A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman

"A Daughter of Han" is both an insightful and a frustrating read. The author, Ida Pruitt, writes in the first-person from the perspective of Lao T'ai-t'ai, a woman Pruitt met and interviewed. There are several interesting themes in the book: conservative society, saving face, foreign missionaries, poverty, numerology, and domestic life.Each chapter presents a few years in Lao T'ai-t'ai's life. She describes her childhood, her marriage to an "opium sot," her husband trying to sell her daughters, and her working life. Lao T'ai-t'ai's life is terribly difficult. She and her children go through periods of hunger that force them onto the street. She sees children and grandchildren die, which Pruitt barely mentions in passing.Unfortunately, the book is somewhat scant on specifics and details. At various times she works as a domestic servant for a Muslim family, a mandarin bureaucrat, and different missionaries, but we never learn how exactly she serves the families or how she makes house-calls as an itinerant vendor. In addition, events just come and go with very little reflection or detail, such as deaths in her family or friends that she mentions with no specifics. I would be curious to know about how funerals were held, what she did with her friends, or even what the cities she lived in were like.Sometimes, the scant details work in favor of the narrative. For instance, there is a brief sentence that describes seeing some of supporters of the Boxer Rebellion in her city. For her, a woman more interested in getting by than paying attention to politics, this would be a realistic description.The narrative style is a little dated, even for a book written in the ‘30s or ‘40s. Even given the local idioms that Pruitt mixes in for color, the writing is a bit halting. There are interruptions and odd interjections that make reading this book very clumsy.Nevertheless, there is very little biographic writing about the lives of ordinary people from this time. This alone makes "Daughter of Han" important for students of history and society.

for long i have not read such a good story in english. ning lao taitai (ning is a surname, and lao taitai meaning old lady, a polite form for an elderly woman in chinese), is an epitome for a peasant woman in old china. while reading the story, i cannot help thinking of my mother who suffered untold hardships and bitternesses in her life to bring up her 6 children standing on this miserable world. life is much easier here and now ,and ning lao taitai is just a story written in the past tense. as a chinese, i highly value this story, for it provides past customs, traditions and cultures, et al, which are fading out in china.

very interesting

Very interesting account of everyday life in long ago China

Great life stories. I’m keeping this book.

Mildly interesting. I was hoping for more details about day to day life, how they ate and cooked and did laundry and traveled and formed friendships and just day to day things. Instead, it's a pretty quick overview of a not especially interesting woman's life story -- this happened, then that happened, then this other thing happened.

This was a beautiful story of a Chinese woman and her sacrifices for her family. A real testament to her strength. A bit of a hard/slow read sometimes, however.

shows how Chinese life has followed traditional patterns that reappear in current Chinese society. Stories of everyday life with love, hate, quarreling and mutual support in the family are like those in the West while the details of the mores differ from those of Europeans and Americans.