A lady who had been an associate professor in Taiwan married a Shanghai-native academic from Hong Kong teaching over here, and became a lecturer herself at the same institution.
She told me this story one day over a cup of tea.
Her husband, being a bloke [sorry, generalisation!] and a bookish man, was not very good at looking after himself, so she had to do almost everything, down to buying his clothes and shoes for him.
(Another generalisation: it is almost standard cultural practice for a Chinese woman to know how to run a household. The old Chinese terms for referring to one’s own spouse are 外子 wàizǐ / “outside person” and 内子 nèizǐ / “inside person”, which give a good indication of the clear delineation of their roles.)
One summer, she went back to Taiwan to spend time with her ageing parents. Returned to London to find that her husband had bought a new pair of trousers. She was suitably impressed, “Oh, he’s learned how to do such things for himself!”
She later discovered that what had happened was: he was trying to iron a pair of trousers but managed to burn them, so had to go and get a replacement pair. (Maybe it was the only decent pair he had, or he didn’t want his wife to notice that pair missing.)
(London, 1997?)
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