at the Limit," writer Ryomi Suzuki, who talks to Chizuko Ueno, mentions that feminist speech and protest are no longer the preserve of a few intellectuals or the privilege of a few elite women. However, when it comes to the topic of living alone, in China, women who can take the initiative and live comfortably alone are still some of the lucky groups of urban women. Imagine a physically and mentally sound adult woman who wants to live on her own, and if there is no widow (a dead man can always give a widow the rationality to live alone), she is either a god or a madwoman in people's mouths. So I sometimes have mixed feelings about this fortunate urban woman. I hope that all urban women who earn a comfortable and solitary life through their own efforts can live more freely and happily, and at the same time, like Chizuko Ueno, because they are curious about whether women can live alone and grow old with dignity, pay attention to how urban planning and construction can cope with the aging society, pay attention to the development of medical security, the elderly care industry, and the discussion of euthanasia in society.
A still from L'histoire d'Adèle H. (1975).
In the final analysis, the root of all the practices of urban solitary women is nothing more than to explore how people can live and how to live with dignity. Therefore, the face of living alone should be applied to all people who choose to live alone when their living ability and economic conditions permit. For example, if there is some uncle in this world who lives alone until he is forty or fifty years old, he loves to talk to trees, only amuses cats and walks birds, no matter how others laugh at him, I believe that he has his happiness.
However, when talking about this topic around Women's Day, it is still necessary to affirm the meaning of living alone for women. For me, the biggest significance is the old question of an ordinary woman living alone today—in 1923, Lu Xun gave a speech at the Beijing Women's Higher Normal School about what would happen after Nala left. Due to her lack of independent financial ability, Nala, a housewife after her escape, has only two paths: either fall or return. A hundred years later, ordinary people like me can give new answers: I don't have to be Nala, and I don't fall. The outside world is windy and rainy, and I can always go back to my own home.
A still from Le hérisson (2009).
Call for stories: Have you bought any bizarre pirated copies, such as a non-existent Harry Potter series, a novel written by "Jin Yong", and a complete collection of a writer with a crooked layout? In addition, you may have other personal memories of piracy. I look forward to you telling us your story.
The number of words is not limited, even if you have a photo! Method 1: Send us a private message in the background; Method 2: Send to email and [email protected]. As of this Sunday (March 12).
The content of this article is original to live alone. Author: Kong Xue; Editor: Sisi; Proofreader: Fu Chunshu. The cover image is taken from Under the Tuscan Sun (2003). Welcome to Moments.
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