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Dr Maria Jaschok is director of International Gender Studies (IGS) at Lady Margaret
Hall, which in 1878 became the first Oxford college (together with Somerville) to
admit women. As a way of celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, IGS wants to respond
to the challenge of its patron, the Burmese leader, former Oxford resident and
academic fellow, Aung San Suu Kyi. The idea is to assist in rebuilding intellectual life
and academic institutions in Burma through collaborative programmes. Dr Jaschok’s
life experience will shine an empathetic light on the task.
German born Maria Jaschok describes most of the time between her birth and
settling in Oxford in 1998 as flight but the story that haunts her happened before she
was born – a woman’s story. The story which has influenced her throughout her life
and is at the heart of most of the objects she would like to take with her to our desert
island is her mother’s.
“In 1995, exactly fifty years after her flight into West Germany my mother, Hildegard
Maria Jaschok, wrote, in restrained and elegant prose, the story of her nine month
ordeal. It was only when I read it that I really understood the source of her profound
silence and the distance it created in our relationship. Jeanette Winterson said that
we tend to write what we can live with. My mother wrote what she could live with and
what she felt her children could live with.”
Maria was born in post-war (West) Germany but the story which defined her
childhood began on Jan 18, 1945 when her mother, the twenty one year old
Hildegard, was told that she should leave her home in Katowice in what was then
Upper Silesia, Germany, near the border with Poland. Hildegard naively thought she
would be away for just for a short time and so set off, in one of the iciest winters on
record, with only limited supplies of food and clothing. Her husband was missing and
she did not know that he had been taken prisoner in Russia or whether he was alive
or dead.
Maria explained “Her decision to leave was partly motivated by her unusual family
background which caused suspicion even unpopularity with their neighbours. Her
family was suspected of concealing their Jewish ancestry and moreover, members of
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her family were regarded as political dissenters in a local milieu that had been
predominantly supportive of policies of Hitler’s government.
“She set off with her two children, Wolfram, a toddler of weak health and Christian, a
baby only a few months old.
Her elderly mother, accustomed to a life-style of
leisurely comfort, and Hildegard’s nursery-maid Marie, legendary in the family for her
moroseness and fierce loyalty, chose to flee with her. In the chaos of war-torn
Europe, because of the shortage of fuel, there were no trains or buses so the
refugees walked or travelled in horse drawn carriages. Hildegard, Marie and my
brother Wolfram rode in one carriage, the light summer carriage, but my
grandmother and the baby were in the winter carriage ahead of them.
“One night hundreds of soldiers passed through the line of refugees and in the
process scattered the caravan. My mother looked everywhere but couldn’t find
grandmother and the baby. In her book, she described the nine months spent trying
to find them, haunted by fears of the child’s helplessness and her mother’s frailty,
unable to focus on the child at her side. She does not describe Marie’s role but it is
clear that when my mother faltered and despaired, she was the pillar of support –
selling my mother’s jewellery to purchase food, ensure my brother’s comfort, and
safe-guard my mother.
“For a while she was trapped in Dresden which had been almost annihilated by
Allied bombing. Even in 1995 she wouldn’t go into details of her encounter with a
brutal military officer - she was an exotically beautiful young woman.
“She did describe in detail how, everywhere she went she desperately asked if
anyone had seen an elderly woman with a small baby. Her first clue to their
whereabouts came in Münster. The International Red Cross was able to tell her they
had been seen near Osnabrück (Lower Saxony).
“My mother described their emotional reunion. My grandmother had been fortunate,
a family which owned a large estate had taken her in and the baby was alive and
well. She had reciprocated for the generous hospitality accorded to a perfect
stranger by teaching the local children.”
Hildegard’s extraordinary nine-months long flight through the chaos of post-war
Europe, her experience of hospitality, kindness and also hostility and rejection and
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her belief that a mother who loses her child is a deficient mother, led to a break
down. At last, she was able to rest and recover and then set about finding her
husband. They too were reunited and settled near Osnabrück. Before the outbreak
of war Bruno Jaschok had been a student at The Academy of Fine Art in Berlin. He
was passionate about painting but his new life left no time to pursue it. Maria
explained,
“Educated young men who had somehow survived the War – however
psychologically scarred – were urgently needed to teach and my father, completely
ignorant of pedagogy, was put in charge of a number of schools. He must have been
happy on the day I was born because he declared it a holiday for the numerous
schools in the district which he oversaw. As I grew up people would remember my
birthday because of that unexpected holiday. But the atmosphere at home was
tense. My father excelled in everything he did be it music, art, mathematics or
literature but he was aloof and demanding. Excelling as a teacher, he was a
troubling father.
