Gender Discrimination and the Devaluation of Daughters in Daughters of Shandong
The Thematic Claim
In Daughters of Shandong, Eve J. Chung examines how a family's preference for sons operates not as a single act of cruelty but as a complete system of value—one that decides which children receive food, medicine, names, education, and belonging. The novel's central claim about gender discrimination is that the devaluation of daughters is itself an inheritance: it passes from grandmother to mother to daughter, is enforced by the very women it harms, and survives migration, war, and economic change. The Ang family's story shows that a girl's diminished worth is not only imposed from above by fathers and grandfathers but also reproduced from within, as women internalize the logic that a son secures the family's survival in this life and the next. Against this inheritance, the novel sets a counter-claim: education and economic independence can interrupt the cycle, one generation at a time.
A Hierarchy Written into Names and Birth Order
The devaluation of daughters begins before the girls can speak, encoded in the names they are given. Hai, the eldest, is a disappointment from birth; her second sister is named Di, a word meaning "younger brother," marking the son their father wished for; the third sister receives only a number, Three. When a fourth daughter, Li-Lan, is born in 1948, her father does not name her at all. These naming practices are not incidental: they announce each daughter's rank in the family's emotional economy, where sons are heirs and daughters are, in Di's later words, disposable.
The family's wealth makes the preference for sons a matter of deliberate policy rather than necessity. Nai Nai weighs the flour each evening to control what the workers eat, yet she spends an ounce of gold on a fortune-teller to learn whether a male heir is coming. When the fortune-teller predicts Mom will not bear a son until age thirty-six, Nai Nai orders the couple to sleep apart—not out of concern for Mom's health but to save the family the expense of raising additional daughters. The novel makes the calculus explicit: girls are, in the family's view, nothing more than wives for other people's sons. The only grandson in Hai's generation, Chiao, receives fried dough, braised pork, and gifts from Qingdao while the girls watch empty-handed. Hai records the lesson that girls were lucky to be housed, raised, and fed at all.
This early section establishes the idiom zhong nan qing nu—"value men and belittle women"—as the organizing principle of the household. Hai is taught to pray for Chiao's success because her mother's welfare in the afterlife will depend on him; only men can worship at the family tomb. The discrimination is thus woven into religion and ancestor veneration, making it feel less like a choice and more like fate. Even Hai, witnessing her mother's humiliation, hopes that she herself will one day have a son, seeing her own future in her mother's helpless form.
When a Girl's Life Is Priced Below a Doctor's Fee
The theme sharpens into tragedy in the story of Three. After Three falls into the river during Ghost Month, she develops a fever and a persistent cough, diagnosed as tuberculosis. The family quarantines in one room; Hai and Mom care for Three and the newborn Lan. But when Mom pleads with Father and Nai Nai for a doctor, they refuse to spend money on a girl child. Three dies in her mother's arms. The novel does not present this as an act of malice so much as an accounting decision: the family has priced a daughter's life and found it not worth a physician's fee. Three is buried in the family grave with incense and prayers, but the rituals cannot undo the fact that her death was treated as an acceptable cost.
The contrast with the family's treatment of sons is stark. Where Three's illness goes untreated, the family's resources are lavished on Chiao, the only grandson, and later on Ming, the son born after the family's move to Taiwan. The pattern is consistent: daughters are expected to be grateful for being housed, fed, and raised at all, while sons are investments worth protecting.
The Cycle Repeats in Taiwan
The novel refuses to treat the family's migration from Shandong to Taiwan as an automatic cure for its gender hierarchy. In Taipei, the same logic reasserts itself in new forms. When Hai returns from school to find her baby sister Hua drinking gray rice water while her brother Ming drinks formula, she confronts Mom. Mom's defense is revealing: Ming is the only one who will support the parents in old age and care for them in the afterlife. She loves Hua, she insists, but her duty as a wife is to ensure Ming grows up well. Hai's fury—she dumps the rice water and mixes formula herself—is directed not at a villain but at a mother who has internalized the system so completely that she cannot see her own daughter's hunger as a problem.
This scene is the novel's clearest demonstration that the devaluation of daughters is reproduced by women. Hai observes that men made the rules in their society, but women often enforced them. Nai Nai, with her bound feet and warlord presence, is the household's most zealous enforcer of the very hierarchy that subordinates her. Mom, who suffered expulsion and public humiliation for bearing daughters, later weeps when Hai gives birth to a girl, hoping for a son so that Hai's position will be assured. The women are not merely victims; they are also agents of the system, which is precisely what makes it so difficult to dismantle.
