Narrating Transgressions inLongwood: The Discourses,Meanings, and Paradoxes of anAmerican Socializing PracticePEGGY J. MILLER. TODD L. SANDEL.CHUNG-HUI LIANG, and HEIDI FUNG

ABSTRACT The goal of this study is to deepen our under-standing of a set of narrative practices in European-Americanfamilies in which young children's transgressions are down-played or erased, a pattern that is cast in relief by the frequent,foregrounded narration of young children's transgressions inTaiwanese families. Evidence from the mothers'folk theories isused to illuminate these patterns, revealing that the pattern is re-versed with respect to the narration of parental transgressions.The Taipei mothers treat parents' past misdeeds as undermin-ing of adult authority and thereby not narratable to children,whereas the Longwood mothers regard parental misdeeds, in-cluding "hell-raising," as highly repor table for their humor andtheir power to humanize parents. These findings are discussedin relation to contrasting ideals and understandings of the dy-namics of selves over time.

For many years now we have been studying personal storytellingas a medium of socialization in families from a variety of cultur-ally different communities. At the most general level, our goal isto try to understand the processes and meanings of childhoodsocialization; we believe that this goal can best be accomplished

by acknowledging that everyday communicative practice lies at the heart ofsocialization (Miller and IIoogstra 1992; Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Schief-felin and Ochs 1986; Vygotsky 1987). Accordingly, we attempt to under-stand both the intricacies of day-by-day discursive practices in families,

Ethos29(2): 159-186. Copyright © 2001, American Anthropological Association.

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especially narrative practices, and the meanings that participants, espe-cially caregivers, attribute to these practices.

A major strand of our work in recent years has focused on the way inwhich narrative practices are enacted by families with young children. Wehave compared two sets of middle-class families: Taiwanese families inTaipei, Taiwan, and European American families in Longwood, a neigh-borhood in Chicago (Miller 1996; Miller et al. 1996; Miller et al. 1997). Thecurrent article builds directly on that work. Our goal is to deepen ourunderstanding of this comparison but to do so in a way that foregroundsand interrogates the European American practices. This strategy contrastswith our usual way of proceeding, which is to present the two sets of prac-tices in as balanced a way as possible, trying to render the Taiwanesepractices intelligible to Americans and the European American practicesintelligible to Taiwanese. What we want to do instead is to allow the Tai-wanese practices to cast the European American practices in relief. Ofcourse, this does not mean that we think the Taiwanese are unimportantin their own right. Rather, we depart temporarily from a more balancedstrategy in the interest of honing our self-reflexiveness—one of the signalbenefits of cross-cultural comparison (Mead and MacGregor 1951). Wehope to expose to view some of the deeply taken-for-granted assumptionsunderlying U.S. socializing practices.

Specifically, we explore the meanings of a set of practices and dis-courses in Longwood families having to do with how transgressions arenarrated, namely, that young children's transgressions are not narrated atall or they are downplayed or mitigated, whereas adults' transgressions, atleast some of them, are celebrated and laughed about. From a Taiwaneseperspective, this is puzzling. This looks irresponsible. What are theseAmericans up to?

It is important to emphasize that this interpretive puzzle emergedfrom observations of everyday narrative practices in families. Like manyanthropologists and cultural psychologists who seek a culture-inclusiveunderstanding of human development, we have been drawn to severalloosely allied practice theories (e.g., Goodnow et al. 1995; Ortner 1984;Rogoff 1990; Shweder et al. 1998). These include Vygotsky's theory ofmediated action (Cole 1996; Wertsch 1985, 1991), practice and perform-ance approaches to language and verbal art (Bauman and Briggs 1990;Hanks 1996; Ochs 1992), and practice theories of social life (Bourdieu1977, 1990). Taken together, these theories converge on the view thatsocial actors—including children and parents—maintain, change, and re-produce the societies in which they live by participating in culturally or-ganized routine practices.

Although the notion of practice implies a focus on what people do—that is, on recurrent actions—it is no less attuned to meaning. Cultural

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practices are invested with normative expectations and with a whole hostof significances that go beyond the immediate goals of the action (Good-now et al. 1995). It is this concern with meaning that links practice ap-proaches to another important theoretical advance in psychologicalanthropology and cultural psychology, namely, the recognition that so-cialization cannot be fully understood without taking into account parents'"folk theories" or "ethnotheories" (e.g., Bruner 1990; Goodnow and Col-lins 1990; Harkness and Super 1996; Miller and Sperry 1987). These termsrefer to local, informal belief systems about the nature of children, childrearing, and development. These beliefs, which vary within and acrosscultures, may be explicitly talked about but are often deeply implicit in thepractices themselves.

Although researchers may place more emphasis on folk theories or oncultural practices, the two approaches are fully compatible. For example,starting with folk theory leads to questions about how the theory is putinto practice in everyday life. Starting with a set of cultural practices, aswe do here, leads to questions about the meanings and goals associatedwith those practices and motivates an examination of parents' reflectionson those practices. This article thus rests on the assumption that a com-prehensive understanding of socialization must encompass both the cul-tural practice and folk theory dimensions of this process. An importantstrength of this integrated conception is its dual focus on the habitual,taken-for-granted enactment of practices and on the formulation of con-scious parenting goals and strategies.

The article is organized as follows. We begin with a brief descriptionof the study and of the ethnographic background. We then summarize ourpast findings with respect to how personal storytelling is practiced. Thenonnarration of children's transgressions in Longwood, in contrast to theroutine, foregrounded narration of children's transgressions in Taipei,prompts us to turn to interviews with the mothers for insight into thesepatterns. The next two sections—on parental ethnotheories of storytellingand hell-raising stories, respectively—report the results of these newanalyses. Finally, in the conclusion, we show that Longwood parents' re-luctance to narrate young children's transgressions is linked to key cul-tural ideals of egalitarianism and self-esteem. We also try to imagine theintegrated impact on Longwood children of this complex configuration ofmeanings and practices.

DESCRIPTION OF THE STUDY

The study is part of a larger comparative project designed to investigatehow personal storytelling is used to socialize young children within thefamily context in several Chicago neighborhoods and in Taipei, Taiwan

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(e.g., Miller 1996; Miller et al. 1990; Miller et al. 1996; Miller et al. 1997;Wiley et al. 1998). We were interested in the modes of participation andinterpretive strategies that families used in narrating young children's pastexperiences. In keeping with standard practice in the field of languagesocialization, we combined ethnographic fieldwork with extensive record-ing of naturally occurring talk in the home.

Because we wanted to understand the ways in which personal story-telling was practiced and understood as part of everyday family life, wetook several steps to promote the cultural and ecological validity of ourfindings. First, we assigned researchers to cultures with which they werefamiliar—a Taiwanese researcher worked with the Taiwanese families andan American researcher worked with the American families. This "match-ing" of researchers and field sites meant that researchers could draw ontheir cultural expertise in recruiting and interacting with the families in amanner that was culturally appropriate. (For a description of the contrast-ing roles that the Taiwanese and American researchers negotiated, seeMiller et al. 1996.) Second, the study was conducted in three phases: field-work, home observations, and interviews. During the fieldwork phase, theresearchers familiarized themselves with the communities through infor-mal observation and collection of documentary materials, recruited fami-lies for the observational phase, and made repeated get-acquainted visitsto the families. Most recruitment was accomplished through informal net-works of friends and family. The observational phase involved a series ofunstructured, video-recorded observations in the home. The researchersrecorded whatever narrative practices happened to occur; they did notattempt to elicit stories. Interviews with the primary caregivers consti-tuted the final phase of the study and form the basis for the new resultsreported in this article. The interviews were conducted last in order toavoid drawing undue attention to narrative practices during the observa-tional phase. By this time, researcher and mother had known each otherfor two years.

