Rethinking Gendered Morality

This vignette, from Margery Wolf’s classic ethnography, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, succinctly illustrates the gendered nature of certain moral expectations in Xia Xizhou childhood, for example, fairness in resource distribution means that little girls should yield to their brothers. Gender biases such as son preference and daughter discrimination have long become a central theme in the study of patrilineal, patriarchal Han Chinese families (Freedman Reference Freedman1966), and childhood experience is critical in shaping such gender biases (Croll Reference Croll2000; Greenhalgh Reference Greenhalgh, Dwyer and Bruce1988). Despite such commonsense knowledge that features the perspective of adult socializers, however, there is a striking lack of systematic ethnography concerning young children’ gendered moral experience.

Based on this particular Xia Xizhou fieldwork, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan was a groundbreaking ethnography that placed women’s perspectives at the center of understanding family relations, despite their structurally disadvantaged position in the traditional patriarchal and patrilineal Han Chinese family. Margery Wolf highlighted rural Taiwanese women’s agency in pursuing their own goals: For example, as outsiders married into her husbands’ households, women created “uterine families” through exerting power over her sons and grandchildren (1972: 36). That ethnography, focused on adult women, did include one chapter on childhood and drew our attention to young girls’ unfortunate situation in comparison to boys: At preschool age, a Taiwanese girl already learned “her first subtle lessons about the second-class status of her sex”: She was called a “worthless girl” since she could understand words; by school age she has had much more family responsibilities than a boy her age, for example, doing chores and taking care of younger siblings (M. Wolf Reference Wolf1972: 66).

But the materials Margery used only constitute a tiny portion of the Wolf Archive. Even if most little girls in Xia Xizhou had indeed “learned to step aside automatically for boys,” as Margery concluded, we would still want to find out if those little girls had any sort of agency: Are they completely docile and passive? If not, what tactics they could use to maneuver against the prescribed norms, and how might they understand their own circumstances? Also, what does it mean to be a good or bad boy in that particular historical context? And what kind of moral experience shaped boys’ selfhood?

For example, in contrast to the opening vignette, the following Child Observation episodeFootnote ¹ depicts a comically shocking scenario about young girls bullying two little boys. This story alludes to a much more complex moral world beyond the general impression of gender differences:

Li-hsin led the girls to do the same thing toward Lin-kuei’s baby brother, alternating between the two boys. The other girls went away but Li-hsin stayed. She upgraded her action by swinging a rope around the two little boys, the rope as an extension of/proxy for her leg. She even showed a passerby boy how to play this game of insult and humiliation. Then her aggressive teasing escalated: First, she looked around, made sure no adult was watching, and hit Lin-kuei really hard. Her little sister joined her to hit Lin-kuei’s baby brother too. After that, Lin-hsin picked up a piece of dirty paper and stuck it on the baby’s neck and said: “I’m giving you a bath.” Throughout the entire observation that lasted four and half minutes, Lin-kuei occasionally protested, threatening with his fist, but he never said a single word.

The juxtaposition of these two stories prompts us to explore the question of gender in more depth and with greater systematicity. It leads us to closely examine children’s actual behaviors, not just moral precepts. It also reminds us to look at children’s own motivations, thoughts, and feelings. The first episode depicts a girl conforming to a moral norm and performing a prosocial act, but in the second episode young girls got quite aggressive and little boys were meek, which seems to contradict local expectations. But there is more to the comparison between the two episodes: In the first episode, the little girl did not want to give the stool to the boy; it was her mother’s scolding that changed her mind. In contrast, no adult was present in the second episode, and at some point the girl Li-hsin even looked around to make sure no adults were watching before she hit the boy. Perhaps girls learn to be meek in the presence of authority but act more boldly when the authority is not immediately present? The reality is more complex and therefore more interesting than the ideals.

In what follows, I first provide an overview of gendered patterns in children’s prosocial and aggressive behaviors. To contextualize these behavioral patterns, I look at how children’s learning of aggression and violence is situated within the local community and also shaped by the larger political and historical context of Martial Law Taiwan, for example, gangsters and policing. As to the moral world of girls, countering the trope of gender stereotypes, I showcase how young girls understand their own situations, navigate the gender hierarchies, and defend themselves. Lastly, to honor Arthur Wolf’s classic research on marriage and adoption and offer new insights on young girls’ emotional experience, I tell the story about an adopted daughter: An “unruly” girl who defies parental commands, asserts her will, and negotiates love–hate relationships with different family members.

Gendered Patterns in Peer Cooperation and Conflict

Ethnographic observations in sinological anthropology have rarely examined the relationship between gender and children’s prosocial and aggressive behavior in peer interactions.Footnote ² Fine-grained behavioral analysis of Child Observation provides new insights into this question, which also extends the SCS legacy and enriches cross-cultural comparative insights on gender differences in children’s behavior (B. Whiting and Edwards 1973). While child development studies have predominantly focused on behavioral initiators, my analysis also included behavioral recipients. The numbers of boys and girls involved in child-to-child behavioral interactions are roughly equal (106 boys and 110 girls, ages below twelve).Footnote ³ But in general, boys initiated more and also received more behaviors, “received” in the sense of being a recipient/target of an observed behavior (Table 4.1).

