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The argument of this paper evolves from thinking about two popular late imperial metaphors for describing a daughter: "a pearl in the palm" and "goods on which one loses money." The sharply contrasting images represent two stunningly different cultural discourses on the parent-daughter relationship. According to the former, the daughter was precious and cherished; yet as the latter professed, in bluntly commercialized terms, she was the least valued and desired. The literary image of "a pearl in the palm" (zhangzhu, zhangzhongzhu), originating more than a thousand years earlier, was gender- and seniority-neutral, referring to both male and female, child and adult.1 But in the Qing period, the phrase commonly referred to daughters.2 "Goods on which one loses money" (peiqianhuo), the more colloquial metaphor of the two metaphors, emerged possibly during the Yuan and was seemingly rooted in the notion that a daughter would end up being part of her husband's household, thus giving her parents no "return" for having raised her and provided her with a dowry.3 During the Qing, both were firmly established as popular Chinese cultural idioms, attesting to their rhetorical power and wide appeal.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, scholarly attention to the two contradictory images was strikingly uneven. While the "pearl" image was barely noted, the "money-losing goods" metaphor became a powerful symbol of women's victimization on which much of academic writing and media presentation centered.4 From the May Fourth era through the early 1980s, a daughter's plight formed a subtext in discussions of the suffering and the marginal status of women in Chinese patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal family institutions: she was the victim of female infanticide, neglected by parents, forced into prostitution or slavery, abused by her marital family, and abandoned by her natal family upon marriage.5 The killing of baby girls, which was attributed in part to the high cost of a dowry-from which the "money-losing goods" metaphor draws its symbols-was portrayed as massive in scale and horrific in manner. It remains such a trigger for intense emotional reaction that one scholar felt obliged to defend Chinese culture against the suggestion of the "possibility of something intrinsic" in it or in "the Chinese people" that "causes these brutal acts."6 Only in the...