At least one dozen families participated in the study at each researchsite. This report is based on interviews with nine primary caregivers fromTaipei (eight mothers, one aunt) and 11 primary caregivers, all mothers,from Longwood, a neighborhood in Chicago. The focal children, who were2;6 at the outset of the study, were four to five years old at the time of theinterview. All of the children had at least one sibling. The samples arecomparable in that both consisted of two-parent families who lived in largecities, owned their own homes, and were economically secure. Most of theparents were college educated.

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ETHNOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND

Despite these similarities, the children in this study inhabited worlds thatdiffered in a variety of ways. (For a more detailed description of the re-search sites, see Miller et al. 1996.)

Taipei

Taipei, the largest city in Taiwan, Republic of China, underwent ex-traordinarily rapid change in the 20th century. During the Japanese colo-nial period (1895-1945) the Taiwanese had limited rights and sufferedserious privation during World War II, but Taipei prospered as the infra-structure for economic development was laid. After World War II, the Japa-nese were replaced by the Chinese nationalists, who ruled Taiwan with aniron hand (see Kerr 1965). When the Taiwanese rebelled in 1947, thou-sands were killed in the February 28 Incident (estimates range from10,000, according to Moody 1992, to 20,000, according to Kerr 1965). Bythe time Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taipei in 1949 to head his "govern-ment in exile," Taiwan was a poor land, harboring two million refugees,fraught with tension between the ruling mainlanders and the majority Tai-wanese, and kept alive mainly through generous foreign aid.1

Given this poignant history, it is all the more remarkable that duringthe second half of the 20th century, Taiwan achieved its "economic mir-acle," transforming an agrarian economy into an industrialized economyin a matter of decades. By 1990 Taiwan had become a consumer societywith an average per capita income exceeding US$8,000, a low rate of un-employment, a relatively equitable distribution of income, and a trade sur-plus envied by other nations (Simon and Kau 1992). In the political spherechange has been slower but no less dramatic. Martial law was lifted in1987, and presidential elections were held in 1996, completing the transi-tion from the Kuomintang (Nationalist) dictatorship to a democratic formof government.

The parents in our study were members of the first "middle-class"generation in Taiwan. The sample includes children whose grandparentscame to Taiwan from mainland China as well as those whose grandparentswere native-born Taiwanese. Most of the parents had a close relative whoresided in the United States or Canada. Although half of the parents spokefluent Taiwanese, all used Mandarin Chinese, the country's official lan-guage, with their children. In addition to representing the ethnic and lin-guistic diversity characteristic of contemporary Taipei, the families alsoencompassed religious diversity. Folk religion, Christianity, and Bud-dhism were all practiced, sometimes within the same family.

Because of continuing migration from outlying areas, space is at apremium in Taipei. Middle-class families live in small apartments, and

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families tend not to have strong ties to particular locales. Taipei is notorganized into neighborhoods, and there is little residential segregation byclass or ethnicity. Within the context of very rapid urban growth, a varietyof pragmatic factors guide residential choice. Although two-generationhouseholds are quickly becoming the norm, replacing the traditionalthree-generation household, the families in our study maintained closeties to grandparents. The children were taken care of by their mothers orby female relatives if the mother worked outside the home. The early yearsof life were spent in close physical and emotional proximity. Althoughfocal children had their own beds in rooms shared with siblings, they sleptwith the caregiver.

Garegivers held high standards for their children's conduct. Two yearolds were expected to successfully negotiate a home environment that wasnot childproofed, offering the temptations of open cabinets and fragile ob-jects. They were expected to listen attentively to their elders, comprehendwhat was said, and behave accordingly. Misdeeds were dealt withpromptly, and rules of conduct were rehearsed. Garegivers also correctedgrammar and mispronunciations and rehearsed rhymes and poems. Theymade sure that two year olds knew their full names, parents' names, ad-dresses, and phone numbers. Literacy skills were actively cultivated. Par-ents read to the children and taught them to draw, and some used flashcards to teach Chinese characters or numbers. All of the children weretoilet trained by 1;6, and several of the mothers reported that they hadbegun toilet training at six months of age.

Longwood

The Chicago neighborhood of Longwood (a pseudonym) has been ahome to Irish Americans for nearly a century, and many of its residentshave deep roots in the community. Holidays such as St. Patrick's Day areobserved with great enthusiasm and include an annual neighborhood pa-rade. The neighborhood is known locally for the beauty of its streets andhomes, several of which are on the national historic registry. Civic organi-zations have worked actively to preserve the special character and small-town ambiance of the neighborhood. Many Longwood residents participatein a cohesive social network based on a common cultural heritage andactive involvement in one of the three local Catholic churches. Most sendtheir children to the local Catholic school that they themselves attended.Thus, the Longwood families, in contrast to their counterparts in Taipei,were tied by cultural tradition, religion, family history, and active commit-ment to a community that has a distinct identity within the larger urbanenvironment.

Most Ivongwood families live in spacious single-family dwellings situatedon quiet, tree-lined streets. The interiors of the homes reflect a child-centered

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emphasis. Each family had a playroom or family room, and each child,even the youngest, had his or her own space and property. Either childrenhad their own bedrooms or two same-sex siblings shared a bedroom.

The mothers in the sample expressed the belief that young childrenshould be cared for routinely by their own mothers. Several also statedthat they chose to stay home with their children because they did not wantto miss the opportunity to observe and influence their children's develop-ment. Like the "mainstream" mothers described by Ochs and Schieffelin(1984), the Longwood mothers engaged in a variety of practices that ac-commodated the environment to the child. These included childproofing,use of child-scaled objects and furniture, and abundant provision of toys.These practices are likely related to a concern for the vulnerability of thechild's status and the protection of the child's emotional as well as physicalwell-being. Toilet training was undertaken with a relaxed attitude and wasaccomplished in most cases by three years of age. The Longwood motherstalked and listened to their children, read to them, and pretended withthem. These were not just enjoyable experiences, they felt, but ways inwhich they could provide the kind of focused attention that children needin order to develop optimally and to feel happy and good about themselves.In discussing a popular preschool teacher, several mothers spoke admir-ingly of her ability to foster children's self-esteem.

Longwood preschoolers were expected to follow rules of appropriateconduct. When children misbehaved in minor ways—refusing to sharewith a playmate, quarreling with a sibling, hanging on the dining roomcurtains—parents intervened promptly and repeatedly if necessary. At thesame time, most parents expressed respect for young children's willfulnessand appreciated the clever ways in which their youngsters attempted toget what they wanted. When a serious behavior problem occurred, such ashitting or biting another person or an uncontrollable temper tantrum, par-ents resorted to "time out" procedures or revoked a privilege or treat. Forthe most part, however, these incidents were not dwelled on by parentsand, once settled, were no longer the focus of attention.