To analyze patterns of specific behaviors, I calculated behavioral proportion scores through dividing the number of an observed behavior by the total number of all observed behaviors, not by the total number of boys or girls. There are inherent features of children’s social life in a community, for example, some children are more active than others,Footnote ⁴ as well as contingent factors in naturalistic observations, for example, some children happened to appear in observations more than others. In other words, there are “outlier” children for every observed behavior, therefore calculating the average number of a certain behavior per person is not really informative. I then analyzed gender-specific behavioral preferences through comparing proportion scores of concrete behaviors by gender (Tables 4.2 and 4.3). The following two tables display only behavioral themes where gender differences reached statistical significance. Overall, gender differences were more widespread in initiated behaviors rather than received behaviors.

Several noteworthy findings from CO shed light on how gender intersects with children’s conflict and cooperation: First of all, this large sample of observational data confirmed a well-established pattern in child development research, that is, boys initiated direct, physical aggression more often than girls. This is a consistent pattern discovered across different cultures and age groups, via different methods, and in meta-analysis reports.Footnote ⁵ Observational research on singleton children in urban China also found that boys displayed more physical aggression than girls during play time (Jankowiak et al. Reference Jankowiak, Joiner and Khatib2011). A novel discovery from these fieldnotes is that boys also received proportionally more physical aggression than girls in this sample.

Other forms of direct aggression showed mixed results: Girls initiated proportionally more instances of scolding, that is, criticizing somebody for specific reasons and more “dirty looks,” but boys initiated more verbal aggression, such as swearing and cursing, merely expressions of anger without resorting to substantial reasoning. Even two and three year olds were observed bursting out all kinds of swear words when getting annoyed by others, which of course reflects culturally specific features of language and moral socialization. Symmetrically, boys were also more likely to be the target of verbal aggression. Boys attempted to dominate others more than girls, that is, demanding another person to do things against that person’s own preference. In correspondence with their domineering tendency, boys received proportionally more submission than girls. Also, boys displayed proportionally more aggressive teasing than girls as initiators, but not as recipients. Finally, “throwing a dirty look,” a subtle nonverbal form of aggression, was rarely examined in prior quantitative research, and especially nonfeasible in self-report or survey research. But it emerged in many scenes of Child Observation, and girls initiated this more than boys.

Regarding indirect forms of aggression, girls proportionally tattled more, reporting someone’s misbehavior to an authority. Girls also proportionally initiated more social exclusion through refusing to allow other children to join group games (“not granting access”). Prior meta-analysis or cross-cultural studies did not find consistent gender difference in indirect aggression (Card et al. Reference Card, Stucky, Sawalani and Little2008; Lansford et al. Reference Lansford, Malone, Dodge, Pettit and Bates2010). But other researchers have argued that such inconsistency might have to do with methodological differences, especially problems with self-reports, and multiple observational studies found that girls displayed more indirect aggression (Björkqvist Reference Björkqvist2018; Österman et al. Reference Österman, Björkqvist, Lagerspetz, Kaukiainen, Landau, Frączek and Vittorio Caprara1998). My analysis lends support to the pattern identified in these observational studies that girls are associated more with indirect aggression. It also sheds light on children’s culture in Xia Xizhou: For example, tattling to authority was an important strategy of indirect retaliation. Also, girls were more involved in certain popular group games, such as hopscotch, jumping rope, and playing house, and they were more likely positioned to control access to these games – in fact, this was confirmed in the result of girls as recipients of “request for access” more than boys.

Contrary to aggression, when it comes to prosocial behaviors, gender differences are much less clear. Experimental psychologists contend that the effects of gender vary for different types of prosocial behavior, such as helping and sharing (Fabes and Eisenberg Reference Fabes and Eisenberg1998), and such effects also depend on the context of measurement (Eagly Reference Eagly2009). Evolutionary anthropologists, aiming to discover human universals and variability through cross-cultural economic games, found no evidence of strong universal gender difference in children’s development of generosity and fairness (House, Silk, and McAuliffe Reference House, Silk and McAuliffe2023). In a patriarchal community like Xia Xizhou, with entrenched gendered division of labor and son preference, however, gendered patterns of prosocial development were identified in Child Observation. Expanding from what controlled experiments typically define as prosocial behavior, for example, instrumental helping, resource sharing, and emotional comfort (Dunfield and Kuhlmeier Reference Dunfield and Kuhlmeier2013), I analyzed a broader range of behaviors suitable to Xia Xizhou children’s world, such as sibling care, and granting access to games/play groups. Moreover, results from my analysis need to be interpreted within the local context.

