Displacement and Refugee Survival in Daughters of Shandong: A Thematic Analysis
The Thematic Claim: Displacement as a Cascade of Losses and Improvised Rebuildings in Daughters of Shandong
In Daughters of Shandong, displacement is not a single event but a cascading series of losses—of home, country, social standing, and family coherence—that forces the Ang women to rebuild identity from whatever remains. The novel's central claim about displacement is that survival depends less on preserving what was lost than on improvising new forms of belonging through labor, communal reciprocity, memory, and the refusal to let hardship erase dignity. Yet the novel also insists that this improvisation is never clean; it demands moral compromises, strains family bonds, and leaves scars that persist long after physical safety is secured.
Tracing the Theme: Three Movements of Displacement
From Zhucheng to Qingdao: The Loss of Home
The family's displacement begins not with a single expulsion but with a slow unraveling. The prologue establishes the narrator's deep attachment to Zhucheng—the courtyard home, the fields, the aging outer wall, the rivers and wildflower fields that survive in memory even after war destroys the physical landscape. This attachment makes the later loss more devastating. When the family flees to Qingdao, they arrive with nothing more than what was on their backs and in a wheelbarrow, as Mom tells Uncle Sen.
In Qingdao, the family experiences the first brutal lessons of displacement. They sleep on the streets, Mom stands guard against human traffickers, and they beg for scraps after church food distributions become dangerous stampedes. The city itself is alien—the noise, the crowds, the foreign architecture of the Villa District. Hai notes that even though they remain in the same province, the change makes her feel like she is in a foreign land. This passage establishes a key pattern: displacement is not only geographic but perceptual. The familiar becomes strange, and the family's former status as wealthy landowners offers no protection.
The search for relatives becomes a defining activity. Mom asks everyone she meets whether they know the Angs or the Daos, and the family discovers that the Angs have fled south without word. Father's letter—if it was ever sent—never arrives. Hai's bitter reflection that Father had no will to return for them crystallizes the gendered dimension of displacement: the men escape, the women and girls are left to survive on their own.
Mount Davis: Scarcity and the Transformation of the Self
At Mount Davis, the family's displacement deepens into a more sustained condition of refugeehood. The camp is overcrowded, food is scarce, and the family's physical deterioration becomes visible. Hai's ID card photograph shows a ghastly girl with bony cheeks and limp shoulder-length hair—a girl who looks like a shell with no soul. This moment is crucial: displacement has literally rewritten Hai's appearance, making her unrecognizable even to herself.
The typhoon that devastates the camp adds another layer. Survivors scavenge through the wreckage, and Hai finds a writing brush in a tangle of clothing. This object becomes a turning point. Di's gift—salvaged from disaster—allows Hai to imagine a future as a calligrapher, a way to earn money and reclaim agency. Hai reflects that poverty made her a worse person even as it made her braver, capturing the moral complexity the novel insists on. Displacement degrades and emboldens simultaneously.
The camp also reveals the limits of solidarity. Northerners help each other, but they also steal from and beat one another. The community is bound by shared language and suffering, yet scarcity constantly threatens to dissolve those bonds into competition.
Rennie's Mill: Building a New Home from Nothing
The relocation to Rennie's Mill marks the family's most extreme experience of displacement. The camp is described as nothing but dirt, with tents lined up in neat rows like tombstones. The government's DDT spraying, the ration cards, the warnings about waterborne parasites—all of it reinforces the family's status as wards of the state, dependent on external authorities for survival.
Yet Rennie's Mill also becomes the site of the novel's most hopeful vision of rebuilding. The refugees form their own government, build a road, construct huts, and create a rudimentary town. Mr. Han's declaration that Rennie's Mill is our hometown now is both poignant and ironic—a claim to belonging in a place that was never home. The camp's residents transform their displacement into a project of collective self-determination.
The Dragon Boat Festival brawl complicates this picture. When pro-Communist workers' union members arrive singing the PRC anthem, the refugees attack them with fists, crutches, and broken table legs. The violence is shocking, but it reveals how deeply the refugees' identity is tied to their Nationalist allegiance—and how precarious their position is. The threat of deportation is toothless because China won't accept them, but the refugees obey the police anyway, afraid of losing their food rations. Displacement has made them simultaneously defiant and dependent.
Character and Symbol Connections
Mom: The Economics of Survival
Mom embodies the novel's argument that survival requires both resourcefulness and moral restraint. She has never held a job, but she insists she will find work in Qingdao. She saves money in her undershirt, refuses to sell the jade bangle, and rejects Di's suggestion to resell supplies at double the price, calling it bad karma to take advantage of people's desperation. Her generosity is reciprocated—other refugees reinforce her tent, build shelves, and share rabbit meat. The novel suggests that in a world of scarcity, reciprocity is not naive but strategic: the community that survives is the one that shares.
The jade bangle functions as a symbol of this tension. Mom keeps it as insurance against further disaster, unable to trust that entry permits will come through. The bangle represents both the family's former wealth and their current precarity—a reminder that material security can vanish, and that what remains must be preserved against unknown futures.
Hai: Writing as Reclamation
Hai's discovery of the writing brush after the typhoon is the novel's most direct statement about how displaced people rebuild identity. The brush is salvaged from wreckage, cracked and broken, but functional. Hai's plan to set up a calligraphy stand transforms her from a passive victim of displacement into an active agent. Writing becomes a way to earn money, to claim a place in the world, and to process the losses that words alone can carry.