In sum, the two sets of families whom we studied in 1988-91 occupieda relatively privileged position within their respective societies, and theycreated a particular cultural idiom at a particular moment in history. Inorder to underscore this point, we refer to these families as Taipei andLongwood families, respectively, although we occasionally use the labels"Chinese" and "European American."2 Although Longwood has changedover the decades, what stands out is the extent to which its identity andcontinuity with the past have been preserved. Families take pride in theirtraditional values and family-centered way of life, rooted in long-termprosperity. And yet the Longwood mothers emphasized that they wereraising their children differently from the way they-had been raised. In

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Taipei, the balance between change and continuity is tipped in the otherdirection. The Taipei children inhabited a world that differed substantiallyfrom their parents' and grandparents'. And yet the findings that we reviewin the next section suggest that traditional Chinese values were still atwork in everyday narrative practices.

HOW PERSONAL STORYTELLING IS PRACTICED INL0NGW00D AND TAIPEI

In this section we briefly summarize the results of the observational phaseof the study as they pertain to how personal storytelling is actually prac-ticed with young children. This summary is necessary because these find-ings pose the interpretational problem that the remainder of the articleaddresses.

We found two striking similarities between Taipei and Longwood inthe ways in which personal storytelling was practiced. First, stories involv-ing the focal child as protagonist occurred at remarkably similar rates.When the children were 2;6 years of age, such stories occurred at averagerates of about four per hour in both cultural cases (Miller et al. 1997).Second, similar participant structures were employed by the Taipei andLongwood families (Miller et al. 1996; Miller et al. 1997). Personal storieswere conarrated, that is, child and family member(s) jointly told storiesabout the focal child's past experience, speaking in the second person, andfamilies also told stories about the child in the child's presence, that is, afamily member narrated a past event from the child's experience speakingin the third person (Taylor n.d.).3 In both of these naturally occurringparticipant structures a very young child was cast as a protagonist in somepast event: in conarrations the child was also a conarrator, and in storiesabout the child, the child was a listener or copresent other.

These similarities coexisted with a striking difference in the contentand manner of narration. The Taipei mothers were much more likely thantheir counterparts from Longwood to use personal storytelling didacticallyand to treat children's past transgressions as a didactic resource. Trans-gressions were talked of openly in front of siblings, researchers, and guestsand explicitly, often in strong language. Rarely was the language mitigated,although subtle nonverbals were often used to signal humor. Nor weretransgressions peripheral or incidental to these stories; rather, storieswere constructed so as to establish the child's transgression as the pointof the story (for microlevel analyses of several such examples, see Millerut al. 1996). Often, caregivers tried to extract confessions from the child:"After you scribbled on my wall, how did you tell your mother? Tell me!Tell me! . . . You tell Auntie, how did you accuse me? . . . You won't say,right? Good, we're leaving." Some stories involved shaming ("Ai, you

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made Mama lose face. That, that, I wanted to dig my head into theground"), and some ended with a didactic coda that drew out the moral ofthe story ("Now I don't cry at all"; "Saying dirty words is not good").

Many of the transgression stories were occasioned by a transgressionin the here and now. In other words, the parent treated the child's currentmisdeed as an opportunity to remind the child of a previous misdeed,thereby reinforcing and personalizing moral lessons through concrete ex-emplars. This practice instantiates the indigenous notion of "opportunityeducation" identified by Fung (1999). Opportunity education encom-passes two interlinked ideas: that it is more effective to situate a morallesson in the child's concrete experience than to preach in the abstractand that parents should take every opportunity to provide such concretelessons. Thus, the child may hear particular misdeeds narrated, and mayconfess to those misdeeds, again and again. Being able to face one's ownmisdeeds honestly, and repeatedly if necessary, is crucial to this proactive,self-corrective process. In short, the Taipei children repeatedly partici-pated in descriptions of themselves as failed moral actors, yet actors whowere expected to do better. Parents, for their part, could not escape theburden of being alert to their youngsters' misdeeds, of keeping account ofpast transgressions, and of remaining vigilant for opportunities to guideand correct if they were to discharge their responsibilities as moral edu-cators of their children.

When we present these finding to our American colleagues, theyworry that the Taiwanese ways are too severe, that young children are heldto punishingly high standards, that these practices will damage the child'sself-esteem and sense of efficacy, and that they will, in fact, undermine thechild's faith in his or her ability to act. Every cultural practice deserves tobe scrutinized for the risks as well as the benefits that it entails, and, thus,these worries cannot be glibly dismissed. However, these risks may be atleast partially offset by the complex and powerful ways in which love isexpressed to children in a didactic idiom (for an extended example, seeMiller et al. 1997). In addition, the very fact that children's misdeeds arenarrated so often may serve to normalize them. That is, these Taipei par-ents seem to take for granted, and perhaps their children come to take forgranted, that it is natural for young children to make many mistakes. But,most importantly, we see that Taiwanese youngsters are afforded a par-ticular kind of agency within the set of practices just described (Miller1998). It is a highly reflective form of agency for children so young, a carefulafter-the-fact and before-the-fact analysis. Children are offered repeatedopportunities to listen carefully, to engage in self-debriefing about previousactions, and to imagine and plan how to behave in hypothetical and futuresituations. Because so much attention is focused simultaneously on past mis-deeds and proactive self-correction, on the parent's disappointment in the

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child and on the parent's faith in the child's moral judgment, these inter-actions pose repeated paradoxes for the child about the kind of moral per-son he or she is.

So, with this vantage point in mind, let us turn to the European Ameri-can families in Longwood. Relative to the Taipei families, these familiesoperated with a distinct self-favorability bias in narrating young children'sexperiences (Miller 1996; Miller et al. 1996; Miller et al. 1997). They rarelytold stories about the child's past transgressions; when they did so, theyframed the misdeed as humorous or portrayed the child in a positive lightdespite his or her misdeed. For example, one of the longest transgressionstories from the Longwood sample invoked an event in which Patrick wentshopping with his family and was promised a ride on a mechanical horseif he behaved well. Although Patrick misbehaved—he took his shoes off inthe store—he caught himself in time, and thus the point of the story, asnarrated by the mother, was that he had comported himself well and wasrewarded with the promised ride. In another example, Tommy and hisolder brother remembered being punished for some misdeed committed afew days earlier, but none of the participants—Tommy, brother, ormother—could remember what they had done wrong, a baffling if not in-conceivable state of affairs from a Taiwanese perspective. This practice ofdownplaying transgressions in the narrative medium seems to be part of awider set of practices that the Longwood caregivers used to protect theirchildren's self-esteem—conducting serious disciplining in private, puttingthe best face on a child's shortcomings, or even recasting shortcomings asstrengths.

What are the risks associated with these practices? From a Taiwaneseperspective, it looks like Americans are courting self-indulgence, irrespon-sibility, and narcissism, a perspective that resonates with recent critiquesof the so-called cult of self-esteem in the United States (Damon 1995; Katz1993; Seligman 1995). This is an important issue to which we return laterin the discussion. There is, however, a prior question that needs to beaddressed. Most cultural practices balance a set of moral trade-offs. TheTaipei parents seem to value moral reflectiveness and rigor so much thatthey are willing to risk severity. But what is it that Longwood parents valueso much that they are willing to risk irresponsibility? What do they gainby downplaying children's transgressions?