Overall, girls initiated proportionally more prosocial behaviors than boys did, but there were also exceptions in specific types of behavior. Girls were more often caretakers than boys, as shown in sibling care and comforting (in most situations it was an older sibling comforting a crying baby). Notably, girls, and in this case baby girls, also received proportionally more sibling care and comforting than boys. Compared to boys, girls also showed a mild preference for helping others, and for granting other children the access to certain group games. However, in some other prosocial behaviors, there was no gender preference as initiators, for example of resource sharing. In addition, boys initiated proportionally more playful teasing, in the ambiguous gray area between cooperation and conflict, but boys and girls were equally likely to become recipients of playful teasing. Some of these differences reflect local cultural norms, for example, girls as caretakers of younger siblings: It was a common scenario to see young girls carrying a baby on their backs. Other patterns might have to do with the particular types of games boys and girls were engaged in. For example, there was a lot of playful teasing in boys’ pretend play games such as “dueling.” Negotiation over permission and access to certain collaborative and cooperative group games such as playing house and hopscotch happened a lot to girls. As explained earlier, older girls were more likely to become leaders of these specific games.

Learning Aggression from Family Experience

When Arthur Wolf resumed his analysis and writing on Xia Xizhou children, his theoretical interest in approaching the SCS’s behavioral systems, such as aggression, had shifted from behaviorist learning theories to examining inborn knowledge. He came to believe that human behavior was not very malleable. Many scientists indeed explain the robust gender difference in physical aggression through biological and evolutionary lenses, for example, sex-selection theory (Archer Reference Archer2004). But regardless of what specific “inborn knowledge” children are equipped with, their actual lived experience is what the Wolf Archive can directly illuminate, and that experience really matters. Learning aggression from observing punishment inside the family, or one violence begetting another, is documented in many societies (e.g., Ember and Ember Reference Ember and Ember2005). One source of such observational learning is adult members of the family. As Margery Wolf’s observation about a defiant little boy suggests, even toddler children were keenly observing adult life. In this scenario, from previous experience witnessing how his father treated his mother, the boy not only learned to use violence as a threat. He also learned about gender hierarchy, men’s authority and dominance over women, and therefore his own privilege.

Another type of experience that contributes to the robust gender difference in physical aggression is parental differential treatment of boys and girls (Endendijk et al. Reference Endendijk, Groeneveld, van der Pol, van Berkel, Hallers-Haalboom, Bakermans-Kranenburg and Mesman2017). Parents in many cultures, especially patrilineal societies, tend to use more physical control toward boys than toward girls (Munroe et al. Reference Munroe, Hulefeld, Rodgers, Tomeo and Yamazaki2000). Transcripts of Doll Play sessions provide unique materials to examine children’s emotions and thoughts about gender and corporeal punishment. The Doll Play test in the Wolf Archive used a set of eight dolls in a farmhouse with a table, chairs, and a tatami bed.Footnote ⁶ The set of dolls (see Figure 4.1) resembles a typical family in the local community, including grandmother, father, mother, and five children (older brother, older sister, younger brother, younger sister, and a gender nonspecified baby).Footnote ⁷ This test features school-age children’s spontaneous storytelling about family scenes. The Wolfs’ team managed to collect Doll Play data with forty-six children, a gender-balanced sample, and some children were interviewed twice. Many children told stories that reflected truthful details of their own family life, such as their family’s demographic composition and relationships, thus I call their storytelling as “reality-based fantasy.”

Figure 4.1 Doll Play (DP) test materials.

Source: Photo by Arthur Wolf

One prominent theme across these narratives is corporal punishment. Boy characters were mentioned more than girl characters in these punishment narratives. For example, a mischievous boy Huang Shu-feng, aged five at the time of Doll Play, had one older sister, one older brother, and a younger baby brother. He identified the baby in Doll Play as a boy, the older brother as a second grader and the older sister as a third grader, similar to his own family situation. Shu-feng told this punishment story:Footnote ⁸

In both Shu-feng and Shu-ting’s narratives, it was the older brother who got hit by his mother, with a rope, which was probably a familiar scenario in their own life. But some other children’s vivid description of cruel violence, in Doll Play and TAT, clearly reflects their impression or imagination about adult moral transgressions, about crime and punishment in the larger world. This connection was easy to miss, as the Wolfs never wrote about the projective tests results. Also, psychological and cross-cultural studies on gender difference in aggression tend to focus on children’s immediate socialization experience and have rarely situated children’s behavior in the larger historical and political context. But this sort of void and omission is what makes reexamining children’s gendered moral knowledge more exciting.

“Bad Boys Become Lo-mua”: Learning Violence from the Larger Society

Figure 4.2 TAT Drawing #4.

