Sent by her family to work in a silk factory just prior to World War II, young pei grows to womanhood, working fifteen-hour days and sending her pay to the family who abandoned her. In "Women of the Silk" Gail Tsukiyama ...Sent by her family to work in a silk factory just prior to World War II, young pei grows to womanhood, working fifteen-hour days and sending her pay to the family who abandoned her. In "Women of the Silk" Gail Tsukiyama takes her readers back to rural China in 1926, where a group of women forge a sisterhood amidst the reeling machines that reverberate and clamor in a vast silk factory from dawn to dusk.