A Migrant Girl Coming of Age: A Zigzag Journey of Life
p. 132-138
Texte intégral
1Twenty-two-year-old Chen (interviewed in 2015) is the daughter of a migrant couple in Shanghai, originally from rural Sichuan Province. Chen’s family—she, her parents, and a younger sister—have lived in Shanghai and Sichuan, sometimes together and other times separately, in the last two decades. She has moved back and forth between Shanghai and Sichuan for schooling, work, and love. She lives in Shanghai with her parents now, but her younger sister is a high school student back in their hometown in Sichuan. The story of Chen’s growth reflects the reinstitutionalization of family in China as described by mosaic familialism—in contemporary China, the traditional patriarchal, patrilineal family system is in the process of transiting to a bilateral family system where parents and adult child(ren) are increasingly intimate with and mutually dependent on each other, and the fall of patrilineal power walks shoulder-to-shoulder with the rise of matrilineal power, while individuals are embedded in a relatively weak social welfare system in an era of precarious economy of globalization (Ji 2017, 2020; Ji et al. 2020). During her spacious mobility between her childhood hometown of Sichuan and present residence city of Shanghai, Chen is looking for home, family, and her personal identity, and is carrying her own social mobility along the social ladders. Her own family has helped shape her life journey life through its own constraints, resources, and mutual support.
Bilateral Family as the Private Welfare Network
2During the last several decades, China experienced a rapid socioeconomic transition together with a demographic and family transition. As the Chinese Confucian patriarchal and patrilineal family mode declines, a bilateral family seems to be emerging, with the individual family increasingly interacting with and exchanging care provision and economic resources with the maternal family, the wife’s family of origin (Cheng 2019; Zhang et al. 2019; Ji 2020; Ji et al. 2020).
3Xiaochen grew up in a little village along the upstream of the Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. According to her memories, both when she was in kindergarten and primary school, she spent her time at school and with her family, i.e. her parents, sister, and grandparents. While her parents were busy and paternal grandparents could not help, her maternal grandparents helped with taking care of her and her younger sister. She shared with the interviewer some rather happy memories. She remembered that she grew up with her cousins, her maternal uncle’s children whose family lived with her maternal grandparents, as well as their own paternal grandparents.
4For a better life for the family, Xiaochen’s father migrated to Shanghai when she was 6 years old, leaving Xiaochen, her mother, and her sister behind. Three years later, her mother joined her father, leaving her and her sister with her maternal grandparents for three years. She still remembers that a few days before the fall semester started, when she was 10 years old in 2003, her mother sent her and her sister to her grandparents’ family. She stood stunned at a crossroad, watching her mother walking towards the station leaving for Shanghai. She was frequently seen afterwards standing there, hoping to see her mother suddenly appear from nowhere. Sadly, during the three years, her mother only returned once.
5Even today, she is still grateful to her maternal grandparents and her maternal uncle’s family. When she came of age, it was also her maternal uncle who set her up with a young man who was also from Sichuan and later became her fiancé. As Xiaochen narrated, she has good relations with both her paternal uncle’s family and maternal uncle’s family, but she added that she is closer to the latter.
6As China has transited from the socialist–centrally planned economy to marketization, the danwei system, through which urban social welfare operates to share workers’, particularly women’s, care and social reproductive responsibilities, collapsed (Cook and Dong 2011; Song 2011, 2012; Ji et al. 2017). Individual families, especially women, have to carry the bulk of the shifted responsibilities. Migrant workers, who usually hold precarious and low-paid jobs with little or no benefits or security, can enjoy even less social welfare than urban residents. Rural grandparents thus step up and provide unpaid child care and related household responsibilities, which greatly support migrant workers’ labor in urban China, and thus buttress the miracle of four decades of great economic growth in China. With the long-term low fertility, women’s large-scale participation in the labor market, and their increasing power inside the household, the maternal grandparents also greatly help with the daughter’s family, which both shares the paternal grandparents’ burden and undermines the patriarchal and patrilineal power (Ji 2020; Ji et al. 2020). This bilateral family network thus forms a private welfare system to support migrants’ families as well as China’s status of being a world factory and economy engine.
Intergenerational Relationship
7During the process of family reinstitutionalization, the intergenerational relationship brings about a shift from a Confucian patriarchal, hierarchical mode to a rather equal, close pattern (Yan 2016, 2018), while Ji (2017, 2020) further emphasizes the nature of mutual dependence or intimate symbiosis. When the 16-year-old Xiaochen decided to drop out from middle school in her hometown in Sichuan, her parents could not disapprove of it.
My parents said that I have to think it through.
They told me that I cannot regret about my decision and that I have to go to work if I quit school.
They said that I cannot regret it. They told me not to cry to want to go back to school, and that as long as I make the decision, I can never come back to school. So, I said, I would not regret. I will crawl my way through since it is my own choice. That’s it (a bitter smile).
8As migrant parents in Shanghai, they cannot have their children go to high school in Shanghai due to the municipal education policy, and they also could not take care of their daughter while she went to school faraway in their hometown.
