CHEN HUIQIN

DAUGHTER
OF GOOD
FORTUNE

A TWENTIETHCENTURY CHINESE
PEASANT MEMOIR

WITH SHEHONG CHEN

INTRODUCTION BY DELIA DAVIN

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Daughter of Good Fortune

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Chen Huiqin

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DAUGHTER
OF GOOD
FORTUNE
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A Twentieth-Century
Chinese Peasant Memoir
With Shehong Chen
Introduction by Delia Davin

University of Washington Press

Seattle and London

 2015 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America
Design by Thomas Eykemans
Composed in Fanwood, typeface designed by Barry Schwartz
191817161554321
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publisher.

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University of Washington Press

www.washington.edu/uwpress

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-295-99471-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-295-99492-5 (paperback)
Complete cataloging information for this title is available

from the Library of Congress.

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The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets

the minimum requirements of American National Standard
for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.

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Frontispiece: Chen Huiqin, 1940s

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Dedicated to Yang Xi (Beibei) and Chen Li

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Contents
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Preface and Acknowledgments by Shehong Chen . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Introduction by Delia Davin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

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Ancestral Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

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2 War and Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Benefiting from the New Marriage Law . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Rushing into Collective Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

The Great Leap Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

No Time for Meals All Year Round . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Years of Ordeal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129

Reaching beyond Peasant Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Changes in the Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

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Farewell to Collective Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .198

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Rural Customs and Urban Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

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A House-Purchasing Frenzy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

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Crossing Borders and Leaving the Ancestral Village . . . . 258

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Between the Living and the Dead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280

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All Our Children Are Plump Seeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297

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Return to Ancestral Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .320

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

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Preface and
Acknowledgments

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he narrator of Daughter of Good Fortune, Chen Huiqin, is my

mother. As is the custom in China, her family name, Chen,
precedes her given name, Huiqin. Because it is not respectful in
Chinese culture for children to address their parents directly by their
names, I avoid doing so here.
Mother was born in 1931 in Wangjialong, Wang Family Village, in
Jiading County near the city of Shanghai. Mother helped her family
farm and maintain a subsistence life, took refuge with her family when
the Japanese attacked Shanghai, lived through the Japanese occupation of her hometown between 1937 and 1945, witnessed the march of
Communist troops through her village in May of 1949, took part in the
Land Reform Movement, endured shortages of material goods in the
1950s, participated in the Great Leap Forward, experienced ordeals
during the Cultural Revolution, moved to become a factory worker and
an urban dweller in the 1980s, visited the United States, welcomed
the relocation of her village with mixed feelings in 2003, and finally
returned to live on her ancestral land in 2012. Since the 1990s, she has
been lighting incense and chanting Amitabha every day at home.
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Preface and Acknowledgments

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About ten years ago, I started a research project to understand the

process of transformation rural peasants experienced in China during
the radical Communist revolution as well as in the following waves
of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization. My native place,
Jiading County, where I still knew many people, was the focus of my
research.
I utilized my summers and a sabbatical semester to do research
in Jiading District Archives and to interview local men and women.1
While in Jiading, I lived with my parents. Many times, when I shared
a piece of information from the archives or an interview, my mother
would add her own recollection of the particular event. My pursuit of
information about life in the past thus led to many conversations with
Mother about her past.
It is a great regret in my mothers life that she had no formal
schooling. When I realized she had wonderful memories and that
her life paralleled the challenges and changes of the modern Chinese
nation, I decided to be the pen through which Mothers personal
experiences would be written down. I put aside my initial project on
the transformation of a collective peasant experience and listened to
my mother as she narrated her own personal experiences.
I returned to Jiading during my non-teaching summer months, sat
down with Mother at her house, and listened to her stories and experiences, taking notes. I expanded on the notes as much as I could and
entered them into my laptop every day. I asked Mother for more details
whenever I needed them. I did this for two summers. When I returned
to work in the United States, I wrote chapters based on my expanded
notes. I called Mother on the phone many times to ask for more information or clarification when I found problems in my notes. Mother
commented several times in a loving tone that I was silly to pay for an
international phone call just to get useless information. In the spring
of 2012, I spent a sabbatical semester in my native home, where I continued to listen to Mothers stories and finished writing the book.
I recorded Mothers narrative in her own words, with the exception of adjusting occasional second-person speech (Do you remember the time when . . .) to first-person for consistency. In the process
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of writing, I asked Mother for more detailed descriptions of items and

