ABSTRACT
For generations, fathers and grandfathers had dreamed of sons and grandsons who would support them in their old age, maintain or expand their landholdings and guarantee their prosperity. Above all, sons, betwixt and between ancestors and descendants, continued the family line. Sons were not only for dreaming, for, in very practical ways, they represented survival, prosperity, security and a future. Indeed, without sons there was no future about which to think, plan and dream. For generations in the peasant household, be it large, extended or small nuclear, there had been a traditional birth preference in favour of sons. In turn, the males of each generation were exhorted to have many sons to fulfil their obligations to their father and their father ’s lineage, or, as a Chinese saying has it, ’to continue the incense smoke at the ancestral shrine ’. Of the attributes customarily charged against an unfilial son, the failure to provide descendants was the ‘gravest of unfilial acts ’, and testimony to the anxieties surrounding the disappearance of a patriline were the many social practices and rituals performed to obtain sons and celebrate their arrival into the world. Correlatively, to have many sons was ‘the greatest of blessings ’ because of their potential role as begetters and providers of family income through labour, land and skills. How many times have I sat in households where the smiles gradually broadened and the cheer heightened among both family and observers as son by son was introduced to the ‘foreigner ’. After the death of parents and grandparents, it was sons, as sole performers of the ancestral rites, who were responsible for the welfare of their departed forebears. It was only sons who were bounded into the chain of generations giving every male of each generation merely a precious title to his body, entrusted as it was to him as the sole link between the past and the future. The first-born son was often referred to as the ‘successor ’ son, and naming practices confirmed that identity primarily derived from place in the chain of continuity conceived in terms of descent order. Simply put, without sons bridging ancestors and descendants and signifying the unbroken continuity of the family, there was no future for the family, for female as well as male members.