Source: The Wolf Archive. Photo by Jing Xu

The most salient theme in children’s storytelling about moral transgressions and violence in the adult society was that of hooligans or gangsters (lo mua in Hokkien). Xia Xizhou was known for its history of gangsters. The village was “the home of a gang that preyed on the town’s merchants,” and the passage between the township Shulin and the village marked the boundary between the territories of rival gangs. Margery Wolf’s The House of Lim described the history of this village’s gang: Lim Hue-lieng (pseudonym), the eldest son in the most prominent family, and the older brother of the Wolfs’ landlord,Footnote ¹² started out as the leader of all gangsters in this village in the 1930s, then of all the other villages around here, and eventually of a large area of the Taipei basin. Although the village was looked down upon by some outsiders, such as merchants in Shulin who were exploited by the village’s gangsters, according to Margery Wolf, the gangster activities in a way ensured the internal order and security of this village (M. Wolf Reference Wolf1968: 48):

In the late 1950s, the new generation’s youths also participated in gangster activities (M. Wolf Reference Wolf1968: 48):

Without systematic evidence on this particular matter, it is hard to draw any conclusion on how exactly this local gangster culture might have shaped the younger children’s life. But the story of Arthur Wolf’s good friend, the Taiwanese historian Wang Shiqing who was born in Xia Xizhou, tells us that at least some parents worried about it: In 1941, after Wang finished elementary school (sixth grade), his mother Ms. Lai moved the family from Xia Xizhou to Shulin town, out of the concern that the home villagers’ lo-mua culture was not good for his upbringing. This story became a celebrated tale in Wang’s biography, and Ms. Lai became a local parallel to “Mencius’ Mother,” the virtuous mother figure in ancient China who relocated home three times to improve her son’s education, that is, for her son to receive good influence from good neighbors (Chou Reference Chou2011: 28).

Young children, keen observers of adult and adolescent social life, definitely had some idea about lo-mua. They were taught that bad boys who got into fights, stole from parents, or did not do well in school would eventually become lo-mua. They might have witnessed some lo-mua violence, or at least heard about it. In Child Observation, children sometimes accused their peers of being lo-mua.Footnote ¹³ In projective tests, especially TAT with a set of pictures that portrayed ambiguous scenes of children interacting with each other or with adults, many young participants spontaneously told stories of violent scenes associated with lo-mua. The excerpt of eight-year-old boy Wang Kuei-ming’s transcript was just one among many examples in which children asserted that boys who liked to fight would end up as lo-mua. Asked how those misbehaving boys would feel, many answered that they would be afraid of becoming hooligans. Killing with a knife seemed to be lo-mua’s signature activity. A seven-year-old boy even associated parent–child fights, interpreted from one of the TAT pictures, with street violence: “[both the child and the mother would fight] with a knife. My mother told me, those (lo-mua) fighting on the streets were all fighting with a knife.”Footnote ¹⁴

Asked what he saw in the first drawing of TAT,Footnote ¹⁵ of a young boy looking at some round-shaped objects (see Figure 4.3), ten-year-old boy Cheng Ling-hui interpreted the objects as coins, a frequently evoked imagery in TAT responses. Ling-hui told a story about the boy in the drawing, who often came to steal his mother’s money. In this story, the boy wanted to spend the money on gambling and prostitution, both of which were common pastimes for local adults. It would only make sense if a bad boy like this becomes a lo-mua. Indeed, Ling-hui went on talking about lo-mua, murders, and policemen:Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 4.3 TAT Drawing #1.

Source: The Wolf Archive. Photo by Jing Xu

In these children’s young minds, lo-mua can be extremely violent, and it was only fair that bad guys eventually got caught by the omnipotent police. The scene of policeman punishing bad boys did not exist only in children’s fantasy. It also existed in their reality, for example, in parents’ threats toward them, especially boys. In the following observation,Footnote ¹⁷ a mother threatened her son of sending him to the police station, for the son would not admit his misbehavior, and the very naughty boy was scared:

Children in many societies fear or fantasize about police. Parents in many societies threaten misbehaving little ones with police punishment. For example, when I was doing fieldwork in Shanghai, my son was going through his “terrible-two” phase. Every night he kept throwing tantrums and refused to go to sleep. Among all the strategies I tried to make him go to bed, the only effective one was to threaten him that the police car was coming. On numerous nights, amid bustling city sounds, I had to hold the crying toddler and bring him to the balcony of our apartment: “Listen! The police car is right there, down in the yard of our compound, to catch babies who don’t go to bed.” My toddler boy at that time had very limited knowledge of the actual reality of police power: His understanding primarily came from reading picture books with all kinds of cars and trucks, including police cars. But the limited knowledge of toddler boys in Xia Xizhou was of a different kind: For example, they would be tricked, in the middle of playing a “gambling” game with cards, when older children warned them that policeman was coming to catch gamblers. Sometimes children saw policemen running errands in the village, and they looked at policemen with curiosity. Children must have passed by the police station near their village. Besides being threatened by parents about what police could do to the little ones, they might have overheard adult gossip about policemen’s various duties and terrifying deeds. Xia Xizhou children’s understanding or imagination of policing offers very specific insights into the political reality in the late 1950s rural Taiwan.