practices that would otherwise be unclear to readers.
Although Mother narrated in Chinese, I wrote the book manuscript in English. Every time I completed a chapter, I translated it into
Chinese and emailed the Chinese version home. Either my brother or
my father would read the chapter to my mother. During the summer
months, I read the chapters to her myself. For every chapter, she listened carefully, corrected inaccuracies, and often praised my ability to
write down her story in her own words. Everything in the final version
is thus an accurate recording of Mothers narrative.
Daughter of Good Fortune is my mothers story, and I want the
reader to hear her voice without much distraction. I have done
archival research and read scholarly works concerning the eighty-one
years covered in this book; however, I have included explanations or
references in endnotes only when absolutely necessary.
The writing of this book has been a journey of learning for me. As
the first surviving child in the family, I developed a very close bond
with Mother. The process of listening to Mothers stories and writing
them down in English enabled me to appreciate the bond in a much
deeper sense. Mothers stories are now constant sources of inspiration
and courage in my life.
As this book goes into print, I would like to express my deepest
gratitude to Mother for all the love and support she has given me and
for her willingness to tell me her life stories. I also want to thank my
father for his confidence in me and his support for my pursuit; my
brother and sister and their spouses for taking care of our parents
while I live and work half a globe away and for their enthusiasm and
assistance in the writing of this book; and my husband for his comments and suggestions, which helped to improve the narrative flow.
My wonderful colleagues Jeannie Judge and Mary Kramer, both
professors of English, read the entire manuscript and gave me detailed
editorial and stylistic suggestions and comments, which helped to
make the writing read more smoothly. I thank both of them wholeheartedly. In the same breath, I thank my best friend and colleague
Dean Bergeron, professor of history and political science, for his
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unwavering support for this book, his insightful and encouraging comments after reading the manuscript, and his sustained enthusiasm.
This book project was supported by Joseph Lipchitz, chair of the
History Department, Charles Carroll, Nina Coppens, and Louis
Falcn, deans of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, provost
Ahmed Abdelal, and chancellor Martin Meehan with reduced teaching
loads and a sabbatical semester. My colleagues Christoph Strobel and
Michael Pierson helped lessen my worries during the process of writing
the book and getting it published. My other colleagues Christopher
Carlsmith, Chad Montrie, Patrick Young, and Lisa Edwards also supported me along the way. I thank all of them sincerely.
My gratitude is also due to Mitchell Shuldman, Richard Harvey,
John Callahan, and Paul Coppens of the Media Center and Deborah
Friedman and Rose Paton of OLeary Library for their patient help in
scanning and cleaning photos, burning CDs, and getting books from
off-campus libraries.
I owe my deep gratitude to Lorri Hagman, executive editor of
the University of Washington Press, for recognizing the value of my
mothers stories, for arranging an introduction by Delia Davin, and for
providing help and guidance in the publishing process. My sincere
appreciation goes to Delia Davin, an eminent scholar of modern Chinese history, politics, and gender issues, for putting my mothers stories into a broad historical framework. I also thank the two anonymous
readers for their helpful comments and constructive criticism, as well
as Mary Ribesky of the Editorial Department and other staff members
at the University of Washington Press for their prompt and kind help.
My heartfelt thanks also go to Amanda Gibson for her meticulous
copyediting and insightful queries. Her edits and queries definitely
helped to make the narrative read more idiomatically and smoothly.
Shehong Chen
Notes
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Jiading became a district in Shanghai Municipality in 1992.

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Daughter of Good Fortune

Wangjialongs location in China. Inset: Wangjialong and vicinity.

400 mi

400 km

10 km

10 miles

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Shanghai

Ye l l ow
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Sout h Chi na
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SHANGHAI

Jianbang
Waigang Jiading

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Introduction
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Delia Davin

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irsthand memoirs of ordinary peoples lives in modern China

are extremely rare: those that recount the lives of peasant women
still more so. Daughter of Good Fortune, the autobiography of
Chen Huiqin, born in 1931, the only child in a peasant family in
Wang Family Village, in Jiading County near Shanghai, is therefore a
precious addition to the literature on rural China. It should become a
standard text for students of Chinese society. Chens daughter, Chen
Shehong, a professor of history and gender studies at the University
of Massachusetts Lowell, interviewed her mother about her life over a
number of years. She transcribed her mothers narrative and then condensed and translated the material to produce an autobiography that
offers a peasant womans own perspective on the way her community
was affected by land reform, agricultural collectivization, the Cultural
Revolution, economic reforms, industrialization, and the rapid growth
of prosperity. Accessibly written and rich in political and cultural
detail, it will be a most useful text for all those interested in the
transformation of Chinese rural society, first through revolution, and
subsequently through industrialization and globalization.
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Much of what we know of rural Chinese society in the decades