MOTHERS' ETHNOTHEORIES ABOUT PERSONAL STORYTELLING

In order to pursue these questions, we turned to interviews with the moth-ers. The interviews focused on the mothers' ethnotheories about personalstorytelling, thereby providing a crucial context for interpreting the mean-ing of the storytelling practices that we had observed. Mothers were asked

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about their childhood memories of personal storytelling and about personalstorytelling as currently practiced in their families. Questions focused onwho told stories, how and when stories were told, whether and how storieswere valued, who told the best stories, the kinds of topics that were storyworthy, how children were included in personal storytelling, and so on.

Although we see storytelling as enacted and storytelling as reflectedon as necessary components of a comprehensive understanding of themeaning of storytelling, we recognize that the relationship between prac-tices and folk theories is always complex. It is well known, for example,that people are able to bring into conscious awareness and reflect on onlya fraction of the linguistic and sociolinguistic knowledge that they put intopractice (Sapir 1949; Silverstein 1981). And, of course, the ratio of con-scious awareness to tacit practice may vary from one topical area to an-other across cultures. Interestingly, we found that neither the Taipei northe Longwood caregivers were particularly reflective about the specificpractice that we had studied observationally, namely, narrating youngchildren's experiences. Several of the mothers denied that their childrencould narrate at 2;6 and 3;0 the kinds of stories that we had documented.A few of the Taipei mothers talked about using a child's past experiencesdidactically. However, the mothers from Longwood did not talk about theself-favorability bias discernible in their narrative activity with young chil-dren.

In both cultural cases, the mothers were much more articulate abouta different but related practice, namely, narrating parental stories to chil-dren. They talked at length about the stories of personal experience thatthey heard their parents and other family members tell when they weregrowing up, and they talked about the stories that they tell their own chil-dren. Moreover, every mother in the study, both Taiwanese and EuropeanAmerican, believed in the value of telling stories of personal experience tochildren. Their reflections on this practice and the stories that they toldby way of illustration deepen our understanding of the meaning of theAmerican practice of downplaying children's transgressions in the narra-tive medium. At the same time, these reflections add a new twist to theLongwood versus Taipei comparison: when it comes to the narration ofadult transgressions, the pattern is reversed.

Once again, we begin by describing the Taiwanese ethnotheories, al-lowing them to cast the American ethnotheories in relief. The Americanperspectives are then presented, and they are further elaborated in thefollowing section on hell-raising stories.

Ethnotheories of Personal Storytelling in Taipei

Most of the examples of stories that the Taipei mothers said that theyheard as children and that they tell their own children are stories in which

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they portray themselves, their spouses, and other "elders" as worthy ofemulation. Often there is an implied criticism of the child that seems in-tended to motivate him or her to do hetter. For example, in response to aquestion about whether she shared her past experiences with her children,YoYo's mother said, "So I will also tell them, 'You never pick up your toys.[You] don't, don't straighten up the living room. Look at your mommy,when she was young, just seven years old, I could fix breakfast and wasvery responsible.' " JingJing's mother provided a similar example:

Sometimes JingJing would tell me, "Xo one wants to be my friend. No one wants to playwith me at school." Then I would tell her, "When your mommy was little, I would goby myself and find [my] cats to play with." Or [1 would tell her], "When your mommywas little, I could play a long time with just one ball." . . . "When you go to school, youwill have other friends to play with. When your mommy was little, I stayed at homeand played by myself. Therefore, [if I could do that], you certainly can play by yourselftoo."

The Taipei mothers' goal seemed to be to encourage their children to liveup to their own high standards by citing concrete examples of admirablebehavior from their own or other family members' lives. According to Wu(1996), teaching by example is one of several traditional socializing strate-gies that are still used in Chinese cultures.

Ironically, the value to the child of this practice is most eloquentlyarticulated by one of two mothers in our sample who said that their par-ents had not shared stones of personal experience with them when theywere growing up. Didi's mother's sense of what she had missed from herown parents motivated her commitment to share her experiences with herown children:

I feel that when people talk about their experiences, these are all their best, best points,like crystals. It feels like they [children who hear these experiences] can be saved fromgoing down the wrong paths [in life]. [That's why] we just tell them [directly]. [We]remind the*"" in advance. Like my parents, they didn't tell us about their experiences.So when we were young, we pretty much relied on ourselves to grope our way. So they[my own children] don't have to grope their way [like 1 had to]. I feel that they can savea lot [of trouble]. That's why [kids] get smarter and smarter. It's because the oldergeneration tells [the younger] what they know.

The implicit ethnotheory that DiDi's mother indexes is one in which par-ents play a crucial role in their children's socialization by sharing the pre-cious wisdom ("their best, best points, like crystals") that they have gainedthrough personal experience. When parents tell children about their expe-riences, they define for them the right path in life. Children are therebyspared the experience of groping along many wrong paths. This motherimplicitly opposed as wasteful the idea that children should learn by mak-ing their own mistakes.

If parents' own past experiences equip them to be indispensablemoral guides, one might expect them to share not only the wise choices

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that they made but their missteps as well. Interestingly, however, theTaipei interviews contain very few examples of narrations of parental mis-takes or transgressions. One exception to this generalization came fromChiChi's mother, in response to a question about whether people add mor-als to stories of personal experience:

Uh. Sometimes there is a bit of [the flavor of teaching a lesson]. For example, like myolder brothers, when my mom told [them] a moral lesson, she'd say, "Ouch! So-and-so,when he was young, he did those things. So, now his life is a mess." Sometimes she'duse this kind of teaching method. . . . [She'd] just describe, just tell you about some-one's past experiences: "You don't want to do this. Look at him. He did these thingsbefore. So, now he's come to this end." It's like we can use it [someone's past experi-ence] as a mirror. Still [there are occasions when she] is like this. . . . Sometimes thereare some people who make good examples. She'[d] say to you, "You can learn fromthem!" I feel that in the past parents would say things like this, "Learn from others!Learn the good stuff. Don't learn the bad stuff." Like this, still they would tell you veryclearly.

In thinking about her own mother's storytelling, ChiChi's mother invokeda mirror metaphor: her mother held up the mirror of other people's goodand bad behavior as a way to encourage her children to reflect on theirown actions and the consequences of those actions. Her quotes from thegrandmother imply continuity between a person's past misdeeds and thekind of person he or she will eventually become. Like Didi's mother, shedid not seem to see any value in straying from the straight and narrow.Notice, however, that the "bad" experiences are not represented as beingthe grandmother's own experiences. That is, ChiChi's mother did not citeexamples of stories in which the grandmother cast herself as a transgres-sor. Rather, it is other unspecified adults whom the grandmother held upas "bad" examples. Perhaps it was not worth mentioning the transgressorby name, or perhaps the narrator did not want to engage in the morallydubious practice of advertising another person's misdeeds. Notice too thatChiChi's mother narrated these bad experiences in a vague and generalway; we get no sense of what these transgressive experiences entailed.This stands in marked contrast to the detailed narration of stories of ad-mirable behavior that mothers said they heard from their parents and thatthey claimed to tell their own children. As we shall see later in this article,this practice also stands in marked contrast to that of the mothers fromLongwood who were far less reticent about adult transgressions.