The Wolfs’ fieldwork was conducted at the height of Taiwan’s Martial Law Era, when police shouldered many local social surveillance and management responsibilities (Chen Reference Chen2007). But built upon the foundation of Japanese colonial police system, policing during the early decades of KMT authoritarian rule in Taiwan was also known for its culture of violence.Footnote ¹⁸ Efforts to reform the policing culture in the 1950s and make it more welcoming in local society did not seem effective (Chen Reference Chen2007). It is hard to piece together a detailed picture of policing in this village from an adult perspective, as we lack systematic materials. But stories scattered across different types of data provide a rare glimpse into what policing was like in children’s life and on their minds.

First, the miscellaneous local surveillance functions of policing in the historical context were visible in children’s games and narratives. Crime drama like “play police” is a common children’s game in many places where policing is an institutional reality.Footnote ¹⁹ But Xia Xizhou children’s various “play police” games offer vivid details of local concerns: For example, police catching thieves who steal chicken and rice from village households, police catching gamblers, and police inspecting household cleaning every month. Their projective test transcripts also shed light on these local functions. For example, looking at one picture in TAT that features a child running and an adult watching (see Figure 4.4), a young girl told this story: A boy is looking at (another household’s) roof; he wants to steal vegetables from that garden. Asked what the child would feel, she said: “Would be caught by the police.” Again, this kind of “bad child” was, by default, a boy.

Figure 4.4 TAT Drawing #7.

Source: The Wolf Archive. Photo by Jing Xu

Besides everyday surveillance functions of policing, the culture of violence also emerged as a recurrent theme in children’s spontaneous narratives: Minor offenses would lead to severe punishment, for example, being shot to death. Gambling appeared to be a big deal in these stories, and police would put occasional gamblers in jail for years. Several children told stories about their parents getting caught by police on the train and brutally punished, for trivial reasons, that is, missing a station and overstaying on the train. Furthermore, in children’s eyes, lo-mua and policing were intertwined in the loop of violence and punishment, clearly a realistic insight.

In all these “reality-based fantasies,” children likely weaved together what they had observed or heard about, such as stealing, killing, and policing, into their fearful but vivid imaginations of violence.Footnote ²⁰ The Wolfs’ team in theory had a unique opportunity to examine gender and political socialization of Taiwanese children in early and middle childhood. But how children felt the pulse of politics never figured into the Wolfs’ research consciousness, and that void itself was a marker of intellectual history. Like the other studies in “the Golden Age” of sinological anthropology, the visions of their research reflect biases of that particular political and historical context: For them, political turbulences in Taiwan’s Martial Law Era, like Japanese influence in an earlier period, were just insignificant noise compared to the lasting “Chinese” culture in the island province (Harrell Reference Harrell, Hsu and Huang1999). The connections between childhood and Taiwan’s politics, then, must have seemed even more trivial.Footnote ²¹ For example, American child psychiatrist Robert Coles, renowned for his studies of children’s political life, was a contemporary of Arthur Wolf. But it took a long time for him to realize that there was a political dimension in children’s experience. He only began to systematically examine this topic after many years of researching children (Coles Reference Coles1986).Footnote ²²

Fortunately, existing fieldnotes allowed me to discover bits and pieces of political socialization process and how this bears on gendered moralities. Violence in that particular historical time had indeed left its mark on children’s developing minds, shaping their understanding of what it means to be a bad child, or more accurately, a bad boy, and what prospects await him. Now let us turn to “bad” girls.

“Iron Teeth” and “Sharp Mouth”: “Unruly” Girls

A group of girls were picking up wood on a summer afternoon:Footnote ²³

MC added a note in this observation, right next to the phrase “iron teeth”: “She [Li-chu] is very stubborn and keeps arguing a lot.” This short conversation exposes two interesting dimensions of girls’ moral world, on one hand, moral expectations specific to girls, for example, helping with housework, and on the other hand, how girls assert themselves despite those normative expectations. In this case, Wang Li-chu was fulfilling her duty of picking up wood, yet she probably also wanted to enjoy more time with her friends outside. At home she probably argued with her parents a lot, given that she wasn’t afraid of her father, even though in this community many children were frightened by the stern father figure, and she used her good work as her bargaining chip.

Not only did Li-chu and Ah-yun have “iron teeth,” the other girl Lan-mei was not a meek character either. In one observation, an adult woman accused her of having “sharp mouth.” While washing vegetables by the river, Lan-mei and a seven-year-old girl Wang Lin-fang got into a fight over territorial issues, when Lin-fang came to wash clothes – both dutifully doing housework. Lin-fang’s mother came over and asked what had happened. Lin-fang kept saying that Lan-mei hit her. Lan-mei disagreed and started cursing, which made Lin-fang’s mother very angry. She shouted to Lan-mei: “I didn’t scold you when my daughter told me that. Why do you talk that way? You are a girl. Why is your mouth so sharp?” Then the mother scolded her daughter too: “What did I tell you at home? I told you not to fight with others. Why do you always fight with others? … You are such a bad girl. You always like to fight others.”Footnote ²⁴

What does it mean to be a good girl? In many villagers’ eyes, first and foremost, good girls, or good children in general, should not get into fights.Footnote ²⁵ A good girl is supposed to keep herself quiet.Footnote ²⁶ She should not argue back or use coarse language. But the earlier conversations about “iron teeth” and “sharp mouth,” the vignette in the beginning of this chapter, about a group of older girls bullying little boys, and many other episodes in the fieldnotes, all tell us that young girls were far from docile. The detailed quantitative analysis of children’s behavior in this chapter also supports this conclusion: Although girls were less physically aggressive than boys, they resorted to a variety of other means – sometimes more frequently than boys – such as tattling, scolding, throwing a dirty look, and social exclusion, to defend themselves or control others.