before the establishment of the Peoples Republic in 1949 comes from
anthropological studies. Some of the best of these were Fei Xiaotongs
study of village life in the lower Yangzi valley (a region not so far
from Chen Huiqins Jiading County),1 Martin Yangs description of
society and life in Taitou, his home village in Shandong Province,2
and Francis Hsus investigation of West Town, a remote semi-rural
community in Yunnan Province where he took refuge during the
Japanese occupation of coastal China.3 These studies focused on the
Chinese peasant family, and its treatment of birth, marriage, death,
and inheritance. They showed that despite local variations, filial piety,
the preference for sons over daughters, and the lesser value of girls
to the natal families that they would leave on marriage were part of a
system intended to assure the continuation of families that were both
patriarchal and patrilineal.
A rural survey conducted by Mao Zedong in 1930 in Jiangxi
Province, where the Communist movement was then based, offered a
more political approach.4 It contained much detail on the agricultural
and commercial economy, as well as on social and family relations,
educational levels, and religious practice. It also emphasized land
ownership, class relationships between landlords and peasants, gender inequality, and the impact of the Communist land redistribution.
Later, land reform and rural society were also described in William
Hintons Fanshen,5 a book based on his observations in a village in
Shanxi Province from 1946 to 1948, and in Revolution in a Chinese
Village by Isabel and David Crook, who were teachers in this region
in the same period.6
After 1949, as access to the rural areas by scholars and foreign
observers was severely restricted and carefully supervised, studies of
rural China had largely to depend on official documents and refugee
interviews.7 Isabel and David Crook wrote a study of the commune
movement based on a short visit in 1959 to the area in which they had
earlier studied land reform.8 However, as they later learned, much of
the truth about the difficulties there was withheld from them at the
time.9 In 1962, Jan Myrdal, a Swedish visitor, was allowed to conduct
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interviews with peasants in a Shaanxi village for a month. His report

gives interesting glimpses of collectively organized work, the struggle
to raise production, the rather mixed effects of the efforts to liberate
women through the new marriage law, and the campaign to limit the
size of families.10 Although he does show how dreary and unvaried
the diet of the northern countryside was at this time, there is no hint
of the terrible three-year famine from which most of China was just
beginning to emerge. Presumably the area he visited had been carefully chosen for having escaped the worst of the hunger.
From the 1980s, after the economic reforms, access to the countryside gradually became easier for social scientists and publications
based on fieldwork began to appear.11 Among these, Gail Hershatters
The Gender of Memory, based on one hundred interviews in Shaanxi
villages over a ten-year period, gives the strongest voice to rural
women, reflecting their roles as political activists, farmers, workers,
and members of their families in the revolutionary period.12 Increasingly, young Chinese social scientists trained in the West have also
produced valuable insider studies of their home villages.13
Memoirs and oral history have also given us access to the stories of
a few ordinary Chinese people. Perhaps the most remarkable is that
of Ning Lao Tai-tai, an illiterate Shandong woman born in 1867 to a
small-town family with a business in market gardening.14 Ida Pruitt,
an American brought up in China by missionary parents, befriended
this woman in the 1930s and wrote her autobiography on the basis
of two years of conversations with her. In addition to a brief spell
in market gardening, Nings father had worked in shops and as a
peddler selling bread, but he was a failure in all these occupations.
His opium habit had contributed to the familys gradual impoverishment. He strictly enforced the traditional restrictions on the females
in his family. Although as a small child Ning Lao Tai-tai had enjoyed
considerable freedom to play, as she grew older she suffered from
the traditional restrictions visited on females. She was not allowed
to attend school, her feet were bound when she was nine, and by the
time she was thirteen she was no longer allowed to go out of the house
alone. That same year her parents betrothed her to an older man. Her
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marriage, two years later, turned out to be a disaster. Her husband

