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Research on the history of the family in south China is both important and difficult. It is important because the family obviously occupies a crucial position in the Chinese psyche, but difficult because available records tend to bear on the lineage rather than the family as such. That is to say, the record tends to dwell on men and their connections rather than women and theirs. A viable source on the history of the family would be biographies of women, many of which are included in genealogies and essay collections. One might, for instance, focus on biographies written in memory of the writers’ own mothers, in the hope that an emotional element might bear on descriptions that would be strongly tinted by the stereotypes. Nevertheless, not even the trauma of death and separation, which were usually the occasions for such essays, provided a means for breaking the stereotypical deadlock. Biographies of mothers recorded in genealogies were written by men, chiefly of literati inclination or pretension, and they expected their mothers to have nursed them, prodded them to hard work, held the family together in times of hardship, managed the servants without having herself avoided hard work, and abided by the standards of filial piety to the husband’s parents. Accounts written by writers on their own mothers were not always very different from the formalistic descriptions of virtuous wives and loving mothers written on behalf of little-known acquaintances. The structural view of the family, as expressed in the formalistic records, is only a construct of what the family should have been, not an account which might have touched the emotions as one should expect from ingrained memories. Without the emotions, the image of mother has to be unreal.1 Images of Mother: The Place of Women in South China David Faure 2 David Faure 46 However, it is not easy to catch the literati unaware for an eyewitness element to motherhood. The following examples have to remain anecdotal and suggestive, rather than thorough. This is a first attempt to probe the records for feelings expressed by men for their mothers, an effort in the hope that they might, if only by a little, subvert the stereotypes. What Does Mother Do But Suckle? A well-known account about a mother is the famous memorial to the emperor by the philosopher Chen Baisha (1428–1500) excusing himself from service at the capital. Chen noted that he was not weaned until he was nine sui, and he cited this fact to emphasize the debt he owed his mother.2 Chen’s father died at twenty-seven sui before Baisha was born, his mother was then twenty-four sui. Baisha made his reputation in Guangdong long before he accepted high office at the capital in 1483, and he gave it up in less than a year. In his petition for permission to retire, he pleaded illness and the need to take care of his mother. Baisha was, by then, fifty-six sui and his mother seventy-nine, but his memorial carried a strong tinge that because he was weak in health, his mother had continued to take a nursing interest in him. This was filial piety, no doubt, and might be corroborated by numerous statements scattered in Baisha’s writings detailing his concern for his mother’s health and safety, but the closeness of mother and son as expressed in this debt of sucking mother’s milk up to nine sui is probably atypical even of most essays in memory of mother. Throughout his life he was quite close to his brother, five years his senior: one poem recalls movingly how he feared for elder brother when the latter was out collecting rent during a rain storm. There might also have been some deference to his elder brother as would have been advocated by the Zhuji jiali, Zhu Xi’s family regulations, that Chen supported and propagated. At Chen Baisha’s house at Jiangmen, on the principal altar are placed tablets of five generations, ending with Baisha’s elder brother, Baisha’s own tablet being set up on a side altar. In accordance with the Zhuji jiali, the tablets indicate single-line descent down the senior male line. This was a rare practice in the ancestral halls of the Pearl River Delta. Chen Baisha had two wives and children of his own, whom he seldom wrote about. If the tablets are indicative of domestic sacrifice set up during Baisha’s life time, and...

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