Margery Wolf Books

The story unfolds with a chance encounter at Taipei airport, leading to a deep friendship between a Chinese literature professor and an American graduate student after surviving a plane crash. As their bond grows, they connect with other lonely souls, including siblings haunted by their past, a couple bound by tradition, and a talented cook who unites them through her culinary skills. Their shared experiences of joy and sorrow forge a unique family. A wedding celebration in California takes a dramatic turn with a devastating earthquake, thrusting the Fong siblings into a crisis.

Studies of Chinese society commonly emphasizze men's roles and functions, a not unreasonable approach to a society with patrilineal kinship structure. But this emphasis has left many important gaps in our knowledge of Chinese life.This study seeks to fill some of these gaps by examining the ways rural Taiwanese women manipulate men and each other in the pursuit of their personal goals. The source of a woman's power, her home in a social structure dominated by men, is what the author calls the uterine family, a de facto social unity consisting of a mother and her children.The first four chapters are devoted to general background material: a brief historical sketch of Taiwan and a description fo the settings in which the author's observations were made; the history of a particular family; the relation of Chinese women to the Chinese kinship system; and the interrelationships among women in the community. The remaining ten chapters take up in detail the successive stages of the Taiwanese woman's life cycle: infancy, childhood, engagement, marriage, motherhood, and old age. Throught the book the author presents detailed information on such topics as marriage negotiations, childbirth, child training practices, and the organization of women's groups.

A young mother began to behave in a decidedly aberrant, perhaps suicidal manner, and opinion in her village was sharply divided over the reason. Was she becoming a shaman, posessed by a god? Was she deranged, in need of physical restraint, drugs, and hospitalization?