“My mother was compassionate but pre-occupied with eight children and the huge
social demands which my father’s position made on her. My mentor, in a way my
parent, was my brother Wolfram. He introduced me to his world of novelists and
poets and I became a precocious and ferocious reader. He shaped my sense of
aesthetics and he challenged me to read critically and to view the world around me
agnostically. My feminism grew from his certainty that his little sister could achieve
anything she set her mind to.”
Maria made reference to a difficult relationship between the frustrated father and the
talented son who was enjoying the artistic career the father had dreamed of as a
young man.
“When, in 1980, I was then a student in London, I received the news of Wolfram’s
death aged just 38, a recording of Kathleen Ferrier was playing in my small study.
Her rendering of Gluck’s aria ‘What is life? What is left if thou art dead’ is thus
forever related to the news of my brother’s death. Ferrier’s voice did not allow for
emotional armour. I was not able to listen to this particular recording for many
subsequent years. My brother had meant too much to me.”
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Her mother gave her book a simple title ‘18. January 1945’ − the day of her flight,
She used one of Wolfram’s etchings from a series he did for a successful exhibition
in Cologne, on the theme of expulsion and exile as the cover illustration.
Unresolved tensions within the family home led to Maria’s first flight and her first
destination was London.
“Nowadays you would call it a gap year but, in 1968, spending a year abroad
was
rare in our social circle. I used my love of English literature as justification but in
many ways it was a camouflage for a sub-conscious desire to flee all that pain and
the silences.
“I chose to remain in England to read International Relations at Sussex and my
parents agreed to support me. As a rather conflicted German I was enthused, like
most of my compatriots, with the idealism and necessity of the European project and
that influenced the choice of subject.”
During her undergraduate years at Sussex University, Maria had one of those
chance encounters that can change lives. She met Cora Bell who was advisor to
Henry Kissinger at the time of the Nixon visit to China.
“Cora Bell’s cold warrior attitude in a perverse sort of way opened my eyes to China.
The only way that I could, as a mere student, challenge what I considered her
shallow understanding of Maoist China, was to read as much as I could. I simply had
to know more than my professor in order to win the arguments in our tutorials. My
passionate involvement with the country, with the idea of a successful revolution that
enabled women’s fullest participation in the shaping of their country, totally naïve as
it turned out to be, begun at that time. I was determined to learn more about it and
wrote to someone whose erudition I much admired, the incredibly busy scientist and
sinologist, Joseph Needham, not expecting him to reply.”
Needham was a famous Cambridge scientist who mastered Classical Chinese in
order to research China's ancient technological and scientific past. As director of the
Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chongqing from 1942 to 1946. Maria
said:
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“He invited me to Cambridge, taking an entire day from his hectic schedule to listen
to me and share his own experience of China. That meeting inspired me to read for a
PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
I worked hard to learn Mandarin, doing a Masters in Chinese Anthropology and
Sociology before embarking on my PhD on the subject of female domestic servitude,
the international campaign for its abolition and the politicization of what became ‘the
Chinese slave girl’ issue in the context of pre-World War II colonial Hong Kong.
I made my first visit to China in 1979 and after getting my doctorate, in 1981, I
decided that I wanted more time to live, learn and research in China. My mother’s
wry observation was ‘is there nothing closer to home? Going to China was an
adventurous option but Maria had developed an unstoppable passion.
“I obtained a position at Zhongshan University (Guangzhou) which involved most
importantly supervision of dissertations considered too ‘sensitive’ for others to take
on. On the whole, I was successful in getting my students through their dissertation
defence.