Breaking the Inheritance
Against this inheritance, the novel places education and economic independence. Hai's path out of the family's logic begins with her desire to attend school and to write. The letters she writes, and her letter-writing business, represent a form of self-possession that the family's daughters are not supposed to have. When Hai earns her own stipend as a teacher, she gains the power to push against the destiny others have imposed on her—buying Hua's formula before handing her earnings to Mom, for example, as a practical intervention in a system she cannot yet change.
The jade bangle is the novel's most powerful symbol of this transfer of worth. Mom sells her bangle so that Hai can go to school, converting a piece of family wealth into a daughter's education. When Hai holds her own newborn daughter and Mom weeps for the lack of a son, Hai answers that her position is assured because Mom sold her bangle to pay for school. The bangle, an object traditionally passed down as a woman's inheritance, becomes the means by which a daughter claims a different future. Flour and bread carry a related meaning: Mom's cooking feeds the household and the workers, and her skill with dough is both her labor and her quiet form of care—the way she sustains the daughters the family refuses to value.
The generational payoff arrives in the story of Yun-Mei, Hai's daughter. Yun-Mei enters First Girls' High School, then National Taiwan University, then earns a scholarship for a master's program in the United States—the first in the family to study abroad. Hai reflects that success builds across generations, from her mother selling eggs to her daughter becoming a scientist. The title Daughters of Shandong is reclaimed in this ending: the daughters who were devalued become the ones who carry the family forward. Hai's final assurance about Yun-Mei—that her daughter would never kneel to anyone—directly answers the image of Mom kneeling on the floor that haunts the early chapters.
Complexity: What the System Costs Even Its Beneficiaries
The novel complicates any simple reading of the theme by showing that the son-preference system harms everyone it touches, including the son. Ming is raised as the family's golden child, but he is also burdened with the expectation that he alone will secure his parents' afterlife. Mom's devotion to Ming is not pure love; it is survival strategy, and it leaves her unable to recognize Hai's support. When Mom finally refuses to kneel for Nai Nai at age fifty-eight, she does so not because Hai has supported her for years but because Ming has graduated and earned his first paycheck. Hai is crushed that, in Mom's mind, it was still her son who made the difference between servitude and freedom. The system's grip on Mom's mind outlasts its grip on her body.
There is also a contradiction in Hai herself. She is the daughter who breaks the cycle, yet she acknowledges her own wavering insecurity and her moments of silence. She understands Mom's choices even as she fights them, and she cannot resent Mom any more than she can resent Hua for drinking the rice water. Di, by contrast, refuses to accommodate the system at all—she calls Hai a coward and insists that all girls are disposable—but her rebellion costs her closeness with the family. The novel does not declare one response superior; it shows both as necessary, incomplete answers to an inheritance that neither sister chose. The book's own discussion questions invite readers to weigh these responses, asking whether the sisters achieve their dreams and whether forgiveness is possible.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How do the daughters' names encode their devaluation, and what does the naming of the final generation suggest about change?
The names mark each daughter's rank in the family's hierarchy: Hai is a disappointment, Di is named "younger brother" for the son who never came, Three is a number, and Li-Lan is not named by her father at all. By the final generation, Yun-Mei's name and achievements—First Girls' High School, National Taiwan University, a U.S. scholarship—signal that a daughter's identity is no longer defined by her failure to be a son.
2. Why does Nai Nai, herself a woman, enforce the system that devalues daughters?
Nai Nai's power within the household depends on the patriarchal order: her status comes from being the mother of a son and the guardian of the family line. Enforcing the rules that subordinate daughters secures her own position. The novel uses her to show that women are not only victims of gender discrimination but also its enforcers, which is why the cycle is so hard to break.
3. In what ways does Mom both perpetuate and resist the devaluation of daughters?
Mom perpetuates it by giving Ming the formula while Hua gets rice water, by weeping at the birth of Hai's daughter, and by insisting that Ming alone secures her old age. She resists it by selling her jade bangle to fund Hai's education, by caring for Three and Lan through illness, and by finally refusing to kneel to Nai Nai—even if she waits until Ming's adulthood to do so.
4. What role does education play in the novel's argument about breaking the cycle?
Education gives Hai money, independence, and a sense of self that the family's logic cannot contain. Her stipend allows her to intervene materially—buying Hua's formula—and her schooling becomes the foundation for Yun-Mei's success. The novel argues that the devaluation of daughters is not destiny but a system that can be interrupted when girls gain access to learning and economic power.
5. How does the novel complicate the idea that moving to Taiwan changed the family's gender dynamics?
Migration changes the family's circumstances but not their beliefs. In Taiwan, Ming still receives the best food, Mom still reserves her security for her son, and Nai Nai still commands Mom to kneel. The persistence of the hierarchy across the move shows that gender discrimination is cultural and internalized, not merely a feature of a particular place or regime. Change comes instead through individual acts—Hai's education, her interventions, and her promise to raise her daughter differently.