spent his money on opium and did not bring home enough to feed his
family. Unable to bear the sight of her children starving, Ning eventually broke with convention and went out to do odd jobs or to beg.
Finally, when her husband sold one of their daughters to raise money
for drugs, she decided she could no longer stay with him. She found a
job as a maid in a well-to-do household and supported herself for the
rest of her life. As an old woman, she was content that her children
had obtained schooling and that her granddaughter had even studied in America. Although she worried that this granddaughter was
still unmarried at thirty-five, she recognized that the young womans
achievementsa good salary and economic independencewere
positive and would have been impossible for earlier generations. Ida
Pruitt lost touch with Ning Lao Tai-tai when Beijing was occupied by
the Japanese in 1938, so we do not know how her life ended.
Daughter of Good Fortune is also the story of an individual
woman. Chen Huiqin was born in 1931 and her story therefore carries
on chronologically from that of Ning Lao Tai-tai. Relationships in
Chens peasant family seem to have been closer and happier than
those in Nings. Chen was a child at the time of the Japanese occupation and the civil war that followed. She lived through the revolutionary enthusiasm and the extreme frugality of the 1950s and 1960s
as a young wife and mother. The Cultural Revolution brought fear
and difficulty to her family at a stage when her life might otherwise
have been becoming easier. Finally, from the time of the post-Mao
economic reforms of the 1980s, the family began to prosper. Deprived
of the schooling her father wanted for her by the civil chaos of her
childhood, Chen Huiqin never really learned to read. However, her
perceptive narration is proof that illiteracy does not preclude understanding of the intricacies of economic and social change.
Her account of the Land Reform is nuanced. During the Land
Reform, land confiscated from landlords was given to households who
had no or very little land. Its egalitarian ideals were supported by the
majority of peasants, as they stood to gain from the redistribution.
However, as Henrietta Harrison points out, the outcomes of the Land
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Reform sometimes involved luck rather than justice.15 In her story of

three Shanxi brothers, two older men had sold their inherited land
to support their addictions. Penniless at the time of land reform, they
were classified as poor peasants and received redistributed land. Their
younger brother, a hard worker who had retained his inheritance,
received nothing. Moreover, he was classified as a rich peasant, a politically disadvantageous label that would not be lifted until the 1980s.
The outcome of land reform in Chen Huiqins family also reflects
the role of luck. Her great-uncles sons had both died. As his family
had no adult men of working age, he had to hire laborers to work his
fifty mu of land. He was thus defined as a landlordsomeone who
owned land but did not work it, depending instead on hired labor. As
a landlord not only was his land subject to confiscation, but he also
lost part of his house and some of his furniture. For the next three
decades his descendants would suffer discrimination as members of
a landlord family. Yet if he had had sons to work the land, he would
have been labeled a rich peasant, not a landlord, and thus protected
from confiscation. Chens own family was classified as middle peasant. Her father had saved hard in the 1940s to buy land, but fortunately his holding was modest at the time of the Land Reform. His
family had once been wealthy and he joked that he should be grateful
to his father, who had gambled away the family fortune.
Chens father was a Daoist priest before 1949. After 1949, he
supported the new regime and became a cadre. He had an enlightened attitude toward women and was clearly deeply fond of his only
daughter. He was determined that they should find her a husband
who would come to live with her family. Although in Chinese society
women normally married into their husbands families, parents who
had no sons would sometimes arrange a matrilocal marriage for a
daughter. Their family line would thus continue and they would
have young people to care for them in their old age. Interestingly,
although Chens father later prevailed, Chens mother at first opposed
a matrilocal marriage for her daughter on the grounds that she would
have problems with his relatives, who would usually have expected to
inherit after his death.
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Usually, only poor families would allow their sons to make a

matrilocal marriage, as it was considered a demeaning arrangement
for a man. The husband found for Chen was indeed of poor peasant
origin. However, in the new society, the label of poor peasant had
advantages. Chens husband, a land reform activist, was later admitted to the Communist Party and rose to be quite an important local
cadre. He treated Chen well and proved to be an enlightened parent
in matters such as their daughters education and their childrens right
to select their own marriage partners. It seems probable that Chens
matrilocal marriage allowed her to develop the strength of character
and the clear views demonstrated in her life story. She lived in her
parents household and her mothers help in bringing up the children
left her free to work outside. Her husbands work took him away from
the village for much of the time and after her parents deaths she
effectively ran the household.
Chen is positive about collectivization but records the economic
dislocation that accompanied the Great Leap Forward and the hardships and food shortages that followed. She does not mention deaths
from the starvation, perhaps because her comparatively prosperous
region had more food security than less fortunate ones. Of all the
political movements that marked the Maoist period, the Cultural Revolution hurt Chens family most. As cadres, both Chens father and
her husband were perceived by the Red Guards as members of the
preCultural Revolution establishment. Both were accused of being
counterrevolutionaries and her husband spent a long time in detention, while her father attempted suicide under the strain.
The Cultural Revolution period saw much stricter prohibitions
on traditional practices that had been merely discouraged in earlier
years. Chens mother, father, and father-in-law all died in this period
and Chen always regretted that they had to be cremated without any
of the rituals she considered proper. Even incense was unobtainable.
The extravagant banquets that normally accompanied weddings
and house building also had to be foregone in those years. Later,
after Maos death and the introduction of economic reforms, such
restrictions were lifted and old customs were revived. Chen records
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in loving detail the arrangements made for each family celebration

