Leftover Women Abroad

Leftover Women Abroad is a realist novel by Zhang Xi, published in 2014 by Xinjiang Youth Publishing House. The author, a researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, encountered numerous single Chinese women during a visiting fellowship in Boston in 2012, which inspired the book. Set in Boston, the novel revolves around three Chinese women from different places and backgrounds: one born in the 1950s, one in the 1970s, and one in the 1980s. Though of different ages and life stages, all three are labeled "leftover women" for being single. They meet in Boston and face trials of identity, livelihood, and love in a foreign land. Taking the dating and marriage experiences of women studying in America as its entry point, the work depicts the cultural misunderstandings and conflicts they encounter in relationships with American men, the setbacks and complications in their pursuit of legal status, and their sense of responsibility toward family and kin. In a quasi-documentary manner, the author presents overseas Chinese women's self-positioning and insistence on self-respect in the marriage market, examining personal choices against the backdrop of emigration waves and Chinese social change, and exploring their trade-offs and adjustments among ideals and reality, money and love, family expectations and personal will, thereby revealing one facet of overseas Chinese women's romantic circumstances.