The Permanent Migration in China
p. 112-117
Texte intégral
1The story that emerges from the interview is about a young woman who is first confronted with the migration of her parents, and then with the changes generated by her move to join them; she later returns to her region of origin during a school episode, and then finally is taken to other places by her jobs. The story is reminiscent of the drama of the “left-behind children” to take up the title of Le Monde (Pedroletti 2020), which is discussed in The Three Sisters of Yunnan, the beautiful documentary by Wang Bing (2012).
2The family dynamic is punctuated by the departure of Chen’s mother, who left to join her husband in Shanghai while Chen remained in the village. From this episode, the extended family is immediately mobilized, as it will be thereafter depending on whether the prospect of return is realized or not. The relationship to this rural and family background is not residual, since it is never totally absent, updated as it is according to school periods or subsequent events, or the needs of Chen’s parents.
3From an academic point of view, Chen is reactivated in the hope of entering university, her parents having decided to send her back to their hometown to continue her third-year studies at college and to take part in the entrance exam for high school. This possibility of registering in several places reveals a difference between the school systems in Chen’s hometown and Shanghai, as well as a landscape of languages that are difficult for Chen. By structuring proximity and distance with the languages spoken, and the familiarity or uneasiness in appropriating them, we see in particular the aspects through which a school strategy is sketched out, in this case an aborted attempt to manage reception spaces and origin ones.
A Reversal of Perspective: That of a Child on the Migration of Her Parents
4The part of her interview that was about education has the advantage of showing a socialization of a child who describes the abandonment she feels in the absence of her parents, and its effects over time. Chen highlights the discipline practiced by almost all her family members, and underlines statutes supposed to embody the order—soldier and teacher in particular—of some of her educators. Yet, Chen’s emotional distress becomes quickly visible; it is apparently a contemporary expression of feeling that previous generations hardly showed, for lack of socialization in this kind of manifestation of self, or often with the concern to restrain themselves and not to manifest their feelings. The difference from previous migratory waves, such as those we experienced in France, is clear. Contemporary migrants of different genders and conditions explicitly state their subjective perceptions of the situation and possibly the emotional shortcomings it causes, as much as such attitudes were most often considered shameful in the past: Men rarely mentioned this kind of attitude and tended to say that these attitudes are feminine. It is a way of partially revealing oneself. While some women expressed them in songs indexed to exile and related to lamentations.
5At first, this look at Chen’s voice as a child is a reversal if we consider that in most stories of migrants, the discourse of adults predominates. The migratory dynamic that emerges is that shown through the prism of education and, in many respects, that of the mother-daughter relationship, which does not obscure the broader one of kinship, at least with the extended family of grandparents, uncles, and aunts. Probably a little more so than in many families, the fear of being unwanted, or of not really belonging, recurs in Chen’s words. In certain respects this feeling becomes an indicator of the composition of the family and the proximities-distances that organize it according to the migratory phases between those where the relationship is distant and those of reunion.
6When looking for resources, the relationship to salaried work is a constant. It is the reason for the parents’ migration, and a job is also what Chen expects and what will lead her to change regions, sometimes related to her family or her love life. There, too, there are points of support linked to Chen’s region of origin and kinship, for example, in using subterfuge in order to get around certain rules. Chen was recruited for work when she was younger than 16 years old. So, she was not of legal age to work, and she had to enter the curtain factory using someone else’s ID to hide her age.
7In terms of love, Chen knows/meets several pretenders not from her region of origin before benefiting from networks in her region of origin that promote a new meeting. She first associates with a colleague who works on the same production line. But the romantic relationship does not last because Chen’s mother is strongly opposed to it, and Chen even ends up resigning from her post in December 2012. This tangle of work, love life, and kinship is verified several times, and the imprint of the mother seems decisive. Subsequently, it is relatives from Chen’s hometown who introduce her to her future boyfriend.
8The exercise of crossing the perspectives between Mediterranean migrations as I was able to study them and Asian ones as they appear to me in this interview, is instructive by revealing the analyst’s reading grid. Mine is strongly conditioned by the complex Franco-Algerian relationship. Like the difficulty of naming migration in China, the mobilities indexed to the rural exodus in Europe, it is just as difficult to find the words to designate the displacements that accompanied colonization, like the regroupment camps (Rocard 2003) that are too often overlooked, and which led to the departure of nearly 3 million rural residents. In China, the distribution of space between urban and rural seems to prevail in order to give the latter a background role. The rural space is from Chen’s childhood, from a part of her family. The parallel with other types of migration is tempting. We can see the extended family mobilized, along with the grandparents, uncle, and aunt, to practically compensate for the absence of Chen’s parents. This is a marked difference from the configuration in which only men migrate, or leave first, making the structuring of lineage by men more obvious. In the case of Algerian migrations, the departure of a male migrant at an early age, before the second age of migration that started in 1945, paradoxically comforts the extended family, which takes care of the wife. The couple in this scenario does not exist socially. It cannot even be evoked, as Chen does implicitly when she displays her sadness regarding her parents’ choice to opt to seek out improved conditions at the expense of the education they have delegated.
