When I left the field, I had a family. A husband in an anthropology doctoral program, who had conducted his fieldwork together with our one-and-a-half-year-old son, who had just begun attending kindergarten. When we first arrived in the field, we took part in matters great and small as they unfolded there, day and night, and devoted time as well to the work of recording them. But through married life I became pregnant, and during the period before giving birth—setting aside, of course, the times I regularly visited the obstetrician for checkups—I still took part in events inside and outside the village as I awaited the birth. The thing was, in the field I was no longer a "quiet" observer but had become an object of care and concern. To us, who used a motorcycle as our main means of transport, one friend in the field, saying it was dangerous for a pregnant woman, gave me the old car she had kept stored away in her garage. The wives in the field prepared foods said to be good for an expectant mother during pregnancy, and those who had given birth in particular shared all sorts of stories from their own experience. When I found a new house and moved during my pregnancy, a local friend was greatly startled—ordinary Taiwanese people observe many taboos during pregnancy, not even using scissors or needles, nor changing the direction of the bed, and here I was planning something as major as a move. For me, who had been in the position of quietly listening to the locals' stories as an observer, watching their reactions and trying to analyze the events I experienced, I had become the object of the locals' attention, my every move stirring the locals' curiosity about a "foreign culture." And this situation, with the birth of the baby, became one in which the locals took on for themselves various roles—the child's godfather and aunties, paternal aunt, uncle, maternal aunt, older brother and older sister—and they were no longer the objects of my research but collaborators in child-rearing, counselors, quasi-kin.

I had become not an anthropologist but a wife living a life in the field, a mother, an ordinary woman. Following local tradition, when the baby was four months old, we held the "shou-nua" rite, said to dry up the drooling, and when the child turned one we dressed him in hanbok (traditional Korean costume) and held a doljabi rite together with the villagers, throwing a feast. Around that time my fieldwork notes were being filled entirely with stories about the child. How much the baby ate, whether he slept, whether he pooped, and what I did when the baby was sick, when and what the baby said as his first word, and whether he had taken his first steps… how much time and energy raising a child takes from a parent…… My attention was drawn entirely to my child, and matters great and small in the field became situations I either attended together with the child or slipped out of using the child as an excuse. The field as an object of research and investigation disappeared, and I was simply meeting my daily life, day by day, in the field. People's greetings always began with asking after the child, went on to playing with the child, and ended with telling me to hurry home with my now-sleeping child. And so, having left the field, I began the work of trying to organize the research materials of that time, but, like someone stricken with amnesia, I could not remember. "You just lived in the field for a rather long time; the experience of living there long does not make you a dissertation. Where are the fieldwork materials?" Thus, having left the field, I set down my research and instead lifted up in my arms the child who had also begun attending kindergarten.

As the ground of life shifted, as I chose a new occupation, and as the child—grown in outward appearance as tall as an adult, becoming an adolescent slowly slipping out of his parents' attention to seek out friends of his own—a guest came to me. For the sake of research on the Hakka, the mistress of the house where I had first stayed and her eldest daughter appeared, across a span of fifteen years. The daughter, once an elementary-school student, had become a career woman in her mid-twenties, and the mistress, who had always been ceaselessly busy raising three daughters, appeared before me in hiking clothes.