Working Title - The Tai Tai Project

The Chinese word tai tai translates to English to literally mean wife. Here I have reached the limit of my Mandarin fluency - although I know the literal definition, I have no idea the connotation related to the word tai tai in Mandarin. However, when a foreigner uses the phrase tai tai in conversation, they refer to, shall I say, women who lunch. This is not a compliment, at least not in my circle of friends. It refers to the foreign women who follow their spouse to Shanghai, outsource the parenting to an ayi, don't learn to drive or to speak the language, and spend their time shopping, getting massages and meeting for lunch at the "it" places. Wearing heels.

By description, the difference between myself and them is not vast. I could argue the differences, but it would stray from the point of the Tai Tai Project. The sheer fact that the word wife does not clearly define most of the women I know is a source of great interest to me. In Shanghai, I have a large number of girlfriends. This is new for me - I've historically been "one of the boys," but I'm enjoying the company of girls. And I'm particularly enjoying the wide array of strong, amazing women I have the privilege of getting to know. Each of these women has a different reason for coming to Shanghai, more complex than simply that they followed their husband's job. Each of these women has a story which led her to this amazing place, and those stories never cease to amaze me.

Hence the project: the Tai Tai Project, for lack of a better name. It is my goal to collect oral histories of these amazing women. Partly as a writing exercise for me - I look forward to writing interesting stories in each woman's unique voice. But partly just for fun. I've already collected three, and what a privilege it has been to interview these three women. Of the three, their stories could not be more alike in many ways - each dropped their life to follow their husband to China, and has spent the last few years focusing entirely on their young children and meeting their family's needs. But each is so amazingly different as well. Becca moved away from New Zealand, her home country, freshly out of college to offer her services as a nurse and midwife in impoverished Romania, where she met her American husband ten years later. Kate got pregnant during her freshman year of college, dropped out of school, and then married the father and went on to have 4 children within 7 years. Lori graduated from Princeton and then Harvard Business School, worked for a decade as a business woman for some of America's top companies before changing her life entirely to focus on being a mother in Shanghai.

I don't know the endpoint this project will lead me toward, although I have some exciting and ambitious (possibly overeaching) ideas. But even if they go nowhere, I'm certainly going to enjoy the journey.