Ning Lao T'AI-T'AI: A Daughter of Han

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 Word Count: 468


From A Daughter of Han by Ning Lao T'AI-T'AI


“My parents had left me a good name, though they had left me nothing else. I could not spoil that for them” (634).

“But I was through with begging. For a year I had begged for my food but had lived in my own home. Now I could not live in my home and must ‘come out’, even though women of my family had never ‘come out’ before” (635).

Ning Lao T'AI-T'AI deals with the stress of poverty and addiction in this story. Her husband is evidently addicted to opium and looked for every opportunity to use the very little money they received to buy opium. It is true that addiction can cause people to do crazy things but I think the fact that the option that he acted on was to sell his daughter. I think that is a pretty extreme example but it shows how the society that Ning Lao T'AI-T'AI lived in viewed women, more or less as throwaways. 

I think Ning Lao T'AI-T'AI’s ultimate reaction to what her husband did also demonstrates the respect that women were taught. Ning Lao T'AI-T'AI was of course angry but she refused to leave her husband but her reasoning is not what we might expect as readers. It is not that she would not be able to survive in society or do well without him, though in many circumstances that might have been true, but she doesn't leave him because of her family. It is the reputation of her family and her family name that keeps her from leaving initially. It sounds to me like Ning Lao T'AI-T'AI’s parents are dead and therefore why would it matter if she spoiled their name unless it had something to do with a societal reputation as well. I think this hesitancy based on this reasoning demonstrates how women were taught that family and the family reputation is important. 

She felt she could not leave him without some unnecessary sacrifice. However, once she does leave him for selling their daughter again, she realizes that these sacrifices might have been necessary. Without her husband, she was able to live free of the fear of losing her other daughter. She found freedom in being a beggar that even richer women could not experience, such as being able to see the magistrate on his way to offer sacrifice without worry of a soiling of dignity. She says, “There [was] no future but there [was] no worry” (635). She had been hiding in her own home and she realized that this was what she needed to be free. Free from her husband but also free from the expectations that came along with being a woman in her society that she previously still felt the pressure of even when she and her family never benefited from it.


Comments

  1. Rachel AntonFebruary 27, 2023 at 7:01 PM

    It is amazing the lengths that people will go to protect their family - especially in this case where the writer left her husband to protect her daughter from him, resulting in her and her daughter living on the streets. It was also very interesting how she found being a beggar to be so freeing, but coming from a controlling household it makes a lot of sense since she is finally able to make her own decisions.

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