For parents, a good girl is a good daughter and sister. She listens to adults, takes care of household chores, and sacrifices for her brothers. A fifty-year-old woman praised the girl of a new family who recently moved to Xia Xizhou from Jinmen: “The daughter is very polite. She buys candy to give to her little brother and doesn’t eat any herself.”Footnote ²⁷ But this does not mean that the daughter has no understanding of the unequal situation, or that she has no desire for the same food. For example, two sisters, five-year-old Wang Ah-tao and eight-year-old Wang Su-yeh gossiped about their little brother. Ah-tao saw that the little brother managed to get their grandpa to give him some pocket money and they were going to the store to buy melon seeds. Ah-tao and Su-yeh then hurried to the store to get a fair share for themselves too.Footnote ²⁸

A good girl should take care of younger siblings. Girls indeed shouldered sibling care duties more frequently than boys, as behavioral analysis demonstrated. But babysitting could be a very annoying duty for girls, so they found ways to evade their duties or enjoy themselves while half-heartedly performing their duty. As Margery Wolf observed: “Little girls who have younger siblings of either sex explored many techniques for fulfilling their responsibilities to parents, but still joining the village play groups” (1972: 66). Mothers can get very angry with their daughters for not doing a good job. The following scene of quarrel happened between two daughters and their mother: One daughter was the “iron teeth” girl Wang Li-chu, and her nine-year-old younger sister Li-lien was reluctantly getting ready for sibling care.Footnote ²⁹

Besides punishment, some adults also used pocket money or other promises as incentives for girls to babysit. Margery Wolf observed this strategy (1972: 66) but she did not describe what the girls thought about it. Actually, girls cared about receiving fair reward and resented unfair treatment. Once MC had this hearty conversation with fellow girls:Footnote ³⁰

The young, female research assistants must have played a crucial role in getting the girls to talk about their feelings and opinions because the research assistants could empathically understand these girls’ experience. Another important aspect of the village girls’ moral life is schooling, which MC and MS identified with and captured in fieldnotes.

“It Is No Use for You to Go to School!”

Wang Chun-yu, the daughter of the wealthiest Wang family in the village, was finishing up fifth grade in summer 1959. She had been refusing to go to school because of some tension with her strict teacher, who hit her hard for not doing homework.Footnote ³¹ She stayed home but did not help around the house. Her mother got very angry and scolded her. But whenever her mother tried to hit her, Chun-yu ran away. Chun-yu even argued back, saying things like “I don’t have to listen to you!” According to MC, Chun-yu often said dirty words to her mother. A relative of the family, a young prostitute, was staying in the house temporarily. MC heard this woman saying this to Chun-yu, in the presence of Chun-yu’s mother: “It is no use for you go to school! You would just have to cook anyway and it wouldn’t help you. … You should work and then you would have money to buy clothes, etc.”

During the pandemic years, I had spent a lot of time in the kitchen cooking for my family. I kept thinking about this episode, imagining how Chun-Yu thought about the young prostitute’s comment on the fate of girls (see Figure 4.5). I also wondered what the observer MC might have felt at this scene. After all, MC went to school and later, allegedly, worked as a maid for Americans in Taiwan.Footnote ³² While talking to these girls, MC had occasionally mentioned her own, similar experience or attitude, for example, about classroom antagonism between boys and girls, and about exam-related anxiety. What a pity that in this episode MC did not leave any comments behind! But at least we got a glimpse into the kind of conversations young girls were exposed to, conversations that might have prompted them to think about what it means to be a woman.

Figure 4.5 A girl contemplating.

Source: Photo by Arthur Wolf

Girls also had their own reflections about unfairness and gender discrimination at school, that boys bullied girls and that some teachers preferred boys. They confided in research assistant MS:Footnote ³³

On the same day, MS interviewed a group of younger girls who were playing together:Footnote ³⁴

Later, MS talked to one of these girls, Huang Su-yun (seven years old), knowing that she wanted to be Class Master: “Are you Class Master now?”

