Perhaps at this late stage, patient readers will believe me when I say that Chinese relationships are importantly realised through alternating patterns of separation and reunion. But here let me put this differently: in China, the story of relations with kin, friends, and spirits is often in fact an account of successive partings and returns. This is illustrated in familial and communal narratives of unity and completion during calendrical festivals (chapter one); in the articulation of relations with guests and outsiders through courteous etiquette during arrivals and departures (chapter two); in local histories of producing and revealing divine power through the summoning and sending-off of gods (chapter three); in the memorialisation of the ancestral dead through journey-like funerals and journey-like returns (chapter three); in architectural details which highlight patterns of ‘coming and going’ (chapter four); and in meals and banquets which often theatricalise the bittersweet nature of reunion commensality (chapter five). When viewed through most of these illustrative practices, acting out the narrative of separation and reunion appears to be the business of men. But in the last chapter I've argued that women – as daughters who must leave, and as mothers to whom one must return – often embody the most compelling versions of this story (chapter 6). Through care received in the cycle of yang, children become increasingly obliged to make a ‘return’ to their mothers, and by extension to give back what is due to their families and their native places.