Dad wants me to be a princess, even now

Moments before I could lift my carry-on baggage to put it in the plane’s overhead locker ahead of our recent holiday to mainland Europe, my father gently urged me to stop. He held its thick handles and lifted it with his thin arms, pushing it into place with a sigh.

“You should relax and be the lady, and let me do the heavy tasks,” he said in a serious tone. “In the future, someone special will come into your life and take over such tasks from me, but that will never happen if you do everything yourself.”

I was stunned into silence. This was not the father I remembered from childhood, who trained me to study hard at school, asked me to earn my own pocket money as a teenager at a local coffee shop, and even taught me household chores so my life alone in London would not turn into a mess.

And now, eight years after I left home and started a new life in the United Kingdom, I realized for the first time that dad still has expectations for me to be a princess, to maintain some dependency and vulnerability, which are considered virtues of women in traditional China.

Well, that came a little late. Little did Dad know, that, over the three years of my university life I had moved apartments five times all by myself, one time dragging suitcases of books and clothes onto a bus and repeating the journey twice, and another time holding tight onto cardboard boxes while waiting for the taxi that would stop them being soaked in the rain.

I thought Dad would have been proud of me. Dad, who was born in the 1960s in rural Sichuan province to poor factory workers, fought hard to receive a decent education and later started his own business from nothing.

As a truly self-made man, he intuitively taught me to fight for success. That was usual in China in the 90s when Sichuan was rapidly urbanizing, with opportunities booming across all industries, and hardworking attitudes were taught to children of my generation right from kindergarten.

But despite all that, China’ s subtle appreciation of traditional femininity has never quite gone. Maybe Dad remembered those values as he suddenly realized the kid he once trained in a strict way had turned into a young woman.

Dad’s education of me is often full of contractions and surprises, just like China as a country, with unprecedented changes is also full of contradictions and surprises.

Meanwhile, living in the UK, a country currently led by a female prime minister, I have never thought there is anything girls cannot do. Most of my female friends are professionals working in the City of London, and, after work, we frequently go down to the pub for a drink, just like the lads do — something my mother never did.

London also has many female role models for me. I still remember the way Dame Fiona Woolf campaigned with such passion for female equality in the workplace during her year as Lord Mayor of the City of London three years ago.

I wondered how I might make Dad understand the new world his little girl has entered. Perhaps, one day he will realize the “someone special” in my life will appreciate my confidence above dependence, and admit that times have changed.