One final feature of the Taipei perspective on personal storytellingdeserves mention. The mothers valued the practice of telling stories ofpersonal experience to children not only because it prepares the child forlife by providing opportunities for vicarious learning but also because itforges strong bonds between child and parent. Angu's aunt (and primarycaregiver) expressed these points in response to a question about whetherpeople use stories didactically:

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Or she'd [her own mother] would say how they were, how [they| went through hard-ship [C/II ku, "to eat bitterness"], how they went through hardship. Then these makeus remember a little bit. . . . [She] walked very, very, very far carrying the salt to sell.Oh, the salt fields were so far away! Salt fields in Tainan. [She told me] how she carried[the salt]. And then 1 could understand a little of that kind of hardship she [wentthrough]. She described it plainly [without much emotion). But I know how she wentthrough hardship. From this, really, you could discover, you would feel how hard it wasfor Mother to go through this kind of hardship to raise us. Really, from this [1] coulddevelop, really, really come to understand my mother's toil. From this, [I] could de-velop a kind of, sort of, not really filial piety but a real appreciation of Mom.

Thus, the kind of bond that is created is of a special sort: hearing storiesof the parent's past experiences enables the child to better appreciate andempathize with what the parent endured, thereby motivating the child totreat the parent with respect and appreciation in the present.

In sum, when reflecting on their own experiences of parental storytel-ling, whether as the remembered recipients of stories when they weregrowing up or as narrators with their own children, these Taipei caregiverscited examples of parental stories that are heavily skewed toward admira-ble deeds. Often these stories are held up to children as models to emulate;the parent's upright conduct is contrasted with the child's shortcomings.The narrative creation of worthy parents who stick to the right and properpath in life and bravely suffer hardship—in combination with occasionalcounterexamples of negative conduct by other adults—provides the foun-dation for vicarious learning, learning that is crucial to the child's moraleducation. At the same time, parental stories invite children to appreciatetheir parents and treat them with respect.

Ethnotheories of Personal Storytelling in Longwood

By contrast with the Taipei mothers, the mothers from Longwoodseemed more concerned with supporting their children's well-beingthrough the mitigation of standards. Mathew's mother said that she usesstories "to reinforce good behavior or to reassure them [her children] insome way that something they did wasn't really all that bad." In furthercontrast, the majority of Longwood mothers gave examples of stories inwhich they, their husbands, or other adult relatives exposed their pastmisdeeds to the child as a way of conveying that they, too, were falliblewhen young, something that the Taipei caregivers almost never did.

It is important to note that the Longwood pattern of revealing parentalshortcomings was not something that we researchers anticipated or que-ried; rather, the mothers themselves introduced this theme. For example,Ellen's mother gave the following example when the interviewer asked ifshe used stories to impart moral messages to her children:

When 1 was li—very young, 1 \va—, 1 lied a lot. Not to cover up anything but becauselying was more interesting than what 1 was doing. And uh 1 remember telling my

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parents that 1 was going to sing a ,solo on the stage. And it went so far as my dad tookoff of work to see me. And when 1, when 1 heard this at the table, 1 said, 1 thought, "1have to tell the truth. 1 have to tell him no." And it was very hard. And I can still feel,I'm still embarrassed. 1 have that feeling. But 1 always tell them, the truth, they haveto tell the truth. Don't lie.

When the interviewer asked, "Have you told your children that story?"this mother said, "Oh, yes. Many times. Many times." She then went on toarticulate the message that she attached to this story: "Sorry, but not eve-rybody has the most fascinating life, but your life is your, your own and,make it fascinating, but don't lie. And when you get into trouble, tell thetruth. Because the truth will come out, always. It's better to get it out inthe open right away, and then it's over with." She also remembered howdisappointed her parents were when she lied about the solo: "And when Ikeep telling my children that once you set a pattern as being a liar, it's veryhard for people to believe you. And that's a trust that's very hard to getback."

Other Longwood mothers emphasized that this strategy of narratingfaults humanizes parents, allowing children to feel closer to them. Whenasked what kinds of experiences people are likely to tell stories about,Melissa's mother said, "Well things where you might have done somethinggoofy, and the kids can really relate to that because I think that they feellike parents are, 'Oh, adults are so in control.' Um, I, I don't solely tell thosekinds of stories, but I think that the kids get a kick out of them." She thenwent on to provide some examples of "goofy" stories. In one instance, herfriend's boyfriend went to a dance and broke the chair he was sitting on.His wounds had to be stitched, which prevented him from playing in hishigh school homecoming football game.

Another mother who explicitly described stories as creating bondsbetween people said that she encouraged her child to confess to misdeeds:"If you [child] do something wrong, I'll be more angry if you try to hide it."She illustrated this point with the following example: "Mope (her daughter]comes to me, she comes to me and says, 'Mom, you're gonna be angry.' Yaknow, 'Mom, I, you know, I drew marker on the wall,' or something. It'slike, 'Okay, thanks for telling me about it.' " She then went on to explainthe purpose of storytelling:

1 think that in terms of why people tell stories, 1 think it is more, in some part, for theirown enjoyment. Leaves room to kids. Ah, what's goin on. 1 think, ahh, people tellstories about their past in order to share something of themselves with you. Ahh, itcreates a bond between two people when you know more about them . . . when yourealize that they've been through the same things that you're going through or you'vejust been through . . . you tend to be closer to them. You empathize with them on adifferent level than maybe you had before.

In these reflections, Hope's mother implied that if her child was afraid toconfess her misdeeds to her mother, she would be unable to build a close

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relationship with her. Therefore, it is important that humor and lightheart-edness be built into stories as a way to create an accepting environmentfor mother and child to relate their experiences, even when those experi-ences may be face threatening. This is the sense in which telling stories ofone's experiences "leaves room to kids."

Interestingly, the issue of confession did not arise in the Taipei moth-ers' talk about personal storytelling, even though our observations of theirnarrative practices revealed that they often prodded their young childrento produce lengthy confessions of past misdeeds. Hope's mother's com-ments suggest that once a child confesses, the misdeed is, in effect, can-celed; it is not a matter to be dwelled on in repeated narrations, as theTaipei mothers do. Mintz (1999) provides further support for this under-standing of confession in a study that examined folk theories of child rear-ing and self-esteem in Longwood.

However, the Longwood mothers agreed with the Taipei mothers thatparental storytelling creates affective bonds between parent and child. Ineach cultural case at least one mother said explicitly that the sharing ofpersonal experience allows the listener to empathize with the narrator.The difference lies in the presumed nature of this empathy and in the endsthat it serves. In the Taipei case, the child's empathy for the mother isemphasized; this empathy motivates the child to treat her with respectand to emulate her behavior. The child's empathy operates to preserve themother's moral authority and the status differential between mother andchild while motivating the child to come up to the parent's high standards.In the European American case, two kinds of empathy are implied,mother's and child's. The mother empathizes with the child's feeling ofinadequacy in relation to powerful adults and is thereby motivated to ex-pose her own shortcomings as a way of equalizing the parent-child asym-metry. This practice thus provides another example of the kind ofself-lowering parental strategy that Ochs and Schieffelin (1984) and Ochs(1992) claim is characteristic of language socialization practices in whitemiddle-class families. The child, in turn, empathizes with a falliblemother: he or she recognizes a commonality with the parent and therebyfinds it easier to admit his or her faults.

In sum, these Longwood mothers converged on an ethnotheory thatimplies that children's faults and shortcomings must be handled with careand sensitivity lest the child's well-being be compromised. One way inwhich children can be helped to keep their misdeeds in perspective is byexposing them to parental faults and shortcomings. The narration of pa-rental lapses reassures errant children and brings parent and child closertogether. It may even allow the child to confess to wrongdoing withoutjeopardizing his or her relationship to the parent.