A Cross Perspective on Migration in China and France
9One of the interests of this interview, as we have said, is the adopted prism, one valuing the child’s voice, that shows, via one of the collateral victims, the cost of adults’ migration seeking better conditions. I am all the more sensitive that I, for my part, tried to use the words of parents and children to question what families are going through. Here, the interview has the advantage of highlighting the prism of the child living through parental migration in different places and times, and its consequences, particularly on the educational register. Certain aspects relating to geographic distance are reminiscent of the context experienced by first-time migrants from the 1950s and 1960s in France. The “reunion,” or, to use the administrative term, “regrouping,” in France involved the migrant’s wife and possibly children. In Chen’s case, the father and the mother lived in the city alone for several years before taking back their children. These family episodes have variable configurations—together or separate from each other—and condition the links. Chen’s parents manage the absence based on their assessment of the situation and the prospects that they see as desirable ones for their daughter. Chen considers her situation a difficult one, whereas for the first migrants from the Maghreb the educational disparity between parents and children breaks with what the parents have known, in this case a shared level of education according to the structures of the extended family.
10Concerning the analysis of this journey, the problem of contextualization first emerges from a linguistic grouping, a necessity generated by the translation of the Chinese text into an English version that serves as a basis for the author, who writes these lines in French. Reporting on it invites a kind of journey of meaning to the principle of part of the internationalization of contemporary research, less to inform about the efforts to approach meaning at best but to say that approximations, incomprehension, and misunderstandings, corrected more or less over time, are part of the process. But it is mainly a way of saying that migration is also, if not primarily, the view that the sociologist has on population movements. It is not a question of underestimating what constitutes obstacles, expectations of resources and pain, and what women and men experience in the context of what I call the migratory situation. It is simply imposing on oneself a reflexive return to the principle of this work, that of the crossed gaze. As we know, these semantic issues do not only concern media and political discourse. The categorization on the scientific register is also loaded consequently. Regarding my work, in particular on matrimonial strategies in a migratory situation, I retained the intergenerational link when speaking of the children and grandchildren of immigrants to take into account an important aspect of socialization and the specificity of the migratory situation. This is a dynamic involving relatives in the domestic enclosure who do not necessarily share, or who lack entirely, the cultural references, such as those which apply to “eating well” on a daily basis or to determining the choice of a spouse, to take two examples, one concerning the ordinary and the other the extraordinary. In this way, we see the links here and elsewhere perpetuate or evolve in parallel with these evolutions in commitments in the city and their forms. It was on this basis that I tried to analyze Chen’s journey.
Migrations on the Generation Relationships Registry
11Also, the evocation of the “generation” to contextualize the situation of the latter questions the determination of the first, the one from which is supposed to stimulate an original departure. The question of course also arises from its end. It recalls Sayad’s (1977) attempt to characterize Algerian emigration by a typology which I retained on the one hand—to grasp the expression of the links in a redefinition between belonging to the original village and anchoring in the city of immigration—and, on the other hand, to understand the intergenerational relationship—parents/children—as the basis of socio-cultural socialization. We also know that the succession of generations, expressed in public debate in France, is perceived as the expression of maintaining distance. “Born/From” as “second, third … generation” then become reminders of otherness signifying a lesser legitimacy to be from here. In China, the devices reserved for the children of immigrants apparently come under a framing system whose objectives remain implicit. It is hardly possible to go beyond an invitation to put in parallel which would show, for France, a succession of forms of support, such as educational units, for incoming allophone students. These are all signs of the consideration of the children of immigrants and of support strategies.
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
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Bourdieu, Pierre. 2008. Esquisses algériennes. Textes édités et présentés par Tassadit Yacine. Paris: Seuil (Liber).
Hammouche, Abdelhafid. 1994. Mariages et immigration - La famille algérienne en France. Lyon: PUL.
10.4000/books.pul.9290 :Hammouche, Abdelhafid. 2001. “Engagements au féminin : la maternité sur la place.” In L’engagement au pluriel, edited by J. Ion, 115–133. Saint-Étienne: PUSE.
Hammouche, Abdelhafid. 2007. Les recompositions culturelles. Sociologie des dynamiques sociales en situation migratoire. Strasbourg: PUS.
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Pedroletti, Brice. 2016. “En Chine, au pays des enfants délaissés.” https://www.lemonde.fr/international/visuel/2016/03/29/en-chine-au-pays-des-enfants-delaisses_4891826_3210.html. Accessed 6 March 2020.
Rocard, Michel. 2003. Rapport sur les camps de regroupement et autres textes sur la guerre d’Algérie. Critical edition established under the direction of Vincent Duclert and Pierre Encrevé, with the collaboration of Claire Andrieu, Gilles Morin, and Sylvie Thénault. Paris: Mille et une nuits.
Sayad, Abdelmalek. 1977. “Les trois âges de l’émigration algérienne en France.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 15: 59–80.
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Auteur
Abdelhafid HAMMOUCHE is a sociologist, and he is currently professor at the University of Lille. He is a member of editorial board of several journals, among them: L’homme et la société, Hommes & migrations…. His current research focuses on social dynamics and public action in urban spaces (local public action related to urban policy or cultural policy). He has previously worked on the family migration situation (marriage, family, link between generation and gender relations, public commitment). He is currently coordinating a research project, “Sociology of town for questioning urbanity and governance of urban spaces,” with French, Brazilian, and Japanese researchers. The main objective of this research is to explain the practices of the town and the action system to govern it by a comparative field study which will enable the analysis of the social dynamics in the emblematic areas of cities like Lille (France), Fortaleza (Brazil), and Yokohama (Japan). His published works include Politique de la ville et autorité d’intervention. Contribution à la sociologie des dispositifs d’action publique (2012) ; and Les recompositions culturelles. Sociologie des dynamiques sociales en situation migratoire (2007).
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