ABSTRACT
Having read, as a graduate student, about the patrilineal and patriarchal foundations of Chinese society, I was a little disconcerted when I got to know my first real Taiwanese family – this was back in 1987 – and realised that, so far as I could tell, there were no men in it. I suppose I was, at least to some extent, in the position of the naive reader
mentioned by Francesca Bray (1997: 370), the type ‘acquainted only with stereotypical images of “traditional” Chinese women as dependent victims of patriarchy cut off from the significant male stage … ’. I’d been living for a few weeks in the teacher’s dormitory of the lower middle school in Angang, a rural Taiwanese township, which I’d been told was a highly conservative and traditional kind of place. Schools being intrinsically dull, I started following the lead of the more adventurous students in jumping the fence and spending my afternoons loitering in the surrounding village. Adjacent to the school there was a small food shop run by a woman and (in rotation) her four daughters, all of whom were high-school age or above. They were a force of nature. The mother was a smart and ambitious operator, and she and her daughters ran a tight ship. They were also extremely warm-hearted and funny, and the local people seemed to like and admire them very much. The mother clearly loved her daughters, and among other things, invested heavily in their schooling. I spent a pleasant hour or two in their shop most days, sometimes helping them roll betel nuts in leaves for their steady stream of customers. Eventually, I did learn that they were, in some respects, an anomalous
family unit. The township was overwhelmingly ‘Hokkien’ Taiwanese (almost all residents were descendants of migrants from Quanzhou prefecture in Fujian), yet the mother was from a Hakka background, while her husband – from whom she appeared to be irreconcilably separated – was a ‘mainlander’. For most of my fieldwork period, he was living elsewhere in Taiwan. As a result, mother and daughters effectively operated in a world of their own, with what seemed to be complete autonomy. From what I could see, the mother ran the show. Of course, their autonomy – and, by extension, the lack of subordination
they experienced as women – is a matter of perspective. Thanks to her
mainlander husband, the girls’ mother had, after all, left her natal community far behind, and in her new place of residence she had neither his nor her kin to rely on. I also never learned much about the financial basis of the couple’s separation. It’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that the husband had a claim on the profits of the shop in which his wife worked so hard. It might have also been the case (although I have no evidence of this) that their separation was caused partly by her failure to conceive a son. I do know that she, for her part, regretted not having a son, and at one point had even notionally ‘adopted’ a local military service cadet as a kind of consolation prize. Bearing all this in mind, what still impressed me most at the time, rightly
or wrongly, was the extent to which these bright, articulate and assertive women appeared to be in control of their own lives. To portray them in terms of patrilineal ‘failures’ of various kinds would have seemed, to me, very odd. In any case, because I was primarily interested in issues of learning and child development (cf. Stafford 1995), I found myself asking: what have these daughters, growing up in this particular family, learned along the way about Chinese family and kinship and gender? The second family I got to know was a more conventional one, at least in
local terms. The middle-aged couple at the head of it were both Hokkien Taiwanese, and the husband (who ran a small construction business) was a local man by birth. His father had died some years before. But his elderly mother often lived with him in his house (as part of a meal-rotation system for elderly support), and he also maintained close ties to his brother and sister, both of whom lived within a short walking distance. However, his brother and sister didn’t live quite as close as his wife’s relatives – for it turned out that she too had been born in Angang. Indeed, his wife’s mother lived literally around the corner from them, and as far as I could tell the couple had more to do with her family than with his. Perhaps partly as a result of this, the wife was, at least in my experience, extremely assertive with her husband; she certainly wasn’t dominated by him in any very obvious way. They had three children, two boys and a girl, who they doted on in var-
ious ways. But at the time of my fieldwork the heaviest educational investment was being made in the daughter, simply because they considered her to be the smart one. Again, I found myself asking: what have these children, with these parents, learned about Chinese family and kinship and gender? But allow me to cut a long story short. As I moved around Angang,
adding families to my vanishingly small sample, a pattern emerged. This multi-surname community appeared to be a place with a fairly high degree of (township) endogamy, and quite a few uxorilocal marriages. Affinal ties were as important, in most cases, as agnatic ones. The daughters I met were unfailingly treated with warmth and love, and given uncompromising support – so far as I could tell from the evidence seen in everyday village life. As you might expect, people in Angang did repeat to me the classic formulation that among the Chinese ‘men are more valued than women’ (zhongnan
qingnü). But it was a little hard to see how children could actually believe such a thing, given their experience of the local world. The adult women I met were, for the most part, assertive, bright and funny (sometimes obscenely so), and they seemed in many respects to be the equals, if not the betters, of the men around them. Among other things, I was struck by their physical strength and, as I saw it, toughness. I recall a fisherman joking roughly (if affectionately) with one woman – not a relative – about the fact that she was much too hard on her husband, to the extent of even hitting him if he got out of line. She responded to this slur by shouting back at him and then eventually, when he wouldn’t stop the teasing, grabbing a slipper off the floor and whacking him, very hard, right on the top of his head. Local people often told me, in the months that followed, that Angang
women were known to be lihai – fierce, terrific, impressive. What could explain this? Clearly, the tendency for Angang women to live close to their natal family after marriage might have helped them resist domination by their husbands’ kin.1 Angang is also a fishing community, the kind of place in which anthropologists might reasonably expect agnatic kinship – not to mention the day-to-day subordination of women – to be relatively weak.2
And of course this was Taiwan in the 1980s, not Shandong or Anhui or Sichuan during the Qing dynasty or earlier. Why shouldn’t the Taiwanese women I met at the end of the twentieth century, even in the countryside, have been relatively liberated? Yet another possibility (addressed by Ellen Judd, Chapter 1 in this volume) is that the ‘strength’ I saw in Angang women was itself, at least in part, a creative response to women’s subordinate roles in Chinese/Taiwanese society and culture. One afternoon, I found myself discussing all of this with a friend, a young
artist from Taipei who had taken up residence in Angang for a couple of months. She too found the local women remarkable. But then she added that, after all, ‘China is a matriarchal society’. For outsiders, she said, this might be difficult to see; but to her it was completely obvious.