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With this analysis of parental ethnotheories in hand, we can return tothe question raised earlier: What do Longwood parents gain hy downplay-ing children's transgressions in the narrative medium? Like the practiceof narrating parental lapses, the practice of downplaying children's trans-gressions narrows the moral distance between parent and child. Thesepractices avert self-judgments that are too harsh, thereby protecting thechild's emotional equilibrium while at the same time preserving the illu-sion of an egalitarian parent-child relationship.

Hell-Raising Stories

In keeping with this emerging picture, several of the Longwood mothersindicated that they delighted in telling hell-raising stories, stories aboutthemselves or other family members who were wild and crazy whenyoung. By contrast, we did not find a single reference to this type of storyin the Taipei interviews. If our above interpretation of Taiwanese ethno-theories is correct, such stories would not be tellable to Taiwanese chil-dren because they would undermine parental authority (perhaps evenexposing parents to shaming by their children) and deflect children fromthe right moral path.

Again, we did not set out to inquire about hell-raising stories. Thiscategory emerged from the mothers' words in response to a variety of ques-tions. For example, in response to the initial interview question, "Can youremember people telling stories of this sort [stories of personal experi-ence] when you were growing up? Did your parents, grandparents, orother relatives tell a lot of stories about themselves?" Karin's mother re-plied, "Oh man . . . you know, I heard a lot of stories about my dad frommy aunts and uncles because he was pretty wild. . . . And he would alwaysdeny them, of course, and they would probably embellish a little bit, butapparently he, um, was rambunctious and would get himself in and out oftrouble a lot." A little later, the interviewer asked, "How would you reactto those kinds of stories?" and she replied, "We would think they werepretty funny." In another case when the interviewer probed for some ex-amples of stories heard while growing up, Megan's mother said, "I remem-ber my father, who was a very good person, um, tell about how he was areal hell-raiser as a kid. . , . His mother locked him out of the house, youknow, and his sisters brought him dinner . . . and snuck things to him. . . .Sort of opposite of the man, the man we knew." When the interviewerasked, "How did you and your siblings react?" she too said, "Oh, wethought it was funny." In still another case, Tommy's mother explicitlydescribed as funny and ironic the fact that her brother, who was a SecretService agent protecting the president of the United States, was the onlyone of her mother's ten children who got into trouble as a child, lie hadgrown up to be "Mr. Responsible." Thus, in these stories a person who is

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now a grown-up, respectable family man is revealed to have been a hell-raiser in his youth, and this hell-raising, far from being seen as a lastingblot on his character, is the source of stories that family members delightin. Apparently, a youthful rambunctious self can be transformed into amature, law-abiding self. Hell-raising stories provide lasting testimony tothat earlier transgressive self, a self that is not so much renounced as cele-brated.

These three mothers did not go into very much detail about specificinstances of hell-raising—but others did. Melissa's mother said that herhusband had a stock of great stories: as a three year old, he had climbedon the roof of the theater, and the fire department had to get him down.Another time he set a fire in the garage. Several mothers talked aboutsiblings whose teenage escapades required that they slip into or out of thehouse undetected. Another hell-raising story, told by Hope's mother,emerged from a line of questioning about when stories were told and whichones were particularly memorable:

My dad just tells another story about how, how my grandmother used to, um, get realangry with him a . . . a, when she had to get him up for school every morning. . . . Andone morning she called my dad, she called him, she called him. He wouldn't get out ofbed. She warned him, "The next time I have to come in there I'm gonna take thebroomstick to wake ya up." So my dad got up, he put all his pillows under the blanket,and he went and hid in the closet. [Researcher laughs.] And he waited. And my grand-mother came in. She said, "I told you I was gonna do this." She took the broomstick,and she started wackin at the bed. [Researcher laughs] And she's wackin and wackin.She realized nothing is happening underneath. And so finally she pulls back the covers,and she sees the pillows, and she hears my dad. He's laughin his butt off in the closet.[Researcher laughs even more.] She opens the door, lie was probably 14 at the time.She opened the door, and she saw him there, and she started laughin. Ya know, youcan see how she might have been angry, but she just laughed. And the two of them werelaughin till they were cryin.

This next example is particularly interesting because the hell-raisingincident occurred only hours before the interview. It seems that Tommy,then four years of age, put his father's car into reverse and rammed it intothe neighbor's garage. This happened in the morning. By the time the re-searcher arrived in the afternoon, the whole neighborhood knew whatTommy had done. The researcher was greeted at the door with this story,and Tommy's mother was eager to talk about the event during the inter-view.

There are several notable features of her reflections. First, she wasconcerned for the young miscreant's tarnished image in the world: "I wasthinking of the poor kid today because I thought, Margaret's [Tommy'ssister's] gonna tell her friends, Patrick's [Tommy's brother's] gonna tell hisfriends, 'My brother drove my. . . .' You know, can you imagine whatthey're gonna do with it?" But she also realized that, with time, this wouldbecome a funny story, and it is funny things, she said, that most stories

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are about. Also worth noting are other relatives' reported responses toTommy's misdeed. These can best be represented by quoting directly fromthe transcript:

Tommy's Mother. . . . and my brother had called me, and 1 said, "Oh, my gosh, listento what happened, Tommy drove the car, he had obviously put it in reverse and drovethe car into the garage." And he said, "Do you remember when John did that and he .. . ," and I said, "Yeah, but 1 don't think that he hit anything," and he said, "Yes, he hita car."

Researcher: Uh, huh.

TM: And John was I think a little younger than Tommy was, but it was like,okay, good [laughs], and then when I talked to my sister, her husbandwas leaving for work, and he said, "I did that when I was a kid, and thegarbage men were out there and stuff, so."

R: Have, and so that made you feel better?TM: And it's grown since then because then my sister-in-law called and in-

vited us to a party, and I was telling her, and she said, "Oh, he was justbeing a little boy. We all like to drive the cars."

Although these reported conversations reveal that Tommy's mother her-self helped to spread the word about Tommy's misdeed, the relatives withwhom she discussed the situation were uniformly reassuring. Their basicmessage was "No big deal; we've all driven cars when and where weshouldn't."

These examples may lead readers to wonder whether hell-raising pro-tagonists are always male. Our corpus includes a small minority of hell-raising girls and women, but their exploits were not narrated with the samelightheartedness that characterizes narrations of male hell-raising. In re-sponse to a question about whether most stories have a moral, Tommy'smother said, "I won't say most of them, but a lot of them do. Like some-times I'm trying to show em from what we did as kids, 'Don't do this orthis.' " She then illustrated with a story about her sister:

My sister was grounded and snuck out of the house. [Researcher: Uh huh.] I'll say, youknow it, it bothered the rest of us. I don't, I can't even really remember if my fatherfound out, but it was like a trust thing. [Researcher: Uh huh.] And it was like, you know,not only was she grounded but she actually snuck out of the house and went up toGrand Beach, Michigan. We thought it was gutsy [Researcher: Uh huh.] at the time, butlater it was like, boy, that was really stupid, you know? Had she been found out, thewhole trust thing, you know, would have really been blown. So, I'll say, "You know, wetrusted her, and she did this."

