Merchants' daughters: women, commerce, and regional culture in south China

389 Pages·2011·2.533 MB·English

by  Siu, Helen F

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Hong Kong University Press
14/F Hing Wai Centre
7 Tin Wan Praya Road
Aberdeen
Hong Kong
www.hkupress.org
© Hong Kong University Press 2010
First hardback printing 2010
First paperback printing 2011
ISBN 978-988-8083-48-0
All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo copy,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Printed and bound by Goodrich International Co. Ltd., Hong Kong, China
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Helen F. Siu and Wing-hoi Chan
Part I Cultural Spaces between State-Making and Kinship 23
1 Women’s Images Reconstructed: The Sisters-in-Law Tomb 25
and Its Legend
Liu Zhiwei
2 Images of Mother: The Place of Women in South China 45
David Faure
3 “What Alternative Do You Have, Sixth Aunt?” — 59
Women and Marriage in Cantonese Ballads
May-bo Ching
4 Women’s Work and Women’s Food in Lineage Land 77
Wing-hoi Chan
Part II Agency in Emigrant, Colonial, and Mercantile Societies 101
5 Stepping out? Women in the Chaoshan Emigrant 105
Communities, 1850–1950
Chi-cheung Choi
6 Abandoned into Prosperity: Women on the Fringe of 129
Expatriate Society
Carl T. Smith
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vi Contents
7 The Eurasian Way of Being a Chinese Woman: 143
Lady Clara Ho Tung and Buddhism in Prewar
Hong Kong
Josephine Lai-kuen Wong
Part III Work and Activism in a Gendered Age 165
8 Women of Influence: Gendered Charisma 169
Helen F. Siu
9 Women Workers in Hong Kong, 1960s–1990s: Voices, 197
Meanings, and Structural Constraints
Po-king Choi
10 Half the Sky: Mobility and Late Socialist Reflections 237
Yan Lijun, with Yang Meijian and Taotao Zhang
11 Fantasies of “Chinese-ness” and the Traffic in Women 259
from Mainland China to Hong Kong in Fruit Chan’s
Durian Durian
Pheng Cheah
Notes 273
Glossary 335
Bibliography 343
Index 371
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vii
Acknowledgments
It is embarrassing to mention how long this project has taken from start to
finish. The idea of a volume on women, commerce, and regional culture
emerged from a conference in 1994 organized by Chi-cheung Choi at the
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, which focused on
merchant cultures in South China. At the time, David Faure and I just
finished editing a volume, Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China,
for Stanford University Press. We were keenly aware that gender was not
given adequate attention. With a few colleagues who loosely constituted
the “South China gang,” we embarked on a project on the region’s women,
attempting to reconceptualize their lives in material, imaginary, and
discursive terms. A regional framework was important to us. We hoped to
highlight the women’s predicaments at crucial historical junctures that had
lasting significance. Some colleagues grew tired of us and moved on. A few
joined with degrees of curiosity. Others who were persuaded to commit to
the project probably did not know what they were getting into.
Despite the project’s long gestation, its collective authors and
participants have shared exciting intellectual discoveries that cross
boundaries in academic disciplines, regional studies, theory and methods
in historical and ethnographic research. A few years back, David Faure
happily declared his exit from South China. With this volume completed,
I can head towards Mumbai and Dubai in good conscience.
We collectively thank funding organizations and academic institutions
that have supported our authors’ research at various stages. I am most
grateful to numerous colleagues and students who have added inspiration
and companionship to the project over the decade. In particular, I would
like to thank Muriel Bell, Susan Brownell, Chen Chunsheng, Deborah Davis,
Kathryn Dudley, Patrick Hase, Gail Hershatter, William Kelly, Dorothy Ko,
Angela Leung, Tik-sang Liu, Susan Mann, Ngai Pun, Elizabeth Sinn, Maria
Tam, James and Rubie Watson. Wing-hoi Chan, Elizabeth Sinn, and Angela
Leung have given special attention to the overall themes that shape the
volume and introduction. The late Carl Smith was with us all along,
inspiring us with his faith in uncovering the voices of the unheard.
The reviewers have been constructively critical and have offered valuable
suggestions for revisions. Colin Day, Michael Duckworth, and Clara Ho of
Hong Kong University Press have, as always, given the project patient and
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viii Acknowledgments
thoughtful attention. I thank the Hong Kong Young Women’s Christian
Association for kindly providing two images for the cover. Yan Lijun, Zhang
Jun, and Yang Meijian have tried their best to make Endnotes work for classical
Chinese bibliographical entries. I am most grateful to Kwok-leung Yu, Emily
Ip, Venus Lee, and Natalie Wong who have provided meticulous editorial and
technical support in preparing the manuscript for publication. I thank the
Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University, and the Hong Kong Institute
for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong for
their generous financial and institutional support over the years.
Our gratitude ultimately goes to the women and men in the region
whose life experiences form the core of the historical and ethnographic
texts that have enriched our intellectual pursuits and humanist sensibilities.
Helen F. Siu
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Contributors
Wing-hoi Chan is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences
at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. An anthropologist, Chan focuses
on kinship, marriage and their performance aspects in South China, the
political contexts of local and transnational ethnic identities, and the politics
of representations of the countryside. Recent publications include “Migration
and Ethnic Identities in a Mountainous Region: The Case of ‘She Bandits’,”
in Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China,
ed. Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu and Donald S. Sutton (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006); “A Sense of Place in Hong Kong: The
Case of Tai O,” in Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population, ed. Helen
F. Siu and Agnes Ku (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008).
Pheng Cheah is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric, University of
California at Berkeley. He is the author of Spectral Nationality: Passages of
Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003) and Inhuman Conditions: On
Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2006). He is also the co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond
the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Grounds of
Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (New York; London:
Routledge, 2003); and Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2009). He is currently working on a book on world
literature in an era of global financialization.
May-bo Ching is a professor of history and a research fellow of the Centre
for Historical Anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University. Her major research
interest is the social and cultural history of modern China. Her recent
publications include Regional Culture and National Identity: The Shaping of
“Guangdong Culture” Since the Late Qing (in Chinese; Beijing: Joint
Publishing House, 2006), which discusses changes in the articulation of
regional identity against the rise of nationalism. Her current projects include
a preliminary study of the introduction of natural history drawings and
knowledge into China since the late eighteenth century and a social history
of Cantonese opera from the 1860s to 1950s.
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