Never Ladies of Leisure

When the Chinese version of Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean-In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead" was released in China this summer, it hit shelves already groaning with "success studies" books.
 The genre first took off in 2001, when the Chinese translation of Spencer Johnson's "Who Moved My Cheese?" became a run-away best seller and spawned countless imitators, including "Whose Cheese Can I Move?" and "No More Cheese!"  Soon numerous publishers released "success" books, many of them translations or cobbled-together essays based on the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Dale Carnegie, and Napoleon Hill, others original works, like "Studying Management with Mao Zedong" and "Entrepreneur Genghis Khan." The genre remains popular –a search of the online bookstore Douban brings up more than a thousand "success studies" books – but in recent years has expanded beyond wealth acquisition and career advice to encompass a fuller version of achievement that includes personal fulfillment and happiness and, like Ms. Sandberg's book, is increasingly targeted at women.
 Two such books published this year, both of which have been best-sellers, are Yang Lan's "The Happiness Project" and Yue-Sai Kan's "Life is a Competition." The authors of each are household names in China, celebrated entrepreneurs, television personalities, and authors who started "leaning in" decades before Ms. Sandberg coined the phrase. Their books are sprinkled with glamorous photos, of themselves alone and with global celebrities – Ms. Yang with Yao Ming and Sophie Marceau, Ms. Kan with Queen Noor, Prince Charles, Hillary Clinton and Quincy Jones. But where Ms. Sandberg openly proclaims her book to be "sort of a feminist manifesto" and calls on women to "internaliz[e] the revolution" and address the "leadership ambition gap,"  Mses. Yang and Kan take approaches that are simultaneously more modest – and arguably, for China, more revolutionary.
 Ms. Yang  – who wrote a preface to the Chinese version of "Lean In" – is a Columbia University-educated journalist who has hosted several popular television interview shows, including "Yang Lan One on One" and the women's talk show "Her Village." She is also the founder of Sun Media and Sun Culture Foundation. In an interview at her company's headquarters in a bucolic complex near the United States Embassy, Ms. Yang explained that the "The Happiness Project" was largely inspired by the more than 800 interviews she has conducted on "Her Village," many of which made her realize the difficulties women have in coming to terms with their emotions. 
 "Our education has no teaching about managing emotions or improving relationships," she explained. "People are going through so much anxiety and tension in their relationships." This anxiety is exacerbated, she said, by the phenomenal pace of change in China and the social and economic pressure that has accompanied it.
 "But it's not just economic growth," she added, "it's the uncertainty of the future, the deterioration of the environment, the tension between people, the separation of families."
 In her book, which was co-written with Zhu Bing, Ms. Yang uses a variety of anecdotes gleaned from her interviews, personal life, and reading to advise women on such happiness-related issues as life-work balance, self-actualization, and relationship-management. She contemplates the joys of travel – she has visited more than 40 countries – and the guilt that accompanies working mothers, like her continuing regret that her travel schedule obliged her to wean her now-teenage daughter after only a hundred days. She acknowledges that – with ample money and help – she has it comparatively easy, but points out that Chinese working women are generally better off than their American counterparts because they have more help from grandparents, more affordable child care, and their children start school at a younger age and have a longer school day.
 Ms. Yang emphasized that she appreciates "Sandberg's courage" in calling for women to "lean in" and acknowledges the importance of breaking through the glass ceiling that exists for women in China, as elsewhere, but believes that urban Chinese women now seek a broader definition of success.
 "They are realizing that material success is not the only thing and they are looking inward," she said.
 Like Ms. Yang, Ms. Kan is also U.S.-educated, although she emigrated to the U.S. as a college student and got her television start there before returning to China in 1984 to produce and host the CCTV show "One World" (which boasted 300 million weekly viewers). She founded Yue-Sai Cosmetics in 1992 and ran it until L'Oreal acquired it in 2004; since 2011, she has been the national director of Miss Universe China and her book was inspired by this experience.
 "It's an arduous competition," Ms. Yang said of Miss Universe, by telephone from Shanghai. "It's hard for a small town girl to go to a big city and then to an international competition. There's a sea of people – how do you come out to be the winner?  In life, it really is the same." 
 In the book – her eighth - Ms. Kan discusses, in conversational style, everything she believes women need to know to win the game of life, including positive attitude, make-up skills, money management, proper etiquette, time management, and taking initiative at work.  Despite her background as a cosmetics mogul and current role training pageant contestants, she focuses more on internal qualities than external.
 "The outside is easy to deal with," she said. "Just get a good cosmetics teacher and you can learn it in one day. The rest is so much harder." 
 Indeed, one of her biggest complaints is the state of education in China.
 "The Chinese education system is horrible – the kids are learning by rote," she said. "They are miserable here."
 Ms. Kan is especially intent on promoting a more global consciousness among Chinese women. One chapter of her book is subtitled "The Way You Understand the World Defines Who You Are" and she says she addresses the education issue at the start of pageant training.
 "I tell them, if you don't know anything about the world, how can you be Miss Universe?  A lot of Chinese don't know anything about the world – they watch TV, they go shopping. So I make them read newspapers!"
To win the Miss Universe competition – or the competition of life – she says that Chinese women must be both "outstanding" and "international," and that China itself effectively has to change to enable this to happen.
 "The biggest problem is limiting what Chinese are allowed to see," she explained. "Because of the controlled media, we don't see anything other than in pirated form. You go to Korea, you see everything! If you don't know what other cultures are like, how do you present your own culture to the world?"