Merchants' Daughters

Merchants' Daughters turns conventional scholarship on its head by asking whether lineages, Confucian morality, and the cultural orientation of merchant families might have provided an unusual space for women's action in South China from the late Qing to the present. It paints an extraordinarily complex portrait of women's maneuvering among multiple layers of social life, from the local to the transnational. - Susan Brownell, University of Missouri --Historians and anthropologists have long been interested in South China where powerful lineages and gendered hierarchies are juxtaposed with unorthodox trading cultures, multi-ethnic colonial encounters, and post-reform market consumption. The divergent paths taken by women in Hong Kong and Guangdong during thirty years of Maoist closure, and the contemporary cross-border fluidities have also gained analytical attention. This collection provides further theoretical application of a "regional construct" that appreciates process, transcends definitive powers of administrative borders, and brings out nuanced gender notions. An interdisciplinary team uses fine-grained historical and ethnographic materials to map out three crucial historical junctures in the evolution of South China, from late imperial to contemporary periods, that have significantly shaped the construction of gendered space. Stressing process and nuanced human agency, the volume uses women's narratives to challenge dichotomous analytical perspectives on lineage patriarchy, colonial encounters, power, and gendered activism.-- --For scholars of modern Hong Kong society, Merchants' Daughters refocuses attention to cultural dynamics in the South China region of which Hong Kong is an integral part. For audiences generally interested in gender issues, this book illuminates the analytical importance of long historical periods in which layers of social, political, and economic activities intersected to constitute gendered notions and strategies. --Helen F. Siu is professor of anthropology at Yale University and director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

ISBN 9622099696   Pages 392 ISBN13 9789622099692 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 839 Publisher Hong Kong University Press   Published in Hong Kong Imprint Hong Kong University Press   Height (mm) 229 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 152 Publication date 15 May 2010   Spine width (mm) 33 DEWEY 338.0082095125   Academic level General, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

		Acknowledgments
		Contributors
		Introduction		1
		Part I Cultural Spaces between State-Making and Kinship by Wing-hoi Chan		23
1		Women's Images Reconstructed: The Sisters-in-Law Tomb and Its Legend by Wing-hoi Chan		25
2		Images of Mother: The Place of Women in South China by Liu Zhiwei		45
3		"What Alternative Do You Have, Sixth Aunt?"-Women and Marriage in Cantonese Ballads by David Faure		59
4		Women's Work and Women's Food in Lineage Land by May-bo Ching		77
		Part II Agency in Emigrant, Colonial, and Mercantile Societies by Wing-bo Chan		101
5		Stepping out? Women in the Chaoshan Emigrant Communities, 1850-1950 by Wing-bo Chan		105
6		Abandoned into Prosperity: Women on the Fringe of Expatriate Society by Chi-cheung Choi		129
7		The Eurasian Way of Being a Chinese Woman: Lady Clara Ho Tung and Buddhism in Prewar Hong Kong by Carl T. Smith		143
		Part III Work and Activism in a Gendered Age by Josephine Lai-kuen Wong		165
8		Women of Influence: Gendered Charisma by Josephine Lai-kuen Wong		169
9		Women Workers in Hong Kong, 1960's-1990's: Voices, Meanings, and Structural Constraints by Helen F. Siu		197
10		Half the Sky: Mobility and Late Socialist Reflections by Po-king Choi		237
11		Fantasies of "Chinese-ness" and the Traffic in Women from Mainland China to Hong Kong in Fruit Chan's Durian Durian by Taotao Zhang		259
		Notes by Pheng Cheah		273
		Glossary by Pheng Cheah		335
		Bibliography by Pheng Cheah		343
		Index by Pheng Cheah		371

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