“Despite the numerous difficulties in getting permission with the authorities to pursue
research independently, it was a fruitful time. I developed wonderful relationships
inside the university and in the wider community. An elderly widow, a retired nurse,
loved showing me off to her neighbours and boasting that I was her adopted foreign
daughter. She thought that I needed nurturing and good food. I did. I called her
Zhang Ma.” (Ma in Chinese means mother)
“Through her I was able to explore the lives of single women and an unusual local
phenomenon called then marriage resistance. Zhang Ma took me to her village
where Gupowu (spinster houses) had been common. I learned more about them
when I discovered an article written by the journalist Agnes Smedley in the twenties.
She described the lives of female silk workers who chose not to marry. Their work
enabled them to live life as they chose to live it and not endure countless
pregnancies and repressive mothers-in-law. Zhang Ma described their style of
shared housing as adhering to a locally common lay Buddhist tradition, which gave
legitimacy to delay, or outright refusal, of marriage. The women used their income to
support their families while not being subject to them.
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“Some, she intimated, lived so close that it was rumoured that their relationship was
as intimate as that of husband and wife. I later on had opportunities to conduct more
fieldwork and publish on what I came to regard as local adaptations of minor
marriage patterns. But I have never forgotten the stories told by Zhang Ma of village
life and women’s choices that gave a first inkling of local realities so much more
complex and diverse than imagined when still a student at SOAS.”
Zhongshan University was followed by an appointment with Long Island University in
the States which asked Maria to set up Chinese Studies programmes for US
students in China and Taiwan, with its main offices in Hong Kong. While in that post
she met another charismatic woman.
“Then already a scholar of considerable renown, the philosopher Li Xiaojiang was
eloquent and persuasive. In the early eighties, she set up one of the earliest
Women’s Studies centres, at Zhengzhou University in Henan. She organised the first
International Women’s Studies conferences and courted controversy not just within
China but internationally too with her uncompromising critiques levelled equally at
successive Chinese governments’ betrayal of women’s early hopes of genuine
gender equality and at the arrogance by which Western feminism appropriated the
sole pathway to a universalised idea of women’s liberation. We corresponded and
met for the first time in 1988. She confronted me with a challenge to help her
establish the first international women’s college and women’s museum in China in
Henan. It was a challenge I could not resist.”
In 1994, Maria became the college’s vice-president and the deputy director of the
Henan Women’s Museum, the first such museum in China, with the purpose of
preserving relevant material artefacts as evidence of the past and creative lives of
Chinese women. More ambitiously, they wanted it to be a genuine research
institution.
“The United Nations planned the Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for
Equality, Development and Peace to take place in September 1995 in Beijing. We
assumed that we would have official support but as Li Xiaojiang didn’t shy away from
controversy, she had made enemies. Although we enjoyed local backing for our
projects, our assumption that we would get national approval was to prove wrong.
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“Our first exhibition was to be about a Shaanxi peasant artist Ku Shulan, known as
The Paper Cutting Woman. Using colourful remnants of old propaganda posters and
a tiny pair of scissors, I observed her arthritic hands making the most extraordinary
creations that turned a paper-cutting into a work of art of the most subtle beauty.
Nowadays images of her work – nearly always depicting Niang Niang, the Goddess
of Paper-cutting - are ubiquitous on souvenirs and household objects that can be
purchased in chic boutiques in Beijing and Shanghai, earning certain people a great
deal of money. Ku Shulan died dirt-poor, to the last exploited by an abusive husband
and by greedy county officials. That she was also a poet, chanting her songs when
creating a new Niang Niang, and that she was possessed of healing powers used for
the benefit of women in the surrounding villages, has been nearly entirely forgotten.
“I discovered her living in the poorest and most remote part of Shaanxi. Who would
have thought that an entire Ku Shulan industry would develop around her? I
purchased some of her work before I left the village, wanting her to possess money
without the knowledge of her husband and local officials. I may have added to her
problems as he was bound to discover her money purse. In her village, she was
called a witch, a wupo, possessed and dangerous. Only under the cover of darkness
did the village women dare to seek her help. She was considered a useful ‘money
tree’ by husband and local cadres.”
