South China Morning Posts Interview (2020.3.8)

Five Asian Women who will make you rethink Gender Equality: Concepts of Motherhood

 

In Hong Kong, Circle Yuen,35,hopes that when her two young daughters, aged two and nine, reach adulthood they will encounter less prejudice in society.

    “I hope they get to be true to themselves. It may sound easy,but it’s hard.”

    Yuen, born and raised in the city, knows what she is talking about. She and her former partner brok up when their daughter was only two. After a series of heated arguments, Yuen released they could not live together, but she did not know what to do next.

    “When I faced this problem, it was so hard to seek help and talk to people. Very luckily I walked into a bookstore and saw a co-parenting communication handbook. I did not know what that was,”she recalls.

    Yuen, who eventually got separated, says pressure from society made her personal struggle even harder.” My daughter was living in our house with her dad, and my grandmother kept asking why I had left my daughter. At the time, I thought I had to take the blame. I believed I was not as good a mother as they were, “ Yuen recalls.

    She has found more healthey ways to communicate with her former partner.” I am still learning.” she says. “But I can say that I walked through the marriage storm and got more confident.

    

    On the way, she has grown as a community leader while being a wife and a mother, says Yuen, who was a fellow with Hong Kong-based non-profit Resolve.

    

“They got me a mentor who shared an important thought with me:

we may see our story as shame, but others see it as courage.”

​

    Yuen, who has had a second daughter with her current partner, now dedicates most of her time to an independent project about co-parenting, which had included producing books, community theatre and educational programmes.

 

    Yuen, who previously worked for an advocacy group against sexual violence, says gender inequality has led to suffering among both women and men.”But perhaps women go throught more self-blaming because of the traditional ways of perceiving motherhood,”she says.” Many female survivors of domestic violence also have a hard time to deal with their partners and to find a solution for their relationship.”

    She says “ the concept of a broken family needs to be rewritten. It should be seen as a reformed family or a restructured family”.