The letters that never arrive—Father's letter, Mrs. Ding's reply—haunt the narrative. Displacement severs communication as surely as it severs geography. Hai's letter-writing business at Rennie's Mill is thus doubly significant: it restores the connections that displacement destroyed, and it gives her a livelihood in a place where few opportunities exist.
Di: Pragmatism and Its Limits
Di's suggestion to resell supplies at double the price represents a competing survival ethic. Where Mom insists on generosity, Di sees opportunity. The novel does not fully condemn Di's pragmatism—it is, after all, a rational response to scarcity—but it does suggest that such calculation can corrode the communal bonds that make survival possible. Di's later criticism of Mom's choices, and Hai's wish that Di could see Mom's courage and altruism, points to a deeper tension: displacement tests not only physical endurance but moral character.
Bread and Flour: The Materiality of Hunger
The recurring presence of flour and bread anchors the theme of displacement in bodily experience. In Qingdao, the family eats flatbread and waits for church handouts of bread and porridge. At Mount Davis, they line up for zhongzhi donated by a philanthropist. At Rennie's Mill, they subsist on rice and vegetable rations. Each meal marks a stage in the family's descent from self-sufficiency to dependence, and each also marks a small act of survival—eating, sharing, enduring.
Complexity and Contradiction
The novel refuses a simple narrative of refugee resilience. Displacement is shown to be morally corrosive as well as character-building. Hai admits that poverty made her a worse person even as it made her braver. The refugees at Rennie's Mill build a community and attack their political enemies with equal energy. Mom's generosity coexists with her willingness to beg, head bowed, for scraps. The family's survival depends on both solidarity and self-interest, on both memory and the willingness to let go of the past.
The most profound contradiction is the family's relationship to home. The prologue's narrator, now living across the sea, draws strength from memories of Shandong—the rivers, the wildflower fields, the wheat. But those memories are also a source of pain, a reminder of what was lost. The novel's final image of Lan learning to walk at Rennie's Mill—the wheat that burst through Shandong soil—suggests that identity can be transplanted, that the child of displacement can carry the homeland within herself. But the image is also elegiac: the wheat grows in foreign soil, and the northern flowers bloom in snow that is not Shandong's snow.
Study Questions
1. How does the family's displacement from Zhucheng change the relationships between the Ang women?
Displacement strips away the patriarchal structures that defined family life in Zhucheng. Father abandons the family, Nai Nai's authority dissolves with the loss of the household, and the women must rely on each other. Mom becomes the family's sole provider and protector, while Hai and Di develop new competencies—foraging, trapping, writing, scavenging. The sisters' relationship is tested but ultimately strengthened, as Di's gift of the writing brush and Hai's defense of Mom's choices demonstrate. Displacement paradoxically frees the women from some forms of oppression even as it subjects them to new dangers.
2. What role does memory play in sustaining the family through displacement?
Memory serves as both anchor and burden. The prologue establishes that the narrator draws strength from memories of Shandong's landscape—the rivers, fields, and temples that survive in her mind even after war destroys them. These memories provide a sense of identity that displacement cannot erase. But memory also causes pain: Hai's bitterness about Father's abandonment, Mom's grief for Three, the constant awareness of what was lost. The novel suggests that survival requires a selective relationship to memory—holding onto the love and beauty of the past while refusing to be paralyzed by its losses.
3. How does the novel complicate the idea of refugee solidarity?
The novel shows both the power and the limits of solidarity among refugees. Northerners in Hong Kong try much harder to get along than they had back in Shandong, and the Rennie's Mill community builds a road, a clinic, and a government through collective labor. But solidarity is fragile: refugees steal from and beat one another, the Dragon Boat Festival brawl reveals deep political divisions, and the camp's hierarchy of registered versus unregistered residents creates new forms of exclusion. The novel suggests that solidarity is not natural but constructed—and that it requires constant effort to maintain against the pressures of scarcity and fear.
4. What does the jade bangle reveal about the family's relationship to material wealth?
The jade bangle represents the family's former wealth and their refusal to fully let go of it. Mom keeps it as insurance, unable to trust that entry permits will come through or that the family's situation will stabilize. The bangle is a hedge against further loss—a reminder that material security can vanish and that what remains must be preserved. But it also represents a form of hope: the possibility that the family might one day reclaim some measure of the standing they lost. The bangle's presence throughout the narrative suggests that displacement does not erase the desire for stability, even as it makes that desire increasingly difficult to satisfy.
5. How does Hai's identity shift across the three locations of Zhucheng, Qingdao, and Hong Kong?
In Zhucheng, Hai is defined by her family's wealth and her position as eldest daughter—a role that carries responsibility but also limitation. In Qingdao, she becomes a beggar and a street child, her identity stripped to its most basic elements. The ID card photograph at Mount Davis captures this transformation: Hai looks like a shell with no soul, unrecognizable even to herself. At Rennie's Mill, Hai begins to rebuild her identity through writing. The discovery of the brush, her letter-writing business, and her growing sense of agency mark a shift from passive victim to active survivor. By the novel's end, Hai's identity is no longer tied to place or family status but to her own capacities—her writing, her endurance, her ability to imagine a future for her children that she could not have imagined for herself.