Thus far in my account – and hopefully not too unwisely – I've largely deferred the direct consideration of gender, preferring to focus on it once readers had become familiar, through reading descriptions of processes related to separation and reunion, with the basic outlines of my approach. The danger with this strategy, of course, is that it may appear to make gender somehow less than basic to my concerns. But a consideration of the impact of separation and reunion on Chinese historical consciousness is inconceivable without a simultaneous consideration of gender. For almost all of the public processes associated with separation and reunion involve roles which are at least superficially, and often fundamentally, different for women and for men. (For anthropological discussions of gender in China see e.g. M. Wolf 1968 and 1972, Martin 1988, Judd 1994, Gates 1996, Bray 1997.) In what follows, I'll consider three possible evaluations of this difference in participation. In the first, processes of separation (e.g. ancestral reunions) are seen, quite simply, as the province of men. In the second, women are seen to participate, but usually in ways which are either behind-the-scenes or strikingly ambivalent (e.g. in wedding separations). However in the third evaluation, and for reasons I'll spell out below, women are seen to be at the heart of the Chinese separation and reunion matrix: they produce, in short, the emotional attachments which compel reunions of various kinds.