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				Stratification
			In rural China, descent is patrilineal, which means it is traced through males.  With patrilineal descent, people automatically have lifetime membership in the father’s group.  In addition, residence patterns are virilocal, which means a married couple lives with the husband’s relatives rather than the wife’s (uxorilocality).  When daughters grow up they live with their husbands and his family.  A woman expresses this in the film by saying, “we raise girls for other families.”    A male child on the other hand will carry on the family name and contribute to the family’s productivity by remaining in the family and bringing in a wife.  A son adds to the family.  If a woman has no sons, a family name may die out.  This is because the Chinese government has had a birth control law for many years, which prohibits families from having more than one child.  Since boys could carry on the family descent line and girls could not, boys were considered more valuable children, and families that could not afford additional mouths to feed sometimes killed newborn infants when it was discovered that they were female, a practice that was considered outrageous, and against which various religious and other moral societies carried out a constant propaganda war.  This practice of killing infants is called infanticide.  When an unwanted additional girl was not killed, she might be redistributed to a wealthier family to work as a serving girl, or be transferred to a poor family where she would be raised to become the eventual wife of a son, thus avoiding the cost of engagement and wedding presents. Such an "adopted daughter-in-law" was called a " child-raised daughter-in-law" in Chinese.
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