Once an old woman accused her granddaughter: “You are one of those girls that never do what people tell them.”Footnote ³⁶ That must have been an exaggeration though: None of the young girls could completely ignore what they were told to do. Their lives were constrained by various ethical obligations, and they were aware of those obligations. But contrary to purely miserable and submissive personalities, various stories of “unruly” girls emerged in these fieldnotes: They were perceptive of the inequalities imposed upon them. They tried to defend themselves and maneuvered to advance their own interests. They also wanted to be in power, to guan (control) others, like those “class master” boys. Even in the more extreme case of inferiority and insecurity, such as adopted daughters, young girls still found ways to negotiate cultural models and assert their agency.

A Fierce Adoptive Daughter

The topic of adopted girls contributed to Arthur Wolf’s most important discovery, that is, the common practice of “minor marriage” in this and neighboring Taiwanese villages: Many families adopted baby girls and raised them to become daughters-in-law. These “little daughters-in-law” are called sim-pu-a in local dialect. Wolf has written extensively about this marriage custom and its psychological consequences, such as incest avoidance formed in the process of childhood cohabitation.Footnote ³⁷ He also wrote about maternal sentiments, for example, in an article entitled “Maternal Sentiments: How Strong Are They?” (A. Wolf Reference Wolf2003). While his conclusions were mostly based on statistical analyses of demographic data, I was more intrigued by a rarely addressed question, the “sentiments” of adopted girls: What was it like to be an adopted girl in that community? What kinds of emotions were salient to them? How did they make sense of their own situation?

By the late 1950s, the minor marriage custom had largely disappeared in Xia Xizhou,Footnote ³⁸ but it was not uncommon to adopt daughters. Although these girls were not expected to marry their adopted brothers anymore, their emotional world, examined in ethnographic detail, can still shed valuable light on gendered moral experience. First of all, adoption still looms large in the village girls’ life, as a realistic threat (A. Wolf n.d.: 73):

Girls were adopted at a young age, therefore such a threat was also presented to daughters when they were little. For example, MC noted this: “Last year they [parents] threatened to give her [Chang Ali, 2-year-old girl] away whenever she dirtied herself. She would cry and scream: ‘No. No. No’.”Footnote ³⁹ Wang Chui-ying, a sim-pu-a of an older generation, a mother in her late thirties at the time of the Wolfs’ fieldwork, remembered the trauma of adoption:

Despite the emotional scars, the adopted girl found comfort in her (adoptive) grandmother’s petting. This hints at the complexity of sentiments in young girls’ world, of attachment and fear, of bonding and pain.

Among the three adopted girls within the age range of 0 to 12, the archive contains the most materials about Wang Shu-yu.Footnote ⁴⁰ I focus on her story because we get to know her personality. Shu-yu was the eldest child in her adoptive family. At the beginning of the fieldwork, she was five years old, living with her (adoptive) grandparents, parents, and three younger siblings, one sister and two brothers, including a baby brother. According to Child Observation, she was observed in 306 behavioral interactions with twenty-seven children and several adults. Figure 4.6 represents Shu-yu’s behavioral interactions with other people in a network graph: A node represents a person, an edge represents behavioral interactions between two nodes, and the arrow represents the direction of behavior (from initiator to recipient). This ego network graph shows that Shu-yu (#193) interacted most frequently with her sister Wang Shu-lan (#195, 3.5 years younger), brother Wang Jun-hsien (#194, 1.5 years younger), and several other children similar to her in age (e.g., her cousins #206 and #205 and friend #253).

Figure 4.6 An adopted girl’s (#193) behavioral-interaction network. The number on each node represents the person’s ID. The white node represent the focal child (“ego” node Shu-yu), dark gray nodes represent other children, and light gray nodes represent adults; square nodes represent females and round nodes represent males. The thickness and darkness of the edge is proportional to the weight of this edge, that is, the frequency of interactions between the two nodes. The darker and thicker the edge is, the more interactions between the two people

Shu-yu was adopted when she was only two months old because the family’s first child, also a baby girl, died. This custom was called “substitute flower,” and part of the purpose was to alleviate the mother’s pain and grief of losing a child. The girl was breastfed by the adoptive mother (hereafter “mother”), and after she was weaned, the grandmother took care of her. This girl, her mom, and paternal grandma formed an interesting triangular relationship that complicates the typical “adopted girl” imagery built from previous studies of Chinese families, including the Wolfs’ own works. Unlike the docile sim-pu-a (e.g., M. Wolf Reference Wolf1972: 76), Shu-yu seemed quite willful, even stubborn. In her mother’s words, she was “touchy,” “very fierce.” The girl’s “unruly” personality might have to do with birth order, her being the oldest child in the family. But a more likely reason, as her mother explained, was that the girl’s grandmother, the matriarch of the family, doted on her and protected her:Footnote ⁴¹