When the interviewer asked why people tell these kinds of stories, thismother said, "Urn. I think sometimes you do it to illustrate a point to yourkids. (Researcher: Hm hm.] Or sometimes I think you just want to show adifferent side of yourself. (Researcher: Uh huh.] Your kids see you as mom,or dad, or an adult, and I think it's kind of fun for them to see that, yes,you were a kid." Mere again, then, is the idea that parental selves are notone dimensional or static and that it is a good thing for children to get

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glimpses of their parents' younger selves, especially if those selves aretransgressive.

In sum, hell-raising stories embody an understanding of parentalselves as complex, protean, and flawed. By telling these stories to theirchildren, parents are announcing that they and other respected adultswere less than perfect when young: so, child, take heart. They are alsobroadcasting their faith that selves can be redeemed even when the personhas strayed deliberately from the straight and narrow path. However, thesedata suggest that the latitude for making youthful mistakes is wider andthat the celebration of those mistakes finds more extravagant expressionfor boys and men than for girls and women.

CONCLUSION

These new findings from interviews with mothers, along with our previousanalyses of everyday narrative practices with young children, suggest thatLongwood mothers and Taipei mothers impute rather different meaningsto shortcomings and misdeeds. Taipei mothers treat children's shortcom-ings as an educational resource, a diagnostic that requires remedy, whiletreating parents' past misdeeds as potentially undermining of parentalauthority and thereby not narratable to children. These narrative patternsindex the asymmetry between parents and children that is a well-knownfeature of Chinese families (e.g., Hsu 1971, 1983) as well as the high valueplaced on deliberate moral instruction (e.g., Ghao 1994; Ghu 1972; Ho1986; Wu 1981, 1996). Longwood mothers, by contrast, downplay chil-dren's misdeeds in the narrative medium because dwelling on misdeeds ispotentially damaging to a child's well-being and relationship with parents.But when it comes to parental misdeeds, these are highly reportable fortheir humor and for their power to strengthen the connection betweenchild and parent. Longwood mothers seem more worried about undermin-ing children's psychological health and remaining approachable to themthan about undermining their own authority.

The American parents' reluctance to narrate children's transgres-sions—a reluctance that amounts to a squandering of didactic opportunityand evasion of parental responsibility from a Taiwanese perspective—cannow be brought into sharper focus. What is at stake for these mothers aretwo key values: an egalitarian parent-child relationship and the child'spsychological well-being. These values are linked in Longwood mothers'ethnotheories of child rearing and self-esteem. In interviews with thesesame mothers, Mintz (1999) discovered that fostering their young chil-dren's self-esteem was a matter of the first importance to them. They be-lieved that self-esteem provides the foundation for happiness, inner strength,and moral autonomy. They spoke of the devastating consequences of low

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self-esteem on children's psychological functioning and success in theworld. When discussing discipline, they emphasized the importance of dis-tinguishing between "being bad" and "doing bad things." Discipline, likethe narration of child transgressions, poses a dilemma for these parentsbecause it exposes the asymmetry of the parent-child relationship and, ifnot handled with care, may undermine the child's self-esteem. By explain-ing to the child that his or her action is bad but that he or she is not, theyattempt to preserve both the relationship and the child's self-worth. Disci-pline in the here and now, unlike the narration of child transgressions, isnot something they can avoid because they, like the Anglo mothers studiedby Ilarwood, Miller, and Irizarry (1995), explicitly seek a balance betweencultivating self-esteem and cultivating respect for others. On the otherhand, to dwell on the child's past transgressions would upset the delicatebalance that they hope to achieve.

In sum, our study, together with Mintz's (1999), contributes to thedebate about the value of self-esteem as a child-rearing and educationalgoal by providing a close-up examination of the beliefs and practices ofordinary families in one U.S. community. That examination has revealedan important link between parental goals of fostering self-esteem and fam-ily narrative practices that systematically calibrate the narration of trans-gressions, from erasure to celebration. It suggests that Longwood parentsmay be more likely than their Taiwanese counterparts to risk the kinds ofdangers—irresponsibility, narcissism—that American critics have identi-fied (Damon 1995; Katz 1993; Seligman 1995). However, our findings alsosuggest that those risks must be assessed against the values—egalitarian-ism, psychological well-being—that Longwood parents affirm and withinthe context of their larger task of balancing multiple child-rearing goals.

But there is more to consider. The Longwood pattern seems on theface of it paradoxical. Young children's ordinary, garden-variety misdeedsare handled in a gingerly manner in the narrative medium, keyed humor-ously, or stricken from the narrative record entirely. It is as though pre-schoolers are too fragile to be reminded of their failings. Against thisbaseline of barely narratable transgressions, any misdeed that does getnarrated is likely to loom large in the child's experience, perhaps largerthan it would in a Taipei child's experience. At the same time, some ofthese childhood transgressions—incipient hell-raising—are accorded spe-cial status. These misdeeds are highly narratable, highly memorable, and,with time, highly enjoyable.

Compared with their Taipei counterparts, Longwood mothers also im-ply a different understanding of selves over time. The hell-raising stories,in particular, dramatize a life trajectory in which it is possible for a trou-blemaker to become Mr. (or Ms.) Responsible. People get a second chancein this moral universe. This is beautifully illustrated in Dennis Smith's

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(1999) recent memoir about growing up in another Irish American com-munity. It is not that the Taipei mothers hold a static view of selves—quitethe contrary. The notion of "opportunity education," the routine narrationof children's misdeeds, and the sharing of parental stories of admirableacts are all predicated on the belief that moral selves can be crafted ifparents provide the necessary guidance and children attend to and reflecton their guidance. This understanding, coupled with parents' use of themetaphor of the right path, implies that mutual vigilance is required lestchildren lose their way. Apparently, these mothers believe that it is noteasy, once one has gone astray, to regain the right path.

The Longwood families, by contrast, seem to envision a much widerand more forgiving life path. Their belief that youthful troublemaking (atleast by boys) will not jeopardize a respectable adulthood is secure enoughthat they can afford to laugh about hell-raising in front of their children.Or, to put it another way, these parents have a lot of faith in the possibilityof dramatic self-transformation. It is, after all, the people who successfullymade the switch from raising hell to raising families who are celebrated inthese narrative representations. Apparently, black sheep are another mat-ter entirely; we have no evidence that lifelong transgressors are celebratednarratively in Longwood.

There is an important caveat to this comparative generalization, how-ever. Although we did not observe a single hell-raising story during ourobservations of Taipei families, although none of the Taipei caregivers al-luded to or gave examples of hell-raising stories and they rarely mentionedstories involving adult shortcomings, it is possible that such stories occurin other contexts. In consulting their own personal experience on thismatter, the Taiwanese members of our research team suggest that it maynot be until children are grown or even married that Taiwanese parentsbegin to share their past experiences more frankly, in ways that discloseless admirable selves. This intuition is compatible with Fung, Lieber, andLeung's (in press) recent finding that Taiwanese parents make a distinc-tion between moral judgments that are starkly black and white, right andwrong, and those that are much more subtle and situation dependent. Thefirst type is what one attempts to cultivate in young children, they say; thelatter may take a lifetime to develop. Whether there are occasions in whichTaiwanese adults, away from the impressionable eyes of their children,celebrate transgressive selves is an open question, worthy of future re-search.