from then on, such as food preparation, clothes, and decorations. She
began to chant and burn incense to Buddhist deities daily and used
shamans to contact her deceased parents. Having discovered through
the shamans what her parents needed, she paid professionals to make
a modern paper house with a car and bought household goods that
could be burned, along with paper money, for her parents use in the
afterworld.
Until the economic reforms, Chens life was characterized by
poverty, frugality, and hard work. She recalled, for example, that her
three children had only ever had one store-bought toy among thema
clockwork frog that her husband purchased for the eldest. But her
family was well placed to take advantage of the great economic
opportunities that accompanied Chinas growing prosperity after
the economic reforms. Her husband, as a cadre of long-serving, had a
pension. He was also allowed to purchase apartments in the county
town at a discount. The family later benefited from a number of
advantageous property deals. The value that Chens father had taught
his family to attach to education also paid off. Her eldest daughter
was admitted to university in Shanghai, thanks partly to a Cultural
Revolution admissions policy that favored peasants. She later became
a university professor in the United States. Her second daughter
trained to be an accountant and married a man who later set up a
successful business. The youngest child studied engineering and was
a university professor in Shanghai before he also set up a flourishing
business. Growing prosperity transformed lives and expectations.
Chens mother had never traveled even as far as the county town.
Yet in 2001, Chen and her husband flew to the United States to visit
their daughter. They also made other trips for pleasure within China.
When their grandson was leaving Shanghai to do graduate work in
Japan, the couple who had once treated their children with a clockwork frog gave him an Apple laptop.
Chen worked in subsistence agriculture for much of her life and
lived in a house without electricity, running water, or drainage. She
now enjoys such amenities as a flush lavatory, a washing machine, a
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telephone, and air conditioning. Her children drive cars. She enjoys
video-chats with her grandchild living abroad when her children
living nearby bring laptops to her house. Modern technology makes
it possible to maintain the traditional closeness of intergenerational
relationships in a Chinese family despite the distances brought about
by modern geographical mobility. Despite all this change, some things
that are important to Chenfamily relationships, the celebration of
traditional festivals, the observance of ritual, and the belief in communication with dead relativeswould be familiar to those who studied
the Chinese family in the early twentieth century. For the moment,
also, her children help to organize and participate in the traditional
rituals. Will this continue or will it disappear with the passing of her
generation?

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Fei Hsiao-tung (later written Xiaotong), Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of
Country Life in the Yangtze Valley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939).
Martin Yang, A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shantung Province (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945).
Francis L. K. Hsu, Under the Ancestors Shadow: Chinese Culture and Personality
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949).
Mao Zedong, Report from Xunwu, translated with an introduction and notes by
Roger R. Thompson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
Isabel and David Crook, Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959).
One of the best of these is William L. Parish and Martin K. Whyte, Village and
Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Among the document-based studies that focus on rural women in the 1950s
are Phyllis Andors, The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women, 19491980
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), and Delia Davin, Woman-Work: Women and the Family in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1976).
Isabel and David Crook, The First Years of Yangyi Commune (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1966).
David Crook, Hampstead Heath to Tian An Men: The Autobiography of David

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Crook, ch. 11, accessed July 12, 2014, http://www.davidcrook.net/pdf/DC14_

Chapter11.pdf.
Jan Myrdal, Report from a Chinese Village (London: Heinemann, 1965).
See, for example, Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden,
Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991),
and Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2005).
Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and Chinas Collective
Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
See, for example, Yan Yunxiang, Love, Intimacy and Family Change in a Chinese
Village, 19491999 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2000), and Mobo Gao,
Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1999).
Ida Pruitt, A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967).
Henrietta Harrison, The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Mans Life in a
North China Village, 18571942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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