The mother did not like the girl, perhaps even resented her to some extent: “I don’t care whether she is a good girl or not, because she is another’s child.” In mother’s eyes, Shu-yu was not a good, obedient girl: “She is very lazy [meaning not doing chores]. I call her and she doesn’t move so I don’t like to call her to do something.” Mother complained about the ethical burden of raising an adoptive daughter: “She is not my own child. If I tell her to do chores other people would say I don’t treat her well.” Such reputational concerns bothered her: “If the child was my own I could hit her and others wouldn’t say anything.” At the same time, mother was always the one exercising punishment toward her because “her grandmother is unwilling.”Footnote ⁴² Mother did not want to give in to her. She often scolded the girl and commanded her to take care of younger siblings. But the girl did not readily comply. She used various strategies to suspend sibling care and enjoy herself when out of her mother’s sight. In a jump rope game with other girls, when it was her turn to play, she put her baby brother on the ground. Seeing that scene, mother started scolding her, threatening to hit her and not let her eat dinner. Shu-yu wasn’t scared at all.Footnote ⁴³ Another time, despite her mother’s shouting, she just walked away smiling and went on playing.Footnote ⁴⁴

More than mischievous, Shu-yu could be really defiant. Shu-yu didn’t like to go to school. In 1958, mother sent her to kindergarten,Footnote ⁴⁵ but grandma defended the girl, saying she was too young to study. A year later, she was sent to school again. She was fine on the first day, but soon she got scared in the classroom. According to MC, her teacher made many of her classmates cry, but MC never saw her crying in her classroom. She was tough and strong willed. On September 15, 1959, Shu-yu refused to go to school again. Her grandmother brought her to school, her arms marked from her mom’s beatings. Grandma pled to the vice principal. The two of them took her by the arm, trying to lead her into the classroom, but she ran away. MC observed the following scenes at school before her grandmother left:Footnote ⁴⁶

In this episode grandmother was clearly the affectionate protector, while the mother was a harsh punisher. The triad of Shu-yu, mother, and grandmother complicates the already fraught relationship between the two adult women. This tension between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law was part of the manifestation of what Margery Wolf called “the uterine family” (1972), that women’s power in this village came from the social unit between a mother and her son, and from the priority of mother–son tie over the son’s conjugal relation. Shu-yu’s Doll Play transcript illuminates a young girl’s perceptive insights about her family dynamics: “Dad scolded mom [for hitting her child]. Grandmother [scolded her daughter-in-law]: ‘Ah! A woman like you, always like this [hitting the kids], such a fierce woman! It’d be better not to marry her. Dad said next time he’ll send mom to the police station’.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The girl knew well of the tensions in her family. She manipulated such tensions to her own advantage. She would use grandmother’s love to shield herself from mother’s punishment, and her mother disliked this.Footnote ⁴⁸

As a girl who was forced upon a complicated journey of adoption, however, she had developed paradoxical sentiments toward the mother. Her fantasy in Doll Play seemed to resemble her own family situation and disclose her hatred toward her mother: “Mom left home after a fight with dad. … All the children cried, except the elder sister. Because elder sister often got hit, so she didn’t cry for her. She was glad to see mom go away.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Note that she happened to be the “elder sister” in her own family. On the other hand, she seemed to long for intimate attachment with mother. In one observation, Shu-yu was teasing a baby, and mother scolded her. But this mischievous girl “smiled and stopped and went over and threw herself on her mother’s back.” Her mom “shook her shoulders annoyed.” She then “smiled, went over and sat down by herself.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This moment of desire and rejection speaks to the adopted daughter’s intricate emotional experience.

Discourses, Statistics, and Personalities

The idea that gender is an integral part of children’s moral personhood runs deep in ethnic Han families. Despite all the familiar discourses and imageries about sons and daughters in the so-called “traditional Han Chinese family,” few studies have dived into the actual world of childhood and examined, in a systematic approach, how gender intersects with moral development. This archive affords a rare opportunity for comprehensive statistical analysis on gendered behavioral patterns. For example, boys initiate more physical aggression, verbal aggression, and dominance, but girls assert themselves in more subtle or indirect ways, such as through tattling, scolding, and social exclusion. The rich ethnographic materials also allowed me to connect children’s behavior, knowledge, and emotions to the larger historical context.

Moreover, I was curious about children’s perspectives, the range of experiences that shaped young girls’ and boys’ understanding of their duties and privileges, rights and wrongs, and the emotional texture of those experiences. Sinological anthropology, or anthropology in general, tend to ignore individual children, or reduce them to family ideologies and childrearing values, such as the trope of filial sons and submissive daughters. In this chapter I recovered the voices of mischievous, naughty, and even fierce boys and girls. Boys observed aggression in their everyday life. They learned that misbehaving boys would become hooligans and gangsters (lo-mua). Girls learned the rules of patriarchy, often enforced by adult women, but at the same time they developed various strategies to subvert these rules, especially when the enforcers were not around. From snapshots of their everyday life, I tried to understand their personalities. Continuing the journey of rediscovering individual experiences, Chapter 5 will present a case study, centering on two children, a brother-and-sister dyad. This case study highlights sibling relation, a special and significant type of peer relation in this community, in addition to exploring the complexity of gender and individual personalities in family dynamics. Thanks to its “previous life,” this unique case also echoes an overall theme of this book, what it means to construct/reconstruct an ethnography.