The Taiwan Gender Equity Education Association is an advocacy group established by academics with an interest in promoting equal rights for women. In 2005, the group published a collection of scholarly papers entitled Returning to the Natal Home on New Year's Day. Late last year, it went a step further, for the first time soliciting essays on culture, customs, and gender equity from the general public. On the basis of the essays, the group discovered that the customs and rituals most likely to cause women grief were those associated with funerals and the Lunar New Year.

Cheng Mei-li, a former editor of "women's books," was one of the judges of the submitted essays. She observes that culture and customs are typically passed down from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law and mother to daughter through a variety of mechanisms, including barring married women from returning to their natal homes on the first day of the Lunar New Year (to prevent the dispersion of good fortune), telling daughters directly that they won't inherit a share of the family property, or even by themselves providing an example by not returning to their own natal homes to take part in tomb sweeping and other family rituals. "Patrilineal inheritance practices and hegemony have severed matrilineal links, but it is women who wield the knife," says Cheng. "From the standpoint of women and their daughters, it's a double blow."

Chao Wen-chin won an award for "Flower of Paradise," an essay in which she describes women's longing for a "matrilineal inheritance" as being like that of fish to return to their natal waters. The essays uses magical realism to depict a carnivalesque funeral procession: "Clutching a great handful of brilliant and varied flowers of paradise, we go visit our maternal great grandmother, maternal great great grandmother...." In contrast to patrilineal genealogies, which focus on the distribution and removal of benefits, imagined matrilineal genealogies "would not determine who could and could not be recorded," "would not vie for some unspoken order," but would instead be only "a school of stubborn fish swimming upstream... returning to humanity's earliest points of origin," and "would exist only to commemorate."

The association views writing about individual experiences as an important first step towards realizing its dream of gender equality. In January of this year, it gathered nearly 10 award-winning authors at one table to recognize and share the best of the essays it had collected. In addition to sharing more tales of joy and sorrow, those present for the occasion encouraged one another to develop strategies for action.

Shan Shan, a high-school teacher from Kaohsiung who won an award for her essay "Moving back to a Parent's Home," says that though she hasn't yet succeeded in persuading her parents to "ignore social pressures from neighbors" and accept her offer to move back home (with her husband of 13 years and her children) to care for them, they have made big progress: this year her mother-in-law and mother agreed that she would visit her natal home on Lunar New Year's Eve before traveling to her mother-in-law's home on the second day of the Lunar New Year. "Change sometimes involves taking risks," she says. "The only way women are going to gain more freedom to be themselves is by speaking up and not placing limits on themselves."

Zheng Aimei, a homemaker who lives in Linkou, brought her daughter, a university student, to the gathering. In her prize-winning essay, "Three Pieces on a Woman's Fate," she draws on her own experience to expose the patriarchal violence of traditional customs. She also uses her cousin's escape from a horrible situation as a pretext for offering up a prayer for her paternal grandmother, a woman who tightly regulated her own behavior, adhered to a male-chauvinist values system, and abused her own daughter-in-law: "Let go of all the bitterness, sorrow, and restraints, and rest in peace!"