Tamara Jacka (1994:666) notes that when rural Chinese women were asked questions about their status or personal welfare, they were frequently either ‘completely nonplussed by the question, or will respond in terms of their family's welfare’. But they also understood exactly what Jacka ‘was getting at’ when she asked who controlled the family income or who did the housework, the latter question provoking laughter ‘because the answer is so obvious’. The comment about Wild Swans above reveals my friend's suspicion that white westerners desire personal narratives more so than Chinese readers. But because she also notes that the Chinese have ‘natural selves’ which had to be disguised during the Cultural Revolution, she is not endorsing the simple opposition between self and community, between individualism and connectedness, between an interior life and externally constituted roles, which is often a feature of western constructions. For her, the Chinese also have ‘selves’ which had to be disguised by the communitarian impulses of the Cultural Revolution.