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Ellen Isaacs | |
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Women of the Silk is the story of a poor young girl, Pei, growing up in the countryside of China in the early part of the 1900s. When she is around 8 years old, her family, strapped after a few difficult farming seasons, decides they must "give her to the silk work." Without her understanding what is happening, Pei is brought to the city and left at a home for girls who work in the silk factory. The money she earns pays for her boarding and the rest is sent home to her family. The book is Pei's story of growing up with the other silk workers, the deep friendships she forms, and her coming to accept what her parents needed to do. Although this isn't a book where a lot "happens," I enjoyed it for its rich description of Pei's world and for its graceful writing. I was interested to learn how the silk workers were among the most independent women in the culture, often looked upon as strange. Some went through "the hairdressing ceremony" to become wedded to silkwork, vowing never to be married, presumably because a woman dedicated to her work cannot also be dedicated to a marriage. They were also quite sheltered and many never saw much of he world outside their small area. Most of the characters in the book are women, and through them, Tsukiyama nicely illustrates the role of women at that time, the values and constraints they lived with, and the choices they were allowed to make. It was also interesting to see how any foreigners were considered devils, referred to as "the white devils" or "the Japanese devils." There is a stretch of the book, after Pei becomes a young adult, when the book seems to stall without a direction, but on the whole, it kept my attention and I found myself caring for many of the characters and interested to learn more about their lives.
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