==HONG KONG==

Have you ever thought about why a woman should use the surname of her husband after she has married? How about the children? Why should they use the surnames of their fathers but not that of their mothers? Perhaps this is just a historical accident. However, if you consider the status of women in the past, you may find that this may be because of sex discrimina- tion. Although there has been some improvement of the conditions recently owing to the U.N. women's conference in Beijing, women are still facing serious discrimination in a lot of countries.
In Asia, Japan is one of the countries which has serious sex discrimination against women. When I traveled to Japan two years ago, I made fiends with a Japanese lady. One night, when we were having dinner, I served her with a meatball. In Hong Kong, my act is a common table manner. Therefore, I did not expect any reaction from her. However, at that time, she was extremely pleased and said, "It is impossible for a Japanese man to do that for me. The men in Japan are all male chauvinists! It is my dream to live in Hong Kong because I think it is the only place in Asia I can find gentlemen!" A day after, there was another incident making me believe that Japanese men are notorious for their being male chauvinists. When I was travelling on a coach, I witnessed a man sitting on a seat, letting his wife stand and hold heavy parcels. Every man around the lady had no intention to help her. To my surprise, it was another lady who gave her a seat! I think the strong male chauvinism has been making the status of women in Japan become unbelievably low.
In China, conditions for women are no better than that for Japanese women. Traditionally, the work load of Chinese women was much heavier than that of their husbands because they had to work on farms as well as to take care of their families. In particular, families in old China were of large size because the women functioned like machines to give birth to babies, and, the women needed a lot of time and energy to work for their large families. Moreover, each Chinese man in the past was allowed to have more than one wife whereas every woman could have only one husband. When proposing divorce, only men made the decisions and women had no right to say even a word. In addition, only a male could be the heir of all the legacy of a family. All these show that China has been a nation dominated by men for a long time.
In modern China, under the one-child policy, which mandates every family to have one child at most, a great number of baby girls are abandoned or killed in their infancy. This is because the Chinese traditionally think that after a girl has married, she and her sons and daughters will use her husband's surname. If the family's only child is a girl, the family name will have no successor after the girl has married, and the family will face "extinction". This causes the low status of women in China to continue.
What has made women become aware of their status recently? In my opinion, as family size is getting smaller in general, women devote less time to take care of their families than they did before. As a result, they have more time to take part in many other activities. When they entered the society that has been dominated by men for a long period of time, they found that there was no place for them. Thus, they began to make efforts to make a higher status for women. In the past 50 years, women have achieved a lot in society, politics and economics. Many have become doctors, engineers and even prime ministers which only men could be in the past.
In conclusion, although men and women have been becoming more equal than before, this is only a beginning. If you try to think about the situations like women who believe in Islam needing to wear "yashmak" whenever they are not at home, or women not being allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, you will see that there are still many women in the world facing serious discriminations and inequalities. To achieve equality of sex, more effort should be made.