Studies of Chinese society commonly emphasizze men's roles and functions, a not unreasonable approach to a society with patrilineal kinship structure. But this emphasis has left many important gaps in our knowledge of Chinese life. This study seeks to fill some of these gaps by examining the ways rural Taiwanese women manipulate men and each other in the pursuit of their personal goals. The source of a woman's power, her home in a social structure dominated by men, is what the author calls the uterine family, a de facto social unity consisting of a mother and her children. The first four...

The Communist revolution promised Chinese women an end to thousands of years of subjugation, an equality with men in all matters legal, political, social, and economic. This book examines the extent to which this promise has been kept. Based on nearly a year of field research and interviews with over 300 women in six widely separated rural and urban areas, it gives us a vivid picture of Chinese women today - their day-to-day lives, their views of the present, and their hopes for the future. To date nothing approximating equality has been achieved: in working conditions, in pay, in educational...

The Communist revolution promised Chinese women an end to thousands of years of subjugation, an equality with men in all matters legal, political, social, and economic. This book examines the extent to which this promise has been kept. Based on nearly a year of field research and interviews with over 300 women in six widely separated rural and urban areas, it gives us a vivid picture of Chinese women today - their day-to-day lives, their views of the present, and their hopes for the future. To date nothing approximating equality has been achieved: in working conditions, in pay, in educational...

A Thrice-Told Tale is one ethnographer's imaginative and powerful response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography. The author, a feminist anthropologist, uses three texts developed out of her research in Taiwan-a piece of fiction, anthropological fieldnotes, and a social science article-to explore some of these criticisms. Each text takes a different perspective, is written in a different style, and has different "outcomes," yet all three involve the same fascinating set of events. A young mother began to behave in a...

By the author of the classic A Daughter of Han, this is an affectionate, revealing portrait of an old, wealthy widow and her family in the Peking of the 1920s and early 1930s. Through the daily life and the memories of shrewd, forthright Lao Tai-tai, we are given an intimate glimpse into centuries-old way of life that was fast coming to an end. We explore the inner workings of an upper-class urban family: the relations between husbands wives and between wives and concubines, the interactions among brothers, the activities and family concerns of a widowed matriarch, and more generally...

A Thrice-Told Tale is one ethnographer's imaginative and powerful response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography. The author, a feminist anthropologist, uses three texts developed out of her research in Taiwan--a piece of fiction, anthropological fieldnotes, and a social science article--to explore some of these criticisms. Each text takes a different perspective, is written in a different style, and has different "outcomes," yet all three involve the same fascinating set of events. A young mother began to behave in a...

A water buffalo wanders onto the landing field of the Taipei airport just as an airplane lands.Two of the survivors of the crash, a Chinese-born professor of Chinese Literature and an American graduate student going to Taiwan to do ethnographic fieldwork, become friends during their stay in the hospital. After their release the friendship continues and in time enlarges to include similarly lonely people, such as the Fongs--a brother and sister who as children saw their parents executed on the streets of Shanghai; Professor Li's nephew and his adopted sister who were destined by Taiwanese...

A water buffalo wanders onto the landing field of the Taipei airport just as an airplane lands.Two of the survivors of the crash, a Chinese-born professor of Chinese Literature and an American graduate student going to Taiwan to do ethnographic fieldwork, become friends during their stay in the hospital. After their release the friendship continues and in time enlarges to include similarly lonely people, such as the Fongs--a brother and sister who as children saw their parents executed on the streets of Shanghai; Professor Li's nephew and his adopted sister who were destined by Taiwanese...