9Another significant decision Xiaochen made for herself was to break off the engagement with her fiancé, arranged by her maternal uncle. Her fiancé’s family migrated to Fujian Province, an east coastal province where her uncle’s family had formerly migrated. After Xiaochen lived with the fiancé’s family and worked in Fujian for almost a year, she broke up with him. She was at first worried about her parents’ and uncle’s disapproval, but they did not say anything. As she said, she returned all the money the fiancé’s family had ever given to her, and her parents for the engagement, according to tradition. She even gave back the gold jewelry to her fiancé, and then went back to her parents’ place in Shanghai. It was actually Xiaochen’s economic independence that sustained her own decision-making.
10For the work history, Xiaochen’s mother introduced her to several jobs using her own connections. For the first one, she asked Xiaochen to go to work in her factory, because she felt lonely. Her factory was far away from where the family lived, so she could only go back home during weekends. She thus asked her to go to work there and keep her company.
11Yet, Xiaochen’s current job is also the highest paid one among all her jobs. At first, her mother used her connection, but the connection never replied. So, Xiao paid an employment agency, which found a good job for her. Two years after the interview, Xiaochen left the factory and started to work for a shapewear and body-training company with her boyfriend. One year later, they launched their first franchise shop of the company. Not long after that, they planned to have a second shop.
12From the above, the parents-children relationship no longer follows the patriarchal, hierarchical relationship. For poor migrant families, parents do not have the authority and resources of the traditional patriarchy to make decisions for their children, veto their children’s decisions, or bear the outcomes of the decisions. They have to discuss with their children and let them take responsibility for their own decisions. Yet, parents love their children. Family is still the financial and emotional harbor for both parents and children, and parents do what they can do for the children. The relationships between parents and children are becoming more intimate, democratic, and mutually dependent.
The Security of Individual Family
13As a migrant child without a Shanghai hukou, Xiaochen was not eligible to go to high school in Shanghai. She was sent back to her hometown in the third year of her middle school so that she could take the entrance exam to eventually attend a local high school. Things had changed in the three years she had been away. The boarding school was in town, and she had nowhere to go during the weekends when all the other children went back home. Both her paternal grandfather’s and maternal grandmother’s families were faraway in the rural villages. Feeling lonely, she dropped out of school and went back to Shanghai, where her parents and sister lived. Xiaochen regretted getting a job in Shanghai. She planned to quit her job and to go to another city to attend a vocational school that trains future kindergarten teachers. But her mother stopped her. Her younger sister seemed to be luckier than she was. Her sister is currently enrolled in a high school in their hometown, Xiaochen explained, because recently her family bought an apartment in town and her cousin who had migrated to Fujian with the family had now gone back to town. So, her sister has a place to go during the weekend.
14When Xiaochen dropped out of school, she directly went back home and idled for half a year before finding a job, because her mother knew that she did not like cold weather. For many times when she was out of work, and the time when she broke up with her fiancé, her family always embraced her without reservation.
15The individual family always provides the economic security and emotional support for individuals. When the individual family cannot provide sufficient protection for its members, it has to rely on the members of its bilateral family to expand its pool of security. Yet sometimes this resort is contingent, and when they cannot provide help or when they are not available, individuals’ lives can be very difficult. Xiaochen’s younger sister is lucky because her cousin’s family was in town when she went to high school. Yet, this was not there when Xiaochen went to school; Xiaochen could neither go to high school nor attend kindergarten teacher training school, likely due to having no family members around. Due to institutional barriers and a thin social welfare system, individuals have to fall back on their own family and the bilateral family network. If this familial backup is absent or the institutional barriers are overwhelming, a person’s life opportunities can become much more constrained.
Discussion
16After Xiaochen migrated to Shanghai with her parents, she went back to her hometown in Sichuan twice. The first time was for schooling, due to institutional barriers precluding her from going to high school in Shanghai. The second time was to find a boyfriend and form a family with a countryman in her home province when she felt it was the right time for her. Yet, after she broke up with her fiancé—who had migrated to a different province, one to which her maternal uncle’s family happened to migrate and where he met the countryman—she went back to Shanghai. It is clear that as a migrant child, her identity is shaped by both places and is linked to her bilateral family members who are in Sichuan and Shanghai or who had migrated to other Chinese provinces.
17For a migration family at the bottom of metropolitan Shanghai, what family can provide for children is survival, from time to time with the help of the bilateral family as a private welfare network; what they cannot provide is the opportunity for upward mobility, due to their own socioeconomic status and resources and institutional barriers. Consistent with family changes in other social groups in China, the parent-child relationship is becoming more intimate, equal, and interdependent, maybe also due to parents’ disadvantaged economic situations and a lack of authority and resources.
18With China’s rapid economic growth and the emerging new economy, such as the service sector and Internet-based economy, migrant youth have obtained more opportunities than their parents and their peers in the countryside. Yet, compared to middle-class urban youth, they lack the cultural capital and opportunities for upward mobility and are usually stuck in unstable, precarious jobs with low payment, repeating their parents’ social class. However, a small number of them may also find a niche for themselves. Their resilience and adaptability in taking feasible opportunities can become their own capital for survival and possible upward mobility.