“Before we were able to open the exhibition we were accused of (illegal) ‘women’s
rights activism’, our institutions were closed down and our offices sealed off. We no
longer had access to our work. Ku Shulan’s paper-cuttings and poetry as well as the
many artefacts we had already been able to collect were confiscated. A Public
Security team was sent by Beijing to investigate the entire group of academics with
the objective of cleaning up the country before the World Conference on Women
commenced. I left the country having negotiated a compromise which allowed return
to China and continuation of research on the understanding that I would resign from
my positions at the college and the museum.”
“It was a difficult time in China. During the investigation, while I waited to return to
Hong Kong, my colleagues were being severely criticised and with no work to do, I
distracted myself by walking around the city. It is then that I made a discovery which
shaped all my subsequent research.
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“I remember my first startling sights of Qingzhen Nüsi (Women’s Mosque) of which I
had no prior knowledge. This led to visits with female imams, known as Ahong, and
the discovery of a more than three hundred year history of female led sites of
worship and education. To my knowledge, no research had been done on these
mosques and I began to develop a research plan for more extensive fieldwork.
“Guo Ahong, the patient informant objected to the many questions I asked of her.
She exclaimed, ‘Why am I taking to you separately when Shui Jingjun is asking me
exactly the same questions.’ This was the first time that I heard the name of Shui
Jingjun a Muslim researcher attached to the local Academy of Social Sciences.
Within an hour, Shui, a sociologist of religion, joined us. It was the beginning of a
collaboration that lasts to this day and which has involved several research projects,
two monographs (in English and Chinese) and a not inconsiderable number of
journal articles and chapters in books.”
They were fortunate in getting the funding required to conduct the comprehensive
field work. One result of their collaboration is their book The History of Women’s
Mosques in Chinese Islam, first published by Curzon and then in Chinese by Sanlian
Publishers (Harvard Yenching Academic Library Series) in Beijing.
Maria explained,
“The narrative of women’s mosques in China goes back more than three centuries
and reveals the courage and persistence of women of faith against considerable
odds. Within their communities, women faced the prejudices of Islamic patriarchy
which sought to circumscribe women’s desire for their own sites of prayer and
education. Within mainstream society, women faced discriminations as members of
an ethno-religious minority. And yet women’s mosques not only survive but their
numbers are growing. In some Muslim communities in central China, the number of
women’s mosques exceeds that of men’s mosques.”
In 1998, Maria came to Oxford as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for
Cross-Cultural Research on Women (founded in 1983) then part of Queen Elizabeth
House. (The centre which became the International Gender Studies Centre [IGS] in
2000 moved to Lady Margaret Hall in September 2011.)
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“I liked the community of the centre very much, finding it immensely supportive when
I was working on my long manuscript on Chinese women’s mosques. Two things
happened which led to my decision to stay in Oxford instead of returning to Asia; my
mother underwent a dangerous heart operation that left her considerable weakened
and from which she never properly recovered. And the Centre was in need of a new
director. I did not foresee that I would stay on for so many years and that I would
become so closely engaged with the development of IGS. I like to think that what
was a decision made under great emotional pressure became in the course of time
just right – for everyone concerned.”
Maria frequently travels to China to undertake research and attend conferences.
Most recently, she gave a series of lectures organized by universities in northwest
and central China. She met with former students who are now themselves lecturers
and published researchers. Despite many enduring political and material difficulties
that variously obstruct the management and culture of academic organizations in
China, she is also witnessing hopeful developments when compared to the 1980s,
during the time of her first fieldwork in China.
Now was the time to ask Maria to make her final choice of object, art or book for
Oxtopia. She held up a fine quality soft leather brief case saying,
“Another important object would have to be my father’s briefcase. It is the most
important and meaningful gift he gave me just as I entered primary school. He had
used this briefcase when he started his career in education, and it is forever
associated with that little girl who looks out of the window, admiringly waving her
father goodbye, as he made his way to work, his briefcase, students’ essays and
books tightly clutched under his arms.”
It seemed only fair that the briefcase fulfil its purpose and contain a few things like
books and photographs of paintings by her father and brother so she will be
reminded of her father, mother and Wolfram on the island.
International Gender Studies Centre patron Aung San Suu Kyi described "the education and
empowerment of women" as indispensable to a "more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all".
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