Daughters of Shandong

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Book Club Questions

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Themes

Self-Preservation Through Community

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of violence, gender-based discrimination, and child death.

Chung’s characters undertake various strategies of self-preservation. While Hai and her sisters learn to be self-reliant when necessary, their experiences as refugees also teaches them the value of self-preservation through community and mutual support.

Although Hai’s culture places a strong emphasis on familial bonds, Hai’s experience proves that it is often voluntary communal bonds that are the strongest and most reliable. The Angs choose to include only select members of the family when they flee the Communists, leaving Mom and her daughters unprotected and isolated on the family estate. Their abandonment forms a significant contrast with the kindness of the Zhangs, who take in Mom and the girls, even at the risk of angering the Communist soldiers. The willingness of the Zhangs to help despite the risks is, in turn, a reflection of the selfless way Mom has behaved for years towards the community of workers, earning their loyalty and gratitude through helping them whenever she could.

Mom and the girls also develop a strong community inside the camp at Mount Davis and, later, at Rennie’s Mill. Their circle is made up mostly of other Northerners, like Mr. Chong and Biao-Wu, but they experience many small kindnesses from fellow refugees. Their experience shows that interdependence and mutual aid are essential for a person’s well-being; when Mom shares their precious rice, she is rewarded by others who help fortify their tent or provide other assistance. When the letter from Nai Nai seems to foreclose the possibility of further aid from the Ang family, the women know they at least have their refugee community for support, a community reinforced by the friendship of aid workers like Anita.

Di, who is an example of independence, shows through counterexample how important community can be. While Di finds her own communities in Qingdao, where she associates with Communist cadres, and in Hong Kong, where she finds work at restaurants, she is deprived of these communities when the family returns to Taiwan. Rather than providing her support, the family proves an obstacle to Di’s future. Yei Yei’s opposition to her love for Li-Tang causes him to break up with her, and it’s suggested that Di never heals from this heartbreak. Rather than offering support, the Angs limit Di’s opportunities to the detriment of her personal feelings and her relationship with others.

These examples suggest that, when families cannot provide reliable shelter or support, forming and keeping voluntary communities can provide individuals with safety, sustenance, and emotional support. Survival is difficult alone, but chances for success improve when one can work with, and rely on, like-minded others.

Adapting as Survival Strategy

In addition to finding community, the novel posits that adapting to change is another tactic essential to survival. This need for adaptation applies not only to situations of acute trauma, like displacement from war, but also to navigating larger shifts in cultural traditions and social values. Those who can adapt will survive, even though, as various characters demonstrate, there are limits to how much people can change.

The importance of adapting is first introduced by Comrade Lao, the Communist soldier escorting Hai to her denunciation rally. He describes how, in the Communist takeover, those who submit to re-education will survive. He believes that because Hai is young, she could be a valuable supporter, but first she must see the problems of the way of life her family pursued. These tactics of attack and torture have little chance of persuading anyone, and as Mom observes, their only chance at survival is to escape and adapt to a new life elsewhere.

With the loss of their home in Zhucheng, Di becomes the novel’s prime example of adaptability, as she is able to find sustenance in whatever manner she can, such as stealing eggs from the Zhangs. In Qingdao, Di mingles with the Communist cadres in order to receive distributions of free flour that the family can use to make bread. While Hai sees Di’s motivations as primarily self-serving, she also acknowledges that Di is likely to survive anywhere. In Hong Kong, Di finds further sources of food by providing labor at local restaurants. Hai’s vision of Di as a warrior queen taking over the city represents her admiration for Di’s ability to find benefit in whatever circumstances confront her.

It is Hai, however, who proves the strongest model of adaptability in the long term, such as when she sets up her own calligraphy stand in Hong Kong. While Di proves flexible in her loyalties, Hai proves flexible about what she will sacrifice or compromise to gain the advantages she needs. Hai, like her mother, has her eye on the future, rather than the immediate moment. She is willing to forgive their father and live in peace with him in Taiwan if it means she can focus on her schoolwork. When she is unable to attend high school, she sets her sights on the next best opportunity—teaching school—and takes every chance she can to prepare for the exams that will gain her entrance.

Thus, Hai, like her sister, has her sights set on independence, but unlike Di, Hai is not broken by the obstacles she confronts. Her ability to adapt to circumstances, even to those she thinks unfair, allow Hai to ultimately triumph in life.

The Demands of Family Duty

The obligations of family duty persist throughout the book, but this value changes over time, reflecting a difference in the pre-war and post-war worlds. The rigid demands of filial piety, a pillar of traditional Confucian Chinese society, expand and become more flexible in the post-war world, best exemplified by the relationship between Hai and her daughter.

The filial duty that Nai Nai demands is based on the traditional belief that, because one’s parents gave them life, a child owes unquestioning obedience to their parents. Sons had an additional burden to provide for parents in their old age, preserving the family’s wealth and performing the sacred tasks of observing ancestor worship and tending the family tomb. A daughter’s filial duty lay in marrying the man her parents chose and being obedient and subservient to her husband and in-laws. She was also expected to bear sons, thus keeping the family name and heritage intact.

Different types of family duty also appear at various stages of the family’s journey in the novel. Chiang-Shen takes in his sister because he believes their blood relationship makes it his duty to help her. Cousin Wei similarly expresses the belief that Mom’s marriage to an Ang makes her part of the family and thus worthy of his assistance—a keen irony, considering that her own husband shows less care for her well-being. While in Qingdao and later in Hong Kong, the family is always alert to meeting other Angs, all of whom would be considered part of a shared bloodline. Uncle Jian refers to his obligation when he arranges for the family’s entry permits to Taiwan. It helps him save face to insist he is only doing his duty rather than pointing out he is providing the protection that his brother has failed to show his wife.

While Mr. Chong demonstrates familial duty tied to genuine affection, part of Hai’s difficulty with her own father is that she can never feel confident that affection plays any role in his behavior. Save for a short period in Taiwan, when he takes his wife and daughters out of Nai Nai’s reach, he puts his filial duty to his parents ahead of the well-being of his wife and children. When Nai Nai abuses and humiliates Mom, he stands silently by. When Nai Nai refuses to pay for medical treatment for Three, Father again acquiesces to her demands, even though it guarantees his daughter’s death. Nai Nai’s hatred for her daughter-in-law likewise feeds Father’s reluctance to seek out his family after abandoning them. Through Father’s characterization, the novel suggests that unthinking commitment to family duty can have a dark side.

Family duty also bears its rewards when motivated by genuine feeling. Mom is rewarded for her nurturance of her daughters by Hai’s insistence on helping support the family. Mom is likewise rewarded for her nurturance of Ming when he becomes old enough to earn his own money, as she no longer needs to submit to Nai Nai’s punishments. Hai is rewarded for encouraging her daughter’s education when her daughter pursues a master’s degree abroad. Her own sacrifices are a joy when she sees her daughter succeed, and her familial bonds, based on mutual care and affection, are much more emotionally fulfilling than those based on duty alone.