A Poem of Changgan Gender Quotes

In these lines we again get a sense of gender relationships that are divided according to conventional norms. The husband is the one who goes off exploring on his long journey, while the wife, the speaker, stays home waiting for him. This feeds into the idea that men are the adventurers and explorers, while the woman's job is to stay put and look after the home.

Stereotypically, this speaker is a woman who worries about her looks, about her "bright cheeks" fading. Her preoccupation with looks here again emphasizes (again, according to the stereotype) that we're dealing with a female speaker here. It's women who have to worry about being pretty, not men—which is totally unfair, we think. Of course, the speaker's cheeks are fading because she's heartbroken and she misses her hubby so much. But the fact that she is worrying about how her cheeks look suggests that the speaker of this poem is a pretty "conventional" woman, according to thousands of years of patriarchal norms.