Progress Report

American women are different. Mr. Wu Kun-Kan, as a Chinese newspaper correspondent in the U.S., had studied the inscrutable ways of the West long enough to realize that. Last week, in a letter to a Shanghai paper, he tried to tell his countrymen about it:

"During the war, women came out and worked. . . . [They] were in high spirits and were well off economically. . . . [But] they had no men. . . . Every day, married women feared for the lives of their husbands and the unmarried women worried and moped at not being able to obtain the love of a man. Some girls 18 and 19 years of age even . . . saved money to maintain themselves as old maids."

Then "last August, when news of victory was broadcast . . . people all over went mad with joy, but happiest of all were the girls. . . .So now returned G.I.s make love easily. In dance halls today, it is the women that wait for the men. . . . Their yearning for men is like the yearning for rain during a drought. . . . In universities, the girls are like refugees who see meat and fish before them; girl students in enticing, flowery clothes gather around ragged boy students . . . competing with each other to gain [their] favors. . . . In the streets, no more is it men who stare at women, but instead women who steal glances at men."

Mr. Wu could not help but regard this turned-about state of affairs as most delightful. The U.S. was indeed the promised land--for men. How different, he exclaimed wistfully, were things in China: "In Chungking, boy students running after girl students find it a very hard job indeed. A boy would often exhaust the strength of nine oxen and two tigers and still not succeed. If their endeavors were used in America, American girls would consider them as most ideal sweethearts."

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