From this base, then, we would like to speculate about the integratedimpact on Longwood children over time of their participation in thesepersonal storytelling practices. Or, to frame this a bit differently, if eachversion of socializing practice gives rise to a particular version of moralagency, then what form does moral agency take within this particular

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socializing idiom? As Mint/, (1999) has shown, Longwood children aregrowing up in homes in which parents care deeply about their moral edu-cation. They know from daily experience that their parents are not indif-ferent to their misdeeds; they know that their misdeeds will be noticed anddealt with promptly. Steady, unobtrusive moral guidance is indisputablypart of their experience. But they also experience—with who knows whatdegree of consciousness—that most of their transgressions are evanes-cent. It takes a really whopping one—getting behind the wheel of the fam-ily car and ramming it into the neighbor's garage—to be remembered. Andthen, lo and behold, that whopper metamorphoses over time into the mostdelightful, the most hilarious of stories. The transgressive self is recoupedby the entertaining storyteller. And these messages are heard repeatedly.It is not only the self-protagonist who is portrayed in this way but otherfamily members—brothers, fathers, uncles, perhaps even a sister or aunt.They, too, have committed celebrated transgressions that now have acherished place in the family folklore.

What, then, is this version of moral agency? It is one that is aware ofand committed to the rules of decent conduct but wary of a too-ardentadherence to the letter of the law. This version of moral agency is alliedwith the idea that there is much to be learned by experimenting, testingthe limits, making one's own mistakes. Note how this contrasts with theidea, expressed by a Taipei mother, that it is wasteful for children to gropeon their own. And, finally, the Longwood version of moral agency findsvalue in transgressive selves. Transgressive selves are gutsy, spirited, hi-larious, and alive. They flower in adolescence and early adulthood, youngbut not too young to know the difference between right and wrong. And,perhaps, although this is never explicitly stated, they even breathe life intoone's mature commitments—to raise children or protect the president ofthe United States. Transgressive selves make the best storytellers; even inmaturity, they are just a story away.

PEGGY J. MILLER is a professor in the Departments of Speech Communication and Psychology at the University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign. TODD L. SANDEL is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, Norman.CHUNG-HUI LIANG is an assistant professor at National Tainan Normal Teachers College, Tainan, Taiwan. HEIDI FUNGis an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

NOTES

Acknowledgments. Peggy Miller presented an earlier version of this article at a collo-quium in the Human Development and Psychology division of the Harvard (iraduate Schoolof Education in October 1998. We wish to express our appreciation to the Spencer Founda-tion for a grant awarded to Miller that funded the data collection for this study and to theUniversity of Illinois Research Board, which funded the analysis-of the interview data. We

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would also like to thank the University Grants Committee, Research Grants Council, HongKong government (CU11KJ20/9511), and National Science Council, Taiwan (NSC88-2413-11-001-003), for grants provided to Heidi Fung that provided further funding for analysis of theinterview data. We thank Sarah Meeks and Bill Kowalczyk for their assistance in transcrib-ing some of the interview data. Finally, we are deeply grateful to the families who partici-pated in this research.

1. Obviously, this thumbnail sketch in no way does justice to the early-2()th-century his-tory of Taiwan, a history that is currently being vigorously reimagined, rewritten, avoided,contested, memorialized, and exploited for political ends in this postdemocraey moment. Itis no exaggeration to say that this paragraph occasioned twice as much debate and e-mailingback and forth among the coauthors of this article than did any other issue—even thoughthe history of Taiwan is not central to our message in this article. Clearly, we have entereda terrain that is highly emotionally and politically charged!

One indication of this new openness is that the February 28 Incident is now being publiclyrecognized. In 1988, following the death of President Chiang Ching-kuo (the son of General-issimo Chiang Kai-shek), one of the first acts of the newly appointed, Taiwan-born PresidentLee Teng-hui was to set up a commission to investigate the February 28 Incident, establishits causes, and identify its victims. After the report was published (see Lai et al. 1991), Presi-dent Lee offered a formal apology to the victims of February 28 and directed the governmentto offer monetary compensation to its victims or their surviving family members. In addi-tion, a park in downtown Taipei was officially renamed the "2-28 Memorial Park." The for-mer mayor of Taipei City (and current president of Taiwan), Chen Shui-bian, took an activerole in the renaming of this park and was also instrumental in commissioning local artists toconstruct a fitting monument, which today stands in the center of the park as a strikingreminder of this tragic period in history. Mayor Chen also promoted the establishment of a"2-28 Memorial Museum," supported by the city government, which displays photographsand important written documents that record this event. In 1996, February 28 became anational public holiday, at which time victims of this event are given an opportunity to telltheir story to the nation. And last, this story, which was formerly taboo, is now openlytaught in primary and secondary schools throughout Taiwan.

2. The use of the labels "Taiwanese" or "Chinese," on the one hand, and "Longwood" or"European American," on the other, is problematic in various ways. For the former pair,while the families we studied in Taipei were native residents of Taiwan—they were bornthere and had spent most of their lives living and working in Taiwan—they can also be called"Chinese," as they are ethnically and culturally Chinese. Therefore, a person can identifyhimself or herself as being both Taiwanese and Chinese, depending on the context. Thepolitical currents involved with the use of either term compound this matter. That is, to calloneself "Taiwanese" may mean that one is claiming an identity that is local to the island ofTaiwan and separate from the political ideal of a united Chinese nation. In our interviews wedid not ask the Taiwanese mothers to discuss their use of these terms or to choose theirpreferred term. However, this matter is an important and salient one whenever one tries toaffix a term to describe the residents of Taiwan. It should also be noted that in contrast tothe Longwood families who identified with a local neighborhood within the larger entity ofChicago, the families from Taipei did not identify with a specific neighborhood in Taipei.Because there is no counterpart to the term Loniiwood, we prefer to call these familiesTaipei families.

Regarding the families from Longwood, it would be misleading to call these mothers by thegeneric term .American, as it could imply that these people represent some kind of generic"Americanness," especially when used in contradistinction to the Taipei mothers. Most ofthe Longwood mothers were Irish Catholic, and all were European American. However, wedo not mean to imply that our findings generalize to all Irish Catholic communities and cer-tainly not to all European American communities. Therefore, we prefer to make reference to

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these families according to the community in which they lived, namely, Longwood (a pseu-donym). Occasionally, we use the terms Irish (Catholic and European American as well.

In sum, in both cases, we prefer the more local term—Taipei and Longwood, respec-tively—because this usage signals our assumption that particular contexts give rise to par-ticular idioms of meaning that may or may not generalize to other Chinese or otherEuropean American communities. We also occasionally use the broader terms (Chinese,Irish American, European American) to remind readers of the families' cultural origins.

3. Although the "third-personizing" that Taylor (n.d.) describes is similar to what we call"telling stories about the child," the meanings that these practices carry are strikingly differ-ent. Taylor's data are drawn from naturalistic observations of family dinnertime in middle-class families living in Southern California. The focal child is five years old. Taylor finds that"third-personizing" is often used to subtly undermine or even shame children and that fa-thers often act as "problematizers" who challenge other family members' accounts. By con-trast, our findings, as detailed later in this section of the article, suggest that mothers inLongwood enacted a strong bias toward creating favorable portraits of the child both in theirstories about the child and in their participation in conarrations. It is impossible to say whythe findings of these two studies are so different: subculture differences, differences in con-text of observation, differences in age of focal children, contrasting roles for fathers versusmothers as narrative participants—all are possible factors.

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