Review by Choice Review
Schak's book is a study of 37 households of impoverished squatters in a suburb of Tapei, Taiwan. Founded in the late 1960s, the neighborhood relied on begging in nearby districts as a partial source of income. Other sources were coercion, gambling, loans, prostitution, and sporadic casual employment. In old China, begging was of a low but legitimate status. In Taiwan it is now illegal, yet tolerated by economic necessity. The author did 13 months of fieldwork between 1973 and 1981. Most of his book consists of case studies of patterns of kinship and personal relations, marriage and divorce, housing, incomes, and expenses. Leadership and women's roles are analyzed insightfully. The text is well written; jargon is minimal. The theoretical orientation of the study begins with and departs from the work of Oscar Lewis in Mexican villages during the 1950s. Lewis saw poverty as a unique subculture from which there is no escape. But the beggars of this Tapei community did escape into mainstream middle-class culture in the 1980s as Western capitalists, attracted by cheap labor, built new factories in Southeast Asia. Schak, however, deals with this development too briefly. In any case, it may prove temporary; the Third World has large pools of cheap labor and desperate people, potential competitors of Tapei. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -A. K. Davis, University of Alberta
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
