In Yuan-tsung ChenÆs The DragonÆs Village (1980), the coming of age of a young woman, Ling-ling, is paralleled with the struggles that the people of China are going through as their country adopts communism. In the middle of revolution, land reform, and the Korean War, Ling-ling matures and discovers who she is as a woman and a person. Her tale reflects how the role of women in China frequently vacillated between emancipation and oppression during this time in history. Chen uses Ling-ling as well as the other women in her story as an example of what women in China were experiencing during this turbulent time, whether they were old, young, rich, poor, bourgeois, urban, or rural.
To understand how the revolution effected the lives of these women, one should first take a look at Chinese society and communism. Chinese society and culture was uniquely suited to the concept of communism in the one aspect that the good of the group is more important than the good of the individual. In fact, the Communist Party had adapted the family circles usually utilized to discipline a child into criticism/self-criticism sessions for their cell groups (134). However, ancient Chinese culture venerated the elders (specifically those who were male), and the ancestors, while communism was much more egalitarian in its concept of the individual. For example, the Chinese Emperor was seen as the national patriarch, to be revered as if he were a god, or an ancestor, or each personÆs own father. A Confucian teaching was, ôThe sovereign guides the subject, the father guides the son, and the husband guides the wifeö (79). Another saying was, "When a girl lives at home, she must obey her father. When she is married, she must obey her husband. And when her husband dies, she must obey her son" (88). Under this tradition the patriarchal male of each family group had the right to sell or rent a child, wife, or sister to pay a debt as is the case with ...