Conversation Between French and Chinese Sociologists
19Beatrice Zani’s piece, “Un-breaking Familiar and Affectional Bonds,” is focused on the “complexifying mobilities” and “imbrication” among “gender, familial ties and migration.” She correctly points out that through this young women’s migrant journey, social and economic orders are entangled with gender, familial, and marital regimes. By unrolling a picture of Xiaochen’s life, she shows how this is constructed through a struggle between polarized endings: rural tradition and urban modernity, to stay or to go, urban subjectivation and familial subjection, obedience to and contestation of familial and gender rules. This is in line with the mosaic familism and its context of complex modernity in contemporary Chinese society, where tradition and modernity coexist in a mosaic pattern, and this mosaic intertwining in individuals’ daily life is simultaneously meaningful and strategic in today’s Chinese society (Ji 2017, 2020).
20Hammouche’s piece, “The Permanent Migration,” “take(s) into account an important aspect of socialization and the specificity of the migratory situation.” He looks into the tangle of education, work, and emotion in the intergenerational link embedded in “the extended family mobilized.” He also provides a comparative perspective to understand the similarity and difference between China’s rural-urban domestic migration and the international migration from Algeria to France. I would like to borrow the term “crossed gaze” to describe how French and Chinese sociologists may perceive and interpret the social phenomena and changes in China differently and how they may reflect on each other’s interpretations. For example, I would like to probe how this emerging bilateral family system to support individual migrants in China may differ from present family dynamics in France and family networks among migrants to France; and further, how sociologists in China and France may look at it from different perspectives and portray it in different narratives.
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.
Format
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Cheng, Cheng. 2019. “Women’s Education, Intergenerational Coresidence, and Household Decision‐Making in China.” Journal of Marriage and Family 81 (1): 115–132.
10.1111/jomf.12511 :Cook, Sarah, and Xiao‐yuan Dong. 2011. “Harsh choices: Chinese women’s paid work and unpaid care responsibilities under economic reform.” Development and Change 42 (4): 947–965.
10.1111/j.1467-7660.2011.01721.x :Ji, Yingchun. 2017. “A Mosaic Temporality: New Dynamics of the Gender and Marriage System in Contemporary Urban China.” Temporalités. Revue de sciences sociales et humaines (26). doi.org/10.4000/temporalites.3773.
10.4000/temporalites.3773 :Ji, Yingchun. 2020. “Masaike Jiating Zhuyi: Cong Never Yanglao Kan Jiating Zhidu Bianqian” (“Mosaic Familism: Daughters providing for parents and the reinstitutionalization of Chinese families”). Ershiyi Shiji Shuangyuekan (Twenty-First Century Bi-Monthly) 180 (4): 77–79.
Ji, Yingchun, Huiguang Wang, Yue Liu, Ruonan Xu, and Zhenzhen Zheng. 2020. “Young Women’s Fertility Intentions and the Emerging Bilateral Family System under China’s Two-Child Family Planning Policy.” China Review 20 (2): 113–142.
Ji, Yingchun, Xiaogang Wu, Shengwei Sun, and Guangye He. 2017. “Unequal Care, Unequal Work: Toward a More Comprehensive Understanding of Gender Inequality in Post-Reform Urban China.” Sex Roles 77 (11–12): 765–778.
Song, Shaopeng. 2011. “Gongzhong zhi Si: Guanyu Jiating Laodong de Guojia Huayu 1949-1966” (“The Private Embedded in the Public: The State’s Discourse on Domestic Work, 1949–1966”). Jindai Zhongguo Funvshi Yanjiu (Research on Women in Modern Chinese History) 19: 131–172.
Song, Shaopeng. 2012. “Cong Zhangxian Dao Xiaoshi: Jiti Zhuyi Shiqi de Jiating Laodong (1949-1966)” (“From Visible to Invisible: Housework in the Collectivist Period (1949–1966)”). Jiangsu Shehui Kexue (Jiangsu Social Sciences) 1: 116–125.
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Auteur
JI Yingchunis professor in the School of Sociology and Political Science at Shanghai University. Dr Ji obtained her PhD from the sociology department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has served as a guest editor for the Journal of Marriage and Family and Chinese Sociological Review in recent years. She is currently a board member of the International Chinese Sociologist Association and is on the editorial boards of Social Science and Research and Oxford Development Studies. Her research interests include family sociology, gender studies, low fertility, and modernity in China as well as East Asia. Dr Ji has published in journals of multiple disciplines, such as Journal of Marriage and Family, Sex Roles, Population Studies, Temporalités,Chinese Sociological Review, China Review, and Social Sciences in China. In addition to empirical studies, Dr Ji has dedicated herself to developing localized theories in the following areas: how to understand changing gender dynamics in China’s socialist-to-market-economy transition; how to understand the changing marriage and family institutions in post-reform China; and how to understand the low fertility in today’s China as well as East Asia.
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