Factory Girls
Jan 23, 2010 18:34:28 GMT -5
Post by Henry on Jan 23, 2010 18:34:28 GMT -5
Dear Colleagues,
My friend Raymond shared the following with me and I wanted to share it with all of you.
Henry
Excerpt from Factory Girls - - From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang, Spiegel & Grau, New York, 2009, page 322………
In traditional Chinese genealogies, a family traces its lineage back to the shiqianzu, the “first migrating ancestor” who came from somewhere else and established himself where his descendants now live. Status-seeking families might claim a connection to a famous person of the distant past, but such spurious links betray themselves in the pages of the genealogy. Only the records after the first migrating ancestor are considered authentic. Migration fixes a person in place and time, and the history of a family begins when a person leaves home.
The Chinese genealogy, which started to appear widely during the Song Dynasty a thousand years ago, is a rigidly Confucian document. Its purpose is to record the merit and righteousness of a clan’s members; like Communist Party propaganda, it prefers to emphasize the positive. Widows who remarried after their husband’ deaths - - in violation of Confucian propriety - - were often omitted from the pages of a genealogy, as were childless concubines and sons who became monks. The list of crimes leading to expulsion from the genealogy was long. According to one set of rules published during the Qing Dynasty, it included: violating ancestral graves, marrying in disregard of social classes, violent rampaging, whoring, joining armed rebellion, treason or heresy, withholding the truth from the emperor, strangling someone to death without cause, or marrying a prostitute, actress, slave, or servant. The genealogy reflected the traditional Chinese view that the purpose of history was not to relate facts or record stories, but to establish a moral standard to guide the living. History was not simply what happened, but what ought to happen if people behaved as they should.
My friend Raymond shared the following with me and I wanted to share it with all of you.
Henry
Excerpt from Factory Girls - - From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang, Spiegel & Grau, New York, 2009, page 322………
In traditional Chinese genealogies, a family traces its lineage back to the shiqianzu, the “first migrating ancestor” who came from somewhere else and established himself where his descendants now live. Status-seeking families might claim a connection to a famous person of the distant past, but such spurious links betray themselves in the pages of the genealogy. Only the records after the first migrating ancestor are considered authentic. Migration fixes a person in place and time, and the history of a family begins when a person leaves home.
The Chinese genealogy, which started to appear widely during the Song Dynasty a thousand years ago, is a rigidly Confucian document. Its purpose is to record the merit and righteousness of a clan’s members; like Communist Party propaganda, it prefers to emphasize the positive. Widows who remarried after their husband’ deaths - - in violation of Confucian propriety - - were often omitted from the pages of a genealogy, as were childless concubines and sons who became monks. The list of crimes leading to expulsion from the genealogy was long. According to one set of rules published during the Qing Dynasty, it included: violating ancestral graves, marrying in disregard of social classes, violent rampaging, whoring, joining armed rebellion, treason or heresy, withholding the truth from the emperor, strangling someone to death without cause, or marrying a prostitute, actress, slave, or servant. The genealogy reflected the traditional Chinese view that the purpose of history was not to relate facts or record stories, but to establish a moral standard to guide the living. History was not simply what happened, but what ought to happen if people behaved as they should.