Connection: Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind

My book, (ahh, I keep forgetting to post that I'm reading a new book!!!) is called Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind. It's about how 12 year-old Shabanu lives and survives a life of many hardships in the Cholistan Desert  with her sister Phulan, her mother, father, aunt, and their herd of the finest camels in Pakistan. But anyway, (This is just so you can sort of understand what I'm talking about,)

   I can see that in Pakistan, as well as China, people of both countries hope and pray for sons and for their daughters to have many sons.  Most people don't care to have any daughters, and would much rather have a boy. Auntie, (who is quite cantankerous ;) always brags about having two sons when her sister (Mama) only has two daughters, and when she is stitching Phulan's wedding dress she outwardly complains, " If God had blessed you with sons, we wouldn't have to break our fingers over wedding dresses." And when the family goes to Phulan's new cottage where she will live with her future husband, Hamir. It is tradition that the family members paint symbols of good fortune on the walls. A fish for fertility, circles intertwined for harmoney in the family, camels for wealth, and a row of lines with arms and legs and appendages that indicate the many sons that the family wishes for Phulan.
   In Social Studies we learned that in China, because of the large population, families were only allowed to have one child. And the preferred gender of choice would be male in most cases. if they had a girl, people used to even kill them. Nowadays, they either keep, or put them up for adoption. I have a friend that was adopted from Vietnam and her sister was adopted from China.
   I think the reason people preferred having sons over daughters is because they thought that boys were more useful and important than the girls. Sure, men used to provide money for the family, but today, women work as well. I don't know, I am a girl, and I feel really bad for all of the girls who were turned away just because of their gender. I think it's nice to see the perspective of a girl who lives in a world where her opinion doesn't matter and she is shunned for her strong spirit, and how she copes with all of this.